Lesson Ten: Circuit Introduction

Oh dear. Looking at the diagram of a circuit it looks resonably straight forward, but in practice it really isnt. Anything but, in fact.

The pre-flight briefing was quite long, as there was about 8 pages of theory in my training manual, but it was quite interesting all the same. This time I did most of the radio calls, which is a big learning experience in itself.

Finally we took off, and I rotated off the runway and lauched the aircraft into the air. The instructor flew the first circuit to demonstrate, and that was lucky due to the mayhem that occurred. As soon as we turned downwind ATC requested us to make a right hand orbit, due to traffic. Once we turned onto finals, the instructor gave me the controls so I could have a go at the landing, which didn't turn out to bad. Instead of doing a touch and go we were to backtrack along the runway and takeoff again, as a touch and go is fairly high demanding on a learner pilot. The annoying thing about backtracking is you have to turn round on the runway 180 degrees, and taxi all the way back to the threshold which took quite a long time. Generally you would use the taxiways to do this, so that was a bit weird.

Now that we were back at the threshold I finally got to take the controls for the entire circuit, and my first attempt at the circuit wasn't too bad, although I kept turning past my point of reference that I was turning onto when changing from downwind to base legs etc. During the circuit we were forced to change another runway, which annoyed me a bit.

Turning onto finals we noticed that there were two aircraft sitting on the RWY threshold not looking like they were going anywhere, one sitting behind the other, so we were told to 'go around'. My approach wasn't exactly spectacular, and it didn't look like much of a straight landing but funnily enough we touched down bang on the centre line (must have been a fluke). I then brought the flaps back up to the take off setting of 10 degrees, and applied full power for the take off. I still have a slight problem of judging the climb out attitude, but should correct itself with the 3 or 4 touch and goes we will be doing each lesson in the near future.

Unless my memory has failed me I dont think anything out of the ordinary occured that circuit, and we touched back down on the runway for a full stop landing before taxiing back.

Overall a very intense lesson, the circuit doesn't look very high demanding, but trust me on this one, it is. Not much of time to enjoy the scenery, but still alot of fun.

Next lesson will be Circuits 2, and we'll probably get through about 3 or 4 circuits depending on how busy the airport is, lets hope not as busy as this lesson!