Scott James Remnant

Thanks to a combination of bad weather and the trip away for FOSSCamp, UDS and AllHand, it’s been six weeks since I last got a chance to fly! Last time we’d covered a second session of stalling and recovery, and the next exercises to cover were the all-important circuits: taking off, flying around the field and landing again.

Even despite the weather cancellations before the trip, I knew it’d be at least four weeks gap, so I’d taken the day off and booked two separate lessons either side of lunch. The idea being that we’d use the first lesson for revision, going over all the other exercises to make sure that I could still remember how to fly — and then use the second lesson to start in the circuit, since I’d be learning something new … landing!

Most people seem to assume that summer is the best time to learn to fly as the weather is better, but today was one of those days that proved the opposite. Although the temperature was around freezing point, the skies were clear and the wind calm.

First hour went nice and smoothly; we covered taking off, climbing, descending, turning (including while climbing and descending) and some practice of stalling and recovery. It was reassuring to know that I hadn’t forgotten anything in the long gap between lessons, and still had the feel of the plane.

The weather had put on a special treat for us; for much of the day, fog was clinging to the ground and hills, with many fields still frosted over. From the air it looked extremely pretty, if a little eerie.

After lunch at the airfield’s cafe it was time for the second lesson, circuits! We’d already covered the ground briefing for this in one of the cancelled lesson slots before, so we were ready to go straight up. Another student had flown the plane over lunch, so only a relatively short transit check was needed; checking the fuel levels and other important bits.

John was to fly the circuit first, and talk his way through it as I followed through. A circuit, for those not flying, is: take off; climb and make the first 90° turn onto the crosswind leg; level out at 1,000ft and make the second turn onto the downwind leg (parallel to the runway); call the tower and perform checks for landing; make the third turn onto the base leg and begin the descent before making the final turn onto final and landing.

We were on runway 36, so the traditional left-handed circuit was the order of the day. Wellesbourne switches between left and right depending on the runway direction so as not to overfly Wellesbourne village itself. It’s not a truly rectangular circuit either since there’s three noise-sensitive villages we have to avoid on our way around.

Over lunch, a Kittyhawk had landed at the airfield and was ready to leave slightly before we were; treating us to one of the pleasures of flying from a purely GA airfield. The FISO informed the departing Kittyhawk that the circuit was clear and asked whether he would like to perform a low-level fly past (normally pilots have to beg the FISO or ATCO to show off, and get told no). So as we lined up on the runway, we were treated to a short air display from the warbird, flying past the tower, climbing into a loop and performing a bombing run on the airfield on the way back before heading home.

Entertainment over, work time. John flew the first circuit, then handed me control after landing for a touch-and-go (taking off again without stopping) and it was my turn. I flew six circuits in total, one straight after the other. At first we were the only ones in the circuit, but by the end we were in a queue of three planes all heading down at once. In fact, on one of the goes round, John decided to use it as an opportunity to perform a go-around (aborting the landing).

I think I got something wrong on each of the circuits. My first landing was somewhat rough, having flared too early and been rather too high most of the way down. The next I turned onto final too late and spent most of the time trying to line up with the runway again; in fact, I did this a few times — and turned too early at least once too. By the last landing, I’d got the turn just right, and kept the descent perfect as well; lined up with the runway and at the right height and speed all the way down. Just a slight shame I ruined it with a slightly untidy flare and by bouncing the plane on the touchdown.

On the whole, I was really happy and so was my instructor. I’d been in control the entire time, and had been correctly using the power and attitude to control the approach. None of the landings may have been perfect, but I have plenty more hours of circuits to go yet — dozens of hours in fact — to get that bit right.

P/UT Hours Today 1:50, Total 10:50

A common mistake of user interface design is to come up with a clever solution to a common user problem, when you should work out a way to remove that problem in the first place.

My example here is the password entry dialog, in particular the GNOME Screensaver one.

The common user problem is that their password is rejected, even when typed perfectly, because the Caps Lock key is on.

The clever solution was to display in the dialog that the Caps Lock key was on, and thus hinting to the user why it might have been rejected.

