It’s starting to come together for me. At least for slow flight and power on and off stalls. With Lesson 5, I accomplished these under my “own power.” I even successfully radioed in each of the maneuvers so others in Charlie South practice area, located to the west of KRVB, would know where we were (BTW: the interactive Comm1M VFR Radio Simulator CD-Rom from Sporty’s has definitely helped me be more comfortable).
But wow, what a difference it was to practice 30-degree turns and then 45-degree turns! When we practiced the 30-degree turns last time out, I could pretty much keep the airplane from losing/gaining altitude. Not so much with the 45ers this time. It felt like we were almost on a rollercoaster the first run at it, I’m not proud to say. The feeling generated by the increased load factor and increase/decrease in pitch was quite noticeable and somewhat disconcerting. But it was also an alert to level out. When the “ride” set in, I reacted by going to the instruments to get back to level flight instead of “keeping my head out of the cockpit” said Seth, and watching what was happening outside the airplane such as the relative position of the horizon to the nose. The second set of turns was a little better, but still needed work. I wanted to keep practicing but we were running out of time if we were going to get some landings in.
