PPL Progress Check...

As you can see things advance well these days... only 2 days after my third preparation flight to the PPL Exam, I had been scheduled for the PPL Progress Check already! The weather has been just fine for the better VFR-work and by the end of the week, if the forecasting is correct, weather conditions will get worse (as usual after fair & classy weather :-p).

... fine.. well... euhm... arriving at Ostend & left from under CAVOK skies overhead Ghent, it turned out that the METAR was right about the sea fog conditions over the coastline. Even the idea to leave Ostend TMA under IFR-conditions & perform the VFR-work in a fog free area overhead Flanders turned out to be impossible as the cloud base sank under 200 feet, the IFR minimums. With my PPL exam planned 2 days from now... I definitely wanted to get airborne within the next 48 hours to be able to do my PPL examination. Since the TAF forecast showed improvements for the 2nd half of the day & having a day off from work, I agreed with my instructor's proposal to remain standby. I was given priority on the plane and instruction... so as soon as the first sunrays would break through & cloud base would be high enough for a VFR departure, we would be leaving!

2 hours later... around 13h00 LT, CAVOK! The seafog had gone as fast a it appeared, chased away by strong sunrays. To be able to receive a green flight and consequently a "go" for my PPL exam, I had to show my skills to the instructor during flight. So we started with the local circuit manoeuvers: normal circuit & normal landing, a landing with simulated deffective flaps - which I flew a few knots to slow first time intending to land the plane with the stall horn on while the aim should have been a positive landing at higher speed, 70kts instead of 65. After that a precautionary circuit, followed by joining righthand downwind to leave Ostend TMA for the airwork. It all started with some compass turns at 2000 feet, fairly close to the Eegem antenna. During the compass turn one should take the magnetic compass instead of the AHRS for a heading reference, knowing that a compass in the northern hemisphere behaves sluggish in northerly turns & jumps lively over southern headings (also known as the "never see north always see south rule"). As the compass turns were ok, we proceeded to the next item: the stalls... climbing to 3 000 feet near Roeselare where OAC had a training area located, I demonstrated my skills to recover from a clean stall (without flaps) & approach stall (with flaps landing). When recovering from a stall, one should increase throttle to full asap & pitch the nose only a few degrees underneath the horizon (10° maximum), to recover within an altitude loss of 100 feet only. First time, I pitched to heavy... making my instructor tell me not to fly the DA40 Worldwar One style :-p. We lost 150 feet, which is a bit too much. So, retry, check... ok! After that I was asked to look down and close my eyes while my instructor would bring the plane in an unusual attitude, telling me to open my eyes, define the attitude and recover. He had brought the plane into a spiral dive, almost instinctively I grabbed the throttle, going idle... applied rudder opposite to the turn & pitched up untill the blue horizon became back visible above the darkish brown terrain on my AHRS. All this while focussing on the speed tape, keeping it below Va. Recovery was satisfactory.
Next item: steep turns! First turn was a lefthand steep turn at 1 500 feet where I lost track with my horizon (the real one, not the artificial) having the plane pitching down... and dropping my altitude to 1 350 feet. So, a retry was necessary and turned out to be succesfull. Afther that a righthand turn as steep as the lefthand of which entry, fixing & rollout happened just fine.

As the icing on the cake, a diversion practice couldn't be missing so close to Houthulst, I got the instruction to divert to the grass strip near Zuyenkerke. While my instructor took controls on a heading of 090 and an altitude of 1500 feet, I set out my track from a checkpoint north of Roeselare... heading 005, to be maintained and no noticeable wind correction needed since the wind was coming from 350. The instructor was satisfied about the heading & timing for the diversion track and ordered me to return to Ostend, tracking inbound Torhout. Fullstop landing & except for the small remark to keep focussed on the horizon during steep turns, I was cleared for the PPL Exam!