The better solution would be to ignore the state of Caps Lock in all password entry dialogs, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s on or off.

My instructor was away last week, so it’s been two weeks since my last lesson. Sod’s law would suggest that the weather would be terrible, but someone must like me because instead it was one of the nicest days in quite a while!

The only real thing of concern was a bit of an inversion, giving a fairly thick ground haze. The student up before me hadn’t flown in the end because he needed a strong horizon for the exercises he’d been doing (just as I did not so long ago) and had instead practiced taxying around the airfield.

John thought it’d be more than fine for me though, especially since I’d managed worse conditions including the gusting last time! The complete lack of any cloud base meant that the gsson today would be more stalling, getting the opportunity in as there’s a couple of hours of these today.

No drama with the checks or take-off today, I’ve got pretty used to handling these by myself now. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I nailed the take-off and had spare brain power to remember to deal with the flaps and fuel pump at the right times and watch the engine gauges and make occasional clearing weaves during the climb.

Headed down the Fosse Way to Shipston again, I’ve a hunch that there’s a club rule that newbies got to the west and students in the later exercises go to the south, since we now seem to spend most of our time down here. Easily climbed all the way to 3,500ft with a bit of practice of climbing turns.

Once there, HASELL and a couple of revisions of a clean stall; no drama here, if anything it was easier than last time since we weren’t trying to keep in a cloud hole. In Victor Alpha today which handles a little differently than Victor November, seems to like to dance to the side during a stall; so a bit of extra need to keep it in balance.

John next demonstrated an approach stall with full flaps, and I repeated it with little difficulty, though again forgot to remove the carb heat. Made a mental note that the throttle and carb heat always go together, and didn’t forget it again.

A base leg stall in a turn was up next, a couple to the left since I didn’t get the first one quite right, and then one to the right to mix things up a bit. Much better that time.

Practised a couple of mid-air go-arounds, since the procedure is much the same as cleaning up flap from a base leg stall; and then it was time to head home. A little bit of excitement as a John spotted a PA-28 and pulled us up and out of the way quickly, not that close but they clearly didn’t see us.

Handled the overhead join, descent and turn onto final, following John through for the last part of the landing, then back to the school.

Next lesson: circuits!

P/UT Hours Today 0:45, Total 9:00

Like any sensible software developer, I have a close relationship with revision control systems. In my previous job, I was an SCM Engineer (see Software configuration management) which meant I had an even closer relationship than most, since we were running the CVS servers and actively using them to track changes and deployments.

We all know, deep down, that revision control systems shouldn’t exist. This kind of thing should be inherent in the design of the operating system, through standard file and filesystem formats. The OLPC interface is making some headway towards that, but for the rest of us, it means using a revision control tool throughout the development process.

Unfortunately, even though the tool is expected to be the most-used command on your system, very few of them are particularly easy to use. Thus there’s a large learning curve, and people become religious about their choice since they have invested significant time in using it.

Just to spice the mix up, not only will people religiously defend their choice of revision control system, but they’ll do so while actively hating it.

In the beginning there was CVS and we all thought that it was pretty good. It was based on the simpler RCS and shared a file-format with it, but introduced control of directory trees and remote operation.

Actually, in reality, CVS wasn’t that good. Its command set could be a little strange and inconsistent (e.g. it’s not possible to diff between two dates on a branch); the support for branching assumed that all branches would be merged into the mainline, and only once; and nobody ever really knew how to create a new project in a repository (tip. cvs import is wrong).

But we all used it anyway, and we muddled through. It did have some good features; it was simple, fast and pretty reliable–when it did break, you could usually fix the repository yourself. And most importantly of all, we understood how to drive it.

And so it was for many years, until Subversion (SVN) came along. Subversion intended to be “a better CVS”, perhaps this goal should have made us suspicious at the time since CVS was already being a pretty good CVS by itself; unfortunately we hated CVS so much we flocked to the new system in hope.

In hindsight, Subversion didn’t really improve on CVS much at all. In fact, arguably, the only real improvement was the addition of atomic commits (in CVS, each commit is per-file, so it’s manual labour to work out which change was made to two files at the same time).

