Saturday December 7th 2002, 12pm, N4754D, 1.3H

Grainne wasn’t able to fly today, but she setup for me to fly with Scott Bunch, one of the other CFI’s at Tradewinds. We got some rain last night, but today is beautiful with blue cloudless sky and no wind. I arrived pretty much on time and Scott arrived just after me. We talked a bit about the stage check last week. I needed to do some turning stalls, I hadn’t ever done them with Grainne and John had asked for one last week. We also decided to go to Watsonville as that is a favorite diversion airport for the FAA examiner. We would practice some slow flight, steep turns and stalls along the way with some soft field landings down at Watsonville.

N4754D was in good shape, this is the plane I’m booked to do my checkride in and I haven’t flown it since my solo cross-country to Sonoma (during which it apparently sprung an oil leak I didn’t even know about until later and was grounded for nearly 3 weeks). I want my last few flights to be in the checkride plane so I’m really used to its handling on the big day. The preflight, taxi and run-up went well. I did a good soft field takeoff and we made a downwind departure heading for Anderson Reservoir. On the way up Scott showed me the Loran that is installed in 4754D – I guess you need to know how to operate everything in the plane you take on the check ride and I’ve never used this particular box before. Apparently it works like a ground based version of GPS with pretty much the same functionality. I’ll play with it some more before the checkride.

Over Anderson, I did my clearing turns and maneuvering checklist and then entered slow flight. This went reasonably well, but I lost about 80’ because I didn’t add quite enough power in. We did a couple of 180 degree turns and this time I managed to roll out on the right heading, but as usual I had some problems letting the plane gain some speed on the turn. We flew a little further south to avoid San Jose class C airspace and then turned towards Watsonville. I could just make out the runway in the distance. Along the way I did some steep turns, one to the left and two to the right. These went well except that I let the bank angle get a little shallow on the right hand turns.

Scott talked me through a turning stall. basically its just the same as a straight ahead stall except you do it in a bank. This means you don’t have to worry about keeping a heading, but you do need make sure the turn is coordinated. We tried two, both power-off. You do the normal setup of slowing down getting in full flaps, then you start the turn as you pull out the power, no more than 20 degrees of bank and start pulling back to create the stall. The main mistake is not pulling back far enough to get a clean break on the stall. The first one worked pretty well, as soon as you start the recovery, its easy to level the wings. The second, I really didn’t pull back hard enough and then kind of preempted the stall break. Still, not too bad for a first attempt – I’ll try some more next weekend just to make sure I’ve got the hang of it.

We were over the mountains just southwest of South County so it was a short trip over to Watsonville. Tuned into the CTAF, it was apparent there was a lot of traffic around the airport. I made a fairly high pass over the eastern end of the field and then made a descending right turn to come in on the left 45 for runway 20. There was yellow biplane ahead of me in the pattern and we passed another couple of planes (rather closely) as I came in on the downwind leg. The biplane was extending his downwind to let some traffic on the ground takeoff. We watched a Cessna Citation (a business jet) takeoff as we flew downwind. I was quite distracted by all the traffic and radio chatter so I left it a bit late to start my descent. So I also flew a long downwind. This was supposed to be a soft-field landing, but I screwed it up. I landed flat (just about on three wheels) and didn’t add the power to keep the nose wheel up. I’m not sure why I made the mistake, but I think it was mostly the distractions of all the other planes and a new airport. We taxied off the runway and back for another takeoff. This one was a short-field takeoff and it went well. Once around the pattern again, this time watching a Lear Jet take off while I flew downwind (there must be a lot of rich strawberry farmers down in Watsonville). This soft-field landing was textbook, no problems at all. We did a touch and go and a downwind departure heading eastwards.

It was a nice leisurely flight back over South County towards Anderson. Over the lake, Scott had me try a power-on turning stall. This was even easier than the power-off stalls and we just did the one. Then back homeward to RHV for a short field landing. This went well, I put the wheels down pretty much where I wanted them, but a little harder than I’d like – Scott didn’t seem to mind. He said that most short field landings come down firmly anyway.

All in all a good flight, no major problems except for the poor landing down at Watsonville. Scott seems to think I’ll have no problems on the checkride, I wish I felt as confident.