Shane, Sullivan, and I went to Arizona last week so we put the lessons on pause. It was kind of nice to have a little break from all things airport/airplane and enjoy each other. Shane had a little time yesterday and the weather was good enough so we went ahead with lesson 6. I got out to the airport about 4 and we briefed on what the plan was for the lesson. The plan was to work with slow flight, continue with flying to a heading, take offs and landings, entering and flying in the pattern, and stalls (gasp). Shane has shown me a stall with a model, but we hadn't tried one in the air.
What is a stall? The stall is the point at which wings fail to generate enough lift to keep the plane stable (I took this definition from an online aviation dictionary). Another way to explain it would be to say it is when the speed of the airplane isn't fast enough to hold the weight of the airplane up. What happens next, the airplane begins to descend. So in order to recover from a stall the airspeed needs to be increased so that the airplane has enough lift to hold itself up. If the pilot doesn't properly recover from a stall it could result in a spin. That is my very basic explanation of stalls (hopefully i didn't leave any crucial information out). If you'd like more info on stalls google it or talk to a pilot. Maybe I'll be able to convince Shane to do a guest blog entry on stalls.
Shane had told me in the briefing that he was going to introduce me to them, and I was a bit nervous. I've been through some pretty terrible turbulence so I wasn't really afraid of them. I figured it couldn't be worse than the turbulence and I'd survived that. I also trusted Shane and knew that he wasn't going to put us in any danger. Shane explained stalls and said there were a number of types. He said he was going to show me a gentle stall. Oddly enough "gentle stall" kind of sounded like an oxymoron, but I was wrong. The gentle stall wasn't a big deal at all and the second one wasn't that bad either. The third one I knew what was coming and I did grab Shane's leg. It didn't scare me just startled me a bit. It's almost worse when you know what's coming. This led to a pretty funny conversation about awkward leg grabs, and according to Shane they're the worst in the summer. Sweaty hands and bare legs and knees can be a not so pleasant combo.
We finished up on stalls and started to work our way back to the pattern. Once back in the pattern we started our descent and prepared for landing. I was able to successfully land the plane again with Shane's coaching. I am starting to gain some confidence with the whole flying thing. I still hate using the rudder pedals and shudder at the thought of talking on the radio. One step at a time I guess!
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