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Today's lesson was greeted by glorious SUPER-VFR weather: clear skies,
20-miles visibility, ceiling 1-8-thousand feet. I hadn't flown since
Monday; would I remember anything? After a now customary thorough preflight, we powered up to taxi to the fuel island ( left tank was 1/4 full, right tank was bone-stone-dry ). _I_ made the call to ground, we started off, I hit the brakes. "Say, Teach.... Can I turn it off and check under the cockpit? I think I might have forgot to tighten the oil filler cap" ). He decided to continue on to the fuel island first. We got there, it was loose :-(. "Well, at least you remembered". The oil had been low, and he came along while I was topping it up, I got distracted. Lesson? Never walk away from that cap without tightening it! It's like a lesson I learned years ago, as a mechanic: Never tighten a nut or bolt "finger tight" and leave it, ALWAYS tighten it to its proper torque. Otherwise, sooner or later, you WILL drive a car away with something important finger tight. We flew off across the bay, I muffed the takeoff, as usual. This time, everything seemed to go wrong: I didn't push the throttle in far enough, didn't hold the yoke back far enough, and let the airplane weave all over the runway. Well, at least I kept a decent 70-80 mph ascent sight picture after he gave me the plane. Here I noticed that my instructor's voice was small, thin, and scratchy in my headset. Oh, no! I can hardly hear him! I mentioned the fact to him, he reached over to my headset and turned a knob on its side. Whew, that's much better! Once across the Bay, we set out to do the rest of the ground reference maneuvers. "I'll show you the basics,", he said. "Then you can practice them alone after you solo." First, the rectangular course. We'd gone over it on the ground, with a toy airplane. He asked me to find out which way the wind was blowing. How to figure it out? Don't see any smoke plumes - no flags... How about those birds? "Nah", he said, "Birds aren't too good. They fly where they want". Oh. I looked around some more. "How about a wind sock?" What?!?! Sure enough, there was a goddamned windsock atop a construction site. We did the rectangle with all left-hand turns first. This came out pretty well - I entered on the downwind leg, turned steeply onto the "base" leg. Wind was only 3 knots, so there wasn't much crabbing to do. We went around the course twice, I managed to hold altitude to +/- 100 feet. Then we made a wide teardrop turn, and came back to do it the other way around. This didn't work as well - the sight picture out the side was totally different, and I didn't quite figure out how to judge the distance from our course. Otherwise, it was about the same. I would say, that the rectangular course is so far, the easiest ground reference maneuver. This is because it has real turns that begin and end, instead of just having to do a constantly changing bank, like in the turns around a point. Then we went off to do the S-turns. We used a railroad track. A train went by, but we didn't follow it( sorry, Gene ). These were nearly as hard as the turns around a point! Sometime during this maneuver, the queasy feeling started to rise. In fact, it got so bad, that for the first time ever in my training, I mentioned it to him, and got him to break off the lesson early, for an hour on the Hobbs, instead of the usual 1.2-1.4 hours. Even the queasiness didn't prevent me from appreciating the forward slip that he did, coming in to land - I want to learn that, it reminds me of a baseball player sliding into home base :-). Next lesson is Sunday morning. We'll finish up the ground ref maneuvers, and move on to new and different stalls. And "elementary spins". I made him promise that there'll be plenty of sky under us when we do that last. Well, actually, Outer Space would be pretty cool, but the airplane's not pressurized :-). I'm already looking forward to solo and beyond. I want to practice turns until they come out of my ears, the altimeter doesn't budge, and my weight stays planted right through my butt. I want to learn to fly at any arbitrary speed between MCA and Va, holding altitude. I want to go to some little-used airport and do high-speed taxi until I get *good* at making the airplane not swerve... - Jerry "11.1 Hours" Kaidor
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