1 July 2008 – Flight 51

Today was my last flight before the checkride.

Instead of going through all the maneuvers like we did last time, Bob needed to fly the 152 over to Max Westheimer in Norman to get the radio worked on. It was a good opportunity to get a little practice in talking to Air Traffic Control and get to land at a different airport than I normally would.

Bob asked me to do a soft field landing for the landing at Max Westheimer. Bob said I was still late on the 30 degrees flaps, but I kept the nose up.

I managed to do okay talking to ATC, but the only way to get really comfortable with it is to just do some flying to Wiley Post and Max Westheimer after my checkride is done. That is down side to flying out of an airport without a control tower. You do not get to the opportunity to work with ATC and really get the process down.

We were there for about an hour, while the display on the radio was repaired. The display was a seven segment and the middle segment of the last digit was not working. It made it difficult to tell of you had an 8 or a 0 for example. Actually you could figure it out, but you had to keep track of the digits while turning. Turned out to be a cold solder joint. The A&P said a touch with the soldering iron was all it took to fix it.

While hanging around I also got a chance to get a good look at a Cirrus SR22. Nice plane, but way more expensive than what I will ever be able to afford. I will be doing good if I can manage to get a used 150.

On the way back Bob said we would do an engine out as well as do a few short and soft field takeoffs and landings. Bob pulled power on me about mid field on the downwind leg and said to land the plane. I made the runway no problem. When it became obvious I had the runway made, Bob had me execute a go around before touching down. We then proceeded to do a soft field landing.

On the soft field landing, I made sure to deploy 30 degrees flaps much earlier. I had to apply a lot more power because of the drag, but the plane handled just fine. After touching down I got the flaps up to 10 degrees, carb heat in, applied full power and did a soft field takeoff. That one went okay as well.

Finally we did a short field landing. Again I applied 30 degrees flaps much earlier than I normally would do. However I did not stay focused on my aiming point for the short field landing. Bob had to remind me to aim for the end of the runway. After correcting for that, I managed a good touch down and could have easily stopped withing 1000 feet. Instead of doing a full stop. Bob had me taxi down the runway and back to the office.

2 July – 9am Checkride