Flying is like harder than I thought it is. It felt like I was doing a lot of things wrong today. I think I have a problem with looking down on the instruments a lot instead of looking out the window. Today basically we did a lot of landing approaches. There are five legs of the approach. There is upwind (for takeoff), crosswind, downwind, base leg and final.

We did those first starting from the downwind with reduced power to 1600RPMs, then by adding 10 degrees flaps at 80KIAs, then turning to base leg and adding 20 degrees of flap at 70KIAs. Last turn to final leg and adding full flaps and slow the plane to 60KIAs.

We used the wrong plane today because most of Scott's students fly the 172. I fly the 152 because it's much cheaper. He was really nice about it, because he didn't charge any ground time to compensate for the more expensive costs of the 172. It's a bigger plane but the seat was a little messed up and it was really low so I couldn't see too much outside.

We did the same thing as last lesson. The left-hand approach is really important in flying and he wanted me to get it right. This lesson I flew really well. I did the turns and made the approach like almost perfectly with a few minor mistakes.

We went up to 3,000 ft and there were lots of traffic around. At one point Scotts saw a few birds and it looked like an airplane flying straight at us.. and he was like "What the... They are really hauling ass!" I thought that was sorta funny.

When we were landing, my approach was dead on the glide path. He thought that I improved a lot. He was saying that my approaches are almost perfect and that even my taxiing was good. I felt a lot more comfortable being the one with the controls also. Good lesson =D

This time we did power-on and power-off stalls. Stalls happen when the angle of attack is too great causing too much air seperation on top of the wings and your plane just drops. When Scott was going over things on the ground, I was pretty much confused... but once we got in the air, I started to understand what the procedures are.

The thing about my takeoff is that I am apply too much right rudder to compensate for the left-turning tendancy. This causes the plane to fly right too much. I think my taxiing is pretty good now. The left-hand approach is slowly coming together. I get it more now. With more practice, everything will be good. Another great lesson!

Oh yeah, I went under the hood today too. That's flying without looking outside.

Today was extremely windy. Last night was pouring like crazy. Winds were gusting around 25 knots. We had to decide whether we were going to fly or not. Scott made the call of flying because we only had to finish up the lesson which includes slow flight. It is like basically designed to develop a feel for the airplane at slower speeds.

It feels like you are hovering over ground because it is so slow that it is close to stalls speeds. The controls are somewhat reversed. You increase power to increase altitude and increase pitch to decrease airspeed. This is opposite compared to normal cruise.

We did some followups on stalls. We went into a fully developed stall which is somewhat scary. I actually went into a spin because I was too aggressive with the controls, but Scott recovered for me. Today was just really bumpy because of the wind. It feels like a rollercoast, just more intense. Like the feeling of flying out of your seat lasts for like 3 seconds. It was sorta uncomfortable. We had a crazy crosswind landing which Scott did and we basically landed on one wheel first but then we got on the ground safely.