Getting into the maneuvers
Summer of 22
After a couple of flights with my flight instructor, I gradually started to understand the controls and instruments of the aircraft. At first, it felt like I was sitting in a spaceship and just viewing the surroundings and getting on the flight controls when I was lucky enough to turn. However, gradually my flight instructor started to challenge me with more tasks. At first, it was just turning in a coordinated manner. It is so much harder than I had thought it was. When you turn you account for the altitude, heading, turn coordination, and airspeed of the aircraft. A 30-degree bank is probably one of the easiest flight maneuvers but it requires the mastery of 4 different components.
This is when I realized that flying a plane is all about mastering altitude, airspeed, heading, and coordination. Every maneuver uses these 4 components some more than others. Besides getting a feel for these components, you also had to develop an understanding of them. Often when I turned I felt g force just pulling me down onto my seat making me feel sick in my stomach because of me losing altitude rapidly because I had messed up the turn. Eventually, I moved on to ascending and descending. Ascending was fairly simple, although I wasn’t coordinated at times, it just involved pushing power in and holding the bank up getting 65 knots (best climbing airspeed), and keeping your heading. However, for your descent, things can get out of control very easily. For starters, if you pitch the aircraft down too much you can build up too much airspeed damage the airframe, and lose altitude very rapidly. This made me scared but thankfully my flight instructor was there to help me out. After doing this a couple of times, I found the sweet spot to get a controlled descent in.
After this, we moved on to some more complex maneuvers. The first one was stalls. A stall is when an aircraft loses all lift because of reduced airflow over its wings and plops down. A stall is associated with lower airspeeds and a high angle of attack. To prevent this and to recover from it pilots practice stalls. The first maneuver was the power-off stall. This simulates you descending for a landing and pulling back on the yoke too much and causing a stall. To do this we got into landing configuration (power to 1500rpm, carb heat on, flaps to 20) and kept descending and pulling back until the airspeed went down and the stall warning came on. The first time my instructor demonstrated this I was shocked, the angle at which she pulled up made me feel sick and scared and how we plopped down was crazy to me. To recover, she got rid of the flaps, pushed the carb heat in, and pushed power in to get us back to flying. Then I went in, initially, I couldn’t even get the plane to stall, it is hard to stall a Cessna 152 because of how much it likes to fly. Once I stalled it, I completely butchered the recovery. My instructor had to come in and help me out. Then came the power on stall which is slightly more intimidating. A power-on stall is simulating your climbing leg where you don’t pay attention and pitch up too much bleeding the airspeed off and causing a stall. To recover from this all you have to do is pitch down and use your rudders to stay coordinated. My instructor demonstrated this and this time I felt more scared because of how hard it was to keep it coordinated. When I tried to stall it I couldn’t keep it coordinated enough and my instructor had to help me out.
Next came slow flight. Slow flight is when you fly the airplane extremely slow. Slow flight is trained and tested at an airspeed that is five to 10 knots above the stall warning activation speed This is intended to help you understand how the airplane works and how your actions affect the airplane. This was the maneuver that I was the best at. I could fly the plane to slow speeds and turn. I could also climb and descend. This maneuver made me understand the relationship between power and altitude and pitch and airspeed. This maneuver is crucial to understanding how to land and I was glad that I could perform this maneuver at an alright level.
Next came steep turns which still make my stomach sick thinking about them. A steep turn is a normal turn but more steep as the name suggests. A steep turn involves an angle of more than 45 degrees. When you do this turn it almost feels like you are flying sideways. This was the maneuver I was the worst at by far because I kept losing altitude at a rapid pace or gaining altitude or having wild fluctuations in my airspeed. All this made my stomach feel weird because of the g forces that I was experiencing.
However, I knew that practice makes perfect. In the coming lessons I would master these maneuvers, I knew it would come but I just didn’t know when back then.
