A good landing is one you can walk away from..
Fourth lesson today, third at Wellesbourne Mountford. Four flights, four instructors so far – I’m fairly sure I don’t have any personal hygiene issues so I’m blaming luck on this one!
Due to some problems with aircraft today (breaking down, students landing them propellor-first, that sort of thing), my instructor had to nip off to Leicester and pick up somebody who was stranded. I’d almost written the day off when they said I might have to fly a piper-warrior (not that I’ve got anything against them, just not flown one yet) but fortunately they shuffled things around and got me a slot with the Robin HR-200 I’d flown the previous two times (G-WAVV or “Victor Victor” as everybody calls it).
My instructor arrived and we walked over to the plane. I hopped in to buckle up while he did a quick check outside. Once we were both in, he had already strapped himself up while I was still fiddling with the ridiculous radial-harness system the Robins have. “Do they do a course in harnesses?”, I asked. “There’s the French for you, ‘make things difficult”. I had to agree, the French do make things difficult.
We went through pre-flight & started it up missing out the shout of “Clear prop!” which is in place to avoid unfortunate incidents involving fast-moving rotating objects & human limbs. “we missed out the ‘clear prop!’” I suggested. “Yes, you’re supposed to shout ‘clear prop!’”. Oh… that was clearly my job then, didn’t stop him just starting it up though!
“Okay, I’ll do the radio, you take her along the taxiway and stop just short of taxiway alpha (can’t remember the actual taxiway)”. It would appear that after one brief go at taxying last lesson, I would be responsible for ground manouvers! It did get relatively easier to manouver after a short while but I was sneaking the toe-brakes on from time to time as I was terrified of the high-speed walking pace we were doing on the ground.
“Just pop it over there & we’ll check the engine”. Now don’t get me wrong, I’d seen these planes turn on a sixpence but wasn’t prepared for having a go myself – plenty of toebrakes went into this one!
Very quickly, I’d lined up at the start of the runway and he just slammed full throttle and we were airbourne. The next 20 minutes seemed to last like hours. He wanted to cover straight & level flight (exercise 6) and after I showed I could do it all with various power & flap settings he decided to play a game of “I’ll bugger up the configuration and you’ll put it right”. At one point, he had almost idle throttle, full flap, full forward trim and banked it at 45 degrees with probably a good hard push on the left rudder but fortunately I remembered the old “power, attitude, trim” before we were sent into an uncontrollable spin leading to a small crater and fireball in a nearby field.
After the fun & games, we headed back to the airfield where we got permission to go straight in (no circuit this time) as it was a fairly quiet Tuesday afternoon, I was getting a little un-nerved that I still had control. Last time I did a full left-hand circuit and a proper approach with the instructor taking control at the final 100 feet. This time was different, he asked me to line up for the final approach. This time, I made a point of lining the runway up in front of me rather than in front of the nose (which would see logical but would actually result in landing parallel to the runway as you don’t sit directly in front of the nose!). 300 feet, 200 feet, 60 knots, trees looking very close…
Those last few seconds were the most nerve-racking of my life, I was desperate to hit the throttle and shout “go around, go around!” but I suppose landing involved touching the ground at some point. “nice gentle pressures at this point” he remarked ever so casually. From my point of view it was like a world war two film, with the pilot desperately ditching a plane in a field missing both engines, fires raging from the wings.
The next few seconds happened very quickly, I wanted to pull back afraid of digging a trench in the runway. “wait for it, not yet”.. when I did eventually bring the nose up to flare I heard the faintest pip of the stall warning very quickly followed by the bump of the main wheels on the tarmac. Good lord, I’d landed without crashing it!
As we went down the runway, the instructor laughed “that wasn’t so bad was it?”… “terrifying” I replied!
To follow it all, I had to taxi off the runway and park it parallel to the other planes. This was a piece of cake in comparison to the ordeal I had just been through!
On the walk back to the clubhouse to do the paperwork and rescue Deb from the local flying geek who had given her the full history of aviation I reflected back on my future choice of instructor for bookings. The past two had been relatively easy going and done most of the work. This guy made me work, made a 40 minute lesson seem to last several hours and make me lose half a stone in sweat. I’ve booked him for the next four lessons, bring it on! 
