I was supposed to have a lesson yesterday but once again the Great British weather decided it was not to be. To be honest I’m glad because the only lesson available today gave me my first taste of night flying! Today I had PPL lesson 4: Night flying.
I am still stuck at one lesson a week as I am still waiting for the CAA to decide what they are doing with my class 1 medical, but it’s better than nothing.
Look at that view! Everything is so much better at night. The sunset, the moon, the skies, the runway lights, the lights of the towns, EVERYTHING! I managed to log 0.6 hours towards my night rating and I plan to get it all done over the winter as I wont be able to do it in the summer. My instructor said we can do it as part of the PPL so it might even work out cheaper to do it now.
On this lesson I took of for the first time, a massive 60 knots then gently pull back on the column and bam, you are airborne trying to keep 65 knots in the climb.
On to the lesson, we focused on doing climbing & descending turns. I’m sure this would be easier in the day where you can see the instruments however for some reason the Cessna has no back lights so they are a bit hard to see with just a head torch.
Either way I got the hang of these pretty quickly and they are not something I found very difficult.
At the end of the lesson I did my first landing (my instructor did the power). What an amazing feeling and to be honest, it’s always nice to know that you can put the plane back down on the ground so I am looking forward to perfecting that.
The first two lessons I was thinking I am never going to get the hang of the settings for climbing and descending and using the trim. However it all clicked today, the settings were coming naturally and I left the Cessna thinking that I had done a good job.
Another 1.1 hours into the log book and we are up to 4.8 hours in total!
