Blog – Low Flying 24/11/2024
Today’s mission was to practice low level flying and the procedures within that spectrum.
The weather was again mint so no excuses there.
After running through our pre-flight, taxi, run-ups, and take-off we flew out to the low level training area and ran thru the following:
- Levelling off at a specified height
- Cruise flight into slow flight
- Coastal Reversal
- Feature Reversal
- Precautionary Landing
- Climb to a specified altitude
- Low level flight following a Feature
- Forced Landing Without Power
Its been a while since I have flown low level so this was a great refresher of the skills required.
The trick is to fly 45 degrees away from the feature with the wind following, then turn into the wind. This ensures you have a small turning circle with no more than 45 degrees of bank.
A Feature Reversal is as shown below:
A Coastal Reversal is almost the same but you do not fly over the coastline:
Even though it has been some time I managed these without any difficulty adding power into the turn as required. I was very happy with them.
Further reading on these exercises can be seen here.
Once we had done a few of those we moved onto precautionary landings.
These are a bit more complex as you do a series of circuits of your selected landing site.
The first circuit is at 500ft AGL, assessing the condition, circuit leg points and safety aspects. The second circuit is at 200ft AGL, again assessing the condition and safety aspects but also timing the length of the field to ascertain if you have enough length to safely land. This is achieved by counting the seconds to fly end to end. (eg 7 secs at 70knots = 350m). Once complete, climb back up to 500ft AGL, Do a PAN PAN call, brief your passengers and execute a short field landing.
Further reading on this exercise can be seen here.
All in all I was very pleased with todays flying. I was on task and well within my limits. I still need to concentrate on maintaining height and speed as I tend to either climb and slow down or descend and speed up. It will come. I just need to polish this up a bit.
Next lesson we will work on these a bit more and add in further tasks so that I keep the momentum going.
Until next time…
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Blog – Low Flying 24/11/2024