I spent the holidays with my sister, who recently moved to rural Kansas (she's a park ranger on the Prairie). Like me, she has just moved to a new place and hardly knows anybody, and didn't get enough days off to travel home... so I flew down there.
I found a place in Manhattan, KS which rents Cessna "SuperHawks" -- that is a regular SkyHawk with a 180 HP engine stuck on front. It was a very nice plane. Shiny. Everything works. Flies like a dream. Climb performance... holy cow! The best part about the extra horses is the added 250 pounds of weight it can carry over the regular SkyHawk... it's a four-seat airplane that can actually carry four adults and full fuel.
I needed the standard CFI checkout first, and I asked my CFI if I could bring my sister and a friend of hers along for the ride, and he said sure. He asked if I was interested in landing on grass and I said YES! I asked him if I could shoot an approach or two during the checkout just for practice (I'm out of IFR currency and very rusty). So we took off, headed south, and did the standard assortment of proficiency stuff (stalls, steep turns, etc.)
I had warned my passengers that we'd be doing a bunch of maneuvers, and that they shouldn't be alarmed, for instance by the brief "plummeting" sensation of a stall. At one point my CFI pulled the power and said "You've just had an engine failure." We glided towards a field and went through the emergency procedures. The usual stuff.
After the flight was over, my sister confessed that she had thought the engine failure was real, and that we were actually going to land in some guy's field or on a road. She said she was actually impressed. "Everyone's so calm! Everyone's so calm!" I had to apologize for that one...
After the checkout, we took off again, this time with my sister in the front seat. She's been wanting to go up with me for a long time, but the last opportunity (in San Francisco) was one of those pile-everyone-in-the-plane, look-up-at-the-clouds, pile-everyone-back-out-of-the-plane kind of days. This time, the weather was great, we flew to Topeka for lunch, and then flew over her house in Council Grove. She was really excited to take the controls, but hesitant to bank the plane more than about 5 degrees. B)
A good time had by all...
--Kath
I found a place in Manhattan, KS which rents Cessna "SuperHawks" -- that is a regular SkyHawk with a 180 HP engine stuck on front. It was a very nice plane. Shiny. Everything works. Flies like a dream. Climb performance... holy cow! The best part about the extra horses is the added 250 pounds of weight it can carry over the regular SkyHawk... it's a four-seat airplane that can actually carry four adults and full fuel.
I needed the standard CFI checkout first, and I asked my CFI if I could bring my sister and a friend of hers along for the ride, and he said sure. He asked if I was interested in landing on grass and I said YES! I asked him if I could shoot an approach or two during the checkout just for practice (I'm out of IFR currency and very rusty). So we took off, headed south, and did the standard assortment of proficiency stuff (stalls, steep turns, etc.)
I had warned my passengers that we'd be doing a bunch of maneuvers, and that they shouldn't be alarmed, for instance by the brief "plummeting" sensation of a stall. At one point my CFI pulled the power and said "You've just had an engine failure." We glided towards a field and went through the emergency procedures. The usual stuff.
After the flight was over, my sister confessed that she had thought the engine failure was real, and that we were actually going to land in some guy's field or on a road. She said she was actually impressed. "Everyone's so calm! Everyone's so calm!" I had to apologize for that one...
After the checkout, we took off again, this time with my sister in the front seat. She's been wanting to go up with me for a long time, but the last opportunity (in San Francisco) was one of those pile-everyone-in-the-plane, look-up-at-the-clouds, pile-everyone-back-out-of-the-plane kind of days. This time, the weather was great, we flew to Topeka for lunch, and then flew over her house in Council Grove. She was really excited to take the controls, but hesitant to bank the plane more than about 5 degrees. B)
A good time had by all...
--Kath