Flight# 4

We had the plane scheduled for Noon. It was still very cloudy but, luckily there wasn't much wind. So, we did more ground practice. After the preflight inspection, it started raining. There is hardly any one flying. This worked out for us because, Bill could let me taxiing on the run way to simulate the landing and take off speeds. That was fun going back and forth on the 5-23 run way. I am getting good at maintaining that center line. Breaking needs more practice though. Looks like, you need to control the rudder with the ball of your feet and the breaks (at the top of the rudder pedals) with the tip of your feet applying the same amount of pressure on both rudder pedals while pulling back the elevator. I could practice this a few more times on the runway and a taxi way. I wanted to practice for some more time on the runway but, Bill wouldn't let me. It seems, training is effective if you practice for no more than an hour and take a break. We taxied back to the parking area.

Parking: This is kind of like parallel parking the car. One person pushes the plane back by placing hands on the propeller at the center while other person, holds the tail down and nose up by pushing on the vertical stabilizer and the fuselage guiding the plane to the tie down position. Once in position, tie the ropes to wings and the tail so that wind won't blow the plane away!

Thunder storms rolled in for rest of the day so, further training was called off. The Hobbs time of this flight was 0.7 hours. Cumulative Hobbs time: 2.4 hours.