2004 has been a year of aerial hi-jinks for me, beginning in March this year with a 2 hour Introduction to Aviation flight.
My 2 hour intro flight started off on a clear morning at Cessnock airport. I really had no idea what to expect, other than that I was to do a bit of the flying, with the pilot assisting with the take off and landing. Sounded simple enough.
The plane was a Cessna 152, a two seat, dual control, single engine aircraft - very popular for training because they are pretty tough. My instructor was a young fellow, Jake, who had almost finished an Aviation degree at uni.
The first thing I noticed about the plane was how much the cockpit reminded me of my Datsun 1000. Words like "small", "simple" and "un-ergonomic" became apparent.
Anyway we climbed aboard after a quick checkout of the exterior, and after some pre-flight checks I fired the engine into life. The first challenge was taxiing. After mentally scorning myself for bothering to move the control yoke (ala plane steering wheel) i soon found that steering a plane like a tank using your feet is not instantly intuitive for people who drive cars, and indeed there was much zig-zagging to be had. But, with a little bit of practice I became only half-lame.
Take off was fun. I only had to pull back on the controls when Jake told me, which sounds easy. In practice it was a stomach churning, white knuckled affair, with me hanging on to the controls as if the more firmly I gripped them, the less likely it would be that we would head downwards again.
Soon enough though I got over this feeling of unease, and began to realise that I really enjoyed the whole flying thing. We headed out to Nelson Bay, and came back down the coast to Newcastle at 500ft.
After doing a bit of sightseeing, as we were heading back to the airport, it was time to do some tricks. First Jake slowed the engine to idle, held the plane slightly nose up, until the stall warning buzzers sounded, indicating that the air going around the wings wasn't enough to produce a decent amount of lift, as the plane soon demonstrated by swiftly pitching groundward. This was great fun, and I got to control (or maybe recover from is a better description) a stall myself too.
The best trick was yet to come. Earlier when we were still on the ground I pointed to a sticker affixed to the middle of the cockpit giving instructions on how to recover from a spin. I told Jake that I was really hoping that we never had to follow those instructions, reguardless he later asked whether I wanted to try one. As soon as I realised that he wasn't joking I said that I didn't think so. Then I changed my mind. Soon enough we were upside down spiralling toward the ground after stalling only one of the wings and rolling the plane over. Luckily Jake stuck to his word, and did manage to get us back out of what he got us into.
So the final adventure of my first flight was landing, where I managed to line up the plane with the runway quite well (I though so anyway). We must have been coming in facing about 30 degrees off straight, as the wind was blowing across the runway. I flew almost all the way back onto the ground, but at the last minute I couldn't manage to get the gently floating plane back onto the ground, luckily Jake quickly plonked the plane onto the runway, and my first piloting experience was over.
