Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Update


Greetings. This is the little hard maple in Peggy's yard. Normally it is a ball of red-orange fire. This year it is bare at the top, yellow in the middle and green at the bottom!

I was slated to help Ivan pour concrete today, so I left work at 1:00 P.M., went home to change clothes and get boots. Got to the site at 1:55 and the concrete truck was supposed to be there by 2:00. We waited and then called, the truck was going to be a little late, will be there by 2:30. It pulled in at 2:51, and as I needed to leave by 3:00 I didn't give any help to the project. Here is the job site on Solberg flowage, just out of Phillips.
Sorry Ivan, I hope you guys didn't have to work too hard, but I must say I had a blast this evening. After leaving the job site I had a couple of errands in Phillips (pharmacy, etc), then home to get ready to go to Merrill. I got to the airport a little after 5:00, did the preflight inspection on my own. Steve's hangar co-owner was there, another flight instructor stopped in, and we didn't' get going until 5:35.
Here's what it looks like on Solberg in October.

I got to taxi out to the runway, do the clearance check, pre take-off checklist, and taxi to runway head. I did the final turn, full throttle and away we went. When the front wheel came off the ground about a foot, I eased the stick back until we were climbing at 42 mph (right for that plane). Did a slow turn during climb-out and headed east. At about 2400' MSL I was told to climb 300' then level off, descend and level off, etc. Turns were added to the climbs and the most complicated was leveling off at some specific altitude while the 180° was still in progress. Steve explained a 'turn about a point' and I did a few around a little pond. There was 15-20 mph winds so staying in a circle around a point on the ground was tricky. Part of the circle the plane was level while turning and the opposite side of the cirle had the plane in a VERY steep bank to keep it from being blown of course by the winds.Interesting!
Here is a pic of Johnson's south lawn with dark spruce and bright maple behind it.


Steve demonstrated a power-off stall and how to recover from it, then I did about three or four of them. Another odd sensation. Finally Steve said to fly directly above a road he pointed out, gain about 500' altitude as we made our way back to the airport. We heard another plane call the airport to announce his intention to do a touch-and-go on runway 21. We could see him do the approach, downwind leg, base leg and approach. By now, it is nearly dark, all the lights are on in Merrill and the airport lights look really cool.... They touched down then speeded up and took off again.... it was another local instructor out with a student. By this time we were parallel with the runway in our down wind leg. As we passed the end of the runway I throttled back, dropped the nose a bit to maintain airspeed and started our descent. Then a left turn, and another and we were lined up with the runway. We were a little short, so I put on a little more throttle, aimed for the center with the intent to land about 100 ft onto the runway. Steve helped some with this part. I then needed to ease the stick back a little to get the plane flying level, and with the reduced throttle, the plane just sinks. At about 1 foot above the ground with the nosewheel, the stick comes back a fair amount which pulls the nose up and causes the plane to sink to the rear wheels. That last maneuver requires constant adjustment to cause a smooth landing. We touched down and I taxied back to the hangar, where we discussed a bunch of things from the flight and general bits of info concerning stalls and landings.



So, it looks like a possible Saturday morning flight coming up, as Steve is home for the weekend. Also scheduled for next Tuesday.
Next tasks will be flying at minimum controllable air speed, power on stalls and s-turns (criss crossing a road or something with symmetrical turns).
Did I mention that I'm having a blast with this??????

Here's the last turn on the way to Ottertail Lodge. The reds are mostly gone, with the gold aspen glow taking over. It looks nice with the evergreens.

The end of the road......

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home