Lesson Number Two

It was another fairly early start for me, well before noon anyway - This time I think I may have been just that tad more excited than what I was on my first lesson, mainly due to the fact that, I had been familiarized with the club instructors, members and staff and of course all the nerves from lesson number one has disappeared into the mist.

The weather this time around was much the same as last, typical, it was British summertime as well, so I suppose that was expected anyway. 

When I arrived at the club, I was informed that I would be flying with a different instructor than of last time with kiwi, I would be flying with Michael - Your typical Northern Irishman, a great guy all round. 

After the quick brief in the radio room, we headed out onto the apron, this time around I was a bit cautious about what we would be doing in the air this lesson.

We quickly ran through our checklist as required and minutes later we were climbing out of Newtownards aerodrome and ready to contact Belfast Control on 128.4 and let them know that we are out of the circuit. I haven't touched radios at this point, so I just listened in. 

We reached our selected altitude, accompanied by the

 spectacular views of the Ards Peninsula to our left and the Mourne mountains to our right.

We got straight into the lesson by talking about each of the main flight controls and what effect they have on flight, we then spent about 15 minutes going through this and actually demonstrating and getting used to their effects. We also touched on pitching, rolling and yawing, but that sort of stuff is pretty self explanatory anyway so there was no need to spend a lot of time on this! That also tied in with using the elevator, ailerons and rudder. 

Before routing back to Ards we had a little go at using 

trim, a little hard to comprehend at  first, but I got used to it fairly quickly, though, I'm certainly not a professional at it!

We were almost ready to turn on to finals for runway 04, the wind wasn't to bad, I flew the approach with the aid of Michael and got the aircraft to the ground before shooting back up, Michael finished the job off, and we taxyed back to the apron and parted Charlie Mike up and set the parking brake.