Blog – Solo PPL Flight Test Practice 28/05/2022
Today was a beautiful southerly of just 3kts. I took off from RWY34@NZPP climbed to 3000ft, and set course for Otaki training area to do a solo handling practice. Todays mission was to fly as accurately as possible and imagine the examiner is sitting in the right seat.
On arrival at the training area, I did my HASELLL checks (Height, Airframe, Security, Engine, Location, Lookout, Lights) before commencing with power on and power off stalls in both the clean (flaps up) and dirty (flaps down) configurations. I have not practiced these for some time now but I was pleased to see that I hadn’t lost the technique and only lost about 50ft which is fairly good going.
Once that was ticked off I did some left and right level turns at 20, 30, and 45 degrees. All of these were ok and within the PPL standard as below:
- Straight and level ± 100 feet, ±5 degrees, trim
- Climbing ± 5 knots, trim, engine temperatures and pressures (T’s & P’s), lookout
- Descent ± 5 knots, trim, engine temperatures and pressures (T’s & P’s), lookout
- Medium turns ± 100 feet, coordinated, reference point
Steep turns ±100 feet , coordinated controls, power, reference point
Happy with all of that I then pulled the revs to idle to simulate an engine failure. After setting the aircraft at 70kts I descended to 1500ft and set up for a power off landing at Otaki strip. The approach was good and the speed was at 70kts until I knew I had the strip made. At that point I put in flaps and reduced speed to 61kts ready to land.
At 500ft AGL I called “simulation over” and set full power, climbing and cleaning up the flaps as I climbed back to 1500ft. I repeated this scenario twice more to really lock it in then, it I climbed to 1000ft and headed down the coast to NZPP for some circuits.
The circuit today was busy with three other aircraft. I had to extend my climb-out on one occasion as I would have caught a C152 in the circuit.
I was stoked that I not only saw the potential danger, but made the decision to extend which was not only easy to fly, but by far the safest strategy to separate the aircraft.
Once we had a good separation, I reverse turned and re-joined the circuit downwind.
I decided to do both flapless and short field landings to practice those techniques. All landings were nice and squeaky with good control, straight, and on the centreline.
I was very happy with my flying today. Not perfect by any means but getting consistently better and more accurate, which was the mission objective.
Happy days!
Aircraft: ZK-KAZ (Cessna 172SP Skyhawk)
Total Time: 1.1
Landings: 3
Go-arounds: 0
Visual Approaches: 6
Terrain Awareness: 0.0
Until next time….
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Blog – Solo PPL Flight Test Practice 28/05/2022