My Flying

Not the band, but the k@k going on in my head. It was a wonderfully sunny day, calm wind and some weak thermal activity. I had four amazing flights where I did everything required of me, but at the end of the day I heard those freaking dreaded words AGAIN, "almost there, just a few things to brush up". My f#uck, if I hear that again I'm going to explode. [/end of tantrum]

I was introduced to incipient spins. The Twin does not spin very easily and requires a hefty hand to encourage it to go incipient. The instructor F(2) demonstrated two left incipient spins, after of course carefully explaining all the theory behind it, then asked me to correct the third, which I did. I took a little too long to pull out of the dive, but I was a little worried that pulling back too much on the stick might yank the wings off.

It's actually pretty easy to get the plane to go incipient once you know how: Fly at about 90 km/h (just above the stall), pull back hard on the stick then add full rudder (left in this case), keep the rudder in until the plane is pointing well down towards the earth below.

To recover: give full opposite rudder until the rotation stops (happens pretty immediately) then pull back on the stick firmly but, gradually at first, to get out of the dive before the speed gets too high. Then use this speed to gain as much height as possible.

Flights one and two were short at 4 minutes each and included some tight turns and incipient spins. The third flight took us 32 minutes to crawl our way up to 2500 feet. I performed another four incipients, both left and right.

The fourth flight was a cable break at just below 200 feet, which unfortunately I was totally expecting. During the launch I felt the instructor take hold of the release knob, about two seconds before he pulled it. I handled it very well, nose down to 90 km/h then full brakes. Only problem was that on the way down I hesitated and tucked away some brake as I felt that we were too slow. He later explained that the speed was still ok as our attitude was fairly sharp downward and thus there was no risk of stalling.

With all four flights I rounded out and touched down very well and without any help. The last, with the cable brake, was a little bumpy (two I think) as we came down with full brakes and I must have flared just a little too late because we bounced.

An absolutely fantastic day of flying in which I learnt a stack. The bummer is that how long will I need to wait again before the weather is right and the instructor has the right attitude to send me solo? Could be a week, could be a year. Four flights, 177ZAR.

What is an incipient spin? Well my crude understanding is that basically it is the start of spin, the yaw and nose down as the wing stalls and drops.

From what we did today in the Twin I would say that this was more the initialisation of a spiral dive than a spin, mainly because the nose was almost pointing vertically down.