Today started with power-on stalls again. Recovery was slightly better than last lesson, but am still not recovering quickly enough. Making progress, so hopefully will get there soon enough.

The second half hour of flight was spent doing simulated instrument flight. Even though extra work is needed to be able to fly on instruments, private pilots are required to receive 3 hours of simulated instrument flight during lessons. When flying simulated instruments, you wear these glasses that are fogged on most of the lens, but clear in the lower 1/3 or so, so that all you can see is the instrument panel. From there, you have to keep the plane flying where you want it to fly, which is harder than it sounds. I did ok, but had trouble with focusing on one instrument, rather than looking at the entire set of instruments. Apparently, a recent study found that experienced instrument pilots will look at 3 different instruments each second. So you really can’t focus on any one thing while flying that way. Today was just straight and level flight, turns, climbing turns, and such — the basics of controlled flight. Next time up, I’ll have to take off with the stupid glasses on, as a way of practicing keeping straight controlled flight. Bloomington doesn’t have the equipment for a tower assisted radar approach, so I won’t have to do an instrument approach until we start cross-country flights and fly out to Terre Haute.

Today was a tad bit windy, but nothing major. Other than that, it was beautifully clear and warm, so everyone was out and flying today. It was a bit busy on landing – there were four plans all coming into bloomington airspace for a landing at about the same time (one of them us, of course. And one a citation). So that was interesting – lots more communication than normal while coming into the pattern. I did ok on the approach, but didn’t hit my targets quite as well as I would have liked and came in a bit hot. There was a bit of a cross wind that I didn’t deal with nearly as well as I would have liked.

Next time up is more instrument flight and some more maneuvering practice. Cross country flight isn’t too far off…