Bracing for the inevitable.

Bob and I had a plan for today’s flight. It mostly consisted of getting-WMAP-over-her-stupid-problem-with-power-on-stalls. As mentioned before we did indeed manage to achieve this. But Bob likes to “make efficient use of our time” during lessons.

Basically this is his way of saying “don’t get too comfortable up there.”

Everything we do has a purpose. Every flight starts with a speciality takeoff and ends with a speciality landing. Even the time taken to get pout to the practice area is used efficiently, much to my disgust. For a long while it was spent under the hood, building up my instrument time. Now Bob uses it to irritate me.

Actually that's not really fair. He uses it to develop my map reading and diversion planning skills. It’s not his fault that I don’t have any.

 I knew I was in for trouble as soon as I started taxiing. As usual Bob had no interest in paying any attention whatsoever to my preflight checks. I could have been taxiing us around in high speed donuts on the apron and I’m not sure he would have noticed.

I groaned inside as I saw the inevitable chart and pencil weapons being eagerly brandished. I was more anxious than I’d like about this flight anyway, the thought of the stalls making me sweat already. I had vaguely optimistic hopes that Bob’d cut me some slack; maybe ease off the pressure just a little. To drop a subtle hint I carefully tucked my chart between the dash and windshield, hoping he’d pick up on the clue that I’d prefer not to be using it any time soon.

Apparently not.

As soon as we are enroute, Bob gives me a diversion to plan. I reluctantly extricate my chart and circle our starting point and destination, slowing the plane down a little as I do so. Line drawn I guestimate a heading and set up on what I hope is the correct path. Remembering to check my heading indicator while I’m still in straight and level flight.

A quick ETA guess and I start looking for landmarks to confirm I’m on the right track.

Of course I’m not. I spot very quickly that the zoo is coming up in front of me, but on the wrong side if the plane. I make the decision to fly overhead and then figure out a more sensible heading from there.

Realising that there are fairly significant winds aloft I attempt to correct for that.  My initial heading guess would have been fine if it wasn’t for the 10 knot or so winds from the South West.

Of course, spatially challenged idiot that I am, I go to correct the wrong way, until Bob points out my error. I mentally kick myself but there’s no time for that as we are at Claremont and the stall-torture is about to begin.

Even when that was done and dusted, we are doing another on the way back. My heading choice is better this time although I’m a little off in my initial assessment of where the hell we actually are. Nothing too major, just off a little. The problem now is that the air has gotten lumpy out here and my stomach isn’t coping too well with the chart reading and the bumps.

Eventually I have to admit defeat, our destination is insight and my stomach is distinctly unsettled. I point out our destination to Bob and announce my intention to track visually and concentrate on flying the plane rather than the chart, for both our sakes.

Truth be told I am slowly getting the hang of this, like anything to do with spatial awareness it is taking me a while.

Bob knows I have challenges with this kind of thing, we spoke about it during our debrief. He reminded me that I’ve found ways to compensate for my difficulties and will continue to do so. It is an ongoing process.

One that he seems hell bent on forcing me to confront every flight.

While the sensible part of me knows that this is for the best, the devil inside me thinks that I have two choices here. I either become really good at the diversion planning OR I become really bad at my preflight checks, so that Bob doesn’t have time to plan these little exercises!