Lesson 24 - Steep Turns

It had been a few weeks since my last flight and I was a bit rusty on some aspects!

The lesson today was to be on steep turns, i.e. those with an angle of bank of 45' or more. In practical terms, these are used specifically to avoid collision, however the manual says that practicing steep turns will improve coordination and flying skills.

The key item is the effect on stalling speed, for which we looked at the maths (AoB = Angle of Bank):

Stall speed at AoB = Stall speed level x Square root of (1 / COS (AoB) )

What this means in practical terms is that at 60', the stall speed is 1.41 x the stall speed at level flight, or about 65knots!

We flew north, back to our old practice area over Osea Island for this lesson. I found the most difficulty with 45' turns to the left. Right turns I had nailed pretty well. I guess the good news is that, in a head-on situation, both aircraft should turn to the right! The difficullty I was having was on maintaining my altitude. I was OK on 60' turns both left and right.

We then did some steep glide turns. The first of these, I lost quite a bit of height in setting up the glide. I had more difficulty with these turns, as I had forgotten some of the aspects of the glide.

Finally we looked at recovering from a spiral dive. After a demonstration, Tim had me look down inside the cockpit while he set the aircraft into a spiral dive. I then looked up and brought the aircraft back to safe flight. First action is to close the throttle, then bring the wings level, then to bring the aircraft into a shallow climb, applying power as appropriate. No problems with this.

On the return to Southend, I totally messed up the rejoin call. Repeat 20 times "I MUST USE MY CRIB SHEET I MUST USE MY CRIBSHEET. I MUST...........!"

During the debrief, we worked out what exercises I would still need to fly. I was at nearly 26 hours and would need to fly the following hours:

Instrument flying = 1:00
Dual Navigation flights = 4:30
Solo revision = 2:00
Lydd Dual = 1:30
Goodwood Dual = 3:00
Qualifying Cross Country = 3:30
Dummy skills test = 2:00
Actual Skills Test = 2:15

This would take me to 44 hours. It really began to sink home, how far I had come and how relatively short the list of remaining items was!