Practice flight 1/23/10

I tell all of our students the same thing.  There is no such thing as a bad flight.  There are flights that are fun, and there are those flights where you learn a whole lot.  I just had one of the latter. 

I briefed the flight wanting to work on not pinching my loops and taking a first look at the hammerhead in this year’s sportsman sequence.  What makes this hammerhead a little special is that it has a 1/4 roll on the vertical downline, something I have never done in the D. 

After a few quick aileron rolls to get warmed up I set up for some loops.  They felt lazy over the top.  I felt like my nose was just falling through the inverted and I was pinching it quite severely.  The only good thing was that I was coming out of the loop at exactly the airspeed and altitude I wanted.  I was only pulling 3.6g’s during the loops but even after only a few minutes I was starting to feel tired.   

Then it was time for the hammers.  This has always been my favorite figure to go fly.  One thing that was making this flight difficult was that the sun was positioned low on the horizon; bright as hell; and perfectly off the end of the beach I was using as a line.  This was forcing me to set up on unfamiliar lines and out over the water so that I at least had some references to find when I was pulling back to level. 

This, I quickly learned, is a bad idea.  Trying to determine how vertical you are when you are out over the water is like trying to bake a cake without any measuring cups.  You have no idea how much to put in (or in this case, just how you are oriented).  What’s worse is with any little bit of deviation from the vertical, the 1/4 roll will only exaggerate that deviation and send you way off from where you wanted to go.  AND…this is about where I started laughing at the whole situation, when you start the downline you have such minimal airspeed that you put in your ailerons for the roll and the plane doesn’t want to go anywhere!  Who shut off the controls?!?!?! 

Okay so what did I learn?

1)    I am out of shape and need to get back to the gym.  There is no reason that I should be that tired after that short a practice. 

2)    Find a better practice area.  Out over the water is safe with the landing spots right there but it makes for a horrible area for ground references. 

3)    I need to get better at relaxing through the figures.  I can feel myself rushing.  This cuts down on the time I have to see what is wrong and take appropriate action to fix it.