Bubba wrote:
Hello everyone,

I'm sure you probably read at least 50 "newbie" messages a week and I
apologize in advance for this one. But as the subject reads, I'm a new
pilot in training. I've only been flying for about a month now, but I
only fly once a week, so really, I've only been up four times now. I
feel comfortable with my instructor and confident in his knowledge and
experience, but I have to admit, learning to fly is much more difficult
than it sounds/looks.

So far, I feel confident in my ability to pre-flight the aircraft, taxi
on the taxi-ways, and take offs. I feel pretty good about those three
things. In other words, I can get myself in the air and establish a
steady altitude and fly (which I really enjoy). However, my instructor
is now showing me "stalls." These scare the living hell out of me!!
We've done power-off stalls for two sessions now and I know what they
feel like and can recover from them ok, but I really, really don't like
these.

Also, last session, my instructor introduced me to landings. Now, my
log book only has about four hours of flight time in it, so you can only
imagine how this went. I'm really surprised the Skyhawks landing gear
held up to my abuse. Plus, for my first attempt, I was trying to land
with an unbelievable cross-wind. The wind was blowing from right to
left and from what I can tell, my instructor had the right rudder pedal
pressed all the way down. Again, this was scary as hell. I'm still
amazed we didn't crash.

So I guess my question would be this: Can any of you guys offer some
advice on how to get through stall training and landings because right
now my confidence is shot.

Thanks in advance,
Terry

Stalls: do them until they are fun. :-) Actually, you are not the first
student who did not like stalls. Check over on rec.aviation.student and
you will find that out real quick. In fact, you will want to sign up
over there because this is just the beginning of questions that you
will have that the folks over there will help with.

Okay, you are uncomfortable with stalls at first. I didn't like them,
either. Most people don't. One way I help my students to become more
comfortable with them is I make the students hold on the yoke by the
center stem only. This keeps the student from turning the yoke and
banking the plane. Then, instead of recovering immediately, I have the
student just hold the airplane in a stall and keep the nose straight
and the wings level using rudder only. Do this with power off stalls
only, of course. I make a game out of it: how long can you keep the
wing from dipping? Pretty soon the student realizes that the airplane
is not going to do anything that he doesn't allow it to do.

Power on stalls are pretty easy to recover from. Most students pitch
too high and get too abrupt a recovery. As long as your airspeed keeps
coming back you will eventually stall. Once you do stall, just relax
the back pressure a little; too many people think they have to push the
yoke forward. You don't, just relax a little and the nose will come
down enough to break the stall. You will find that you can move in and
out of a power on stall just bobbing the nose up and down a little. Try
to see how little movement you can do it with.

Now, you might think that messing around like this you might get into a
spin. Well, what of it? You have your instructor along and he is
supposed to know how to recover from mistakes like that. Even so, it is
unlikely because what I have you doing is just hovering on the edge of
a stall. Hanging on to the center of the yoke is also going to keep you
from making inappropriate aileron inputs.

Usually when a student is having trouble with landing he has not
prepared well enough with slow flight and ground reference maneuvers.
Granted, the student begins landing almost from the first lesson, but
serious study of landings should begin only after the basic work has
been mastered. I usually hold off on landing practice until just before
solo, but that is still about half the pre-solo work you have to do --
crosswind landings, recovering from landing errors, no-flap landings,
etc.

Look for these common errors: not looking far enough down the runway,
pulling up the nose too soon ("fear of runway"), and poor airspeed
control. Never practice more than three landings in a row before having
your instructor demonstrate another one. It helps to keep from
developing bad landing habits.

Don't worry about the Skyhawk's landing gear. For certification they
drop the plane from something like 20 feet and if the gear doesn't
break, it passes. I can almost guarantee that you will hurt yourself
before you hurt the gear, with the exception of the nose gear. If you
must make a bad landing, at least don't drop it on the nose gear. It
just is not built to take it. Neither is the propeller, engine, or
firewall, all of which can be easily damaged by landing on the nose
gear. So don't do it.