David's Flight Adventures

Lesson 34 - 20th July 2021 Continuing with the solo consolidation again today.  I was with Dave Slater today and we started by doing a few circuits.  Although it was a glorious day, it was a bit choppy and the wind was varying between runway 2 5 and runway 3 3.   My landings were not brilliant but were OK enough. Once Dave was happy, we went back to the clubhouse and plotted out a slightly different local route.  It was similar to the previous route, but going a little bit further and going clockwise this time.  I plotted it out on SkyDemon to see if I could follow that.  I had the route on the physical map, but most people tend to use moving map technology, also called an Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) on an iPad or the like.  They are the Sat Nav of the sky.  I use SkyDemon as that is the most common one used in the UK.  I have had a look at ForeFlight but I didn't find it as logical to use. As well as the exercise to navigate the route, another part of the exercise is the departure

 Lesson 32 - 30th June 2021 This was pretty much more of the same again as the last few weeks.  This time I was with Martin and we started with 2 touch and goes and then a full stop landing.  Martin got out and sent me on my own to do a double lap of the forest.  This is good as it is building up my solo hours (now standing at 4 hours 45 minutes).  Martin said I will need to do that again next time and then we can look at the proper cross country, probably to Popham. The forest circuit was OK but I was very inconsistent with my altitude.  I need to be more consistent.  I should have been at about 1700ft (on the QNH), based on the cloud base, but it varied from 1400ft to 2000ft when I wasn't paying attention.  It is something that you need to be watching all the time, like the speed in a car. At one point, Dave came over the radio to ask where I was as he was doing circuits with a new student.  I gave a very wishy washy response about going along the ridge heading towards the house!