30 degree turns

Been a little over a week and Christmas out of the way, took the opportunity of the two public holidays this week to fit in a couple of lessons.  Yesterday was medium turns.

Back with Adam again and in VH-IGX.  Did the usual pre-flight briefing.  The air exercise is for straight and level 30 degree turns, then climbing turns, followed by descending turns.  Out of the box was pretty much the same as usual.  However I had duty for all radio calls.  Hmmm.  Was a bit "how your going" with the read backs.  On taxi clearance I read back the time, rather than the runway, oops.  Adam was quick to correct it.  So to help get more familiar with radio calls, I thought listening to some radio chatter would be cool.

On the net, the website LiveATC.net provides access to a bunch of radio feeds.  Australia has pretty good coverage, but even better, Jandakot is online.  The Jandakot feed provides Perth Radar, Jandakot tower, Jandakot tower for circuits and Jandakot ground.  Pretty good coverage if you want to get some familiarity going.  Anyway, the website is good, but they have an iPhone app which is alot better.  You can take ATC with you on the go and listen through your ear plugs anywhere that tickles your fancy.  On the bus, driving along etc.  I've just added a page for the Best aviation apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.  The details for the iPhone LiveATC and a few tips can be found there.

Anyway, the turns.  They were good fun.  We started out by doing an "S" type manoeuvres to get used to turning in, getting balanced and then exiting the turns.  All good.  The turns were done as full 360s.  Left was good, but my right turn was rubbish.  Lost too much altitude.   Tried again and it was a bit better.  The direction change requires a small nose down, turn in, keep balance and then back pressure to get the nose up to maintain the height.

The climbing turns were next.  I found these much easier for some reason that the straight and level.  The descending turns were the same, they were pretty easy too.  Anyway after that we tracked back to Jandakot via Cockburn Sound and in over Boat Shed.  We headed in on runway 06L.  We got immediate clearance and then into land.  Hmmm.  It was not too flash the approach.  Using a little too much power at one point, the plane pulled out of its decent into a climb.  Anyway, sorted with the power drop and burrying the nose towards the ground.  Adam helped with the quick adjustments needed and in to land.  We won't chalk that landing as a good success, rather a lesson in how not to perform throttle control on landing :p

Here are some GPS maps of the flight.  These were created using my cycling computer, a Garmin 305.  The images are then generated by the Mac software called Ascent, which I use to track my cycling efforts.

This next image shows the aircraft speed and altitude over time.  The blue shaded area is the altitude, whereby the green line shows the speed.  The max speed was 238km/h, not bad for a Cessna 152.  It was during a decent :)