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Back in the Air

I managed to get back into the air for the first time in several months. I kept thinking it's been "about a month or six weeks" since I've last flown, but a check of my logbook showed that I last flew July 24th -- yikes five months! Needless to say I decided to fly with a CFI and start the process of getting sharp again (again!).

Rather than just climbing back into another beat up old PA-28, I decided to finally make an effort to get my tailwheel endorsement, so I headed back to Amelia Reid Aviation, found a nice instructor, and went up in one of their Citabrias. I felt like a beginner again -- and not in a good way. I was behind the plane a lot (a 115 HP Citabria no less!), flew un-coordinated, and felt uncomfortable for much of the flight. I do enjoy flying this plane more than the PA-28 in many ways, though -- it just feels quite responsive to control inputs and is a great pleasure to flick around the sky. The view from the front seat is pretty good -- the nose appears quite low in level flight, and I'm sure it will take a while to get used to the sight picture. I have a tendency to keep the nose up a bit on the PA-28's when flying by sight, so this plane might exacerbate that problem.

Some of my uncomfortable feelings was undoubtedly due to the unfamiliarity of this plane -- it's just different from the Pipers of course, but also the the gauges are non-standard, which meant I had to hunt to look for the airspeed indicator for example, rather than just glancing in the known spot. In addition, I had the ongoing feeling that the instructor was providing some control inputs. Some of this feeling was probably due to the rudder pedals, which are a bit heavy to control, but I'm sure he was tweaking things from time to time. This has always bothered me -- it puts me into a "do I have control or does he have control?" mindset -- which is very bad. Less bad, but also troubling is the "did I do that or did he do that?" feeling. I emphasized the "I have the plane -- you have the plane" protocol with him, but I will discuss this in more detail before the next flight.

The approach and landings he suggested were fun: cut the power to idle on downwind just abeam the numbers, then "dead-stick" it on in. Due to traffic in the pattern we were unable to do this as described, but came close. In three landings I only added power once to get back to a decent glide slope. Even then we just add enough power to get up the right glide slope -- it's back to idle once on the slope. The landings were all OK... but did the CFI help...?

Categories: flying

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