(Its support for branching, tagging, copying, renaming, etc. were no better than CVS’s when done in the repository by hand.)

The cost of this single new feature was a much more complicated interface (with two separate commands), a backend that tended to break down weekly and a lethargic slowness to its operation.

Most people I know now justify their use of Subversion instead of CVS by “Subversion is maintained, CVS isn’t” which is a somewhat self-fulfilling justification.

While the mass conversion to Subversion, and ensuing disappointment and frustration, was going on; something new appeared on the horizon: Arch.

Arch was different, it broke one of the core assumptions of revision control, that of the repository as a cathedral. In CVS, and Subversion like it, if somebody wants to modify your code (even if on a branch) you need to give them access to your own repository. In some cases (especially with CVS), vast access control and permission structures would be in place to ensure proper behaviour.

With Arch, you don’t; all you need to give to anyone is read access. Anybody can make their own branch by copying yours and committing to their own copy.

This model also necessitated fixing a long standing problem that CVS had; Arch has repeatable (smart) merging. If you merge from a branch, you can merge again later, and again, and again.

Arch made this possible through each commit (changeset) having a globally unique identifier; made from the branch’s own globally unique identifier and the changeset number in the branch.

Unfortunately while this was a massive step in a new direction, Arch had an absolutely terrible user interface. Its command list was terrifying with over 100 commands, many of which had multiple word names (tla set-tree-version). It exposed too many of its own innards, and expected you to learn them. It also forced baroque file naming semantics on its users and strange policy (though shalt not commit without first running “make clean”).

Efforts were made to improve Arch’s user interface through projects such as baz, but they were always to be doomed from the start.

We’ve since seen an explosion of new revision control systems; Monotone, Darcs, Git and Bazaar.

What’s especially interesting is the commonality between these systems. They are all “distributed” like Arch, though they also all discard the strange “unique branch identifier” convention and instead simply assign a unique identifier to each file or commit.

This means that they all support personal branches, and by necessity all support repeatable (smart) merging.

So how do they differ, what are their killer features and killer problems?

Monotone is all about repository integrity, ensuring that every commit is both authorised and intact. It pays for this with a severe lack of speed.

Darcs is based around a “theory of patches”, a branch is not made up of its history but by the collection of patches in it. Unfortunately this often breaks down, and darcs frequently gets stuck calculating even trial and commonplace branch models.

Git is very strange to me; its killer feature appears to be the speed at which it can handle very large trees, but the interface is as insane as Arch’s was. It is heavily optimised for the “I only apply patches” development model, at the expense of ordinary development models (it shares an issue with Arch where calculating annotations on an individual file is an expensive operation).

What about Bazaar? Its killer feature is that it is designed to work the way you do. The command set is relatively small, and each of them works in the most obvious manner. It also supports plugins so that you can always implement your own workflow.

Of all the revision control systems, it’s the only one (that I’m aware of) that supports both distributed and centralised workflows (and lets you go distributed when you need to, e.g. when you’re on a plane).

Here’s a few examples of how Bazaar’s command set works the way you do. To start managing some code in bzr:

$ cd myproject
$ bzr init

To add the files, copy in your usual .bzrignore file and just add everything:

$ cp ~/bzrignore .bzrignore
$ bzr add
added foo.c
added bar.c

Check the output for mistakenly added files, adjust .bzrignore and remove the file with bzr rm.

A common operation is realising that the commit you’re about to make should really go on a new branch for now:

$ cd ..
$ cp -a myproject myproject-foo
$ cd myproject-foo
$ bzr commit

A copy of a Bazaar branch is a different branch, you can commit to it separately. There’s a bzr branch command for it too (which deals with issues such as bound branches, checkouts, etc.) but it’s nice to demonstrate that Bazaar does what you’d expect even when you don’t use its own commands.

Pulling changes from another branch (where you haven’t made any modifications yet) is easy:

$ bzr pull ../myproject

As is merging (when your branches have diverged):

$ bzr merge ../myproject

One particularly nice feature is that after a merge, you see the merge as a single commit and it can be treated as such; but it also has the set of merged commits indented under it–you can examine these as individual commits as well!

