I found after a lesson in the morning, working during the day, coming home and spending some "quality" time with the family (if they weren't asleep), it has been good to have some "reflection" time later in the evening to think about the concepts learned that morning or issues that arose and how I could maybe reinforce them so they might not happen as much in the future.
Now it may not be for everyone and since I'm not flying everyday it's probably easier to isolate each lesson at the end of the day and spend time in front of the PC. But some out there in training land might benefit from sitting down and going through some of their lessons and note down bascially what went wrong and type it out for reinforcement (eg, radio calls, effects of controls, pre-landing checks, HASEL etc)...for me this week it was pedals & hovering. If anyone has other suggestions on how they review or reinforce the learning process, I'd be interested to hear from you.
Two lessons this week, Monday was max power t/o's and steep approaches and yesterday limited power / circuits. Monday wasn't too bad, fairly long briefing but there was a bit to go through (overpitching



Now yesterday was a bit more of a revelation - this was the first time I'd been up with this instructor and I'd been looking forward to it - he was the one who had been behind me in another machine during a lesson some weeks ago commenting on my use of pedals in the circuit



We'd done the first running landing and when I'd pulled up to a normal hover just to move over a bit he said, let's have a look at the way your pulled up into the hover there. In hindsight it's easy to see...how can I explain...it's like if someone bounces a ball up but you can't see it until the last second when you try and grab it. I was trying to grab the machine just after it was airborn. Not "hovering" once the collective left the floor. So we stopped there and did some 90deg turns hovering,landing and then up again, turn, hover, land and up... Then after the next running t/o and landing we'd do it again. After a few circuits we headed back and I could tell straight away I'd gotten a lot out of this lesson. Don't get me wrong I've gotten a lot out of every lesson so far (they've all been awesome) and every instructor has had a little bit of something different that the others didn't (suppose that's an advantage of a variety of instructors),but this flight was one those Aarh!!!! lessons. I just hope I don't bloody forget during next week

Until next time...
choppernut
