Day Forty-Four – More Unusual Attitudes

Okay, back under the hood today for more instrument training.  Today we practiced instrument recovery from unusual attitudes.  With my head down and my eyes closed, my instructor would put the aircraft into a stall or maybe a spiral dive.  I would then have to open my eyes and from only being able to see the instruments, interpret what was happening to the plane and then recover appropriately.   Airspeed is an important clue – slow speeds usually indicate a stall and high speeds usually indicate a spiral dive.  The attitude indicator can help you interpret which direction the plane is going in, i.e. a left turn or right.  It is very disorienting because when you have your eyes closed, it is impossible to understand what is going on.  When you open them, you only have seconds to react correctly.  I didn’t seem to have any trouble recognizing what was going on once I was allowed to see the instruments.  My instructor, sneaky guy that he is, was very good at putting the aircraft through a variety of contortions before turning control over to me.  On the last exercise, I opened my eyes and for a split second I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  Turns out, he had actually put the airplane back into straight and level flight!  There was nothing wrong and nothing to correct.  Fooled me…