From Bottleneck.org
Come Fly With Me
The day started at 8am on Saturday morning with a quick ground briefing about how aeroplanes work, after which we piled Ruth into the back seat, me into the left seat and the instructor into the right of a Piper Warrior II PA28 161. We took off from HMS Daedalus (now called Lee-on-the-Solent Airfield) on an "Explorer" trial flight from Carill Aviation at about 8:30am on Saturday morning. It was a beautifully clear and sunny day, blue skies without a cloud in sight, and no wind to speak of. The takeoff from Daedalus takes you out directly over the beach and into the Solent, so it's a beautiful spot for it.
The instructor took us up to between 1600 and 2000 ft, then demonstrated the controls and overflew us around Portsmouth for a while, a great place to do this sort of thing, as you get the scenic view of the coastline, Isle of Wight and the Solent, as well as getting a good from-the-air look at the Naval Dockyard.
After this it was over to me to take the controls for a little while. I must admit, I struggled to get the feel of them at this point, and was quite jerky on the controls - this I think was partly due to trying to be a bit too clever and perform nice, coordinated turns (a coordinated turn is when you apply sufficient rudder in a banked turn to keep the nose of the plane pointing in the direction of the turn, thus avoiding slip - it's not too easy for a novice!) I also got told by the instructor to stop looking at the instruments and look out of the window more - both to enjoy the view, and get my visual cues about what the plane was doing. I guess that habit came from playing Microsoft Flight Simulator a bit too much, where the view out of the "window" gives you no sensible information at all!
After bimbling about over the Solent and the Isle of Wight for a little while, the instructor took the controls and bought us in for a landing at Bembridge Airport, Isle of Wight. We sat and had a cup of coffee and a chat. I explained how surprised I was that there was so little need to continually re-trim the plane, but the instructor did say that it was a particularly calm day. He also told me not to worry about performing coordinated turns, and instead to just throw the plane about a bit and enjoy it.
By 9:35am we were taking off from Bembridge again. The instructor put the plane in a climb, gave me control, and told me to take it up to about 2000 ft, level out, and trim for level flight. I was quite surprised how easily that came, getting the trim correct in particular. That's quite difficult on a flight simulator, because the joystick always pushes back with a constant force for a given deflection - so the process becomes iterative - trim a bit, ease the joystick back towards the centre, see how the plane responds, trim again... In a real plane, it's so simple - you're maintaining pressure on the controls to keep level flight, and as you trim the plane you feel that back-pressure decrease until the controls feel light again - at which point, you're trimmed. It took me about a second to re-trim the plane for it's new level attitude, it was so natural.
So, I played around a bit more with the plane, and both enjoyed it more and felt smoother at the controls once I'd stopped worrying about the technicalities. After that the instructor popped us in to controlled airspace to look at my home in Hamble (most interesting listening to all the radio chatter from Southampton) and then it was back to Lee-on-the-Solent.
All in all, I think I'd rather like to learn properly - as the instructor pointed out, the total cost would be of the order of £6500, which is similar to the cost of a second hand car - it's also something I could save for reasonably easily if I wanted to. I also like the idea of one day being able to drop my career and just do something like flight instruction to bring in enough cash to get by - who knows? Either way, though, it'll have to wait until after the wedding!
Photographs from the day are here!