Last of the stalls, some landings, and good news.

Afternoon flight. Absolutely perfect weather. We plan was to finish up the stalls (accelerated and cross control) and then do some no-flaps landings. Sounds good to me – but then again, just sitting around at the airport sounds good to me.

Accelerated stalls were pretty wild. The trick is to keep the engine at around 2200 RPM, put the plane in a 45 degree bank (we did them both left and right) and then ABRUPTLY pull back on the yoke. The plane stall very quickly, but not very dramatically, thanks to the high speed. The idea is to show that the plane can be stalled at any attitude, and at any speed. Easy, and fun. Next were cross control stalls (out of a slip). Weird, but easy to get, once again. Then it was back to Van Nuys for some slips to landing without flaps – to simulate a loss of flaps. Hard to get at first, but once you have the slip concept nailed, it all falls into place. The trick for me was getting the plane lined up with the runway after coming out of the slip. We did a few of those, slipping to both sides, and then did a couple of regular touch and goes the normal way – with flaps. A couple were not pretty (5’s at best) but a couple were respectable 8’s. Getting better! A couple hundred more, and I should have it nailed.

After the lesson, I asked Richard when I might be looking to solo. Not because I’m overly anxious (yeah, right), but because of my travel requirements with the job, I don’t want to be real close to solo, and then have to leave for a week or 10 days. That might actually KILL me. I showed him his list of requirements prior to solo, and he said that I was very close. He requires his students to have passed the FAA written exam before soloing, so he said I should get that out of the way as soon as possible.

I scheduled 5 more flights between now and next Friday, since I’m leaving for New Orleans (ouch) that next Saturday for a week. Maybe I can solo before that?

1.6 hours/13.6 total