Lesson 7 - Review and Intro to Steep Turns

Flight Time: 1.3 hours
Total Time: 9.2 hours

We flew to the Olympic Peninsula today, where we started the flight with a review of power on and power off stalls, which are slowly becoming easier for me.

Ed than gave me an introduction to steep turns, which are at a much steeper bank than I’m used to – 45 or more degrees. This maneuver once again put me out of my comfort zone, since you can look out the side window and see the ground. After a few attempts, though, I got much more comfortable, and started enjoying the feeling. I didn’t do extremely well on them my first time and had a tendency to pull out of the bank whenever my rudder swung out of coordination, and although I need more work on them, I really started enjoying them after a few attempts.

There’s no parallel that I’ve been able to find to describe to feeling of flying – especially during maneuvers like these – but maybe the closest I can get is to have you imagine riding a rollercoaster that you can control.

Once we’d tried a few steep turns, we headed towards Bremerton (KPWT) to practice touch-and-goes and to get an introduction to soft field landings. With soft field landings, you approach final at a slower speed – 58 knots – and hold full back elevator after touchdown. This keeps the front wheel off the ground, preventing you from digging in, getting stuck and damaging the front landing gear. Ed also drilled me not to come to stop or apply brakes until you’re ready to park – otherwise you risk getting stuck (on a real soft field at least).

We practiced four touch-and-goes before calling it a day and heading back to Boeing Field. On the way back, Ed pointed out a very short paved runway to me. It was, he said, a remote controlled airplane field. He pointed out the X’s at the end of the runway in place of numbers, put there to prevent actual aircraft from trying to land.

I’m doing okay with a 3700 foot runway, but I couldn’t imagine trying to land on one that was 300 feet long.