2 types of workout

One mental... the other quite physical!

So I got up at O'dark thirty this morning to ensure I was out at Ardmore before 8am ready for my 2nd flight in the twin...

The sky was full of blue and a giant ball of yellow, a very very nice morning for flying.

After pre-flighting and a briefing on the considerations for flying a twin in the circuit, we taxied out... did out run-ups and took-off, at which point the instructors door came ajar! Leading to a very noisy circuit and full stop landing so we could get it shut.

Take 2 was much better, and we spent the next hour going round and round in circles...

The first couple were a bit hectic, I was struggling a little, and the speed both in climb and across the ground really did catch me out! For instance, on the first circuit, by the time I'd got the aircraft sorted after take-off and conducted my after take-off checks, I was almost at circuit altitude and I hadn't even turned off the extended centreline! By the time I was sorted in the downwind with the power set and got the gear down to help keep the aircraft under 120kts and then completed my downwind checks, I was late downwind! In a 152, I can have that pretty much done by halfway downwind :-/

But, practice makes perfect, and towards the end, I was getting into a rhythm... keeping ahead of the aircraft and making some decent approaches and landings.

And because I'm a sucker for punishment, I decided that I would go ahead with the afternoon's flight... Intro to Asymmetric flight. This occurs when one of the engines in a twin-engine aircraft fails. In a single-engine, if your engine dies, you're going down, hence why we practice forced landings without power. In a twin, if you lose an engine, it a lot of instances, you are still able to fly "quite" happily on one engine... it's not quite as simple in reality, as I found as this afternoon, but you can do it.

The problem with flying a twin on one engine, is that the engines are usually mounted one on each wing, so if one dies, the thrust from the one good engine is pulling that side of the aircraft along faster than the side with the dead engine, and hence the aircraft wants to constantly swing around... aka "yaw"... Us pilot's generally like to fly in straight lines, so this tendency for the aircraft to want to yaw is a bit of a problem...

Thankfully, we can just straighten the aircraft out with rudder... or so you'd think... it requires MASSIVE amounts of rudder to hold a light twin straight with only one engine working... on the plus side, I can skip the leg press exercises at the gym this week! :P

But again, those cunning pilot's of yesteryear have devised a procedure for dealing with these engine failures, where you keep the aircraft under control by using rudder and full power on the live engine, then set about the task of positively identifying the failed engine, verifying it is failed, and then setting up the engine to produce the minimum amount of drag... and so we worked our way through the various scenario's... engine failure in the cruise, engine failure in the climb, engine failure in the descent...

We followed that up with a "Vmca" (Minimum Control Speed) demonstration, to prove that if you fly too slow on one engine, there is a point where you have full rudder in to counter the yaw, but the aircraft just keeps going and continues to yaw and roll due to the reduced effectiveness of the rudder at such a low airspeed and eventually the aircraft will enter a spiral dive (which leads to other bad things like crashing and dieing!)... Thankfully, we conducted this demonstration at 3500' ;)

Then it was time to head back to Ardmore... on the way Jason popped in a sneaky "surprise" engine failure (all the others he had announced) just to see what I'd do... I handled it OK, but a bit on the slow side remembering the steps in the procedure... I only have 3 hours in the Duchess... and about 1 handling engine failures, so I'm sure it will come with time and practice :)


These Flights: 1.1 + 1.4 Dual Multi
Total Hours: 320.3 (150.4/140.3 Day, 8.6/17.4 Night, 3.6 Multi, 18.6 IFR)