6th lesson - perfect weather, great flight

Time: 1 hr 18 mins
Total time: 4.5 hrs

The weather was absolutely perfect today, with 5-10 MPH winds, no clouds in the sky, and it was very, very smooth in the air. Adam and I took the C172 with the G1000 today, which was great. I talked to ATC for every communication today, which was a lot of fun and is quickly becoming one of my favorite parts of flying. We tookoff from runway 16 and headed northwest to the practice area.

After Adam showed me some prominent landmarks, he had me do some slow flight which I found much easier this time. Afterwards, I did a couple power-off stalls and then later a power-on stall. I felt that I executed the maneuvers pretty well and followed his directions pretty well. After some various climbs, turns, descents, and traffic avoidance and some more stalls, we headed back to KPWK for landing.

I flew a good approach and recognized that we were way high coming in on final, and adjusted the power/pitch to get on the proper glidepath. I flew the plane down to the flare which is the farthest I've taken it down since, so I'm getting closer to that first totally on-my-own landing. After landing we taxied back to the hangar and had some fun with cicadas running into the prop and getting killed.

I feel that I did a good job today, and, although it sounds trivial, I think a lot of this was due to my seat being up a little higher. On my previous flight, my seat was down so low I really couldn't see over the nose of the aircraft without stretching, which turned out to really impede my flying. Additionally, I solved the problem I was having with the brakes/rudder pedals. For some reason when I pressed the left brake too much and the plane started to go left, I was hitting the left brake more, thinking that that would correct the left turning. Obviously, this increased the turn and made everything much worse. I figured this out and started correcting with additional pressure on the right brake and soon I found myself making smooth turns and smooth braking after landing.

This was a great flight and again I'm excited for the next flight, scheduled for either Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon.

One more note, I officially picked Adam as my instructor as I feel he is the best instructor I've been with so far and will help me the most in my training. I also ran into Eric at Palwaukee Flyers who actually happened to be reading this blog which was really cool. I totally didn't expect much anyone at all to be reading this, let alone someone at Palwaukee Flyers! I think that's great.