You can probably tell I was on the way back from Santa Monica, but on a Sunday? Nope, I wasn't at work. A coworker of mine is starting flight training, and he had never been up in a small plane before. He had the guts to go up in my rickety little thing, and I proceeded to spoil him with the coolest flying he's gonna see for a while...hehhehe. I put on my CFI hat for a while (I'm not really a CFI, I never finished that up) and gave him a really cool experience. He's gonna know more about this stuff than his flight instructor for sure. We started with the preflight. I took him all around the plane and showed him everything, talked about aerodynamics, yadda yadda. We probably spent 45 minutes just poking around the plane. We went flying for a while and he got to do and see all sorts of cool stuff. The RV is a little sensitive for a first-time flier..for example, at one point I said, "Ok, point the nose down a bit, we're already up at 10,000'." I had levelled the plane off at 7500' and given him the stick, and it didn't take long for us to oscillate up and down (but mostly up) quite a bit. Things happen pretty quickly in an RV without much notice to the uninitiated. I find that most people, experienced pilots included, aren't ready for the amazingly open sight picture...and what may feel like a relatively nose-low attitude in level cruise flight. People tend to let the nose come up because of what they're used to seeing in spam cans, I believe, and before you know it you're climbing at 1500 feet per minute without any real airspeed decay. This plane is a real "feel" plane. It takes a very light touch and is very easy to overcontrol. That's not to say it's not stable...it's definitely stable...but it goes where you point it, and it does so quickly.
Anyway, I corrected Matt's misconception that a stall is when the "engine conks out." Hehehhe. We did some power off full flaps stalls and he dug it. I know a lot of people get nervous when they're starting flight training and the instructor says, "Tomorrow we'll start doing stalls." If you've never done or seen one before, how do you know what to expect? Matt is a smart dude and he's really into the physics of all this stuff, so he dug all the aerodynamic mumbo jumbo -- and having done skydiving and stuff before, he wasn't at all squeamish about anything I offered to show him. His initial instinct when turning was to pull pretty good into it, about 1.5G or so. I showed him some 2+G stuff, and he wanted to roll, so of course I obliged. "Do that again!" Don't twist my arm...
We did just about everything that he would eventually do in his training. Beyond the four fundamentals I taught him sectional map symbology, we did some radio work, he did VOR triangulation and tracking, etc.
We stopped at Chino for lunch, and he got to see Linas' fuselage under construction, and Matt asked if he could see my engine. I popped the top cowl off and he was shocked at how clean everything looked. Listening to his comments when talking to Linas about his fuselage construction and stuff, it was pretty clear that we might have another RV victim at some point. I can't wait to hear about Matt's experience flying Cherokees. It'll be interesting to see how he takes to that after an indoctrination involving scooting around in the fighter-like RV. I know I would have been spoiled for life after that. Glad I didn't know any better back when I was doing my training!
Anyway, after dropping him back off at Santa Monica, I did the usual departure and flew over downtown LA, under the class B.
