Lesson 3

It's Saturday morning, 0800 local (1400Z), and the sun has risen to crystal clear skies above and to the south and high clouds and colder air coming from the north. My instructor, C, has arranged for another instructor (let's call him M) to take me up when C has the day off, which he often does on the weekends.

So I arrive early and start preflighting the plane, 2160Q again, and it goes fine. M arrives and asks me what C and I did during the last lesson and then he asks me some questions about the plane, which I get right and wrong. He asks me how the control services are connected to the flight controls and I say the rudder and elevators are by cable and the ailerons are by push rod. Wrong! They're all connected by cable in a Skyhawk. Doh. Now, remember that it has been a full week since my first two lessons and now I'm a little rattled.

We get in and do the before engine start checklist and then I try to fire up the engine. My brain farts and I have my right hand on the throttle instead of the mixture so the engine dies. M reaches up and pushes in the mixture quick but it's too late. So we try again and this time I get the timing right. So now I'm a little more rattled.

Then I use the radio communication cheatsheet that C gave me last week to request permission to taxi. M is giving me this funny look and the ground controller asks me to repeat my request. I thought I sounded funny in my borrowed headset but what I didn't realize is that the microphone is cutting out so only 1 of 3 words is getting out. We discuss shutting down and swapping them out, but M suggests we keep going and I just focus on flying and he'll handle the radio (though I'm suppose to write down what I hear). That's fine by me. So we get clearance and start taxiing. Dang, I just can't find the right amount of nosewheel pressure to hold a straight line so we're all over the place. Now I'm even more rattled.

During the runup we discover that the left magneto is fouled again. I discover that M's technique is different from C's in that he does the steps in a different order. With the engine at 1800 RPM he leans the mixture until we get an RPM drop and then we run the engine up to 2200 RPM. C does it the other way around. Of course, it works and the next test shows a minimal RPM drop on the left magneto.

After we get clearance I taxi out onto the runway and manage to perform a decent takeoff. We turn to the East and climb to 2000' and cruise out to the East practice area which is over and beyond Lake Lavon. The view is spectacular of the Dallas skyline and I can easily see all the major landmarks ... Lake Lavon, Downtown Dallas, the tollway corridor (tall buildings that mark where Addison Airport is located), Lake Lewisville to the north, and Lake Ray Hubbard, which is south of Lake Lavon.

Now I'm starting to calm down and I feel more comfortable. I trim the plane to fly straight and level at 2000' and now we're, sort of, chatting about what we're going to cover in the lesson and sightseeing while we scan for traffic. I notice that I've got a bit of a breeze hitting me in the face so I reach over to roll the air vent away from me and the little vent ball pops out and into my hand! Now I've got a blast of air hitting me in the face! All I can do is look at M and say, "ummm sorry." He says, "don't worry about it" and takes the ball from me.

After passing over Lake Lavon we do some clearing turns and then we practice more slow flight. Power back ... raise the nose ... maintain altitude ... put more power back in once we pass 50 kias. Then we try some gentle turns, a 180-degree turn and then 90-degree back to the right. This is pretty easy except I have trouble keeping my altitude, though I don't think we lost more than 200-300'. And I don't think I consistently held the speed down to 45 kias like M wanted, I think the airspeed hovered around 50 mostly.

Then M had me to some constant-speed ascents and descents. All pretty easy. So then we decide to head over to Collin County Regional Airport (KTKI) to fly around the pattern. We descend to pattern altitude and are given clearance to enter on right base for runway 35. We enter the base leg and slow under 110 kias and drop the first 10-degrees of flaps. At 80 kias we turn final and I get introduced to crosswind landings! I can't remember the wind speed but it was strong and coming from 330 degrees. So M talked me through doing a touch-and-go and I had a really hard time keeping the plane centered on the runway. M never stated that he had the controls so we both kept our hands and feet in the right places and guided the plane down, but I could tell that he really did have control of the plane. Which is fine, because though I've read about this a million times it's not anything like experiencing it for the first time.

We've got all three wheels down and we're rolling and M states that I have control and says "give it full power and let's go around." So I do just that. Flying the pattern turns out to be pretty easy. I raise the flaps and push the throttle all the way in and give it some right rudder. We lift off and ascend to 500' above the ground before turning to the right (yep, non-standard pattern) on crosswind. After a few seconds, because we've now got a healthy tail wind, we turn to the right again and line up parallel to the runway. We reach 1600' MSL and I level off, trim and pull the power back so we stay at around 90 kias.

I can hear over the radio that there's another Cessna on final so we look for it and spot it by the time it's on short final. Then the tower clears us to land so we turn base when the runway is at a 45-degree angle from our tail. I pull back the power and put the flaps down 10-degrees. We start to descend and I turn final after a few seconds. I leave the plane crabbed into the wind until we're about 500' AGL and then I push in the right rudder to point the nose down the runway and then start dancing with the ailerons to keep the plane headed the right direction. Well, dancing isn't the right word. It feels more like I'm flapping my wings like a goony bird. So M steps in and helps me keep the center line. About 100' above the runway we start the flare and just as we're about to touch down a bird appears out of no where flies across our nose. We're both startled and so we balloon a little before touching down.

I know that bird was small but at the time it looked HUGE. Like a condor. =;-)

I raise the flaps and put in the power and we're off again. At some point there M requests clearance to depart the pattern and we turn to the left to return to Addison. By now the cold front is getting closer and it feels like the clouds are just looming over Dallas. All too soon we're back at Addison and landing. This landing goes much smoother as the runway is oriented towards 330 degrees and again I'm not actually doing the landing but I've got my hands and feet on the controls to feel what's going on.

I taxi us back to Monarch and secure the plane.

During the debriefing M tells me not to sweat the touch-and-goes at TKI. He said that crosswinds aren't even introduced into the training until much later and so it really wasn't fair to throw me into that situation. But then, on the other hand it was realistic and I still managed to fly a good pattern even though I needed a lot of his help on the actual landing phase. By the time I got home I needed to lay down for a while to decompress!

Overall, this was still a lot of fun. Overwhelming, but fun. As I laid there running over the lesson in my mind and trying to relax I had a huge grin on my face.

But the really good news of the day was that my new headset arrived later that afternoon, so no more borrowed headsets!

This flight: 1.3 hours
Total time: 3.5 hours