Saturday, March 4, 2017 – 1.2 Hours
The weather was nice for my lesson today. We flew to a beautiful area that was a small valley with a few ponds in it. It was a beautiful view. Unfortunately, my camera was out of reach, so I’ll try to take some pictures next time. We did three power off and three power on stalls. The power offs went fine. I need to work on 2 things with the power off stalls. On the first power off stall I “recovered” before it actually stalled. The second thing I need to work on is keeping the ball centered better. I think I just need to do a lot more power on stalls, because I’m comfortable with power off, and I have done a lot more of them.
We then went back to Moontown and did 6 landings. They were fine, but I need to become more automatic in the traffic pattern. I did learn something very valuable in the traffic pattern, which I will illustrate below with some crappy photos I took.
There was another plane in the pattern, a Champ, who consistently reported where he was as we both were doing take offs and landings. The Champ did NOT have on landing lights. If you hadn’t guessed it by the lack of concrete, etc. at Moontown, there is no tower, so you really have to rely on your eyes and other pilots reporting their positions. It is really important to stay alert. Well, we realized the Champ hadn’t reported his position in awhile (this might have been on the 3rd or 4th pattern) and we could not see him. For a split second I saw glare of the front window of the plane, then nothing again. Mr. King pointed out this is why one should always have on their landing lights. The bright white and royal blue airplane disappeared in front of the hill. If I hadn’t known it was there, I would not have seen it. When we went inside the office, Mr. King asked him if his radio died. Apparently he has a handheld radio with a short battery life and it had in fact died.
Waving At Airplanes 