For my second lesson, it was just the instructor and myself. My instructor made me do the walk around to check the exterior of the plane by myself which was simple enough to do on my own. When I told him I was ready to start on the preflight checklist, he hopped into the Cessna 172 and we prepared for taxi.
After hearing the complexity of communications to ATC last week, I thought it would take me forever to learn. But once the plane was started and we were ready to begin moving, my instructor quickly informed me that I would be doing the communications. I was nervous and the last thing I wanted to do was take time from the busy controllers by stuttering into my headset. I wrote down the information I would be relaying on my kneeboard and I was ready. I hit the button on the yoke and began to speak. I couldn’t believe that I was actually doing communications so quickly and, in my opinion, rather successfully. I not only did this for taxi but also take off, landing, and then taxi back to my flight school.
Taxiing was a lot easier this time around. My first time taxiing resulted in my automotive driving sense kicking in in which I kept grabbing at the yoke rather than using the rudder. Like my previous lesson, we took off from runway 16R out of Van Nuys and headed towards Warner Center en route to Simi Valley where the airspace is open enough for a student pilot like myself to practice some maneuvers. We began with the 4 fundamentals of flight which include: climbs, straight and level flight, turns, and descents. I picked up on these pretty standard manuevers relatively quickley and we were able to move on to steep turns. Our steep turn lesson consisted of picking a point on the horizen and then doing a 360 degree turn by keeping the plane at a 45 degree angle. My first attempt resulted in a bit of a loss in altitude so we practiced it a few times until I was able to keep a 360 at a 45 degree angle without losing altitude.
Before I knew it the lesson was over. We made our approach back to VNY and were instructed to land quickly and clear the runway due to some other traffic. My instructer took the controls and we were back on the ground. I was able to log another 1.2 hours of flight time and was confident in the manuevers I just learned.
I would like to thank my girlfriend Erica for taking the photos (and waiting patiently on the ground while I learn in the sky).
(This post was created on June 16, 2008 but reflects the date of the flight)
