Iain Hosking - Flying Training - Lesson 11

You are here: Flying > Training > Lesson 11
Back

Lesson 11: Circuits

Saturday 24 December 2005 at 6.30am with Niall Higgins in Citabria VH-RRW

Yes, a lesson on Christmas Eve. Well, it was early so didn't affect the Christmas preparations.

This day was very odd weatherwise. I was woken at 4am by a howling wind at Faulconbridge. Checked Weatherzone, the Bureau of Meteorology and Airservices Australia (location briefing) and Camden was calm. Headed off at 10 past 5 and drove through lots of ground-level mist. The sunrise was pretty through low cloud on the horizon. It was very atmospheric at Camden and the windsock was limp (see photo). Jim Drinnan was there early getting ready for fire- spotting patrol. I helped him get a Cessna and two Citabrias out of the hangar and was already doing a preflight inspection on RRW when Niall turned up.

Taxiing was relatively smooth (though I did cut a corner turning left into the taxiway). After run-up Niall had me turn into the unfamiliar runway 10. We kept to the left (the middle is looking tired). I felt like Baron von Richthofen bouncing down a grass strip in a tailwheel aircraft. After takeoff the climb seemed sluggish - 80 knots was very flat so I settled on 70 kts. This was not an illusion. The temperature lowered the air density (which pilots refer to as raising the density altitude) so we had less power and less lift.

The reference point was a white church on a hill and a house in the foreground (kept on the left of the nose). We turned at 800 feet, by which time it was already getting very warm in the cockpit (I was wearing shorts and T-shirt this time - not the flapping work trousers that distracted me last week). By 1000 feet Niall was sure we had the heater on, so we fiddled with it - it's a black knob under the vent and pulling it out made it even hotter so it turned out it was not on - it was just a mass of hot air moving down from Central Australia.

At circuit height - 1300ft - there was significant turbulence. At one point a particularly large bump tried to turn us over on our back (it seemed - at least we seemed to be standing on the right wing, which was alarming). At the end of the downwind leg found we were 200 feet lower than at the start. Niall commented that this was normal with the turbulence, and basically that the turbulence just had to be handled. I must check what the recovery would be - the Flying Training Manual has a section titled Unusual Attitude Recoveries, but it limits itself to nose-high and nose-low attitudes and doesn't mention what you do if the aeroplane is on its side...

We shared the circuit with a Cessna 182 from Airborne Aviation, who at first said he was going to use runway 28 (ie the opposite one from us, which would have been exciting) but relented and switched to runway 10. It turned out he was correct because we ended up with a tailwind by the end of the lesson.

The first couple of landings were reasonable, though I was a little too high and too fast. I could tell Niall was quite pleased. Then as he said I "went off the boil", ie I started veering from one side of the runway to the other again. I think at one point I actually put in the wrong rudder, which is unforgiveable. Does anyone else do this after 10 hours' flying?

I was obviously coming in too high on final, so Niall developed a routine of a sideslip to lose height, followed by a sharp, "You've got it!" around the runway threshold with the plane just recovering from being end-on to the ground at what felt like 10 feet up and still some way away from the planned touchdown point. I didn't do my best landings after these moments.

On the bright side there were some periods when I seemed to see with some clarity just how much rudder to put in and when to stop the correction and straighten it up again.

I'm not sure how many cicuits we did - 7? 8? but by the time we'd touched down for the last time and parked it we'd done 1.2 hours so it was quite intensive.

Then a couple of other students went up - by this time the wind was up and was blowing pretty much down runway 28 so they used that. Anita (17 hrs) was up with Neil Tucker in WKM (orange) and a young fellow whose dad was kitted out with radio and binoculars was in RRW with Niall.

By this time a RFS volunteer had turned up to go fire-spotting with Jim. He was pretty concerned about airsickness and had grey bands on both wrists. His problem was going to be juggling digital camera, GPS and tablet PC while keeping sick bags close by, all at low altitude in turbulence. It's turned out a quiet day though - no bushfires, though Cathy reckons today's weather reminded her of Christmas Day 2001.

After the flight everone compared notes and without exception everyone had been fumbling with the heater controls, convinced that the heater was on. That was the weirdest part of the weather, as there's nothing very unusual about wind.

The Weatherzone temp and wind history is shown above above, but of course it doesn't show the fact that the temperature actually increased with height.

Did some more research on the internet on tailwheel landings. This comment from the Taildraggers.com forums was useful:

"Malcolm, You are probably working too hard on the problem. As you gain a bit of experience and learn to relax a bit it may seem to emerge for you. One key thing that often gets forgotten when experienced people coach new pilots is the discussion on where to look, where to put your eyes. If you can find a reasonable focus point down at the end of the takeoff or landing area, far enough away that it will remain still during the whole process and give you a fixed reference with which to judge the emergence of any unwanted yaw, it can be very helpful. You can pretty well assume that the aircraft will yaw to the left as you add power and raise the tail. The more quickly you perform these actions the more exciting things will be. Easy does it. Keep your heels off the floor so you are nimble on the pedals. It's only an airplane after all. Hang in there. It will come. Alex [Burton].

Here's a couple of circuits (by other students, not me!):

Click thumbnails to enlarge.