Morning Flight

After a ground school session on Tuesday night, we did a short session on Wednesday morning and then flew. Covered charts.... lots of information on a chart. The legend goes on and on. It's basically a topo map with everything a pilot would need to know. They expire every couple months. It's a folded roadmap kind of thing called a "sectional." We are in the Salt Lake sectional. It would take about 4 to cover the northwest.. each named after the biggest airport in the area. Seattle, Billings, Klamath Falls, and Salt Lake cover us. Next time we intro controlled air space.

Anyway, did preflight and fired it up. He had me talk to ground, the tower, and departure until we got in the air. I had a little experience on the radio in the A.F. years ago, so I did pretty well. We practiced a few steep (45 degree) 360 turns and I was able to maintain altitude.. unlike last week. Then we practiced Engine Failure procedures. CFI cut the engine back to idle, and we went through the procedure. As we came in to approach the chosen emergency landing area, we would apply power and go up to do it again. Did it about 4 times. I won't go all 6 steps other than to say that the first step is to announce (out loud--even if alone) Engine Failure! This sets up a scenario and starts the checklist. If you don't do that, you can piddle around trying to decide what the problem is and waste valuable time. It's a personal heads up! The last step is to radio the tower. No sense wasting time radioing and crash because of it. Better to do what you can to land safely and then call. The intermediate steps have to do with establishing best glide speed, finding a landing spot (he likes fields because roads have power lines along them), some troubleshooting steps, and then preparing for forced landing.

It was a beautiful day. Clear and pretty. I flew most of the approach and he helped with the landing. Once again, a great time. I think we are going to shoot for an afternoon and then the following morning next week, too. Woohoo! I have 3.7 hours logged.