My Student Pilot's Log: Presolo

Flights 3-4

Flight 3: Thurs, Nov 9. (1/3.4)

For this lesson we switched to a Cessna 152. The combination of today's cooler weather, which makes the air more dense, and the 152's added horsepower made the plane really want to climb.

It was my turn to practice stalls, but no matter how many times I watched them demonstrated, I just didn't get it. (I guess it's good to test your instructor's patience early on; mine passed the test.)

Although I had done a lot of reading since the last lesson, I didn't look at the syllabus for this flight. Had I done so, I could have just memorized the few steps needed to cause and recover from a stall, which I'll have to know anyway. What should have been a few minutes of practice used about half the class time, and since it was late afternoon, darkness ended the lesson after the first touch & go.

It was too bad, because there was a crosswind just right for some good approach and landing practice, and another 15 minutes of daylight would have been handy. (There will be night training later, but that's not the time to learn how to land.)

Today's training did not go well from a textbook point of view, but I did learn two things that made it a valuable session. Focus on today's lesson, and don't book a one-hour lesson that ends right at dusk.

It was after this lesson that I thought it would be a good idea to take notes after each flight. I wrote the first few from memory; now I take a notepad with me so I can write the notes in the car before leaving the airport.

Flight 4: Sat, Nov 18: First Controlled Airport, First Web Link. (1.4/4.8)

I took last weekend off from flying to go to a Miami Dolphins game, but I didn't get too far away from the subject. Every other exit on the drive south seemed to have an airport, I heard two airshows I couldn't attend mentioned on the radio, the weather was perfect for flying, and the stadium was surrounded by planes towing banners. At least the opponent wasn't the Jets.

It had been nine days since my last flight (that almost sounds like a confession, doesn't it?), so I was anxious to see what I'd forgotten. I started off by trying to steer on the ground with the yoke, but other than that the lesson went very well. I talked on the radio for the first time, just to do a pre-takeoff check. In the air, I was glad to see that I was continuing to make progress. I did the stall practice properly this time.

Today marked my first visit to a controlled airport, starting with a touch & go on a 9000-foot runway at Lakeland Linder Regional (LAL). It's the home of the annual Sun & Fun Fly-In (an airshow that's important enough to have its own web page) and a rather large airport for a small city.

We taxied maybe a mile to get to the airport restaurant for lunch. There was enough traffic that it took about 15 minutes to get a clearance for takeoff. I don't know what the average wait there is, but I'm glad my training is based at an uncontrolled airport. Visibility was the highest yet, since I was able to see downtown Tampa from over LAL, about 30 miles according to my road map.

Glossary