Lesson #5 - Trim practice, steep turns, slow flight

Unlike yesterday morning, today was a great day for flying. My wife, Cyndi, decided to ride along and take some pictures. Today was all flying, no ground work to speak of. I also did a fair bit of the radio work today, calling ground and tower for taxi and departure clearances at KPAO. A little more radio practice and I think I'l be OK. 

The focus today was on continued practice of trim, climbs, turns, and descents, plus the introduction of some slow flight practice. Dave went to great lengths to keep me looking outside at the horizon. He covering the instruments with a chart and had me trim for what I thought was a certain speed, then uncover and check. I started to get the hang of it, making a concerted effort to watch the distance between the cowling and the horizon and trying to burn into my brain what that looks like for different airspeeds and configurations. I practiced a couple steep turns in each direction and practiced holding altitude and bank angle in the turn and rolling out on the correct heading.

Slow flight was interesting. We went up to about 5000 feet and Dave showed me how to enter slow flight. I worked on trim, and did a few gentle turns. It was pretty weird slowing the plane down to 40 knots, just on the edge of a stall in a nose-high attitude. (We did manage to hear the stall warning horn a few times.) We did a few entries and exits from slow flight just so I could start to get the feel of it. We also did a few exercises to set up for landing configuration, adding flaps and trimming for about 65 knots while aiming for an imaginary runway in the distance.

We thought about doing a touch and go and Half Moon Bay (KHMB).  It was kind of bumpy on the way over so we decided to head back to KPAO. As we were in the vicinity of KHMB, we overheard a pilot in a Baron chew out some helicopter pilot just hovering on the runway while the Baron was on final. The Baron had been calling his position all through the pattern, and when he got to final, there's this helicopter in his way. Not cool. A few heated words were heard on the radio.

We headed back in over Palo Alto and Stanford started to get set up for landing. Dave warned me not to get under 2000 over Palo Alto or the little grey-haired ladies would come out with their stinger missiles and shoot us down for making too much noise. We descended to about 1500 over the freeway, then down to 1000 and entered left downwind pattern for runway 31. I did a pretty good downwind to base turn, but had a harder time turning and getting lined up on final. There was a little crosswind and I was over-controlling, causing some oscillation. Dave helped me straighten things out and get 669TW on the ground.

Lesson #5: 1.9 hours

Total hours: 7.0