Climb and Maintain ...

The flying adventures of a software engineer in the Pacific Northwest.

Monday, May 28, 2007

"Top Gun" Moments

For one reason or another, whenever I strive to learn something new, I sometimes go through stages where things get worse before they get better. It's when the instructor demonstrates a maneuver, you do it by rote repetition (and it turns out semi-well, probably through luck), but in subsequent days, things are not going as well and there's lack of visible improvement. Or, worse: you've been doing well on a maneuver, and suddenly you find that nothing is going your way: the maneuver is outside of PTS tolerances, and perhaps the entire training flight has not gone as well as you might have expected.

I've had one of these moments recently in preparation for the commercial checkride (which, by the way, is already scheduled -- no backing away this time!) I call those events Top Gun Moments, because it seems like when they happen, I go home, watch Top Gun (again), and I tell myself that I can still do it! :-) For this recent flight, it had to do with my perennial problem -- eights on pylons. The maneuver just isn't going so well, and I'm wondering if I'm ever going to just magically "get it". I seem to choose pylons that are either too far apart, or too close, or such that I lose track of where they are altogether in the middle of the maneuver. The plane seems to go all over the place -- and even though I know what to do theoretically with respect to pivotal altitude, I can't seem to reliably translate this knowledge into physical flight control movements.

To add to the frustration, my power-off 180 degree accuracy landings are all over the place: I'm either short, long, or not within the 200-foot PTS limit. What's worse is that I seem to have done quite well on these before, and now for some reason they're not turning out as well. All this seems to be calling for me to watch Top Gun again. :-)

The checkride is coming up soon -- I've scheduled some additional flights to make sure that I'm all up to standard. On a more positive side, at least I'm up to snuff on my airplane and systems knowledge!

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