My final flying lesson « The Hundred Dollar Hamburger

10
Jul/090

My final flying lesson

Finally, after 2 cancelations, I flew my final flying lesson with my instructor, David Chune von Tangen. This marks the end of my normal flying lessons, and means that I’m ready for a preliminary test with the school leader in my flying club, and the skill test with a controller from the the Norwegian Cilvil Aviation Authority. If I pass those, then I’m done, and I can officially call myself a pilot.

Today we decided to fly LN-NRF, a Cessna 172SP from 2005. I love that airplane, and compared to the Piper Cherokee I usually fly it’s a rocket! It’s got a 180 horsepower engine, climbs around 30% faster than the plane I usually fly, and cruises at 120kts, compared to the 100kts I’m used to. It’s also fairly new, less than 4 years old, so if you put your nose really close to the seat back, you can almost get a wiff of that new leather scent! It’s super stable, and when you get to cruise, you can pretty much trim her out, and she flies herself. She’s also equiped with a 2 axis autopilot which flies by GPS (or NAV), so she’ll even get you we’re you’re going without to much hassle.

The weather today was not very good. There was rain, some low clouds and reduced visibility in certain areas. The cloudbase however was pretty high up, around 4200 feet, so we decided to take off and check conditions once we got off the ground. We took off and got good climb performance, around 1000 feet pr. minute, so we quickly got up to 2000 feet. We saw that the weather was ok for airwork, and we continued south to our designated training area overhead Lake Øyeren, just south of Lillestrøm. The clouds we’re getting thicker and lower at the end of the lake, which mean that we had to stay closer to the northern end.

The lesson today was the final D-block lesson, meaning IFR flying. For those not familiar with this term, IFR is short for Instrument Flight Rules, and means that we simulate IFR flight by me flying with a pair of view blocking goggles that only allows me to see the instrument panel. This excercise is designed to familirize the student with flying when there are no visual reference points to fly by, meaning no visible horizon, and no visible navigational landmarks.

The plane is equiped with a GPS, so navigating was fairly easy, but coordinating the plane without visual reference point however isn’t! The danger of flying in IFR conditions is that your mind tricks you into beliving that your airplane is at a different angle than you think, and you end up flipping over or going into a spin. It really is hard to trust only the instruments, and I’ve experience vertigo several times under “the hood”.

We ended the flight with a short trip over Oslo, and the flew back to our base at Kjeller airport.

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