After a not so stellar Saturday and some much needed sleep, I got back on the horse so to speak. Sunday was another beautiful day. We dropped Sullivan off with his aunties and decided to head out to the airport. The plan was to work on keeping my altitude, practicing ascending and descending, and work some more on take offs and landings.
We pulled the airplane out, preflighted, and went through the checklists together. I've about got the checklist memorized, and am really starting to get a good grasp on the instruments' functions. After completing the checklist we started our taxi out to the runway, and I'm happy to say I can now taxi in a fairly straight line. It only took 9 lessons to work out the bugs, but oh well. We turned right on to the runway and headed to the turn around on one six. To learn about how runway's are numbered go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway. If a plane would turn right on to the runway at Pella they'd head to one six and if they'd turn left on to the runway they'd head to three four. We got to the turn around, completed our checklist, and taxied out on to the runway.
I got all lined up on the runway and mentally ran through all the things involved in the take off. Once we were ready to go I put one hand on the yoke and the other on the throttle. I added full power and we started to to roll down the runway quickly gaining speed. All the while trying to keep the airplane on the center line while keeping my feet off the brakes. The rudder pedals steer the plane on the ground but tapping on the very top part of the pedal activates the brake. I'm going out on a limb here, but guessing it could get ugly if one would hit the brakes while pushing the throttle in to full power. Once the airspeed reached 50 knots we started to raise the nosewheel so that we are airborne at 55 knots. In order to keep the airplane accelerating it is important to reduce the pitch so that the airplane can get to an optimal speed of 73 knots. We did this by pushing the nosewheel forward.
It is also crucial to push on the rudder to keep the airplane from veering off during the climb. I have been having a really hard time with this because it physically takes so much power/pressure to get it pushed in. Shane says it probably takes between 40 and 50 lbs of pressure to do this during the takeoff. Needless to say some of my take offs have been less than stellar, and have been not anything close to straight down the middle line. Three of the four takeoffs were this way and I was getting close to giving up for the day. Luckily, I was able to express my frustration to Shane and we were able to work through it. I'm really excited that we were able to figure this out together and communicate with each other. This was the type of situation I was afraid would stress our relationship, but we made it through with flying colors. Ha, no pun intended!
The rest of the lesson went really well. I feel like I'm really starting to know what I'm doing. And this has been a major boost to my confidence. I think Shane has been humored through this all especially since I have my very unique way of doing things. Most students struggle with their landings and breeze through take offs, but not me. I guess we both learned some things this lesson and the most important thing being we work very well as a team.
BTW I found an app for my phone that converts text to voice so I won't actually have to talk on the radio. This is a total score for me!
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