After the first couple of weeks, and mastering the different stalls, we moved on to steep turns and turns around a point. These maneuvers are designed to mimic the turns you would be making in the pattern maneuvering to land. Steep turns are a 360 degree turn at a 45 degree angle. You have to roll into the turn and out at the same heading, plus or minus 5 degrees. You must maintain altitude within 100 feet and the bank angle within 5 degrees. First off, turning an airplane at forty-five degrees is, at first, a little scary. My first steep turn was pretty funny. I got my altitude and air speed all set and rolled into the turn and had some trouble maintaining altitude but got around to where I started and rolled back out of the turn, feeling pretty good. Rick looks over at me and says “Let me know when you’re ready to start the turn”. He said I was barely at a standard rate turn which is twenty degrees so I had to do it all over again and this time he set the plane at forty five degrees and I about shit a pickle. Needless to say, it took a few times until I was comfortable and competent doing steep turns. This is a good maneuver to help your coordination when making turns and see how turning affects air speed and attitude. Most airplane accidents happen when you are low and slow, so this is very good practice.
Turns around a point are designed to simulate flying the pattern and the effect the wind has on the plane. When the wind isn’t blowing, it’s nothing more than flying a rectangle but throw in a little wind, and it gets a lot more difficult. You have to adjust the timing of your turn and the rate of turn to stay as close to a rectangle as possible. Believe me when I tell you when we first started turns around a point, it wasn’t pretty. It looked more like a trapezoid, to be honest. One of the other things we practiced quite a bit was emergency procedures. One day, we were flying along, and Rick reaches over and pulls the power all the way back to idle. I said to him “Are you nuts?” and he laughed and said, “What are you going to do now? You just lost your engine. My mind was racing so fast I didn’t do anything, I just sat there. We had talked some about what you do in this case but he caught me by surprise and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what to do first. Well he put the power back in and then we went over the proper procedures to follow if in the event you lose your engine. Basically, you need to establish your best glide speed and trim the plane for that speed. In 64551, another Cessna 172 that pretty much turned out to be my steady plane, it’s around 80 knots. Then you need to select a place to land and the best way is to make a turn in either direction to see if the best place is behind you and then after you select where you’re going to land you need to head directly for that spot. Then, if time permits, you can try changing tanks and attempt a restart in the event you ran a tank dry, but depending on altitude, you don’t have a lot of time to worry about restarting the engine At that point, you can tune the radio to 121.5 and declare an emergency. If you’re lucky enough to be near an airport declaring an emergency, pretty much, clears any other traffic out of your way, and you have priority to land on any runway available. As you approach your landing spot, you need to gauge your altitude and bleed off any excess altitude and air speed and prepare to land. Whether it’s in the top of the trees, a field or in the water you need to land under control. The vast majority of off airport landing are survivable as long as you land under control. This is where all the training really comes in to play. You don’t want to stall and spin yourself into the ground trying to land without an engine. So the next time Rick reached over and pulled the power, I was ready and did all the things needed for a successful off airport landing. You don’t actually declare an emergency, but you do change the channel, and you actually fly the plane down pretty close and then just go full power and go about your training. It was quite scary the first time, but it was fun, and we were getting closer to doing take offs and landings or touch and goes depending on where we were landing. This is when the real fun starts.