Took pseudo student (PS) up for a flight yesterday and I think we might actually be making some progress. We started the flight with a take off, what else? and apart from him taking FOREVER to get the mighty Cessna 150 up to full power he got us in the air like a pro. At which point he let the airspeed get low, not good, and drifted to the left. I managed to coach him back to the proper “not about to die” airspeed and decided that we would start the days lesson with departure stalls. A departure stall is what happens when a pilot points the nose of his aircraft at the sky light he’s flying an F-15 when in fact he’s flying something that has let’s say, less power. A plane goes up only when it has sufficient airspeed, then it goes down. If the pilot has enough altitude to recover from the stall and keep flying great, if not…well.
After PS had the departure stalls down pat I looked for something else to teach him and as luck would have it we had a broken cloud layer at three thousand feet that would do nicely. I had PS climb up to the cloud layer and used the clouds to simulate rising terrain and what to do when confronted with such a situation. We pretended that we had flown into a box canyon and didn’t have enough power to clear the mountains on either side. I showed PS how to orbit inside the valley while climbing to gain enough altitude to clear the terrain. I also showed him how to do a hammerhead turn if you there wasn’t enough room to circle.
After that we went back to the airport where his landings were much improved over our last flight. I only thought we were going to crash once.
