I woke up this morning to the sound of thunder. I was afraid today was going to be another cancellation. I called Bob and he said to meet him at 10am. We needed to do some oral test prep and get some paperwork done.
At Bobs office, we reviewed the log books again. We also filled out the form 8710-1, which is given the examiner to document how many hours of training I had received and solo time I had completed. While we were doing this Bob asked me various questions about the airplane, FAA regs, airspace, etc. I did pretty well, but there were a few that I did not get right.
After about an hour and a half of paperwork and questions, we checked to see what the weather was like. The storms were to our north and it was overcast where we were at. Still the winds were calm and and the ceiling was more than high enough to get out and do some review.
While I was not doing everything perfectly, I was not being as clumsy in my responses as last time. We started off with steep turns to the left and the right. Both of those I did well. I held my altitude and rolled out on the proper heading.
We next went into some slow flight. I could do a little better on this. I was having some difficulty maintaining speed and altitude. I think I managed to stay within limits, but I could better.
We next did departure stalls to the left and the right. I handled these better than last time. On the departure stall to the left, I overcompensated a bit on holding the right rudder and the plane rolled some to the right. However, I maintained control and recovered from the stall.
We did some low power stalls. I was not doing those too well. I had a tendency to push too hard on the yoke and dive plane. I also forgot to raise flaps once and Bob took my hand off the throttle and put them on the flaps to remind me.
We also practiced forward slips. This was actually the first time I had really had a chance to try them. It did not take too long to get a feel for them.
We went back to SNL to do some short and soft field takeoff and landings. The shortfield and softfield takeoffs went okay. On the shortfield landing, Bob was still not happy with my keeping the nose up. The shortfield landings did not go well at all. I was consistently too high and even with full flaps I had too much airspeed to get stopped in 1000 feet. They were more like normal landings than short landings. I know we will have to hit those some more.
Bod did a couple a power out situations on me. In the downwind pattern, Bob pulled power and said you just lost your engine. I set my airspeed to 70 knots(normally 60, but Bob wanted some safety factor) , confirmed with Bob that he wanted me to immediately turn base and headed for the runway. I made the runway and touched down , but I was a little far down the runway to guarantee a full stop. Bob took the controls briefly to get us back up in the air.
During a soft field takeoff Bob pulled power on me halfway down the runway and said I lost power. I was a little slow reacting since I had not had experienced this scenario. Still there was no other choice, than to put the plane back down on the runway. After the wheels touched, Bob immediately had me apply full power to climb back out before we ran out of runway.
Bob also threw in a go around. I was a little slow on reacting to his initial call to go around, but I managed to get the throttle in, climb out and retract flaps.
I did not feel as bad about my performance as I did the last time I went up, but there is still some more work to do. I hope three more days will be enough.
Tomorrows lesson is rescheduled for 11am, because more storms are expected early in the morning.
