Lesson Eleven: Circuits (1)

Finished lesson number 11 a couple of hours ago, on quite a cold and miserable Autumn day, which was Circuits No. 1. Unfortunately the drizzling rain made visibility quite difficult, bringing it down to just 20km. We were operating on the grass, which is fine on sunny days but when its rainy and wet the runway becomes a bit more difficult to see and judge.

Unlike previous lessons, circuits only require one briefing, which took place during my last one, Circuit Introduction, so we simply flew, which was a nice change.

I began the pre flight however I was soon rudely interrupted half way through by a sudden downpour, luckily the aircraft provides a considerable amount of shelter in the form of wings and the cabin. Aircraft passed my inspection and we hopped into the aircraft and taxied out for departure.

Take off for Circuit No. 1 wasn't too bad, although I was a bit slow rotating and it took a while for us to get into the air. My instructor manned ATC for the first circuit while I concentrated on flying, and we were soon downwind for the grass. I'm still shocking at turning out onto my reference points, but I improved as the lesson went on. Rolling out of the turn onto finals was slightly underestimated. My landing was pretty average, I didn't quite pull back quick enough when flaring the aircraft on touchdown. We were doing a touch and go so we applied full power after raising the flaps from full 30 to 10 degrees, and applied some right rudder to keep us pointing straight on the runway.

Circuit number 2 was a right hand one. Once on short finals the instructor gave me the controls again, this time I flared better and landed on the main gear. Once again full power was applied and we took off for circuit Number 3. This time the instructor said that I would fly the circuit by myself with as little imput as possible and didn't do to badly apart from forgetting the carb heat and raising the nose when reducing power back to 1600 RPM. My approach was looking prettt good, until I lost it and noticed we wern't coming down quick enough, so I took the the initiative of completing a go around as a safe option, which is good for practice anyway.

Lesson number 4 definitely wasn't the best of the day, as we had to considerably lengthen our upwind leg to avoid a large cloud that drifted our way. We were soon back on short finals for the grass, this time it was quite a good approach and I was very pleased with it. Unfortunately that marked the end of the lesson, which was one of my most enjoyable yet, thats for sure.

Flying time: 0.8 hrs
Total flying time: 7.4 hrs