Brush-Up Lesson

The holidays have been good to me. I received the G1000 book and the training CD I was expecting, so I have some good aviation reading material to curl up with this winter.

I finally got up in the air again. The glass panel is down for maintenance and its annual, so I went up in 9DS with Alex to shoot landings on runway 12 at Gary (GYY). I went up with an instructor because I had done so little flying recently that I wanted a safety pilot on hand. However, despite my almost complete lack of flight time since August, the procedures, communications, and landings hadn’t deteriorated significantly and the entire flight was excellent. I missed pushing the prop forward on one landing (dag nabit!), but otherwise everything went astonishingly well. I was able to execute soft field and short field take-offs and landings to PTS.

On my last landing at Gary, Alex surreptitiously pulled the circuit breaker for the flaps while I was on downwind glancing out the left side. Then, abeam the numbers, Alex pulled the throttle to idle and said—with that wry grin all flight instructors have at this moment—“simulated engine failure”. I started my turn toward the runway and saw that I was excellent shape. The tower had already cleared me to land, so I keyed the mic: “Niner delta sierra, simulated engine failure,” just to keep the tower informed. I got a bored “Roger” in response. I had the field made made made (I was high, actually), so I checked my airspeed and flipped my flaps. In the back of my mind, I registered that there wasn’t a light on the flap indicator and a sound was missing while the flaps should have been extending. I looked out to the left wing and saw that the flaps were, indeed, not extended. I laughed—Bill had taught me well—and started a forward slip. I got about 1000 feet down the 7000 foot runway in the slip and descended to 5 feet above the runway. I pulled out of the slip and floated … and floated … and floated … and floated. This was going to be the smoothest landing I’ve ever made—if there was still runway left when the wheels touched down. Finally they touched with about two-thirds of the runway to my rudder and plenty left in front of me. I taxied to parking and talked things over with Alex while the plane was refueled.

I’m going back tomorrow to start instrument training. Yup, you read that correctly. Heh.