Today was an early morning flight at 8am. We got to the hangar and started preflight before Steve arrived. It is my turn to fly today and we started with some instrument work under the hood.

Next, we worked on slow flight. Twice I put the plane into slow flight. On the second attempt, Steve asked me to make a shallow left turn. I banked to the left (wings lower on the left) and to keep the turn coordinated, I had to relax the right rudder just a little bit. I relaxed it a bit too much so there was more yaw to the left as I was also banking. The plane has an over banking tendency since the outer wings are moving faster than the inner wings leading to more lift on the outer wings. Since the plane was close to stall speed (stall horns blaring constantly during slow flight) I thought the plane could go into a stall and left spin so I instinctively went for the throttle to give it a little power. This is when Steve caught my arm and pulled it back (see 6:21 in the video). He mentioned that power in that situation could have got me into a lot of trouble. Later, he demonstrated (at 7:05) what would have happened if I had given it throttle in the middle of the left turn close to stall speed. He didn’t give any power but his demonstration showed that we would have entered a spin. He quickly corrected it but you can see that the plane was in an unusual attitude of a very high bank angle to the left. If I had given power in that situation, we could have gone into a steep spiral. Phew.

We then did three touch and go landings at New Jerusalem. But first, we flew over the airport to check wind conditions since there was no weather information for the non-towered airport. After the landings, in the way back to Livermore, at 14:08 in the video Steve demonstrates how a fixed pitch prop’s RPM increases with nose down pitch when the airspeed increases.