What’s the downside of Bazaar? Well, it’s not the fastest system (but by no means the slowest), for small to medium sized projects this is never an issue but may be for extremely large projects–fortunately the developers are improving its performance all the time!

But that doesn’t matter; it is, honestly, the first revision control system that I don’t hate.

Two lessons booked today, one before lunch and one after lunch. The long term forecast hadn’t looked good, and I thought it’d be a good idea to try and cover the weather. Turns out that my hunch was right, the weather really wasn’t looking that good this morning, but looked like it might clear up towards the afternoon.

The original plan had to be to cover slow flight and stalling today, but the weather wasn’t going to be good enough for that; certainly not good enough for stalling.

John decided that the best thing would be to go up and do some revision of turning, especially while climbing and descending; and an introduction to slow flight. Then after lunch, if it had cleared up, finish up slow flight and move on to stalling.

We had plenty of time, because the previous student had cancelled; and as it turned out, the one between my lessons and the one after cancelled as well!

Victor November as usual, but today spotted a problem doing the checks; a screw had come loose on the left wheel spat and had to be tightened before we took off.

Handled the take-off again today, a fairly easy one along Runway 36 remembering to turn to 030° afterwards to avoid overflying Charlecotte who don’t like it when we do.

First bit of revision into climbing turns accomplished then, and again as we turned onto downwind before leaving the circuit. Held the course south, and did some descending and climbing turns over Shipston-upon-Stour before heading west.

Cloud wasn’t going anywhere, and the horizon was really indistinct which made holding a reasonable attitude quite difficult, let alone turning on it; but managed to muddle through.

Next up was an introduction to slow flight. This is basically slowing the speed right down while holding the altitude, keeping the nose very high. Brought the power back in a couple of stages, and after each one it was increasingly harder to hold the aircraft’s attitude and required huge movements of the controls.

Stall warner sounded as we got particularly slow and it was time to recover, so lowered the nose and increased to full power, climbing out of it.

Practiced those a couple of times to get the feel of it right. Then time for a bit more practice at some turns, had the aircraft in a descent when John asked me to turn, which I did; but I’d forgotten to get it in trim first, as a result made quite a mess of turning out and levelling off. Bugger.

In fact, I felt that the weather was throwing me off completely so we headed back to the school for lunch, with the hope that it’d at least clear up for the afternoon session.

No such luck though, after a decent lunch and some time in the briefing room covering the procedure for stall recovery just in case, the cloud wasn’t going anywhere. It had lifted a bit, and there was a spot of blue sky around Wellesbourne, but no more than that.

Visited the control tower to see what it was like, and they weren’t too keen on it either. Someone was up doing their skills test, but they’d headed off to the east for some decent weather.

Definitely wasn’t going to be doing any stalling today, and John asked me what I wanted to do.

Since it had improved slightly, and I wasn’t happy about mucking up some of the basics in the last lesson, I asked whether we could go up again for some revision of climbing, descending and turning.

He agreed that was a good idea, so that’s what we did. Another take-off, climb up through the circuit and out. He then set me a few exercises such as turning to a particular place, getting us there, changing altitude and turning onto a new heading, flying there; changing altitude again and turning towards home before a standard over-head join into Wellesbourne.

The improved visibility and much more relaxed nature of the flight, not having to learn anything more, really put me back at ease and I found that I was able to do the exercises much more confidently than I had before.

In the end, quite a productive lesson despite the weather. Several things to read up on for next week, since depending on the weather it’ll be more slow flight, some stalling or maybe even a first circuit or two.

P/UT Hours Today 1:30, Total 6:50

Wasn’t sure what I was going to be learning today! I’ve reached an interesting point in the course where there’s any number of lessons I could do, depending on the weather.

Ideally this lesson would be some revision of slow flight, and an introduction to stalling; but stalling is going to require a decent enough cloud base (over 3,000ft!) to be able to do it.

