Today was my third flight lesson. Topics included slow flight and the use of flaps. We spent most of the time flying at the minimum maneuverability speed of the aircraft. At such low speeds, the controls are really soft and don’t react particularly well. Most of the time, we were going slow enough and at high enough an angle of attack that the stall warning horn was blowing. I managed to make a couple of reasonable turns at such low speeds, but I wasn’t maintaining altitude nearly as well as I would have liked — of course, this is true for normal flight conditions as well. I need to work on better coordination of using ailerons and rudder. I’m not using enough rudder when conditions aren’t optimal — slow flight and cross winds being two of the notable examples. I also fail at maintaining heading when I’m working on other maneuvers. The last one I’m hoping will settle down a bunch when I get comfortable with the general flying thing and I have some time to pay attention to something other than not running the plane into the ground. The lack of rudder usage in slow conditions means that I try to get control of the plane with the ailerons, which means that I let the plane get way out of whack and it’s hard to get it settled back down again.

Next lesson (Friday early morning) will be more slow flight, this time working on stall recovery (which unfortunately means stalling the plane, which will be a gut wrenching experience).

There was an article in the IDS about the Flying Hoosiers, a flight club at IU. Of course, the article included no useful contact information (stupid IDS). I’m going to try to get in touch with the group, as it would be nice to be able to talk to other people learning to fly :).