Night Flight

Last night I completed my night cross-country flight. We flew over to Beaumont (KBPT) and then headed back completing some lesson elements on the way back. Part of those were "under the hood" meaning you wear a dorky plastic thing on your head so you can't see outside the airplane and can only fly using the instruments. Picture wearing half of one of those plastic dog collar cone things on your forehead and then you'll know just about how cool you feel doing this.

Anywho, its best when learning to fly, to bore your instructor. In my case, I really already know how to do all this stuff because 1. I got some flight time in advance with my boss Jim and 2. flying is kinda just coming naturally and so my instructor pretty much just comes along for the ride because he has to. But the good thing about this is he is now teaching me advanced maneuvers that you otherwise wouldn't learn or be ready to attempt until higher ratings like commercial license and certainly ones he's never taught a private pilot student before. So where this is all going, last night we were at 4500' and pretty much right on top of Chambers County airport where we were going to practice some more night landings. So he taught me how to do a steep spiral descent. In a word... AWESOME! This maneuver is pulled off by rolling into a 60deg bank angle (which pretty much feels like you are sideways) and cranking it around in a spiral to lose altitude really quickly. At 60deg you are pulling 2-g's through the turn (cool) so we whipped around 5 or 6 times down to 1500' before leveling it out. Bam! we were set up to land at the airport in no time. I gotta say that was a pretty good maneuver and one I'll be doing again. For reference, private pilots are only supposed to learn 45deg level turns. Which aren't exactly easy either but much easier than 60deg spirals.

All in all, way good time flying last night.