Otherwise if neither of those are possible, it’d be starting on circuits and learning how to land. I feel a bit like Indiana Jones at the moment; when people find out that I’m studying for a PPL, they usually say something like “I didn’t know you could fly?” to which I have to reply “Fly, yes. Land, no.”

Weather didn’t look too bad looking out of the window, but got increasingly worse as I drove to the airfield. Didn’t look like stalling was going to be happening today, the cloud was coming in far too low. John agreed and decided that we’d do the briefing on it, but would probably just do some revision on slow flight and complete that exercise.

A new plane today, G-WAVA. A notorious poor starter, but Stephanie claims has now been fixed! Not sure about that, it definitely didn’t want to start this morning! Probably wasn’t entirely happy about having needed duck tape stuck across the oil filler cap. While doing the checks, I’d been unable to get the cap to stick back down again.

An odd cross-wind today so we were on the much shorter Runway 23, since this was a bit of an unexpected challenge, John handled the takeoff while I followed him through. Once in the climb, I had control again and we did some practice of turning climbs as we headed out of the circuit and down to the South.

Overhead Shipston (they must really hate the sound of small aircraft there, we always seem to be flying in circles around them!) John asked me to bring the power back and hold the attitude to keep the height; more power back, more holding of the attitude and again until we’re only just a few knots away from the stall; once more and the warner sounded, so nose down and full power to recover, climbing away.

A few practices of this, before going again with flaps and then practicing turning while in slow flight. Turning has the extra challenge of having to nudge the power in to avoid a stall, since the turn increases the stalling speed whilst simultaneously decreasing the speed!

Didn’t quite nudge hard enough on a turn to the right, I’m sometimes a little too gentle with the controls when I need to be rather more forceful with the power at times.

I’ve also caught myself adjusting power and watching the RPM meter, rather than listening for the change in tone. Made a mental note to stop that, and found it much easier for the rest of the flight. Had been doing it turns too, and watching the attitude indicator; oops! Bad habits creeping back while I’m busy learning new things.

A few more practices before heading back home, as the rain came in; which we caught over Stratford as turning to begin the overhead join. This was a bit more interesting, since we were in a different pattern and turning at different times to what I was used to (having normally joined for Runway 36).

P/UT Hours Today 0:45, Total 7:35

I really wasn’t sure whether the weather was flyable looking out of the window this morning; the forecast hadn’t been that promising, but today’s METAR was a little better — at least it gave me some room under the cloud.

Phoned the flying school and was told that the cloud base was pretty high, but that wind was rather gusty down the slot. Flyable nonetheless.

Got there, and John had decided it was too gusty to start on circuits; he wanted it rather calmer for my first landing attempts. Instead he’d been down to the South-West with the previous student, and there was a good couple of holes in the cloud, so ideal for stalling!

Gulp.

In reality, the idea of stalling shouldn’t have made me that nervous as we’d been close to the stall with slow flight the last couple of lessons and had already practiced recovery. Nonetheless the thought of deliberately stalling the plane and losing the precious lift wasn’t exactly making my day. Two hours of it to do for the course though, so brave face!

Checked over the plane, largely okay except for a screw loose on the wing that John had already spotted during the previous flight, quickly fixed and taxied off down to the hold. Runway 18 today, haven’t used this one in a few weeks, so a different place to test the brakes and rudder, but remembered.

Have noticed that I’m largely being left to do the checks and pre-flight myself now, and that they’re becoming close to second nature. Still noting that I tend to pre-empt the FISO in shortening the callsign, and deliberately left a space on my kneeboard for writing it down once told it. Didn’t help much, since I ended up forgetting to shorten it and confusing myself, something to work on I think.

In fact, this time John didn’t just let me do the checks and pre-flight, he left me to it all the way through the take-off as well! I’d gotten a little used to his voice talking me through it the last few times, so I compensated by talking myself through it instead.

It seemed rather busy to me, the fact that once off the ground we basically ended up going sideways with the wind didn’t help; and I was using up all my brain-power to keep the plane climbing and in balance. John was entirely happy, and thought I coped brilliantly with the challenge, so that’s ok then.

Bumpy climb all the way to Shipston, where there was a nice hole in the cloud as promised. More than enough room to climb to over 3,200ft for the exercises.

