Lesson seven: In which I feel a bit like Goldilocks

For all the rain and coldness that's typical for this time of year, autumn does occasionally pull a truly excellent day out of the hat. Today was one of those days. Scarely a cloud in the sky, no wind, and reasonably warm to boot. Who could ask for more?

So, off to the airport. The briefing room was in use, so my instructor shoved me out of the door onto the apron, and got me to do the walk around on the aircraft we were going to take. All done, back indoors, head out to the aircraft, and... the right hand seat had an issue, and couldn't be fixed.

Ho-hum. Never mind, there were other planes. The instructor went to book out another aircraft, while I did another walk around. In we climbed - checked the seat; all OK. Checked the brakes. Hum. Problem. Oh boy, the mechanics are going to be busy tomorrow.

Right, third time's the charm, yes? Again, the instructor disappeared while I did a walk around. I was happy. We climbed in, more checks. Yes, we were both happy. Off to go - a mere hour later than planned, but never mind. Today's lesson was to be turning - yes, another one of those things that I've been doing all along, but now I get to do it properly.

I don't know why, but for the first ten minutes, my left arm seemed to be unnaturally heavy; if I wasn't paying attention, we'd find that I'd dropped my left hand, and we weren't flying level. Time to give myself a talking to. With that sorted, onwards and upwards, ready to start making new and different mistakes.

Turning - or specifically, turning properly - involves quite a few things, not least of which is keeping a good lookout to make sure you're not going to run into anything; on several occasions, I found that I was keeping my head down in the cockpit, before reminding myself that if I was going to hit anything, I'd stand a better chance of seeing it if I looked out of the windscreen. Having mastered keeping a lookout (and there were a few other things in the air, not least a few helicopters), I moved on to forgetting to keep the nose up - scarcely a turn went by where we didn't end up heading towards the ground.

Once I'd mastered not heading towards the ground, we started... ummm... doing just that. I'd be learning to do turns with 30° of bank, meaning that you can see the ground out of the side window fairly well. Combined with a decent, the overall vision is one of a death spiral!

By the time we'd finished doing all of that, we had to head back to the airport. Being a nice clear, sunny day, the ground had warmed up a treat, and we were treated to some light turbulence to liven things up.

Coming in to land, we were sandwiched between larger aircraft; an airbus had not long taken off, and there was one a few miles behind us as well; my instructor took over in order to get us down, and off the runway as quickly as possible. We deliberately approached higher than normal (not a problem, given the length of my local airport's runway, compared to the landing distance required by the little Piper) in order to avoid the wake turbulence from the larger aircraft that had just taken off; the wake of a large plane (or even a helicopter) can cause all manner of fun and games for pilots of smaller aircraft, including tipping them completely upside down! Best avoid that, then. Shame, because it looks so pretty in the picture.

Lesson six: In which I attempt to avoid crude jokes about going down

One of these. Bigger than my old Fiat 500
with wings - but still bloody tiny.

Damn you, real life; will you please stop getting in the way of learning to fly? It's September, and I've just managed my second lesson of the year. Fingers crossed, getting a proper job instead of mucking around as a contractor will mean I can budget a bit better, and fit some more regular lessons in. That said, with summer having finished as promptly as it began, we'll have to see what winter throws at us. The last 24 hours here seem to have been dominated by howling gales, so let's hope that's not going to be the theme for the next few months.

As my last lesson was climbing, the logical way to follow on was descending - of course, I'd descended at least once in all of my previous lessons in order to get back on the ground, but this time I was going to do it properly. I was in a Piper again, having decided to make the switch from the smaller Cessna. On reflection, I think I'm starting to like the aircraft. Although the Cessna feels more responsive (almost twitchy, sometimes) the Piper handles what the weather throws at it somewhat better. Furthermore, it cruises at a rather different attitude - whilst the little Cessna is somewhat nose-up, obscuring much of what's directly ahead of you, the Piper shows you a bit more of the landscape.

To add a bit more interest to the day, the weather had decided to throw me a curve ball. I've flown from my local airport many a time, either sitting at the pointy end of a light aircraft, or sitting further back on something far bigger. Every single time, I'd always taken off in the same direction, but this time the wind direction meant I was going to see it from the other end. Well, I was excited about it, even if nobody else is.

I got to do my first walkaround check of the aircraft - making sure that both wings were in the place where the factory had left them and all that jazz, and clambered inside. Despite having two more seats than the Cessna, the Piper has only one door, and it's not on the pilot's side. Getting in when you're more than about 5'8" requires a bit of contortion, but I managed to get there somehow. Off we went, up into the wide blue yonder, to fly over a bit of the countryside that's now getting to look hugely familiar to me.

There's a certain slightly alarming element about descending, in that the term 'aim point' comes into your vocabulary. Of course, this is intended to be about aiming for runway thresholds and the like, but during my lesson, my aiming point ended up being a lighthouse. Managing to surpress thoughts about how aiming a light aircraft at a lighthouse is a stupid thing to be doing, we descended. Then climbed. Then descended. And climbed again. I became aware that I was completely incapable of climbing and maintaining a heading at the same time. Oopsie, forgot about the rudder pedals - that'll help.

