I didn’t mean it really.

Probably owe Bob a bit of an apology. For the record when I said the following things, I didn’t actually mean them:

I hate you so much right now – right after his fifth iteration of “just one more” when doing power on stalls. Yes, I know why you are doing it and hell, you even got me saying it eventually but I reserve the right to bitch constantly about having to do these manoeuvres.

Touch that throttle again and I’ll break your fingers – again with the power on stalls. He kept on nudging up the power. I noticed. Of course it had nothing to do with the fact that I kept subtly (or not!) nudging the power setting back down.

It really is a testament to Bob’s good nature that he brushes off such comments without a second thought.  My last flight was kind of weird from a conversation point of view.

When I’m under the hood, I lose the power of speech, when I’m doing stalls I’m very very vocal. So I was switching between refusing to speak to him and cursing him out with every second word.

Somehow he manages to cut through this and spot the difference between WMAP is going to have a total meltdown any moment so we’d better stop and move onto something else and WMAP is just being her usual mouthy self. And acts accordingly.

He think he realised that last flight I was tending towards the latter. He made me do power on stall after stall, starting at a fairly benign power setting and then gradually bumping it up a little. He was totally and utterly relentless, even going as far as to say “we’re going to carry on doing these until your arms ache”

Yep, well we achieved that alright, the next day I had stiff arms and legs for sure. Of course it doesn’t help that I’m back to the “death grip on the yoke” and it really does hurt your arms when you are trying to simultaneously pull back to stall the plane and push forward because you don’t want to.

After what felt like an age of stall after stall, Bob even had me at it. “Let’s do that again” I said as I wasn’t sure if I’d let the stall fully develop.

Finally he relented and we moved on but I swear I was doing those manoeuvres for a good 20 minutes. Which reminds me, although I loathe and detest them with a passion, I need to remember that they are a teeny tiny part of my flight test. All that is required is one power off stall (fairly benign – I can cope with these) and one power on stall (hopefully I’ll get an examiner who isn’t too fussy about the plane config and I can knock the power setting down a notch or two!)

Just need to do one and it’s over!

Ah but of course I need to do one AND keep my mouth shut.

That might be the hardest part of all.