Sunday - First flight in the twin!

Woohoo - the major milestone was now reached and my champing at the bit desire to fly the twin was finally realised.

The weather was great and the cloud base was quite ok for a first flight doing general handling since one needs more height available to generally chuck the aircraft around. I expected to go up more or less straight away since all we were going to do was general handling which we already knew how to do, only not in this aircraft. But we had to do nearly two hours of ground school (which I did not expect) about the differences and dangers of flying a twin. In fact it's quite scary! It's actually more dangerous that flying a single in the first 1000 feet or so after takeoff as it does not have a large excess of power like big jest such as the 737. Consequently, if an engine fails just after takeoff you have to sort it out pronto and fly at a safe speed that you can climb away at in order to circuit and land back again. So, to cut a long story short, it was quite sobering.

Once we were airborne and out over near Wetherby in the pilot's "playground" we practiced all the basics of straight and level, climbing & descending and turns. The first thing about flying a twin is you don't have a stonking great engine and propeller in front of you! This makes for a very much different perspective as far as the position of the horizon relative to the top of the dashboard (for want of a better word). I had quite a bit of difficulty getting just straight and level right and trimmed out as there is so much more land in front of you and you think you much be descending all the time, but if you pitch to the same horizon as you expect in the twin you end up climbing quite rapidly. In fact, I hadn't really grasped this by the end of the lesson. It all went reasonably ok, but my inability to get it in trim flying straight an level put a dampener on the trip somewhat.

It also takes quite a lot more time to slow down and whereas in a twin you can pitch the nose up to slow down on low power, in the twin it will just climb so you have to be really patient but consequently plan ahead more in terms of when you need to slow down/descend etc.

When we came back into Leeds, we had to do a full stop landing rather than a touch and go because of a big jet having departed shortly beforehand. My approach was pretty crap though The landing wasn't too bad for a first attempt as far as I remember. we then did a loop along the taxyway and back onto the runway for another takeoff and circuit. This time the approach went much better and I was pretty much on the money for the PAPIs all the way down and did another decent landing, though in both I flared somewhat high and late meaning I landed a bit further down the runway than ideal.

In the debrief, two main points came out:

• I spend too much time looking in the cockpit at the instruments to see if I;m straight and level rather than looking at the picture/horizon outside and it's position relative to the dashboard.
• I was told I'm always trimming, and controlling the pitch on the trim rather than setting an attitude and holding it before trimming away any control forces.

I do agree I do trim perhaps too much before I should, but often this is to relieve a large amount of control force. The small trims I can see that The aircraft isn't in trim eg. because it's climbing, so I make a small adjustment to the pitch with the elevator and then immediately a small trim movement to maintain that, but it must look like I'm trimming to control pitch. Will have to try to change to the proper way for the sake of not getting pulled up on this in the CPL, just in case.

So all in all a reasonable first trip, but something of an anticlimax as is so often the case in flying when there is for so long this distant goal. When you get there you often end up thinking, "Well, what was the big deal?". C'est la vie...