Revision
Game plan for today: –
- Take-off to Training area
- Stalls
- Slow flight
- Steep turns
- Overhead join
- Touch and goes
The weather in Masterton could not have been better for this time of the year in NZ. Crisp still morning, no clouds and no wind!
Taxi and climb out to the training area was uneventful. I was being instructed by another instructor, as my usual was in Wellington hard at work for JetStar.
My stalls, turns, and slow flight went so well that my FI said “ok lets do some touch and goes” after about 10 minutes. I set up to fly to “the ponds” which are my usual reference point to call the traffic and set up for the overhead. Just then my FI decided to pull the throttle and say “oops your engine just died. What are you gonna do?”
As we were around 1900ft at this point my FI explained that I should look all around including behind us to decide on a place to land. I selected a nice long paddock behind and near us and advised Peter that we will be at 68kts best glide speed and will commence decent. He let me glide way down to about 100ft off the ground on final before he said “ok simulation over, power up and well done!” I was stoked. I had never had a simulated engine failure go for that long. It was awesome and I was just fizzing at the end of it.
Every task after that went as smooth as silk. I was in the zone and enjoying myself so much.
I nailed the overhead and five touch and goes. The Jacobson Flare Technique just works for me. The pattern was a bit loose and I still need to concentrate on energy management. Remember “A good Pilot is always learning”.
I returned to the aero club with a huge grin of satisfaction knowing that finally my take-offs and landings are getting consistently good. So good in fact that our CFI commented how great they were. From a guy who has thousands of hours of Ag flying that is a true compliment!
This session proved to me that you can have the worst session sometimes then the gods smile on you and everything just clicks. Trust me I have had some shocker training days when nothing went well but this session made up for all of that.
Until next time….
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