Had another lesson in the Liberty today. It’s not the most powerful plane in the world, but it sure is nice for training. Winds were 190@10, so everyone was using Runway 21. I was a little worried about the combination of wind and the finger brakes, but it was no problem.

We worked on basic maneuvers under the hood again, just to get more used to the plane. The plane’s instruments are all electric (including the attitude indicator and directional gyro, since there’s two electrical systems due to the FADEC system), and it’s possible to fail the AI or DG separate from other instruments. So my instructor failed my AI in the middle of maneuvers. It took me longer than I’d like to notice that it failed — the vertical guidance started sliding before the horizontal guidance, and my cross-check against the altimeter was not strong enough to catch it until the gyros slowed enough that the horizontal scan didn’t match between the AI and DG. Oh well. Just before starting a steep turn, he failed the DG, which was a pain because I was in the middle of a steep turn with no gyro. I leveled out and started flying compass heading, and we moved on.

One dumb mistake I made — when the instructor recovered the DG (ie, pushed the circuit breaker back in), I didn’t adjust it to compensate for the fact that we were turning while it was off. It took me a while to notice. Dumb, dumb.

Next time I fly will be a bit more review, then a quick check with another instructor, then approaches, approaches, approaches.