Slips...

Another hot and humid day today with haze. My lesson started out as normal with pre-flight. Once complete I went through my start up check list and brought 80121 to life. Millville was responsive today with a quick answer including airport and traffic advisory. Winds favor 28 today and that's a good thing since my rehab lighting and signage contract has 14/32 NOTAM'ed out. Ok, turning into the wind for my run up I make two errors on my checklist. I forgot to set transponder from STBY to ALT and calibrate my heading indicator with the compass. Dave reminds me of the need to take my time and check off each and every item. A short call to Millville after again checking the traffic pattern to notify MIV that "80121 is departing 28 and heading to the designated training area." Instead of T&G's to start Dave wants to work on forward slips. I climb out to 2000 and once in the training area I pick my visual point, a nice sandy beach. Ok...pull the carb heat on, decrease throttle, bank left and rudder right. All the while spot checking that airspeed to make sure I am at 70 knts. It took me a second go through to get the feel of the rudder required for the forward slip. The airspeed and heading looked great so that was a plus. All the puzzle parts for those landings I'll be working on.

I also worked on medium banked turns left and right and really worked on my roll outs on heading. It was now time to head back to the airport for a few rounds of full stop landings and taxi outs. Ok, approaching the airport, I felt a lil disoriented on my position kind of busy going over what's to come in my head and having no room for common sense. I tell dave I need to get my focus going and pay attention. Dave reminds me that with the runway over the nose its time to turn downwind, so I turn to a heading of 100, maintaining some right rudder for the wind correction. Ok checking left I'm across from the numbers so its carb heat on reduce to 1500 rpm and add notch of flaps. So far so good,airspeed is good rate of decent looks good. Looking back to my left I'm about at a 45 to the runway so I make my turn to base and add a notch of flaps. Looking good so far so I turn final, alignment nice making corrections with rudder and trying keeping wings level. I looked short down the runway and it caused me to want to "fly" the aircraft down to the runway. Dave reminds me ...nose up....nose up......listening for that stall horn. Ok.....back under control nose up, Dave corrects my yoke back movement since I started to pull back with a slight movement banking left. Dave instructed me to be gentle with the yoke and my back pressure must be "straight" without that tendency to bank left. It's a short roll to the taxiway and then back to runway 28 for two more go rounds. Each landing did get better. At least they felt better on approach, more stable and the numbers (gauges) were looking more consistent. Dave advised me that we will work on more slips and T&G's thursday. I noticed today he was pretty quiet, pretty much hands off all the way until I turned out after takeoff and on final for landing. It seemed like he was evaluating my progress more then usual. Back to the book for more study and the DVD's for more flight instruction too. I'm looking forward to Thursday already !!!