Today’s weather is pretty challenging, with occasional wind gusts up to 15 knots. Apart from that, everything is great, and we’re going to fly at about 3000 feet, where the air is less turbulent.
Today, I flew a different airplane, and I had the impression that it was not properly trimmed and tended to turn left in cruise. However, the compass was more stable than in the previous aircraft. The pilot’s seat was not perfectly comfortable, and despite my average height (5’10”), I felt that I needed a pillow.
In the previous lessons, we focused on controlling the airplane without outside references. Today, we started to use navigation instruments such as VOR, NDB, and GPS. We don’t have DME in any of the airplanes, so we use distance measurements from the GPS.
Besides navigation, we continued practicing maneuvers, such as constant rate climbs and descents, constant rate turns, constant speed climbs/descents, partial panel flying, and compass turns without the gyro.
As the wind gusts became stronger, we made only one flight today.
I passed the stage II written test today, which mainly consisted of approach chart questions. It was exhausting, requiring a lot of attention, but not so difficult, and I got a score of 90%. While I know I could have done better, I am still satisfied.
I plan to take the rest of the written tests as soon as possible and focus on the practical part.
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