Lesson 5 - Power-on Stalls

I told myself that for my next flight I'm going to take the initiative and do what I know I should be doing without pausing on every item for conformation from my instructor. I'm going to fly the plane.

Before ground school I've been practicing my checklists on the ground in parked planes and I've been running through the whole routine from inspection to cruise. I became quite comfortable with it and I knew I could do it mostly myself the next time.

Lucky, the Saturday was beautiful and strangely there weren't too many people in the air. Unfortunately, the airport was extremely busy. It took about ten minutes before I could squeeze in a request for taxi and another ten minutes before I could repeat myself because ground control missed it the first time. When we got to the runway I noticed I had forgotten to put my seatbelt on. As I'm fumbling with it the tower asks us if we want to go, but by the time I had my belt on, there was someone on final.

Finally we get on the runway and I can do my thing: full power, check RPM, right rudder, check oil pressure, right rudder, check speed- "Speed alive!", right rudder, 55 knots "Rotate!", slowly pull back... slowly... and we''re up. Nice and smooth. Turn to left to Blackie Spit at 400 feet and increase speed to 90 knots at 1000 feet. Level off at 1500 feet. That's as far as I got practicing on the ground, so now what...?

My instuctor guides us over to the practice zone and we set up for maneuvers and he demonstrates a power-on stall. Seems simple enough. It's like a lot like a power-off stall, but with more rudder control. So I pull up, and pull up until the nose starts to drop. I let it drop a bit, but then it really goes down. The slip indicator is showing the ball to the left so I "step on the ball" and give it some left rudder. Wrong. A low nose and turning into the low wing and we have now entered a spin! I do a 180 degree spin staring straight down at Stave Lake. My instructor calls "I have control" and as soon as I center all the controls the plane stops spinning. All my instructor needs to do is pull up. Good thing the people at Cessna have anticipated newbies like me and have designed their planes to have lots of positive stability.

I did a few more stalls without as much drama and puttered on over to Pitt Meadows for a touch-and-go. I let my instructor fly us there as I took some pictures.