Solo aerobatics

On my last aerobatics lesson, my instructor, Max, had verbally ‘signed me off’ for solo aerobatics limited to loops and rolls only. His advice was to do four or five hours by myself until I got them really ‘off pat’ with no more than 5 weeks between sessions, then come back to him to polish up on stall turns and to do more complex aerobatics that required speeds and throttle control much closer to the margins for the versatile Robin.

So this was to be my first solo aerobatics session.

The weather looked OK, broken and thin cloud, hard to tell how high, but I envisaged climbing ‘on top’ and doing aerobatics up there with the cloud undercast as the ‘hard deck’.

I turned up at the airfield first thing in the morning, so no first hand advice on cloud height. Nevertheless, I checked the Robin out. It needs a careful check before solo aerobatics as I emptied my pockets, ditched the loose items in the aircraft and discovered a spare torch and a pen clip in the pilot foot well – accidents waiting to happen! I also strapped up and secured the passenger side five point harness – you don’t want to get smacked in the mouth by a flailing strap at the top of a loop!

Hmmm…. fuel just below the second mark. Given that I was solo (so less weight) and the cloud could close in beneath me and mean perhaps a hold and an NDB / DME let down, I opted to put a bit more fuel in. So I taxied over to the pumps and squirted a further 25 litres in – making me feel more comfortable – I don’t want a blinking fuel light if I have an instrument let down to do!

I lined up and took off and climbed to my stomping ground between Bredon Hill and Wellesborne Mountford airfield. At 3800’ I was scraping my head on the bottom of the clouds – drat – it is right at the height I don’t want it to be at. I could go above, but the undercast would probably be at 4200’, meaning I would have to be doing the manoeuvres between 5500’ and 4300’ – not a good altitude for the Robin as it is decidedly asthmatic much above 4500’. So I decided to start at 3700’ with the usual 3000’ as the hard deck.

Check and HASELL check complete, I popped 7004 into the transponder, turned the electric fuel pump on and turned on every light the plane had.

I started with rolls to both the left and right, with a ‘push’ while inverted to flatten out the bottom of the sacred circle. As I guess I expected, the first one or two to each side were not great (but OK-ish). After that, I have to say I found them pretty straightforward and I seem to have got the hang of when and how much to push, when to stop etc. Although the roll rate to the left is quicker than to the right, I seem to find rolling to the right a little better for me. I did about nine rolls to both sides (i.e. 18 in total), interspersed between some loops.

The loops were a bit different. The first three of four weren’t that good, in fact two of these were definitely dodgy! One was very lopsided (I must have pulled back crooked) and the other – well, suffice to say I lost a fair bit of altitude! Its odd how much you miss the visual and verbal clues you pick up on when the instructor is there, but then I guess that is what solo is all about, developing your own ‘inner voice’.

I think my own ‘inner voice’ started to come on-stream and I was working the loops much better towards the end of the session and losing much less altitude with a better float over the top. I think I got there by the end of the session, finishing off with what felt like two good loops. All in all, I probably did nine loops.

I checked the time and found I was already out for 1 hours and ten minutes – time to head back.

I composed myself and allowed the adrenaline to die down about and headed back at the leisurely 90 knots that the Robin does in the cruise. I had to wait for a gap in the combined tower and approach frequency, with the controller patiently trying to sort out what sounded like students all cutting in on each other (wait for a gap in transmissions then blurt your message despite the fact that the controller was expecting a read-back from the last transmission). The controller politely but firmly pointed out the error and why the offender was wrong, not to chastise, but to inform – nicely done I thought.

I go a standard overhead join for 22 with right hand circuits. I slotted in behind a Gloucester based yellow Slingsby and followed her onto final. Flaps down, I was given late clearance and put in a reasonable landing.

Parked up, shutdown and put all the loose stuff back in the aircraft. A good session and one that I badly needed to do solo to develop my ‘inner voice’. An hour and twenty in the end as P1 – the first P1 that I have done since August!

I booked another session for mid-January and will aim to do one of these every three weeks or month interspersed with training on the RV6.

However, next up is an overdue FAA BFR checkride, hopefully on Saturday 5th January at Oxford with Bill Tollett in a PA28 that I will hire from Oxford.