JEP FI-4: More stalls, slow flight, instrument time, flaring

Goals:

• Climbs, descents, and turns to a heading by instruments.
• Steep turns.
• Stall recovery practice.
• Accelerated, cross-controlled, elevator trim stalls (demo).
• Emergency procedures, forced landing location selection.
• Landing practice.

Flight:
Preflight and pre-flight briefing as normal. When briefly talking about emergency procedures, Chuck mentioned the "wind the clock" step that used to be prevalent but not so much nowadays. More on this below in the discussion.

We took off on 13 and I had a good take-off. I'm doing things more autonomously now, so I departed the pattern when I saw fit and headed up-river to our practice area. Chuck had me don the foggles and going only by instrument reference perform some climbs and descents first while maintaining heading and then while turning.

Then without foggles we reduced airspeed for slow-flight maneuvers, using the rudder to turn to different headings. This was followed by a power-off stall, which naturally was followed by a recovery :) I lost 300' on this one.

Next, Chuck demonstrated a steep turn to the left with a roll-out onto a specific heading. While he was still in control of the plane, he started another steep turn to perform an accelerated stall. This seemed just like a really tight steep turn, and was recovered pretty much by just returning to level flight. That one was ok. We also did a cross-controlled stall and an elevator-trim stall (eek).

It was my turn for a steep turn to the left, through which I gained 100', and a slow turn to the right, through which I nearly maintained altitude. Rolling out seemed natural. The foggles came back on, but I don't remember what we did with them this time. Perhaps more slow-flight maneuvering? I'll have to check the syllabus and see if that jogs my memory.

In any case, we headed toward West Point (FYJ, or Middle Peninsula Regional) for my first non-JGG landing. UNICOM didn't answer my request for an advisory, and we hadn't heard any traffic in the area (no skydivers). There's a processing plant of some sort just up the York River from FYJ and the smokestacks clued us in on the local winds -- we'd aim to land on 9. We stayed wary of the departing Cirrus as we entered crosswind to circle around for left-hand traffic. I did a good pattern and had a pretty good landing on the extra-wide runway, reasonable flare and everything. There was a little snaking on final, and we floated a tad down the runway, but all in all it was my best one so far.

We back-taxiied, departed, and headed south for JGG. As I was maintaining Vy, climbing and starting to turn south, I became distracted a little by how far off the heading indicator (or directional gyro, DG) was compared to the magnetic compass.
We chatted for a second about using the mag compass in this case, and we wrapped up when the stall warning started to sound. Holy crap, how did that happen?!?!!? My eyes immediately went to the airspeed indicator, which read over 70 MPH. The stall speed under normal conditions, which I thought we were in, is 52. I still don't know why the stall warning came on then, but I knew what had to be done: reduce pitch, regain airspeed.

Once we were back over our peninsula, we focused on emergency procedures. Lightweight, at this point -- as Chuck throttled back, I looked around for spots we could land. The options were a selection of fields (thanks, Virginia! :) ) and that was about it. Of all the surrounding fields, we were passing the most appealing one on the left at that time. Next order of business was to reduce airspeed to the best gliding speed (also Vy) and assess whether we could make it in a pattern. We could, so with our Vy airspeed I turned us back around and headed for the field. During what seemed like a long approach, we sized up our choice and other alternatives that were nearby and stuck with the original choice. Once we "made it" we powered back up and resumed our heading towards JGG.

The rest of the flight back to JGG was normal. We talked about workload management and realistic distractions and the prerogative of the pilot-in-command to call for a "sterile" (silent) cockpit. We entered right-hand traffic at JGG for 13 and my pattern and landing were unassisted until the flare, since I overshot the runway heading when turning final on that truncated approach pattern and snaked around a little. Taxi, takeoff, only overshot traffic pattern altitude by about 50' this time, good pattern, better final, first "drop in" landing (not a good thing), and done.

Discussion:

1. "Eight-hour clock" in the emergency procedure:In times gone by, there was an "eight-hour" clock in the instrument panel that had to be wound by hand, and one of the very first steps in dealing with an emergency was to wind the clock. Why does the clock need to be wound if there's a cabin fire or the engine cut out? For no other purpose than to force the pilot to focus on a task and think about what was going on. The lesson in this is that jumping wantonly into action may not produce the best results, and in fact may make the situation more dire, so pause, focus and then act.


