PPL Lesson #8: Spins and spin avoidance

Today was my first lesson after a couple of weeks of no flying so I was feeling a bit rusty, and the weather forecast was non-committal on whether we’d get sufficient height for spinning or whether we’d be banging out circuits. In the end the weather was lovely (if a little breezy, which will become important later) so my instructor had me take us a bit further out than our normal practice area to give us sufficient headroom for hurtling towards the ground at high speed.

After climbing to 5000ft and steering clear of a mob of gliders to our west, we did a quick rehash of spin avoidance from last lesson and then I got a demo of a fully developed spin and recovery. I counted 4 full turns but there may well have been more as I was supposed to be keeping an eye on the turn indicator as the primary means of identifying spin direction. We’d done one demo of a full spin and recovery at the tail end of last lesson which I found massively disorienting, but it was much better this time and I might even go so far as to say that I enjoyed it. After climbing again it was over to me for a handful of spin recoveries, progressing from “just about okay” to “nicely done” as we went along, and we finished by once again revisiting incipient spin recovery to ensure those are the primary upfront skills.

Then it was back to Blackbushe for what was supposed to be a few touch and goes to prep for circuit work next week. As we were crossing the numbers from deadside we overheard the wind report given to the aircraft on final: wind 250 gusting at 20kts. Although straight down runway 20kts is right on the limit of the school’s policy for students, so my instructor decided that a full stop was probably prudent. He told me I might be in for a pretty sporty landing for this early in my training but he was happy for me to give it a go and we’d get to find out just how good my landings are.

I flew a nice circuit with an early turn to base to accommodate for the drift and all was well on final right up until the main wheels touched the runway, shortly after which we were surprisingly airborne again. Initially I thought we’d bounced despite a relatively soft touchdown, but my instructor filled in the blanks once we were on the ground: I’d continued to pull back on the yoke as I’d done for pretty much every other landing to allow the nose wheel to come down, but with the gusty winds our airspeed exceeded Vr and so took off again. My instructor took over, gave it a squirt of power and brought us back down for landing. No unassisted landing in the logbook for this lesson then :(

On the plus side I nailed all the RT including getting a basic service from Farnborough, a distinct improvement on last lesson. All those practice calls whilst driving as recommended here really paid off I guess.

Another 47m puts me at 7h09m flight time. Next lesson is Friday next week, and we’re cracking on with circuit practice so hopefully plenty of opportunities to redeem myself for today’s less-than-stellar landing.