HOUSE 77 Xmas EDITION

I meant to write this on Friday but I got sidetracked with that whole "night out" thing. Anyway, let me try to describe to you what I did on Friday at Brampton Flying Club. Currently I'm listening to Odyssey by Lovelife, as is found on Tom Middleton's spectacular The Sound of the Cosmos...if you can find it, it's an appropriate backdrop to what I am going to discuss.

On Wednesday I started flying what is called the circuit. The circuit is essentially the pattern that aircraft must fly in around an airport in order to structure and distance aircraft from one another. Think of it as a ringroad around the airport.

A typical circuit involves an aircraft taking off on whichever runway has them facing into the wind - this is called either the upwind or take-off leg of the circuit.

Once a pilot reaches 500ft above ground level (not to be confused with above sea level) they turn (typically - not always - depends on the airport, but doesn't change at that airport ever) 90 degrees to the left and continue climbing.
This is called the Crosswind leg.

As the aircraft reaches 1000ft AGL, they turn left 90 degrees again, and level out their climb. They are now on the downwind leg.

They continue parallel to the runway, and once they have reached a point that is roughly 45 degrees beyond the threshold (touchdown point) of the runway they turn left again 90 degrees, onto what is called the Base leg, and now descend so they are 500ft AGL by the time they turn once more in line with the runway.

The final leg is not surprisingly called the Final Leg. Big surprise eh? Here they descend to the runway and land!

And that is what I have now done about twenty times or more since Wednesday. You just go around over and over again. It sounds boring but it's excellent practice because you can correct mistakes you make shortly after having made them, in order to be able to rapidly advance your skills. What is MORE fun (and terrifying...) is that I've been landing with moderate crosswinds. Which means I have to do what's called a sideslip onto the runway. Which means I will tilt the wing of the aircraft into the wind, and yaw the nose to line up with the track of the runway, so I travel in a perfectly straight line, cept with my wing dipped low. It is a challenge, but I'm getting fairly good at it for a beginner.

Then there are the engine failures. Imagine yer flying along, and suddenly your flight instructor cuts the throttle and says "Engine failure, what ya gonna do?" Okay really now. That makes you sweat. haha. I've done it a few times. I am okay when he does it to me at the Base turn, that is simple, you just get to the runway you were about to turn to anyway. But then he did it to me just as I made my turn into the Downwind leg. Then I had to land on the other runway and drop 800ft of altitude in about maybe half a mile horizontally. I kid you not, I had the wing tilted well past 60 degrees to the left, the nose pointed down at around 20-30 degrees, and meanwhile I am throwing in full rudder, and plummeting to the ground at some horrendous rate, whilst trying to keep my speed at 65 knots. Suffice it to say I didn't make it. If it had been a real failure, I could have touched down and MAYBE been okay, but I didnt get down fast enough (weird paradox isnt it?) to have enough runway to stop safely, and probably would have run off the end of the runway in reality. But that's better than outright crashing!

Anyway, the entire process is more fun than anything else I've ever done in my life. I can't wait to take you all up on trips!