Today started with yet another DME hold, this time on the ABQ 310 radial at 12 DME. My entry was pretty good, but I took far too many laps to get on the radial. Good news is that i stayed in the protected airspace the entire time, so at least it wouldn’t have been a total bust. For the holds and then most of the maneuvering today, I had much better control over the plane (maintaining altitude and heading) than I have in the past couple of weeks. My scan is also drastically improving, giving me time to look at other things (like the checklists and the MFD with the moving map / traffic). I’m starting to get comfortable with that part of flying, which is reassuring.

We then did partial panel unusual attitude recovery, where the instructor puts the plane in a non-straight-and-level attitude that’s moving towards something really bad happening (diving or stalling usually) and student then gets to recover into straight and level. These are a total pain in the butt with steam gauges, because the partial panel is usually an attitude indicator loss. The G1000, however, is the primary AI, backed up by a vacuum AI, so you always have an AI that works (or are about to die, but that’s another story). Nose high recovery was fine, but on nose low (a dive), I always wanted to pull up on the nose before leveling the wings, as one doesn’t like diving towards the ground. But this is not good, because it adds stress to the wings and if you are diving, you want to keep as much stress off the wings as possible.

Stalls weren’t too bad, but it’s hard to get used to the thought of using rudder to level the AI, because that’s just not how you usually do it. Yet somehow, this doesn’t bother me when I’m doing VFR stalls. I suppose it’s just like VFR stalls — you get used to it and everything is second nature.

We then repeated the entire thing, this time using the G1000 instead of the backup indicators. The stalls were a little easier than on the partial panel because it includes an inclinometer (aka, the ball) which tells you whether you are in coordinated flight or not. For some reason beyond comprehension, while most backup attitude indicators include an inclinometer, the one on the G1000 does not. So you just kind of guess to keep coordinated flight, which is a little difficult for unusual attitudes.

Practiced some more steep turns — still having trouble with those, need another flight to get where I need to be with those.

Due to time, we then ended with a standard VFR approach. The pattern was a bit busy and we were short on time. Made a better than usual approach, but still a little high on final. Had a much better sight lines through the flare and had a better feeling for my height. Still bounced it a bit because I came across the threshold too fast, but I’m slowly converging on something that doesn’t suck.

Next week is cleaning up all my maneuvers for a stage check with another flight instructor. So more of everything from lessons 1 – 6. Yippie.