Solo 6: VOR, stalls, short-field takeoffs and landings

Goals:

• Play with the VOR.
• Short-field takeoffs and landings.
• Stalls.

Flight:
I went to the airport ~11 this morning and could not find my plane. Curious, you say? Curious indeed. I checked with Kevin in the maintenance hangar since he's going to look at the landing light circuit breaker that keeps popping and the oil leak over the right seat's left rudder pedal; he didn't have 388. In the terminal Charlie told me that another owner took it out around 10:30 -- no mention of this on the schedule, of course, since Husband and I had the plane booked for today. I got his voicemail every hour until ~3 pm, and I was taxiing to 13 by ~3:45.

JGG was a happening place today, traffic all over the place. No wonder since it was a beautiful 65-degree (on Nov 26!!) calm and cloudless day. I did a short-field takeoff (only slightly over my target airspeed this time at ~70 mph) and headed up river toward the Chickahominy.

I turned northward to look for the Harcum VOR. I cleared for traffic then looked down at the sectional to verify the frequency for HCM***, punched it into nav2, and turned up the sound to verify the Morse code. It looked and sounded good. My plan was to use the VOR indicator to take me to it so I could look down and see it from above; I've seen it when Husband was flying, but this seemed like a productive-in-a-tangible-way exercise for my first solo experiment with the VOR.

I know that from the western Williamsburg area HCM is relatively north, across the York River, and east of FYJ. So I dialed the VOR indicator until the needle centered with the "to" flag active. Odd, it said 270. That didn't make any sense to me. I maintained my heading while clearing for traffic and mulling this over in my head. Why would it say I was on a radial of 270? By the time I looked back down 15 seconds later, the needle had deflected a few ticks to the left. My heading hadn't changed, so now I was really confused. I could see the VORTAC just left of my nose (GPS track coming soon to verify that I was pointing mostly north -- the sun was low to the left).

I decided to chase the needle to see what would happen. As I turned left, it seemed like the needle just kept going farther left. Now I was really really confused. There was HCM in sight off to the right, and I was heading due west; I should have been crossing the 360 radial any time, so I decided to start over and find the "take me to HCM" radial. I twisted the OBS until the needle centered, expecting to see something in the neighborhood of 360... but it centered on 240. What was going on?!?! I must REALLY not understand VORs!

Hang it all, I called it off. Surely you all know what was going on. It dawned on me as I drove home from the airport what was happening -- I'll save it for the discussion. Here's a hint:

I cleared for traffic out to the left and headed back down toward the junction of the Chickahominy and James. At ~3300', I picked out a few options for emergency landing sites, should they be needed, then throttled back and trimmed for slow flight. With the stall warning squealing I rudder-turned to the left a bit, then straightened out and pitched up to stall. I recovered in ~150'. Not great, so I tried it again and got ~100'. (I realized, too, that the GPS isn't going to help me assess my recoveries very much since it only samples every 6 seconds.)

I returned to slow flight and powered up for a takeoff stall. In contrast to the power-off stalls, this one kinda surprised me. I was able to get a clean break -- right before it felt like I was going to tip over backwards! -- and the plane dipped to the right. I was expecting it to dip left. My assumption here is that I was using a lot of right-rudder to maintain heading during the throttle application and still had it in when 388 stalled. Well, no problem, I released the right rudder and applied some left rudder and a little left aileron, too, and leveled out then recovered. I didn't note the altitude at which the stall occurred, so the altitude-loss statistic is unknown.

I descended into the airport vicinity and heard that the activity around the airport was still fairly high. Over the ferry docks (~4 nm SW of the field) I announced that I was at 2000' inbound for 13. I heard a fella 8 miles north of the field and another fella 5 miles east of the field, in addition to two in the pattern. A minute later someone else who seemed to be practicing had taken off and was staying in the pattern and asked for inbound traffic to give locations, so I announced ~3 nm SW over Jamestown Island.

The spacing worked out fine so my 45 entry to right downwind was unobstructed. As I was abeam the numbers and putting out the first 10 degrees of flaps for a short-field landing, someone announced that they were on downwind. Eeek! That was a little alarming. I advised that I was abeam the numbers and asked if they had me in sight; they confirmed. I relaxed a little and turned base and decided that with 3 planes in or near the pattern, a short-field landing would be not just useful for me but also practical so I could remove myself from the busy traffic as soon as possible.

