My final “test flight” was at White Waltham WLAC in another Warrior. After my PS28 flight I’m fairly sure I want to learn in a Warrior as there will be no “conversion” once I pass my PPL and it feels like a more stable aircraft to learn in. Also, Blackbushe Aviation only have one aircraft so if it breaks I’m stuck …. WLAC have loads of Warriors! In this case it’s a Piper PA-28-161 Cherokee Warrior II

Having had awful weather forecasts beforehand I was not expecting to fly, I was booked in for 8am. The night before the weather looked like it was going to be fine and the morning proved that the forecast was correct! We went through pre flight and I taxi’d out to runway 21. After pre flight run up my instructor took off and after climbing to around 500ft he handed over.

We headed west away from Heathrow airspace and performed similar maneuvers, climbing, banking, descending as well as using the flaps and a demonstration on how not to remove all 3 stages of flap at the same time as you drop suddenly! I flew back into a left had circuit descending over the airfield and landing back on runway 21 (with the instructor taking over a few hundred feet before touchdown). I then taxied once we had left the runway to the fuel station.

It was quite interesting as a very different take off / landing on the grass rather than the tarmac of Blackbushe, I think it will be a little more challenging to learn here but that is what I want really!

Summary:

When adding power to cruise once you reach cruising speed you will actually need to take a little power out as the airspeed over the prop will help it once travelling faster. The opposite is true when lowering power.

Climb at full power with an airspeed of 79KIAS (80 will do!)

Flaps can be engaged once airspeed is inside the white arc line (103KIAS) … add and take out one click at a time otherwise you loose height rapidly!

Preempt adding flaps by pushing the nose down slightly as you add flaps, once at full flaps re-trim which is about 4 rotations or the trim wheel.

FREDA …. F(uel)R(adio)E(ngine)D(irection)A(ltitude)