Morning VFR Flight #18

8:30am-11am (actual hobbs: 1.5 hrs)

I was late (8 planned) and didn't get WX.

1658F - we planned to go up thru clouds, but there were none - very clear, so once over SP bay, we started VORs...

Flying VFR to skaggs VOR was a good start - seeing how the needle really moves & getting the idea of 'what side' of the needle we're on in terms of the cardinal compass instead of nmemonics of 'fly to the needle' or 'turn towards the needle' or etc...

That went well, and I could see the Skaggs VOR building, so on went the hood. For anyone reading this in the future - yes: it really does block out the whole world, and you still can see the instruments decently.

For the first 30 min or so, Jeff had me maintain 2900' and tune, identify, twist to fly towards VORs: Skaggs, from Skaggs on a radial, to Sausalito VOR, back to Scaggs, to Santa Rosa (I think). All of this went well.

At around 30 of the 50 min or so of hood work, I got disoriented for the first time - nothing scary, but it was the first time I didn't keep the wings as level as I would like.

Looked at a chart, looked back, and what-cha know? We were at about 20 degrees of bank and I had no idea. Gotta keep up the scan.

No problem, but I can see for the first time first-hand, how the body really, *really* misleads you in terms of inertia, balance, etc... gotta trust those instruments (which I do by now!)

Things were going very well, so we tried going to Oakland's VOR and the reception was really iffy on both NAVs, so we went towards SCAGGS (we were up by Santa Rosa), then turned towards OAK and before taking off the hood, I asked about stalls.

It wasn't a normal thing to do for a VFR student, but what the heck - we tried one power off stall, and while nothing went badly, my recovery wasn't nearly as stable as normal (ended up climbing etc...).

Back to OAK - no problems - OAK tower was nice and asked where we were parking - Kaiser I said. They asked if we wanted a landing on 15... yes...

so we were cleared to land on 15. I responded back 15R thinking it was the opposing end of 27L (duh!) but they pretended not to notice.

Slipping to lose altitude instead of making an S-turn over bayfarm island, and in for a decent landing on 15 - right near Kaiser - cool.

Been studying almost every day - it's going well - almost done with the GFD private pilot manual book (big heavy one). Now it's time to

get working steadily thru the FAA written test guide. Jeff says we'll be doing XCs within a week - me probably doing solo XC in the next two weeks.

It's awesome!