Well, reading week is here for Canadian university students, or as it’s more popularly known south of the border – spring break. So for an entire week, I can schedule flights for every day and hope that the cloud, wind, and precipitation gods bless my bookings. Maybe I should make a sacrifice of some kind to them. Somehow I don’t think slaughtering a goat will do much. Perhaps a propeller?
This Monday and Tuesday marked the first time in a long, long time that I have been able to fly back to back days. On Monday, I got in a whopping 1.4 hours of airwork practice. Steeps turns, stalls, and forced approaches, oh my! Oz parallels aside, it was very productive. I’m still getting used to flying the C172 after transitioning from the DA20, so I need all the airwork practice I can get. My instructor has a knack for pulling the power at the most inopportune times in order to simulate an engine failure. I could be checking the ATIS on our way back from the practice area and wham: 3000′ to get through a cause check, securing the engine, simulating a mayday call and giving a passenger briefing – all while pitching for 65 knots, warming the engine every 500′ and making my way to a farmers field that I deem appropriate to land in. Ah, the excitement of being a student pilot.
Today we practiced diverting to an alternate. We flew London to Ingersoll, a small town about 15 miles SE of the airport, then simulated low ceilings coming in from the SW. I planned our diversion by orbiting just to the east of the town for about 5 minutes. Diversions are my nemesis. I was told to divert to Stratford, a small uncontrolled airport about 25 miles north of Ingersoll, so I planned to fly at 100 knots, 2500′, heading of roughly 360ยบ with an ETE of 15 minutes.
Southwestern Ontario can really suck for diversions. We have lots of fields, not many big landmarks, and lots of empty space. In other words, you’re navigating through no-man’s-land and looking for any distinctive attributes that you find on the map. I managed to find the town of Stratford, and I knew the airfield was NE of the town, but for some reason I just couldn’t find it. But not to worry, my flight instructor couldn’t find it either so that made me feel like I wasn’t totally stupid. We searched for a few minutes pretty intensely, still flying towards where I thought it was, and turns out it was right in front of us all along. I should have never admitted I didn’t know where it was and taken the credit for flying straight at it. Luck and skill is interchangeable for me on a regular basis.
So after getting to Stratford, I orbited the airfield for a bit trying to find a windsock. Took some time to find one, but I managed to deduce we should be landing runway 23. I proposed an upwind descent to enter a mid-left downwind. I got the response, “Are you sure?”. This is flight instructor code for, “You fail, try again”. It was at this point that I remembered runways 23 and 17 in Stratford are right-hand to keep traffic away from civilization. Stupid mistake that would have been a fail item on a flight test. I’ll definitely remember next time though.
Overall, both flights went fairly well aside from a few small stupid mistakes. I was within limits on all of my maneuvers which is good to know. Weather looks bad for the next day or two so hopefully I can get in some more flights towards the end of the week, and if the stars align, flight test on the weekend.
Now – time to make my sacrifice to the sky gods.
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