Skills Test Part Two

And so to handling. After the morning going so well, failure felt even more certain - perhaps my training was navigation biased or something. We met at 1500 in the club house and set out for the aircraft. On the way there, Martin was caught by the aerodrome manager as inbound from Canaerfon there was a PA28 that thought it had nosewheel damage. The plan was for the damaged aircraft to do a slow flyby so that the nosewheel could be looked at from the ground and advice offered. This emergency effectively closed the runway so that by the time the PA28 started its slow pass, it had several aircraft in the circuit above, several at the holding point, and the police helicopter hovering at the side, videoing the nosewheel. The police helicopter air taxied to our side of the airfield and Martin hopped in to look at the video footage. Fortunately, no damage could be seen, so the PA28 pilot was had to put his aircraft down with everyone on the airfield looking on. The nosewheel suspension looked a bit soft but no other obvious damage, so all was well.

After all that drama, it was back to preflight checks. As we taxied to hold A3 along with half the population of that part of Manchester all delayed due to the previous emergency, another emergency came through - this time a taildragger with a loose trim tab. Luckily he got down just fine after a vertiginous glide approach. So, after faffing about for a good half an hour, we were off.

Immediately the learning began. We did some co-ordination of rudder and aileron and it was immediately apparent that Martin's control was precise and firm, where mine was the opposite. Then into some steep turns. Then some steeper turns. It was fabulous fun. Then some stalling and some incipient spin recovery, which was both informative and enjoyable. There is nothing quite like pushing an aircraft around the sky and that day it was a complete mental and hand-eye co-ordination work out. It also feels amazing - in a steep turn you're experiencing twice the force of gravity, which is all very well momentarily on a roller coaster but is very different when it's over a three minute period.

At this point I was convinced I'd failed. Looking back, I'm not sure why. Everything I had done was within the tolerances laid down, but next to Martin's handling of the aircraft I felt I'd failed for certain. I was ready to put it down to experience and schedule my retest. So when we rejoined via the overhead (an entertaining manoeuvre I'll always enjoy) I expected we'd finish up.

Except we didn't. We did a few circuits with different approaches - normal, glide, flapless and so on - and then a precautionary landing, which I've not done that much in training but on reflection seemed to get roughly right at the time. The final full stop landing was not too bad with the stall warner blipping slightly was we touched the grass.

The moment that Martin told me I'd passed plunged me into confusion. To be honest, I'd already got my lines about needing more handling practice prepared - lines I used and intend to follow up on. But I'd passed. I wasn't that bad. In fact, I was safe enough to be let loose on the skies of not just Britain, but the rest of the world too. Perhaps I wanted to be the finished article and ace every part of the test, but after 50 hours training that's just not possible. Martin has 17,000 hours and he's still trying to improve and as he said as we walked back, this is the start of the apprenticeship.

So I've been trained by Frances, with several thousand hours, who herself was trained by Malcolm Dobson who, along with Martin, was flying before I was born - I think Martin started with an RAF glider scholarship at Barton back in 1966. There's a lot of knowledge that I'm now partly responsible for, all of which was obtained at an unknowable cost.

At this stage it would have been easy to crack open the champagne (which we did back at home) and do precisely nothing. Except that it would have been terrible preparation for the technical oral examination - the Skills Test Part 3