2. Tracking extended centerline on takeoff: I'm feeling good about taking off now, and am sticking pretty well to the centerline when thundering down the runway. Ha ha ha, like a 172 thunders! :) At JGG, once we lift off I can no longer see the runway and have felt that I haven't necessarily been tracking the extended centerline for a straight-out departure very well. Chuck suggested after lifting off to set myself up so that I can see the edge of the runway and thereby have a reference. When we left West Point, with its nice wide long runway, I could see it after lift off both out the
   front and out the side, so that one seemed pretty good.
3. Scary stall: The elevator-trim stall SCARED THE PANTS OFF ME. Chuck described what was going to happen, I prepared myself mentally for it, but all I remember is seeing the entire windscreen getting entirely filled up with ground, swooping in from the bottom left, and saying in a terrified voice: "No, no, no, no, no..." And that's not being melodramatic. After stabilizing, Chuck looked over and assured me it was ok, which I knew to be true. It totally gets my goat that I react this way! I don't want to, I know I don't need to, but it happens! I hope that it's just a reaction to the introduction of these stalls and that after a few times through them that "brace-for-death instinct" will go away. The other stalls don't bother me now, so this ought to be true, but OMG. Next time up, we'll have to do it a few times to desensitize me.
   
   But the elevator-trim stall is worth talking about a little more. This is the problem case where you're all set up for landing, everything is peachy, you're trimmed nice and slow, your flaps are full-out, and then you have to abort the landing. Thus, it's the "dog on the runway" stall. To go-around, you put in full power, start to climb and prepare to milk in the flaps. But whoa! Before you can even think about the flaps, the stall warning is screeching and you gotta pitch forward! The problem is that you're trimmed nose-high, so the extra throttle wind exaggerates that pitch and since your stall speed is already lowered by the flaps, it doesn't take a huge decrease in airspeed to break your control. Plus, the torque of the full-throttled engine is amplified at slow speed, so you swoop off to the left. This is the case where recovery with minimal loss of altitude is crucial. No, this is the case you just don't want to be in -- the point of this demo is what can happen if you don't maintain control.
4. Steep turns: A steep turn involves a bank of 45 degrees (or higher, I reckon), back-pressure on the controls to maintain altitude, and a rudder balance to keep the ball (in the turn coordinator) in place but not so much as to affect altitude; the rudder controls whether the nose points left or right, so tilt that halfway on its side and the rudder then controls some relative pitch as well. These feel fine.
5. Forced landing site selection: Who wants to land in a field? Ooh, ooh, me me me! Just kidding. We sized up a bunch of fields: that one's too far, that one has hay bales, that one has power lines, that one's too short, that one has lumpy ground, etc. Even as we got close to our selected field, we found power lines that we hadn't seen from above, poking out over the tree line on the near end of the field. We would have cleared them just fine, but it's a lesson in the unexpected and in active re-assessment of non-standard procedures.
6. Drop-in landing: On my final landing today, I flared too high. So I relaxed the back-pressure and let the nose drop a little, then flared again after we had descended some. On this second flare, we just dropped the remaining distance to the runway and kinda went thud. It was the opposite of graceful. I don't remember the stall warning being on, so I haven't yet put the pieces together for why we fell, but fall we did. Maybe it was a ground effect issue. After I figure that out, I'll let you know what I learned and how to avoid it. The key is that I need to get better at knowing when to flare; partly this is hindered by not being able to see the runway over the dash when we're over the runway and pitched up already for lower airspeed at idle power.

Self-Assessment: A lot of progress in 4.5 lessons! Still too stressed out by (certain) stalls, but even worse is I really logically believe they should not stress me out yet they do!

• Preflight: Good.
• Taxiing: Pretty good; not afraid to use more throttle for tight turns now.
• Take-off: Yay! I feel good about these! Need to focus now on maintaining departure heading after lift-off.
• Maintaining airspeed: Getting there, more practice.
• Stalls: Power-off stall, good. Dealing with most stalls, good. Dealing with that one stall, tremendously awful psycho.
• Slow flight: Good.
• Maintain attitude, altitude, heading by instruments: Good.
• Change attitude, altitude, heading by instruments: Acceptable.
• Forced landing: Just an intro today, but was ok for that.
• Pattern: Much better. Need to eliminate squirreliness on final.
• Landing: Still assisted by Chuck on the flare sometimes.
• Radio calls: Decent, will improve with practice.

Next: JEP FI-5: More of the above, plus we'll kick it up a notch (Bam!) by doing recovery from unusual attitudes under the foggles. We've already done all of the maneuvers for the next lesson, and possibly the lesson after that, according to the syllabus, so it'll be practice.

• More of the above!
• S turns
• Rectangular courses
• Instrument maneuvers

Hours logged this lesson: 1.3
Hours logged total: 6.0
Instrument hours logged this lesson: 0.2
Hours logged total: 0.2
Take-offs and landings this flight: 3
Take-offs and landings total: 15