Flight #7 - Shoreham - First take-off and landing

The wonderful weather from September continued into October and I woke up this Sunday morning to blue skies and barely any wind.

I did my usual routine Sunday - up around 8am with blood sugars 6.9 which is quite good for a flying day. Had a white coffee. Went to church at 8.30 for communion, grabbed a white coffee at the local shop and drove to Shoreham airfield. On arriving there tested blood sugars at 09.45 and found they were 10.0! It can't be the communion wafer - it must be the lactose in the two white coffees that's lifting my blood sugar. Next time I will go for a black coffee and see if that makes a difference.

I went out and did the pre-flight checks on the aircraft, just feeling overjoyed at the beautiful morning weather. This lesson would be about doing Medium turns, which are a very controlled level turn at 30 degrees bank with good use of rudder and keeping the aircraft at the same altitude. We would be doing this over the coastline above Bognor Regis so total distance on route chart below looks small, but there were plenty of orbits.

I taxied down Alpha and Bravo towards start of Runway 02. Here's a picture of me checking clearance behind the aircraft as part of the power check...

Unexpectedly my Flying Instructor (FI) asked me to taxi the aircraft on the runway and then pilot the aircraft through the take-off for the first time. What an amazing feeling. The take-off and climb were okay but I tracked to the right of the centre line which is not good so next time need to do a much better job of taking off and climbing in a straight line. Here's a video, and remember I didn't know I was going to get to do this...

We took off to the East on runway 02, and after turning to the West and climbing to 3,100 ft we started the Medium turns to the left and right. Then we moved onto combination maneuvers over the Solent such as "turn left to a heading of 050 while descending to 2,700 ft". Here's a right hand orbit while maintaining height at 3,100 ft...

Finally I practiced my descent and approach to Shoreham passing over Worthing pier just above the 1,600 ft minimum clearance, then did Base config set-up (carb-heat on, 1,500 RPM, 75 kts airspeed, 2 stages of flap). As per last week my FI asked me to turn onto final and apply last stage of flap and pitch for 70 kts lining up onto the runway. Unlike last week he didn't then take control and land the aircraft - he talked me down as I did it for the first time!!! To teach me a lesson for letting go of the throttle during the maneuver he pushed it to full power during the descent (30 secs into video). I quickly brought it back to approach speed again. A fun game - but I must learn to keep hand on throttle when not in cruise. Amazing feeling. The touch-down was smooth but my short-final approach was twitchy - far too much control movement, but not a bad place to start. Here's the last few minutes...

I can't believe I got to take-off and land - both for the first time and on the same day! Both were not great, but they were safe, and I know I can get better from here.

Here's the chart of our flight...

Weather...
- EGKA 050820Z 01007KT CAVOK 08/06 Q1021
- At 08:20 GMT on 5th (October) wind 10 degrees at 7 kts, ceiling and visibility okay (visibility at least 10km, no clouds below 5000 ft). Temp 8 degrees, dew point 6 degrees. Barometric pressure 1021 hPa.

Blood sugar readings...
> 2 hours before flight: 6.9
< 30 mins before flight: 10.0
Landing: I didn't know I would be landing so didn't measure blood before doing maneuver, but I did check after landing and blood sugar was 11.4

Note: Isn't it odd that all I had to eat/drink between first reading was two white coffees and communion wafer and blood sugar went up by so much?!

Flying hours...
This flight: 1h 0m
Accumulated: 7h 15m