Sport Flight License

Flying light sport aircraft has always been a dream to follow. It was time to make it reality. I have a lot of experience flying thanks to aeromodeling. Having flown aerobatics, warbirds, jets, FPV, etc. makes flying from the cockpit a second nature. Apart from that, I have already flown a few times in three different light sport aircraft (ICP Bingo/Savannah, Tecnam P96 and B&F FK9).

I'll expose the experience down below as a brief logbook of each practical lesson.

Casual Logbook

Introductory flight (0.5 h)

This was the first contact a had with my new flight instructor and the trainer aircraft, a Tecnam P96 Golf. This is by far my favourite among the ones I've tried. Low wing configuration and perfectly harmonised flight controls (something I didn't find in the FK9). This is a great sporty trainer, very forgiving and a joy to fly.

We had a nice flight , flying around the aerodrome and with my instructor pushing the plane a bit since he knew I liked aerobatics (my body had to get used to it, although). I controlled the plane to do a proper leisure navigation and a final approach. All great.

First lesson (0.5 h)

This day, we had an issue with starting the engine. The key was turned, but the aircraft had no intention to start. The problem seemed to lay on a defective mass cable connected to the battery. Once changed, we did the pre-flight and the flight.

Since we were running late due to sunlight, we could only fly for half an hour. I told my instructor if we could practice approaches and touch-and-go's. It was not common for him to do that that fast, but accepted and did it with little effort. The panorama was beautiful.

Second lesson (1 h)

This was a more traditional practice. We did the pre-flight instruction step by step and performed a scheduled lesson based on fast and slow level flight and trim. Some minutes later, I had done everything from this phase and we started doing approaches and touch-and-go's. Also landed with a bit of instructions assistance and probably a bit of rudder too.

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Third lesson (1 h)

It was quite a tricky day with the worst crosswind direction in these runway. It was challenging to perform T&G's. I had to get used to bank quite a bit at touchdown with a lot of rudder input and to pull back until I slowed the P96 down enough. Some tries were a bit rough but they got smoother at the end.

Fourth lesson (1 h)

The wind was aligned with the runway this time. The T&G were really nice. I was a tad rough with the throttle, however, not rolling that much and going to air too quick. Once I corrected that and managing good rudder input, they were perfect and finally landed totally on my own.

Fifth lesson (0.5 h)

We had extremely confusing winds and sudden tailwind gusts with some close to stall moments . Approaches had to be tried from both ends of the runway, but there was no way to make a slow approach. We had to end the class at half hour because I wouldn't be able to learn nothing at that point.

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