Anyway, long story short, a steep and fast final produced a 2-bounce landing and I missed the short-field turn out but made the mid-field turn out.

I did three more short-field takeoffs (all were good), two short-field landings (not one of which produced a short-field turn out, but they were close), one go-around with 20 degrees of flaps out (was fine), and one normal landing (was fine).

Discussion:

1. VOR practice: Idiot, gosh! I had stupid Hopewell tuned in, not Harcum! Diligence in preflight and in-flight verification only got me so far! I truly believe this was caused by carelessness and being a girl. I knew where the VOR was. When I looked at the sectional both times, I traced NW from JGG, found the big blue ring, saw the H in the name and took that freq. Shame on me!
   
   How many strikes do I get for this one? One for bad geospatial reasoning -- HCM is almost due north of JGG, as you can see on the sectional excerpt below, not NW. Now that I really take a good hard look at the sectional (and in making that GPS track pic above), I'm so embarrassed! 240 still doesn't quite make sense -- maybe it was more like 250. Another strike for jumping the gun when I saw the H in the name and not reading the entire name. I'll take two strikes for that.
   
   
   But I do feel good about the in-flight experience. All that confusion was justified -- it was not behaving as I expected because it was following orders and my orders were flawed. My situational awareness in the air was better than on the ground. In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense for HPW being tuned in.
   
   That was actually kind of a good learning experience. I have a little more faith in my interpretation of the instrument, as well as some insight into using multiple VORs to determine your position.


2. Stalls: The power-off stalls were fine. I don't care for the stall warning, and probably never will, but this time up it wasn't the worst thing to hear all by myself. The power-on stall had that little right-dip surprise, but as has been the case with many of the recent little lessons, I just did what had to be done to level and recover.


3. Short-field landings: Why were my landings "so long" today? I overshot the short turn out on every last one of them! Procedurally, I was aiming for 500' when turning final, then putting out the remaining flaps and killing the already-low power. It was a steep descent, but at this point I was aiming for the numbers, not for a particular airspeed. My gut says I was fast, and my brain says I should have been aiming short of the numbers, although it seems that would just have made me faster. Maybe 500' (field elevation of 49') is too high for that approach, or I need to go to a glide much earlier.
   
   I gotta say, though, that it feels good to think of having to go to the mid-field turn out as a "long" landing, as compared to one of the earlier solo landings where I used up every last foot of the 3200'-long runway! Progress, eh?
   
   As for the takeoffs, you can see me turning for the pattern earlier and earlier as I got comfortable with the climb-out. The first departure is missing because I forgot to turn the GPS on before takeoff; you can also see the go-around in there...

Self-Assessment: Coming along...

Flying
• Preflight, taxiing, normal takeoff, : Good.
• Short-field takeoff: Improved.
• Soft-field takeoff: Needs practice.
• Maintaining airspeed, stalls, slow flight (VR/IR),: Good.
Maintain/change attitude/altitude/heading by instruments
• Recover attitude, altitude, heading by instruments: Acceptable.
• Forced landing: Good, need more practice.
• Forward slip:: Dunno, needs more practice.
• Pattern, radio calls, normal landing, directional control after landing: Good.
• Crosswind landing: Improved.
• Short-field landing: Okay, needs more practice.
• Soft-field landing: Not sure...

Navigating
• ADF: Okay for an intro, needs practice.
• VOR: Needs practice.

Next: I've got the plane at 11 am on Monday, which may be a lesson or solo. If a lesson, the syllabus calls for basically a review of everything we did in 14 -- VR/IR use of navaids and stalls, short/soft-field takeoffs and landings -- plus forward slips to a landing and more IR recovery from unusual attitudes.

• More landings of different types.
• Practicing everything.

Hours logged this flight: 1.2
Hours logged total: 23.3
Instrument hours logged this lesson: 0
Instrument Hours logged total: 1.3
Take-offs and landings this flight: 4
Take-offs and landings total: 66
PIC hours total:: 4.4