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.