Air and ground work

Air work

Last Sunday we had more CFI ground school. The weather was heavy rain, so no chance to fly. But this weekend was dry and clear, so I flew the PW5 this morning before heading off to CFI ground school in the afternoon. Because it had to be early, it was of course a sled ride. I went up to 4000' AGL and practiced a lot of turns, checking that I am rolling out right on the desired heading, since the commercial tolerance is tighter. I also worked on not coming out of the turn with more speed than I started.

I did three straight-ahead stalls and was surprised to find that it really wanted to drop a wing. Twice the left and once the right. It recovered nicely, but it bothers me that it was so laterally unstable. I don't remember that from previous stalls.

Then I did a couple of pattern tows to practice landings some more. As I've mentioned, I seem to have a habit of landing short. Talking with J, it's probably that I'm expecting the PW5 to float in ground effect, and it really doesn't float much. Landings 1 and 2 were short, #3 was good.

Ground work

So now we've completed our four-week CFI training kickoff. I have a much better idea of what I need to do. One of the materials is a week-by-week study and practice plan; I think it goes for 36 weeks. There's a lot to study in the Fundamentals of Instruction area, but it's starting to make more sense to me. I have some good materials to work with... I'll list them in a future post.

Our club is going to run a 6-week ground school for students working on their Private cert. The chief CFI wants each of the four CFI students to teach some of it, which will be a great opportunity to work on lesson plans etc. As luck would have it, I'm scheduled for the first week, which is two weeks from now. I will do a half hour each on Preflight Inspections and Weight & Balance. So I've already started on a lesson plan for the W&B, and that's going prety well.

Coincidentally, I've been working on helping to clear up some questions about the weight and balance for our Grob 103. The Flight Handbook does not give the usual "station" or "arm" information. Instead it provides a general "loading plan" which means you don't need to calculate anything, but it also assumes nothing ever changes with the aircraft. So we're trying to get all the numers to reproduce a standard w&b worksheet. I found the Type Certificate Data Sheet on the FAA web site, and we have recent weight information, so we have nearly everything we need to finish off this little project.

Our chief also wants us to think about our motivations for becoming instructors. I'll post my thoughts some time soon.