Takeoff – Week 2 – 2/28/24
Luke P -
Flagstaff isn’t an easy place to learn to fly. As you might have noticed Flagstaff is almost never without wind, and wind tends to add an extra layer of difficulty to flying. Along with that, Flagstaff is high altitude, and planes don’t perform as well at high altitudes. The weather here isn’t very flying friendly, so I miss a lot of days. For that reason I started my flight training long before the senior projects began because there is almost no way I would have finished in that time.
As I said, Flagstaff is really high altitude, but the thing that makes it worse is that it gets pretty hot in the summer. The temperature affects something called density altitude. You can think of density altitude as the altitude the airplane feels it is at. As the air temperature gets hotter, the distance between the air molecules increases and there is less air in an imaginary box. This hurts the performance of the engine because the engine can suck in less air, it ruins the fuel/air mixture of the engine, but luckily airplanes are able to control the fuel/air mixture with a control we call the mixture (pretty clever naming). When taking off out of Flagstaff, we lean the mixture, meaning less fuel is going to the engine so we waste less fuel. As you would expect this means that we get a lot less power out of Flagstaff which leads to decreased climb rates.
So with that, there’s a lot more to worry about when flying out of Flagstaff. I remember taking off out of Flagstaff the first time was quite a different feeling. Unlike a commercial plane you don’t get the drag racer feeling as you go down the runway, but it is still really fun looking out the front as the white lines pass under you while accelerating. Also, being in a light airplane, we takeoff in a much shorter distance. The first time taking off it feels really wobbly (the gusty conditions don’t help). From then on, the normal takeoff feels a lot more smooth but the first one is a bit of a shock. The other variations of takeoffs also feel a bit unstable at first, but with practice they become much less so. I remember climbing out from runway 21 was really rough that day because of the thermals created by heat on the ground in the summer months. We turned right to depart the pattern to the North where we flew over the city and not to far away from my house. As we were flying my instructor taught me proper use of the rudder, and just the basics of flying the airplane. My instructor would briefly make fun of me over controlling the aircraft by throwing around the controls for a few seconds. It might sound a little mean, but it actually helped a lot and made me more conscious of being lighter on the controls.
A Cessna 172, which is what we fly, isn’t super prone to it, but bad flying and over controlling the aircraft can lead to something called pilot induced oscillations. Essentially what happens is the plane will bank to a certain side, and the pilot will over correct it and bank the airplane to the other side. The pattern continues and you start to look like Cougar in Top Gun.
After flying over the city we turned to the Southeast and headed towards Lake Mary, which is our “practice area”. Here I learned my first maneuvers such as steep turns and stalls. Stalls are a long winded thing to explain and I’ve already gone on for too long, so I’ll save that for another post, but essentially the wing loses lift, and we need to learn how to recover a stall back to normal conditions of flight.
When we were done learning the first basic maneuvers required for the private pilot check-ride, we headed back to the Flagstaff airport where I shadowed the controls as my instructor landed. It concluded my first flight of many. After flying we always do a “de-brief” where we talk about what was done right and what needs to be improved, and so the very first step of flying was finally completed.
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