Practice Skills Test PPL
01 Jun 2006For this flight I had to treat it as if I was fully PIC, making all of the decisions including whether to fly at all. As such I had to put this off for a week and cancel it twice because of the weather, but anyway, finally went up to the airport on one of the most perfect days, weather was CAVOK with only light winds which just happened to be straight down the runway as well.
I went out and gave the plane a quick check over, the only major problem was that the landing light wasn’t working, but that doesn’t stop us flying, the a/c needed some fuel so I took it over to the pumps, a really strange thing happened while there, the guy filling up for me found a black piece of foam floating in the fuel tank, I took it back to the flying school and, my instructor said the plane was still ok, so she was now a passenger and I taxied to the 24 turning circle for the preflight checks.
After those, we took off on rwy 31 climbed straight ahead to the strange bend in the Tamar and then routed direct to Bodmin, arrived 26 seconds early (not too bad!) then routed to Holsworthy and arrived a min early. I started to route to Crediton as planned, but after about 4NM my instructor simulated us going into cloud so I turned 180 degrees on instruments to get out of “the cloud” & once we were out again, I had to find my position using RNAV.
I got a radial from the berry head VOR and a true bearing from Plymouth, that put me just north of Holsworthy, looked out the window, and there was Holsworthy! We then diverted down to Roadford lake and did a steep turn to the left, one to the right, another to the left then climbed to 3500ft and did 3 stalls, clean, base leg config, and final approach config, then we did a PFL, which didn’t work to well so we did 2 more and they were ok so we flew back to Plymouth via Tavistock and joined overhead for rwy 31.
Went back into the circuit and did a normal landing, flapless landing, and a glide approach (which we landed on) all were ok, kept messing up the flare, but they were not too bad, taxied in and shut down. Only 10 days to go to my birthday now and I just have my actual skills test to go.