First day back - rusty

Monday 6th Oct was my first day back flying after over 10 days off due to the weather and wedding commitments abroad.

I was thinking on the ground that I'd probably be doing circuits since that was the stage I was at. However the instructor recommended I did a bit of a twin refresher with general handling and then asymmetric work as I might be a little rusty. Probably a good thing, because despite the fact that I didn't think I'd really forgotten it, in the heat of the moment it can all just go straight out the window as happened today :-(

We took off and started out with some steep turns which went ok from what I remember. Then the instructor asked me to demonstrate a stall in the approach configuration. Now the same instructor had impressed upon me to learn by heart the stall procedures (practice them every night), but I had not really done it and was definitely caught out here. While I could remember more or less how to recover from the stalls I am required to demonstrate in the test, I couldn't remember all the specifics about how to set the aircraft up. With some prompting from the instructor I managed to set up the aircraft and perform the demonstrated technique passably (IIRC) and the same with the stall in the landing configuration.

Then onto asymmetric work. Can't remember the specifics of how it went since I'm writing up this blog entry a week after the event, but the rustiness definately showed. I initially struggled to maintain control/heading/airspeed on the engine failures in the cruise, but once they began to come more naturally again I had to add engine failure after takeoff to the mix. Because of the high power & low airspeed configuration, I again struggled to maintain my heading and also partially mucked up the vital actions and shutdown drills. One small crumb of comfort was that everything was beginning to polish up by the end of the lesson.

In the debrief the instructor rightly ticked me off for not having practiced my stall setup drills but overall wasn't too damning and said that the asymmetrics work wasn't a big problem, just down to a lack of currency. His debrief also went into the fact that if working in an airline I'd be expected to do this kind of thing all the time - I'd have to memorise many checklists, perform them in many different emergency situations, and that I'd have to do this very regularly such as every 6-12 months, so I'd better get into the habit/mindset of it sooner rather than later.

Suffice to say I do now practice the stalls in my head every day so hopefully won't arse them up again, but time will tell...

While today's performance wasn't beyond all hope, it did put me into a bit of a downer.
PS. This was totally reversed the next time I flew - this CPL malarkey is a always bloody roller-coaster ride - highs & lows/peaks & troughs :-(