The empennage kit was delivered by Fedex Friday afternoon.
I had to finish the second work table before I could unpack it. Mister Kim supervised the task.
We were satisfied with the final result.
Mister Kim begins unpacking.
The small box openned.
There were a couple of small bends on the bottom rudder skin. They were easily fixed with fluting pliers.
OK, I can do this. . . .
I think. . . .
Finally faxed my order to Van’s for an RV-7 empennage kit today. Will have to wait until Monday for order confermation.
Practiced a lot of steep turns yesterday. I was a little nervous when Drew demonstrated a couple, but I was just too busy when doing them to get nervous at all. You have to use all the controls to keep bank angle down, nose up, and speed up. They aren’t hard, which is not to say that I’m not going to need a lot of practice. The main trick is to figure out where the spot on the panel the horizon should be. This was my 5th hour.
No flying today. It just looked too smoky up there from all the wild fires. ATIS said the visibility was 6sm, but I didn’t really buy it. It was mighty hazy on the ground and looked worst up above. Drew said it was clear above about 6000 ft, but I didn’t thing I would be able to see a clear horizon even from up there. It was hard enough just to see the hills across the highway at work! My first NO GO decision!
To make up for it I put in some time on the flight simulator at home. I hooked the flight yoke back up and practiced some slow flight and stalls. Just for the fun of it I landed at SFO. This was probably my best landing to date, so maybe the slow flight practice helped some. More likely, it was my focus on trying to keep the air speed at a constant 60kts with full flaps. It’s much easier to judge and adjust my landing point if I keep my airspeed constant.
Hopefully the air will clear up by Monday for my next lesson.
Went for my second lesson with Drew. I was more calm this time. We had to taxi all the way to runway 19, so I got quite a bit more practice staying in the middle of the taxiway. Getting better. This time he added climbing and decending turns to the program. It went pretty well. I just have to remember to set the attitude and periodically glance at the instruments to verify. Not too bad at all.
We next tried a little speed control. Last time we cruised around at about 2300 RPM. This time we droped down to 21 and lost about 10 knots. Down to 20 dropped another 10 knots. OK, going slow required more back elevator during turns, and a lot more for climbing turns. You can see were this is going. We’ll be doing slow flight and maybe start on power-off stalls next time.
I got an introduction to flying the pattern this time. I descended down to pattern attitude and entered on the down wind. Turning to base was easy enough. Drew took over for the turn to final and we went on in.
This was also my introduction to the radio. I did the talking to ground control and Drew did the tower. At least I didn’t embarrass myself, though my readbacks were a little too sloppy. I’ll do better next time.
At this point it really seems to take a lot of consentration. It felt fine while flying, but when we got back to the office I was just wiped out. All I wanted to do was go find a bed for a nice long nap. I’m sure my productivity the rest of the day was just about zero. But boy is this fun!