From Near Death To Success

Did a little flight instruction with my pseudo student to day and had a small scare followed by some definite improvement.  We started out by taking the mighty Cessna 150 up to 2500 feet for a little slow flight practice followed by power on stalls and then the ever popular accelerated stall.  For those of you non-pilots types an accelerated stall is where the pilot puts the plane in a steep bank and then hauls back on the yoke to increase the angle of attack to a point where the wing stalls, basically.  In practice it’s a lot of fun if your skilled at the maneuver, if you’re a new student pilot it can be downright terrifying.

We did three or four of them before I decided that he’d had enough fun for one day so it was back to the airport for landing practice.  On the first attempt I had to grab the yoke at the last second to keep us from crashing into the runway at an angle that would’ve rendered the aircraft un-flyable, always considered bad form, the second wasn’t much better with my student pushing the wrong rudder peddle as he was about to land pointing us at the grass on the side of the runway instead of the long paved part, causing me to save the day yet once again.  But the next two landings were positively lovely.  Ok he ran out of airspeed a little high on the last one and fell out of the sky like a turd from a tall Moose but the airplane was still usable when we stopped bouncing so I gave him that one.  All in all a good day’s flying.