Multi Engine Blog 5

Today I did an observation flight in N978WC.  this was my first time flying in the Seminole.  I was observing John Nadolski and Dave Atkinson.  The purpose of this flight was to practice Vmc and to practice shutting down and restarting the engine.  For the flight we flew to Tooele and started off with shutting down the engine.  I thought it was a very strange experience to see the propeller not spinning, i have never seen that while in the air before.  While the engine was shut down I thought the seemed fairly easy for Dave to control the aircraft with zero side slip, and it had better performance than I expected with only one engine. I think it will be very helpful when I am training to have seen this.  I also liked seeing the propeller restart just from increasing the blade pitch.  After that Dave did some Vmc practice.  I was glad to be there for that because having my weight cut down the arm from the CG to the tail.  when Dave reached Vmc it was because of full rudder deflection father than the stall horn.  The pitch down for the recovery was also a lot of fun.  After that we did Steep Turns.  I did not understand how these would be so difficult until I saw one for real.  the configuration of the aircraft seems like it would be very difficult to keep a reference point on the aircraft, and once you start to get off your altitude, it is hard to recover it.  After that we did Landings, which I have already experienced in the simulator, but it was nice to see them in real life.