Fog!

Hmmmm, this does not bode well for flying!

Evidently not very localised either!

Maybe it will clear up... Maybe...

Broken through the 10% Mark

Got some flying in today, and had what was an initially frustrating but ultimately rewarding and good fun lesson.

Turned up early and went through the "A" Check on the aircraft (which today was the slightly older Delta- Tango):

All went well on the pre-fight and for the first time I was tasked with doing some of the radio calls, which was a little bit intimidating but was able to get some kind of hang on it - there is certainly a lot of information you need to take in and when you've got a lot of other stuff going on your concentrating on you can very much experience a bit of information overload. Anyway got the old girl successfully in the air without too much bother and headed off the South-East training area.

Once we were up, the first half an hour was more than a little bit frustrating for me. We were basically right on the cusp of VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions) due to a bunch of low cloud that surrounded the island and flying over the sea this basically meant that you just had just a complete wall of grey in front of you with neither a visible horizon or any kind of landmark in site. Not being able to see the horizon initially made life very difficult for me and I seemed to be forever ending up in an attitude not of my choosing and either in a slight dive or a slight climb. Nothing overly bad, but it just felt like sloppy flying as I was constantly not realising it initially and then having to correct the mistake. Eventually though I got the hang of it and stopped trying to gauge the attitude solely by looking out the window and relying more on my instruments (specifically the Attitude Indicator). Once that was figured out things got a lot better, and on the plus side that was a definite learning experience in terms of learning how to fly in less than ideal conditions.

So what did we do? The first bit of the lesson was stall recovery and we went through that a few times and it seemed fairly straight forward. Basically learning what to expect, how to identify the stall and how to get out of it as safely as possible. After that, due to the conditions being what they were, it was time for a bit of a change of plan as we moved onto circuits, something that I wasn't expecting to get to do until next weeks. 

A circuit is basically a relatively quick way to cycle through the fundamentals of flying an aircraft and I will be doing an awful lot of them in the forthcoming weeks. Essentially a takeoff, followed by a climb to 500 feet, followed by a rate 1 turn with climb, continue the climb to 1000 feet, a level off, followed by a rate 2 turn, then straight and level parallel to the runway, followed by a rate 2 turn onto the base leg, a descent and set up for landing, followed by a final rate 1 turn and a landing. You can do these one after the other by performing "touch and go" landings, where once you've hit the deck you pretty much immediately drop the flaps, kick the throttle up to full and take off straight away without leaving the runway (which is quite a satisfying experience):

We did four in total, and I have to say they were a lot of fun - the first two were a bit flakey as a learnt what I was doing but the last two were noticeably better and certainly made me feel a lot better about the lesson. Looking forward to do doing a lot more of those as they certainly are a great way of learning the fundamentals.

So overall a good day and certainly felt like I improved by the end of it, and that's got to be good.

Oh, and we did have a passenger on board today (a mate of my instructor), who unknown to me apparently took some video of the lesson, so might get to post up some video sometime in the near future.

Hour Count = 4.7 Total Flying Hours