Some revision of FREDA checks and HASELL checks, then handed control to John so that he could demonstrate a clean stall and recovery with power. Not as dramatic as I feared, it seemed to take ages to actually stall, and then the nose simply pitched slowly to the ground as we lost height. Hold it down, full power, and pick your stomach up later as the plane regains height.

My turn now.

Regain the height, HASELL check then reduce power to idle. Hold back on the column to keep height, pull back on the column, heave back on the column. Speed washes off quickly, then at some point the stall warner sounds. Still pull that column back, with all the strength you have, as the plane tries to pull it away from you and eventually it goes limp and the plane pirouettes down. Column forward, full power, wait for a good speed, and collect the stomach. “Good,” said John, “minimum height loss, well done!”

Maybe that wasn’t so bad after all. Regained the height, and a full turn to keep out of the cloud and had another go. Minimum height loss again. One more then; this time pulled out a fraction too early so the stall warner sounded, I reacted instantly releasing the column pressure and John was pleased that I’d simultaneously demonstrated to myself how to repeat the stall during the recovery, and how to avoid/recover from it.

Cloud was coming in a bit, and we were having to turn in it to get away and there just wasn’t enough of a hole left to carry on. Descended down underneath the cloud base again, which turned out to be 2,200ft; and set a course for Stratford.

Flew the pattern for the overhead join, but the FISO decided to throw me a curve-ball; on announcing that we were descending deadside I got told “use callsign Robin Victor November”. Turns out that there was a helicopter flying around clashing with our usual callsign.

Crosswind made it a little tricky to get the plane to descend and turn at the same time, so John took control to get us in the right direction before giving it back to me for the rest of the descent and join.

Passed over the threshold and heard radio traffic from someone announcing downwind, and looked out for them since we would shortly be turning onto downwind ourselves. Spotted them in front of us, but about 1,000ft higher! Quick sanity check ensued, look out of the windows to see whether we were too low, and check the QNE and altimeter. All ok, he must have been too high. This must have been the case, since by the time we turned onto base, he was rather lower.

Handled the turn onto base and start of the descent myself, up to the turn onto final; but the crosswind was too much to get the attitude right so John took over for the landing itself. “A bit unfair for your first landing to be in this,” he said while wrestling with the plane himself!

Control back to me on the tarmac, checks and taxied to the fuel bay to fill the plane back up for the next student. No wait this time, so easily done and back to the school.

Next week will depend on weather; if it’s relatively calm, we’ll be starting on circuits (and landings!) otherwise if there’s a good cloud base or hole, it’ll be more work on stalling, especially different types of stall.

P/UT Hours Today 0:40, Total 8:15

I think I’ve just invented a new sport…

Everyone knows the game of Googling your own name, and finding out all sorts of fascinating things that you have forgotten or didn’t realise had made it onto the Interwobble.

Here’s a new twist, use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine instead and read through things like old versions of your homepage.

I’m honestly shocked at just how much incriminating material I’ve found, both from my own website and segfault.org

This comment on my site from Leonard Richardson and my reply especially amused:

What percentage of the time are you drunk? This is to settle a bet.

Okay, well on an average week I guess I go out for 3 nights. Friday night starts at 5:30 and ends 12 hours later, the other two days would be probably from 9:30 to 2:30am, so 5 hours. So we can say I spend 22 hours innebriated. Just under a day, or 13% of the week. Some weeks that might be as much as 25% to 30% I guess tho.

Who was the bet with, and more importantly, who won?

