Alex Brett
Author's posts
Aug 31
Crosswinds
I woke up to see clear blue skies and the sun shining, so this morning’s lesson looked to be promising – I then looked at the METAR and TAF and realised that it was going to be a pretty much 90 degree crosswind, which was less encouraging! Once I got to the aero club, it …
Aug 30
Glide approaches and more solo
I had a lesson booked for Wednesday – the weather wasn’t suitable for any more solo work (it was borderline in terms of the club’s limits, but given I’d only been solo once before it would have been a bad idea as I doubt I’d have been able to handle it!), so instead the instructor …
Aug 24
First Solo!
I haven’t posted for a while (I have got a few notes about previous lessons which I might get round to putting up at some stage), but I have to do a post today as I had my first solo this morning! I’d had a lesson that went very well yesterday, where the last part …
Jun 27
Circuits again
After a cancelled lesson yesterday due to some engine testing that was being carried out at Cambridge making circuits impractical, and the destination the instructor had planned to go (Duxford) to do them suddenly getting too busy, I was looking forward to today’s lesson. I did start to wonder if somebody had it in for …
Jun 20
More circuits
I think I’m going to have to think up more imaginative titles for future blog posts, given the number of circuits lessons I’m likely to have! Unlike last week, today the surface wind was reported as around 4 knots from variable directions, and a nice high cloud base – by the time it actually came …
Jun 15
Circuits
Today’s lesson was the first (of what will be many!) doing circuits – the circuit is a rectangular pattern flown to co-ordinate activities around a runway for landing, where each ‘leg’ (i.e. side of the rectangle) has a name, and specific activities that are carried out on it. I woke up to find the wind …
Jun 13
Stalling
I was worried at the beginning of the week if I was going to be able to get either of my lessons this week, as it didn’t look promising – however, this morning the cloud base was reported at 4500 feet with no significant wind, so things were looking good. I had a slightly eventful …
Jun 06
Slow Flight
Today’s lesson was meant to be on slow flight and stalling – unfortunately the cloud base was such that we wouldn’t be able to get high enough to practice stalling safely, so we’d concentrate on the slow flight side of things. At first glance flying slowly doesn’t seem like it should be an issue, however …
May 31
Turning
After some initial confusion as to what lesson I was doing (yesterday’s instructor needed to dash out after the lesson and hadn’t had a chance to transfer his scribbled notes to my training file), we went and had the brief. The key thing here was going to be to try and keep the turns co-ordinated …
May 30
Climbing and Descending (2)
Despite forecasts to the contrary, I woke up to find the weather was looking good, so went off to the airport. After a relatively short briefing (since this was essentially what I did last time, just adding use of flaps and power – though the instructor did give me a useful tip for how to …
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