Cessna Citation X.
I'll own one when I win the lottery

Eventually once we'd done the climb-descend thing enough times, it was time to head back. The airport was rather busy - for the first time since starting to learn a year ago, I saw another light aircraft in the sky. We ended up holding near the airport, spending a good ten minutes flying in circles before we could come in. When we eventually did, air traffic control warned us that there was something crossing the runway ahead of us. And there it was - right in front of us - a rather bigger and shinier business jet. Fortunately we missed it. "I wonder if it's anyone famous?" my instructor asked as we taxied in. We both peered over, but had no idea who was getting out. I decided not to get them to autograph a blank page in my log book.

Lesson five: It's the wrong plane, Grommit!

Blimey. It's been five months since I last flew. Things happened. I got married. I went on honeymoon. I spent months in penury after my wife frogmarched me into every jewellery shop in the Caribbean.

So, today was the day to get back in the air. I popped along to the flying school, met my instructor (a different one to my last few lessons, but never mind) and... ummm... a different aircraft. Hmm. It seems there'd been some confusion over my booking, and so I'd ended up with a Piper, a hefty four seater rather than the little two seater Cessna I was used to. "Do you want to go in the Piper instead?", well it had been five months and I wasn't going back home without at least flying something.

So, briefing over, we wandered out to the aircraft. It was different: the Cessna's high-wing, so you have to make sure you don't take a lump out of your head on the way in; the Piper's low-wing, and you have to clamber over the wing to get into the cabin. A quick look around the controls and instruments showed that it was the same sort of thing I was used to, but with everything in different places. Baffling.

Being towards the end of a lovely, warm day, we experienced a bit of turbulence around 1,000 feet. The heavier Piper wasn't too affected by it, but as I found out on lesson two my usual Cessna would have been less fun.

We spent some time recapping, to make sure I'd not forgotten it all in the five months since I last flew. Fortunately, all the time spent sitting on the bus reading the book and actually going through the motions using the imaginary control column coming out of the back of the seat in front of me helped. I don't think I got any funny looks while I was doing this on my morning commute; at least I managed to restrain myself from making plane noises while I did it.

Having satisfied himself that I'd managed to remember at least something, my instructor moved onto climbing. It may seem odd that climbing doesn't happen until my fifth lesson, but that's how it is. Quite how I've managed to get this far with the wheels off the ground, I'm not sure. Equally odd is that descending doesn't happen until the next lesson, so the fact that I'm not still up there is a bit of a mystery.

After doing a bit of climbing, we got discussing the aircraft. Back in the flying school office, there were people asking my opinions - how did I find it compared to the Cessna? Everyone seemed to expect me to say that I loved it, and I wanted to fly a Piper from hereon in. Well... I'm not so sure. It's heavier, and it feels that way when you fly it; being light, the Cessna seems to do things so much quicker, and with less persuasion. That said, the Piper did feel more stable. I guess I'm going to have to figure out which one I preferred before my next lesson.

Lesson four: In which a seagull is strangled

Christmas has been and gone. My other half got me my very own plane, too!

I get a real one when I've got my licence, yes?

I also got given a voucher for a flying lesson, fortunately enough with the school that I've already been learning with - a big thumbs up to my ever-generous mother-in-law there! So the voucher and I went to the airport on a cold, but otherwise lovely day. Virtually no wind, good visibility, scarcely a cloud in the sky - who could ask for more?

Same drill as last time, sit down, have a chat. My instructor took me through some stuff that I'd already read about in the book, confirming that I'd understood some of it, and completely got the wrong end of the stick with other bits. And off we went - Exercise 6, Straight and Level flight, which I'd been assured wasn't as easy as it sounded.

Stick wings and a propeller on this. That's
what I'm learning to fly in.

Off we headed: into the aircraft, checks done, taxi to the holding point where we waited for an Emirates A330 to clear the runway - you get a real feel for how big those things are when you're sitting in the airborne equivalent of a Fiat 126 as one goes hurtling past at full throttle.

Up we went, climbing to 4000 feet - with it being a lovely day, the instructor was worried we'd be finding other traffic, so wanted to try and climb above it. As it happened, we didn't see another aircraft all the time we were out.

Things didn't go smoothly at first. I kept forgetting which was round controls worked, pulling the throttle back to idle when I needed more power, using the trimmer upside-down and all sorts. "Those are the two things people tend to get confused" said the instructor, a man who on our previous lesson admitted to managing to pull the mixture out to lean and cutting the engine off on one occasion - apparently the sort of mistake where you quickly learn not to do it a second time.

Although I was doing the majority of the flying, there were points where the instructor took over in order to demonstrate things. Whilst demonstrating how we could fly at more than one speed for a particular power setting, I became aware of a noise in the cockpit - I was informed that this was the stall warning, 'stall' being the term used to describe what happens when a wing stops flying, and starts plummeting.

"I thought it would be louder than that?"
"It gets louder as you get closer to the stall speed. It's like strangling a seagull."
"I wouldn't know."
"Neither would I. But that's what I imagine strangling a seagull would be like."

On my previous lesson, the instructor had taken over for the landing. This time, it seemed that I was going to do most of it. With clearance issued, I did quite a poor job of lining up with the runway but got there eventually. Unlike lessons 1 & 2, I knew what the controls did, and I was being trusted to use them. The instructor, a man whose continuing health was dependent on not letting students do silly things, had his hands near the control column in case I decided to dash us both into the runway.

We were down safely. The look of relief on the face of my flying-phobic fiancée who was waiting at the flying school was palpable.

Next month: The roller coaster ride that is climbing and descending.