Today was another long lesson. We flew to another local regional (Wilson, NC) and practiced a few patterns there. It was very disorienting to me trying to get a grip on what features on the ground were the runways. I'm still busy running through the gauges in the cockpit and spend too much time inside instead of looking outside. I'm sure as I get more comfortable, that will change. Embarrassing enough, I was doing a check (instructor prompted) prior to entering the pattern and only one tach needle was active in the green arc. The other was pegged down.

Evidently, the instructor had pulled the breaker for the tach and I had missed it completely during my normal scans. Yikes! Need to work on keeping my brain engaged on the gauges other than just Airspeed and VSI/Alt (not that I do a bang up job of that right now either).

At the dest airport, I worked on hover, pick-ups and setdowns some more (my approach was pretty good once I stopped thinking about it too much and just kept the correct sight picture). My hovers weren't great. I'll tell myself it was the winds variable from 310 - 330 at 8kts gusting to 16, but I really think it was just me having a bad day. One eye-opener was when my CFI had me use only the left pedal in the hover. The right pedal input is really more of a "less left pedal" input. Afterwards, I did worse with 2 feet on, sigh. I kept focusing on not using too much right foot and ended up not using any left either.

Patience, young grasshopper. . . I'm hoping this will sync up for me a bit better once my brain has some down time to assimilate the info.

Then I got to do a Max power Take off.

From memory:

1. Do a magneto check first (disable governor and check RPM drops like the after startup procedure).

2. Pick up from the ground to just an inch or two hover then. . .

3. Pull max power (MCP + .9 in the Beta2) and apply just a little forward cycle to get up to around 20-25KIAS.

4. Ride the ETL up until about 50' AGL and then assume a normal Take Off profile.

The flight legs to the regional and back were fun and nerve-wracking at the same time. There were stretches where it felt natural and relatively easy and then there were times where I completely was chasing the aircraft.

Next flight is Saturday morning. Looking forward to it and will update the blog afterwards.

Safe flying. . .

Kelly

Edit: I checked my log book after writing this and realized that I'm currently at 9.2 hours TT (1 hour of Sim). Still 10 hours towards the rating, but wanted to clarify.