Lesson 23Got another first for the books! (So the log is a little longer than usual...)
This last Saturday I found this rare opportunity of a double slot on a weekend afternoon. We've been trying to get time to get those 3hrs of solo circuits in but weather hasn't been kind, so I thought maybe with a 2 hour slot we might be able to squeeze in some solo in there!
The winds had a different plan, with 13kts crosswind my FI suggested we instead went out and did our first navigation lesson. The double session was perfect to allow for the extended briefing and we had plenty of time to get back before sunset.
Having done some reading and playing around in simulators, some nav was familiar to me, but most of the process was new. We started the lesson by fairly quickly going through the flying parts of navigation, such as what to do at turning points and enroute, and left a more in depth look at pre-planning for after the flying to avoid racing the sun.
Once we're off everything was fairly straight forward, the x-winds were rough but seemed manageable when not doing circuits and got calmer as we got higher up. Cross referencing landmarks with the charts came easy to me, I always loved reading maps so this is right in my ballpark, and the rest of the flying was essentially straight and level with the addition of keeping an eye on the times, traffic and airspace infringements (we had basic service from Southend throughout the trip - something I've now learned a lot from in that other thread!
).
The biggest difficulties I had on the trip was:
1. The sun glare! Finding it very hard to spot landmarks at times when the sun shines right in the eyes and reflects on the windshield. I wear glasses so I don't have sunglasses at hand, but I'm seriously reconsidering this for the future (any advice from specs wearers?). Although I have to say, much of the difficulty came from windshield glare and cloud haze that just killed our visibility.
2. Keeping time
. Like I'm not talking about complicated maths or anything, literally just looking at my watch and reading the time correctly. I failed so many times it was embarrassing! I'm not much of a watch user and the watch I have right now is something I bought specifically for flying. It's a pretty simple watch, but without numbers on the face, and on a normal day that's fine for me, never thought it'd be an issue. But when it came to reading it in a slightly more stressful situation like flying a plane I really wasn't able to
. Maybe it's just practice, or I should reconsider and get a simple digital watch with big numbers.
And then we were back on the ground, only 1:17 on the tacho timer so marginally longer than my usual 1h lessons, and I was expecting I was going to have a quick debrief and off I go. But no. Next was almost a whole hour of basically ground school with my instructor. He gave me a thorough intro to pre-flight planning, we sat down and retroactively "planned" the flight we just had, he taught me how to use the different rulers, the CRP, the charts, and the VFR flight log, as well as a short refresher on getting clearances and basic service.
I loved every bit of it. My instructor kept apologising for having to learn all this "boring" stuff, doing maths with a calculator, etc, but for me this is in big part of what I was looking forward to when learning to fly. Yeah sure, the actual flying of the aircraft is amazing, but, maybe as an engineer by trade, drawing on maps, measuring drift, using the awesome but insane CRP computer, cross-referencing charts, etc is just pure bliss
.
Next time he said I should plan the same flight again before coming in to the lesson and have everything except the current wind pre-planned. The nerd that I am, I couldn't be happier with that homework.
Oh, and finally, I also wanted to mention that despite spending a good ~3 hours at the school, I only spent 1:17h on the tacho timer, meaning I only got charged for that by the school. Not sure if that's standard, but I found that incredibly generous, given my instructor spent so much time with me I thought I would be paying twice that!