I must say, it’s tricky to teach people to land. Most manoeuvres that you have to learn in order to be a pilot can be practiced thousands of feet up in the air, where there’s no danger and no damage if things don’t work out, and where the instructor has plenty of time to fix things if and when they go wrong.
You’re in a small airplane in level flight at 100 knots. You increase power and pitch up to place the aircraft in a climb, at the same airspeed. Has the angle of attack increased, stayed the same, or decreased?
WITHOUT a doubt there are some fabulous fight instructors and schools in Canada. Unfortunately there are some pretty shabby ones, too.
Here’s a video extract from a recent lesson where we did some spins, and I introduced my student to the “falling leaf” exercise, which gives valuable experience in roll stability and control (and the lack of them) when the aircraft is stalled.
Suppose you wanted to learn the piano. And your piano teacher said that they were going to teach you one note per lesson: today, we’ll learn middle C. Tomorrow, maybe an E♭; the lesson after that will be on an F♯. And at the end of being taught all 88 notes on the keyboard, you’ll be able to play the piano.
Doesn’t that seem a funny way to learn a musical instrument?
If you do an amount of cross-country VFR flying eventually you’ll come across a situation where your airplane is headed what looks like right at a bunch of clouds. It can be helpful to know a few minutes in advance, whether, when you reach the clouds they’re going to be at your altitude, or whether you’re going to pass above or below them.
On 21 January this year (2019) footballer Emiliano Sala was killed when the Piper Malibu aircraft in which he was flying (from Nantes, France to Cardiff) crashed into the English Channel. The accident was widely reported at the time, along with all sorts of speculation about the cause. There has also been a lot of press about the licencing status of the pilot, David Ibbotson, who was also killed.
The scenario: our single-engined training aircraft airplane is set up in a stable descent on approach to land. The configuration is appropriate, perhaps with partial or full flaps extended. Airspeed is somewhere between 60 and 80 knots. What happens to the flight path of the airplane if the pilot pulls back on the yoke and raises the nose? Stop and think about the answer for a minute, then read on.
Today I added some survival equipment to the baggage compartment of FLYO.
Transport Canada’s published flight test standards for PPLs changed earlier this year in a couple of interesting ways.