Sunday, August 22, 2010

Exam 2 & Lesson 09

On Saturday, I sat my Aircraft Technical Knowledge exam and had a flying lesson.  A bit crazy looking back on it as I was absolutely exhausted afterwards.

The exam was difficult.  I won't lie, the internal workings of in line and radial piston engines don't hold much interest for me so studying was probably  a bit sparse considering my learning curve.  I will just wait and see the results when they're posted next week and be happy with a passing mark.


After the exam, despite feeling a bit brain dead, I went up for a lesson in the circuit.  The lesson was Engine Failure After Take Off - you know what to do if for some reason the engine cuts out when you're a mere few hundred feet off the ground.  So, how do you practice that?  Well, you begin your circuit with a nice take off and at some point on the climb out the instructor pulls back the throttle, now you have to recover and get the plane flying toward a suitable landing site without power.  Right.  The first time we did it, I was a bit blonde and recovered by putting the throttle back in (right answer when doing a go around which feels similar in that you have no power on but you want to fly again, but wrong answer if there is no power available like on an EFATO).  It took me a couple tries with the instructor feeding me my "lines" to get it right and not reach for the power.  Next lesson we are going to have to do a few more of these and then add in the bit about glide approach to landing...

Good news is, my landing set up is getting a lot better and I was actually lining up the runway well despite a cross-wind.  The cross-wind was making getting the plane onto the ground a lot different and I'm sure I'll appreciate learning the cross-wind technique once we get to it.

No comments:

Post a Comment