Today we practiced slow flight.
We started the day with a ground school lesson on how to check weather. My CFI showed me the awesome Aviation Weather Center, which has become one of my favorite bookmarks. After determining the weather wasn’t bad enough to prevent a lesson, I grabbed the keys to N1727V.
Out to the plane, preflight, taxi to the active runway (still feel like a drunk duck), and takeoff performed by my CFI. This time he had me do the takeoff while he assisted on the controls. Out to the practice area we go.
We worked on slow flight — this is where you fly the plane at slow speeds (duh!). It is designed to teach you how the plane feels at slower speeds — the controls are less effective and you need more control input to move the plane around where you want it. This is a precursor to landing, where your final approach is done at slow speeds.
My CFI then demonstrated a stall. At altitude, a stall is easily corrected by pitching down and gaining airspeed. Where stalls are killers is in low altitude, such as when coming in for a landing. If you get too slow or let the angle of attack get too high when low to the ground, you can stall and fall into the ground with Very. Bad. Results.
Luckily, recovery (given that you have sufficient altitude) is fairly simple — get the nose down and increase airspeed to decrease the angle of attack and get that airflow normalized over the wing.
After the stall and recovery demo, we headed back to land at DXR. Another lesson in the books!
Flight time today: 1.4 hours
Total flight time to date: 5.6 hours