Flight #3

Today I completed flight number 3. It was mostly "doing circuits", meaning take-off, then doing a bunch of touch-and-go landings.

You can find the GPS track at the bottom of this page or over here: flight-003-20190525.gpx

I was lucky I didn't have a lot of cross-wind (wind from the side) yet, today the the wind nicely aligned with the runway - which is ideal for practice.

The landings are - currently - the hardest thing to learn. You have to look and estimate when the right time is to "level off". At that point you make the plane go parallell just over the runway - that way it loses speed and eventually starts going down. Once you start dropping down, you have to start pulling up the stick smoothly.

If your timing is off, you can end up losing speed too low making your landing really hard and possibly bounce. On the other hand you could also slow down too high up and stall - making for an even harder landing.

But I think it's one of those things you need to learn trough doing and mussle memory. I am not there yet! But with only three hours in I shouldn't be too hard on myself.

Apart from that, I really need to use my rudder (feet) better during take-off and landing. While I know I must "give right foot" because the plane's nose turns to the left due to the propeller - knowing when to do that and how much exactly is another story.

I also had some instances where I pulled the nose up too high during take-off. Which is bad because this can induce a stall during take-off - which is probably the worst time to have that.

I also figured out how to track my flight and embed the track in this blog!

On the track you can see I went for a tour around Hasselt. This was my instructor noticing I needed a break. Doing the circuits requires quite some concentration and it was really nice to relax a little. Great call by my instructor.

What initiated it was that I had to turn base so I pulled the engine to idle but I eventually forgot to turn!! The result was I would be a long way away from the run-way. Instead, my instructor decided to get us out of the circuit for a little bit.

Running costs

0:54 hour flight time: € 86,40
1 hour instructor: € 30,00