Cessna C172 familiarisation training

Time to move on to wide-bodied airplanes!

Today I finally got to fly the familiarisation training program for the four-seater Cessna 172. I got the flight manual beforehand to go through and then had to fill up a questionnaire/exam, which had questions about the type. Most of all it was pretty straightforward like "what is the speed for best rate of climb?" or "how much fuel can you take on board with four standard weight people on board?" but I encountered a few more difficult questions too.

My new airplane, the Charlie Oscar Kilo

The intetion was to fly to the nearby Hyvinkää airfield and practise touch and go landings there after doing some training area excercises and then head back to Malmi, so I did a brief OFP, a few calculations and off we went. One of my coursemates wanted to act as an observer on the backseat. It's quite useful since you get a little extra air-time and experience by monitoring everything closely.

There's quite a lot to go through in the Pilot's Operating Handbook.

The airplane itself is not too different from a 152 being kind of an oversized version of it. All the familiar instruments, knobs and switches are there, the checklist procedures are quite the same and the airplane feels already somewhat familiar after having spended 75 block hours in its little brother. The Garmin GPS added something new to the package and so we spent some time going through its specifications and features.

The working environment doesn't differ that much from a 152. Even the checklists are almost identical. The main distractions come from the new HSI and the reverse placement of the tachometer and gyro.

The flight itself went well and I enjoyed it very much. I did some normal turns, steep turns, stall recoveries and slow flight which all went without problems. I noticed the additional stability compared to the 152 and also the force required for some manoeuvres was somewhat larger. This also highlighted the importance of proper trimming. Also, the Cessna 172 requires a lot more right rudder in take off and climb-out when compared to the 152.

Landing the four-seater was a little different. This plane requires much more focus on maintaining the right speed throughout the landing procedure. If the speed gets too high, it is quite difficult to get it back again. I had to do a go-around when first trying to land with less than full flaps since I underestimated the quite good glide characteristics of the 172 and had a little too much speed. The airplane just didn't want to stop flying..

Quite a beautiful one if I may say so.

So now I'm qualified to fly the Cessna 172 and we will continue flying school flights and training flights with this one. This doesn't mean we'll stop using the 152 but will begin flying with both airplanes to the end of our CPL training, depending on the assigned flight for the day and airplane availability. The Cessna 172 is good for example when flying longer cross-country flights and I'm hoping to gain a lot more hours on this one!