Shaking off the rust.

Because it had been two weeks since my last flight, I had to fly with an instructor before being let loose on my own again. Bob and I did two circuits, one touch and go, one full stop. During one of them he asked me how I was finding it after a two week break. I shrugged, my flying was fine. I still remembered which end was meant to point forward and what all the fancy levers did. No rust there.

What I did notice was I was finding more difficult to focus on what was happening on the radio. I didn’t miss any radio calls but I was filtering it out a little more than usual. On my solo flight out, I missed some info in a radio call from ATC and had to ask them what they wanted me to do. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I initially misidentified the traffic that ATC were talking about.  Nothing dangerous, I did exactly the right thing when I wasn’t sure about what they wanted me to do, I asked. That’s probably the mark of a reasonable pilot.

The skill came back reasonably quickly though, once out at the practice area I could figure out what the, admittingly minimal, traffic was doing. Enough that I successfully negotiated with another plane at the same altitude that I would stay south of Claremont if they stayed north.

The stalls went fine, power off ones seem ridiculously pedestrian. There’s no fear involved in doing them now. JES stalls very very gently, sometimes it is hard to figure out when she’s gone. I swear that during one stall with full flaps, I got the ASI to read lower than zero!

WMAP- redefining the laws of physics since 2012!