This explains a lot …

Continuing my mission to put together a kick-ass team to develop the Ubuntu Desktop, the following position is now up on the website:

Posting Date & ID: September 2007 UDD
Job Location: Your home with broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: To adapt and develop the GNOME desktop to improve the Ubuntu user experience.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• Use open source development methods to create, select and adapt software to produce innovative user experiences and address the common problems of desktop computing
• Extend the desktop platform as necessary to support development
• Work with designers, artists and other developers to develop ideas and complete the project
• Involve the community of development projects, teams and Ubuntu supporters to incorporate a range of perspectives and ideas
• Take ownership of many aspects of the desktop user experience (”look and feel”) in Ubuntu
• Follow projects and trends in user interface design in the open source world, integrate the best technologies into Ubuntu and ensure their quality
• Analyse, triage and respond to bug reports

Requirements skills and experience:

• A keen and insightful eye for user interaction
• A passion for intuitive, usable and visually appealing interfaces
• A strong desire to produce distinctive ideas that stand Ubuntu out from the crowd
• Experience with the GNOME development platform and desktop environment and technologies such as GTK+
• Some experience with mainstream graphics technologies such as OpenGL and Cairo in the C programming language
• Ability to be productive in a globally distributed team through self-discipline and self-motivation, delivering according to a schedule
• Familiarity with open source development tools and methodology, especially those in common use for Ubuntu and Debian package maintenance

How to apply

Please send a cover letter and CV with references to hr@canonical.com. Please indicate in your submission the role for which you are applying. We prefer to receive applications and CVs/Resumes in either PDF or plain text format.

Another offer of an extended lesson this morning, due to an earlier cancellation, but unfortunately I had too much work to do so had to decline. Happily traffic was almost non-existent on the drive down, so was half an hour early anyway.

Today’s lesson was the last of the “basics” - turning. Obviously I’ve already done quite a bit of that so far, but this would be the lesson that ticked off the formal exercise in my log book.

Checked the plane while John wrote the briefing up on the board as usual, today we’d be in Victor November again; which is fast becoming my “regular” plane.

No problems with the checks today, they’re starting to become fairly natural and am finding that the procedure is sinking into memory and I’m using the list to check myself as I go rather than following it.

Taxied to the hold for Runway 36, handling the Radio Traffic myself and had a nice shocking surprise when John announced that I’d be doing the take-off today!

Since 36 has left-hand circuits, and there was little wind, our into-wind checks where done facing up the runway. So after finishing them, we turned round to the left so we could scan the circuit before resuming the centre-line to the holding point.

Held while another plane turned onto final, to give me plenty of time to do the take-off and once that was down, the sky was clear so lined up.

I’ve followed John through on take-offs for the last few weeks, so knew what to do; full power, hold the centre line, and then pull back gently on the stick when we reach 65 knots and adopt the climb attitude.

And that was that, up in the air and a turn to 030° to avoid a noise-sensitive village, holding the climb attitude, turned onto the crosswind leg, levelled out and onto the downwind leg before departing the circuit and heading towards Shipton-upon-Stour.

And onto the lesson, turning onto a reference point and then turning onto a selected heading. First John demonstrated a turn to each direction so I could see the nose attitude required, and then I repeated the exercises.

No problems here; already done enough to know the general form and had pretty quickly mastered it with reference points and headings.

At one point, while we were turning, John spotted an RAF Hawk flying below us and had me roll out of the turn so I could see it. Later I found out that there’s a big exercise in Gloucestershire which that must have been heading to.

Turning exercises were followed by some revision of climbing and descending, especially with flaps. No problem with setting the switch the wrong way this time, and was able to observe the effect much easier.

Nearly time to head home, so John decided to try a test for me and asked me where I thought Stratford-upon-Avon was. I checked the compass to see which direction we were heading (East), and out of the window to figure out roughly where we were (south-east of Long Marston); so Stratford had to be ahead and to our left. Sure enough, I could make out a town of the right shape over there, and the white buildings near Wellesbourne airfield, so confidently pointed.

“OK then,” John said. “Take us there.”

Turned to the heading, and as we approached John made the call to request joining instructions from the airfield. I’d been right, yay!

I lined us up to pass over the end of the runway at 2000ft QFE, while John left me to it; in fact, I ended up doing the majority of the join and descent myself with John taking control once we were on final.

Another very good lesson! I’m really starting to feel like I’m in control of the plane.

Two lessons booked next week, so we’ll be covering Slow Flight and Stalling with some revision on turning whilst climbing and descending. Looking at the exercises, it may be only a few weeks before I’m into circuits!

P/UT Hours Today 0:55, Total 5:20