So, what have I been up to? I've been flying - perhaps not as much as I'd have liked to, having spent enough money to get my licence on refitting the bathroom. They say you can't fly a house, but you also can't shower in (most) aircraft. I have got a few hours under my belt though, mainly doing some of the bits of flying that I don't really want to do.
When I refer to bits that I don't want to do, I mean the bits that are, frankly, just no fun. The bits where they teach you to fly in a way that you just don't want to do in reality, mainly so that you know when you're about to get into something bad, and how to get out of it.
My first not-particularly-fun lesson was slow flight. The aircraft has speeds it likes to fly at, and speeds where it really doesn't want to be flown, and as you get into the bottom end of its operating range, it becomes a bit of a pig to fly. None of the controls respond to the light touches that they normally do. Years ago, I owned an absolute shed of a Land Rover Discovery; one day, the power steering pump failed in the middle of me navigating a mini roundabout. Suddenly, a vehicle I could steer by fingertip pressure only became something that took considerable feats of strength to manage - and that's possibly the best analogy I can think of for how the aircraft was behaving.
After that came the bathroom, and months of penury. I decided that having a quick refresher lesson was in order, and so I spent an hour or so going back over everything that I'd managed to get rusty on. With that out of the way, it was back to doing things I didn't want to do.
So... stalling.When I mentioned I was doing stalling, a family member asked "But what if you can't get the engine started again?". In aircraft terms, the word 'stall' has nothing to do with the engine, but rather relates to the wings - a glider, which doesn't even have an engine, is perfectly capable of being stalled.
I figured it was time for a picture, mainly because I was getting fed up looking at a wall of text, but also because it helps illustrate what I'm talking about. The image above which I lifted from Wikipedia shows the forces on the wing: thrust from the engine (pulling it through the air), drag from the air (resisting the thrust), lift (from the wing doing its thing) and the weight of the aircraft, trying to pull the whole thing back to earth and opposing the lift.
These forces oppose each other. If you've got more lift than you have weight, you go up. More weight than lift, you go down. The stall is a condition where the lift packs in and suddenly weight becomes far more of a problem than it was moments earlier. What this means in practical terms is that you stop flying, and start falling.
Stalls happens when the angle the wing cuts through the air at (the angle of attack) becomes too steep, and the airflow over the top of the wing gets all messed up. Unfortunately, the syllabus says that I can't just be told this, and I have to actually experience it.
Before doing this, we make sure we're safe to do it. Safe. To basically stop flying. Ooookaaaay... Time for an acronym. HASELL
Height - High enough that we're not going to hit something when we inevitably lose height.
Airframe - Flaps set, brakes off (presumably the brakes being off is one less thing to worry about if it all goes Pete Tong and we find ourselves landing off-airfield).
Security - Harness on, door closed, anything heavy strapped well down so I don't get clobbered in the back of the head by my flight bag.
Engine - Still running. Still got fuel. Not doing anything it shouldn't.
Location - No airfields/controlled airspace/cloud. Not over a a built up area. Let's not dwell on why we're avoiding built up areas - it's not a happy thought to be having.
Lookout - Make sure we're not going to hit another aircraft.
What follows this is the most counter-intuitive thing I've done since starting to learn to fly. I pulled the power back, and tried raising the nose. As we got slower, raising the nose became harder and harder, needing a really firm pull on the controls to do it. The whole thing feels wrong, especially when combined with the knowledge that you're deliberately going to stall the thing, instinct tells you to lower the nose straight away and stop mucking about. In fact, I did that on at least one occasion and got told off by my instructor. As you keep doing it, the aircraft's stall warner realises what you're doing, and a really annoying "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" sound fills the cabin. This is where you really should stop it and lower the nose. But not today, we're going to keep pulling back, which is now getting really hard to do. Things start to shake. It really isn't fun. And then it happens - the aircraft suddenly drops its nose.
This is really where the title of the blog comes in, it's part of a longer saying. "Push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. Pull it back, they get smaller. Keep pulling it back, the houses keep getting smaller until they suddenly get bigger again." - that last bit where the houses suddenly get bigger is the stall.
So, now we're falling. Fortunately, this isn't half as bad as it sounds. Push the controls forward and stick some power in - and we've recovered.
OK, so it's nothing I couldn't have learned from reading it, but the syllabus (and common sense) demands that pilots can recognise and recover from a stall, and that's why there's two whole lessons on stalling in there.
My second stalling lesson was yesterday. It was a glorious day on the ground, which unfortunately translated into a horrible one once I got in the air. The rising heat from the ground might have made glider pilots jump with joy, but it pretty much thwarted my attempts at flying straight and level. Fortunately, once outside the airport's airspace, we were able to climb to clearer air. The rising heat was still clear from the lack of any real horizon; as a visual pilot, you're taught to fly with reference to the actual horizon rather than relying on the artificial horizon instrument - well, today, the real horizon was a sort of fuzzy grey band. I picked a spot in the fuzz that I thought might have been the actual horizon, and decided to stick to that, which sort of worked.
A quick couple of clean stalls, just to make sure I'd not forgotten last lesson, then into stalling with flaps and stalling on approach. Although we were practicing these at 4000 feet, had they happened in reality the chances are I'd be on approach to a runway, and therefore quite a lot closer to the ground, so my instructor was naturally keen to make sure I'd nailed it!
Sorted. Great. Home again. Decending down to 1500 feet for the run in to the airport, things got grotty again. This is normally the bit where after the hard work, I get to relax and enjoy the flight, but I was back to constantly having to correct the aircraft after it had been pushed off course. Bah!
My instructor talked me through the approach, with me taking the aircraft right down to the point where we'd be flaring for the landing. Next lesson, I'll hopefully be taking it all the way down onto the tarmac. "We'll probably have some very hard landings next time" he told me with a grin.
In the mean time, I need to hit the theory books. Air Law is something I need to get sorted before I do my first solo, and I need to get my medical sorted too - hopefully that'll just be a formality, although it seems that it takes an hour, which will be the longest I'll have ever spent in the presence of a doctor.
