The Beatson Turns

This has been my view for most of a very busy September and October, learning to fly a from the “wrong” seat…

…trying to synchronise my thoughts and actions and words to learn how to teach.

…It took ages to prepare lesson plans (above), which together with an hour in the Cessna 152 (below):

…turned into a mess of notes, ticks and scribbles:

Of course the weather does not always cooperate at this time of year…

It was a little windy a few days ago, time to sit in front of the fire and catch up on ground school subjects…

I did manage to get the RV out for a couple of trips, “keeping the oil warm” is my excuse. It was great to fly along enjoying the view with no pressure to perform, although I did find myself verbalising my thoughts and actions, just as if I was demonstrating to a student:

Once the course is finished it will be back to tinkering in the Cub, getting the wings ready to come off. The aircraft has now swapped positions with the Tiger Moth to ensure any Cub work doesn’t block them in:

Oh yes, the “Beatson Turns”…it seems I misheard. The term is “beats and turns”, like in a sailing dinghy, beating across the wind, then turning and beating across the wind in the opposite direction. The term was mentioned when we were doing glide approaches…if you are too high you can do s-turns to increase your track distance, but this is a modified version where you don’t make much forward progress – a way of losing a lot of height without losing sight of the emergency landing field.

Here was me thinking it was named after some famous instructor chap from the 1920s called Beatson. What a character he might have been…