Slooooow Flying

I'm definitely getting better at the landings. I tried the "slow flight" training exercise this evening, but the instructor was too impatient, so I went to free flight and just practiced on my own. I was able to trim the aircraft out to a nice 80 knot climb to 5000 feet, then level off and increase speed to 100 knots and trim it out for that speed and to hold that altitude. I then tried to back it down to about 65 knots, and was mostly successful, although I dropped down to about 50 knots at one point and set off the stall alarm. Just drop the nose a bit and add throttle and I got out of that one. Whew!

After a little more tweaking I settled for about a 70 knot cruise and was able to trim it out for level flight at that speed. I then throttled up and turned back towards Dalton. I managed to trim it nicely for a 90 knot decent at about 300 feet per minute. That got me back over Dalton about 2000 feet above the airport. I turned for final approach and got into a nice 65-70 knot descent losing about 500 feet per minute until I got almost to the runway. Then I killed all power, and flared out with about a 100 feet per minute drop over the runway. I actually stalled the plane a couple feet above the runway, but otherwise it was a pretty smooth landing. I was also nicely lined up on the runway, which hasn't always been the case. Once you figure out how to trim the plane for a certain speed and decent rate, you can pretty much let the plane handle that part and concentrate and steering to the runway correctly. When you're having to simultaneously hold the nose up, adjust throttle, and try to bank left and right to line up, things tend to get messy quick.