Time: 1500Z (1000 MST)
Flying time: 1.8 hrs. (cumulative 12.8)
Landings: 4 (cumulative 30)
Aircraft: Skyhawk N7873N (T-41C)
The story of the lessons so far: If I can get landings down pat, get my physical out of the way, and pass the pre-solo written I'm soloing soon.
I'm not convinced as of today that this means much. Landings bit it off at the root, although they were still safe, and only on one did Jeff help a lot.
Preflighted the beast myself and waited for Jeff to finish with another student who is going on his instrument checkride soon. Got us up in the air expeditiously, and headed out to the practice area. We did some slow flight at 10,500', then a couple of power-on stalls. I'm getting over my fear of these things, and I managed to keep our heading constant at 270 and altitude within 50' during the stall. Then we did a power-off stall, and a power-off stall in a turn simulating a stall turning from base to final. This went rather easily.
Did one emergency descent, and a simulated final approach to a road. I had selected a stretch of straight, flat road, but it turned out that I chose badly, as it was rather far away to glide to it. Fortunately, Jeff had suggested that the smart money is to set up for final on an earlier part of the road that was off to our right --- the stretch I planeed to land on was directly in front of us and had we been higher we'd have been lined up perfectly already, but by heading a bit to my right I could intersect and follow the road, just in case it turned out to be farther away than I thought. It was. Anyhow, got to about 200'AGL and punched power to climb back up to 6,500 to practice ground reference maneuvers.
Had a little trouble selecting an appropriate road for my S-turns, but when we finally got that settled, I did about 3 of them. Don't much like the feeling in the pit of my stomach when we do those steep turns at 600'AGL, but it's coming. Turns around a point are getting much better too, but I still need to work on keeping the altitude constant. I'm afraid of getting too low, so I wind up pulling the nose up a bit too high and gaining a hundred feet or so.
Three t&g's at AEG don't thrill me. For the first one I have to do an extended downwind to avoid some traffic, and screw up the pattern. Second I fail to get the slip right. Have trouble trusting the "wind from the left, use right rudder drop left wing" bit, and wind up applying the opposite controls reflexively. Gotta get rid of that. Last one is OK, but I'm stressed out enough that I ask Jeff for us to stop and go home (it's almost time anyway, and he was only going to have me do one more). I felt that more practice today wouldn't improve matters, and that I'd only have gotten worse. However, for our next lesson we'll only do landings, no airwork.
Back to Charlie airspace went without incident, and I only had trouble once when given a vector a bit quicker than I could grasp. Somehow gotta get a handle on separating the wheat from the chaff in radio work, and pull out my instructions without turning to Jeff and saying "did you hear that, what did she say?" Remember can ask tower to repeat if necessary. At any rate, I didn't have the feeling of total brain loss I'd had before, and even said 7873N without flubbing as the last time we had her out.
Jeff going on vacation, next lesson in about a month! Bummer.