What follows is my first actual post on my flight lessons — I wrote an introduction and some background a few weeks ago. Much of this I’m writing simply for my own benefit, to help solidify my training. There’s more detail than you’ll probably find interesting — I’m also aiming to keep it accessible to anybody, so I may oversimplify some parts.

Here’s where I’m at: I’ve had eight lessons and logged a total of 9.3 hours. I try to fly twice a week (which gets tough with the weather), and a typical lesson is 2 hours at the airport — about an hour of which is actually in the sky.

Preflight

During our first two lessons, my instructor, Will, showed me how to preflight the plane, and I now handle this on my own. It consists of walking around the plane, looking for any obvious problems, manipulating all of the control surfaces, checking for their connections, examining tires, intakes and sensors. I also check the oil, double-check the fuel levels with a dipstick, and even take three fuel samples, looking for water or dirt.

From the very beginning, I’ve learned that pilots are a cautious bunch, with many routines and idiosyncrasies to keep themselves and their passengers safe. For example, when in flight or on the ground, we have a system so that there is never confusion over who is actually flying the plane. When control is transferred, the original pilot states, “Your controls,” the new pilot states, “my controls,” and the original pilot states, “your controls.” It feels a bit silly sometimes, but after a few times when I was unsure if Will was flying the plane or if I was supposed to, I realized why this is done.

Taxiing

This took me a few lessons to get the hang of. You steer with your feet, while keeping a hand on the throttle. The pedals are a bit tricky, because the bottom half controls the steering of the nosewheel (and the rudder when in flight), but the top of each pedal controls the braking for that side. To make a sharp left turn, you push the left rudder pedal in (which pushes the right pedal out), and then feather the left brake with your toes, to make the plane pivot around the tire.

This gets easier after a bit, but is complicated when there is wind on the ground, in which case your other hand is on the control column, adjusting with each turn to keep the wind from lifting up a wing. As soon as I would grab the column, I’d begin to forget to steer with my feet, and try to steer with the column. Which doesn’t work. Thankfully, the Ann Arbor airport has wide taxiways and I had plenty of room to practice. At this point, the only time I get nervous is when I’m pulling up to the fuel tank.

Turns, Climbs and Descents

On my first lesson, we tackled these simple maneuvers. I was expecting to blow through this stuff — I had played enough fighter plane fight simulators to know about pitch, bank, and yaw, right? Well, not at all. Like I mentioned in my first post, getting the hang of the instruments is like getting information from a firehose. Once over the practice area (about 10 miles north of Ann Arbor), my first task was to make a turn from north to west. This actually meant:

1. Checking for other planes
2. Turning the yoke to the left
3. Waiting until the plane reaches the correct amount of bank (in this case, 30º)
4. Watching my altitude, and slowly pulling back on the column, to keep from descending
5. Watching the turn coordinator, which indicates how much rudder I need to simultaneously push
6. Neutralizing the yoke once the plane reaches 30º of bank, but maintaining back pressure
7. Watching the heading indicator until the plane reaches the right heading.
8. Turning the yoke to the right until the plane rolls level, simultaneously releasing rudder pressure

So that’s a slightly simplified list of things to do during my first turn — I didn’t even try to maintain my speed, which would have required a bit of extra throttle during the turn. Obviously, those things become second nature rather quickly, but for those first few turns, my brain was just struggling to remember what to be watching.

In particular, I began by fixating too much within the cockpit, instead of watching outside. From what I read, this is pretty common among student pilots. Until I learned what the outside is “supposed” to look like in various situations (normal climb, 30º turn, etc.), it was easier to use the gauges. The problem is that gauges are slow, require more time to parse, and they take you away from watching for other planes. At this point, I feel a lot better about my progress with scanning the gauges and the horizon. It’s still tempting to occasionally fixate on one gauge, though. Even 5-6 short seconds focusing on the altimeter means that I’m unaware of airspeed changes during that time. This becomes infinitely more important during landing, as I’ll explain later.

Climbing and Descending Turns

My second lesson was a lot of continuation from the first, though I began to incorporate simultaneous climbs and turns. This more than doubles the amount of concentration, because you will likely finish one part of the maneuver before the other, which forces you to watch every piece of information. These maneuvers are also much more common than 1-axis changes. A plane that is both climbing and turning is easier for other planes to spot, and when flying around an airport, one will frequently be continuing to climb while turning through the traffic pattern. When turning, the plane also has a higher stall speed, requiring a careful watch on airspeed during climbing turns.

This is when I first began to understand the problem of “letting the airplane get ahead of you,” which is a frequent dilemma for student pilots. If I’m not thinking ahead during these maneuvers, suddenly the plane has reached my target altitude, and I need to think about my next move. By the time I execute it, I’m 100 feet above my target, which adds five more steps to descend back down. All the while, the plane continues to turn and is likely to overshoot the turn while I’m still catching up on altitude. This phenomena is particularly troubling during landings, when I find myself 20 seconds from touching down, while my mental checklists are a minute behind. Just another thing to learn and practice!

Stalls

Before I go further, I need to explain a bit about stalls. First, when speaking of stalls in an airplane, I’m talking about aerodynamic stalls, which don’t have anything to do with an engine stalling. An aerodynamic stall occurs when there is no longer enough air flowing over the wing to provide lift. This typically happens at low speeds, but can happen at any speed if the plane pitches up sharply (causing an excessive angle-of-attack). Stalls typically occur during landings and takeoffs, because the plane is moving slower than normal. They are most dangerous at this time, because the plane has less altitude to recover.

A pilot should have plenty of warning before a stall occurs: the plane gets quieter, because less air is flowing around it, the controls become mushy, then the stall warning horn begins to sound. Finally, the plane begins to buffet, which is felt through the control yoke, and when the stall is fully realized, the plane pitches down, without any command from the pilot. This is actually a designed behavior, because as soon as the nose pitches down, the plane quickly recovers airspeed, breaking the stall and allowing the pilot to pull the plane up to a level attitude.

By my third lesson, I was practicing stall recognition and recovery. We practice a few different types of stalls, especially approach and departure stalls, simulating landings and takeoffs. To practice these, we configure the plane as it would be during that stage of flight (flaps, throttle, airspeed, etc.), except we’re 2,000 feet above the ground, instead of a few hundred. This gives plenty of time to recover.

To execute the stall, I would simply pull back on the yoke, which causes the nose to pitch up, and airspeed to decrease. It’s a bit tricky to convince yourself to do this because the plane is obviously informing you that something is wrong: the controls feel terrible and the horn is blaring. As soon as the stall happens, the nose drops, and the recovery phase of the maneuver happens. This means applying full throttle, allowing the nose to dip to gain speed, then quickly recovering level flight, all before descending below the simulated “ground,” (which, again, Mom, is 2000 feet above the real, solid ground). This all happens in under 5 seconds.

This practice was a whole lot of fun because so much is happening and the plane is behaving in a lot of different ways. My biggest problem was keeping myself from adding power and recovering before the stall actually occurred. I was wimping out.

Conclusion

I have much more to cover, including radio calls, slow flight, steep turns, takeoffs, landings, and my successful FAA physical, but I underestimated how much I have to say. Stay tuned for more updates as I work to become a pilot!