Titanium Cranium
Well-Known Member
I did my night cross country flight tonight to complete my night flying time. Everything was beautiful and uneventful all the way up to my landing sequence at my home airport. I entered downwind like normal and when I reached my referrence point I turned on my carb heat, throttled back, added some nose-up trim, and set my flaps to 10 degrees. I noticed that I was having to force the nose down way harder than normal when the flaps extended and I saw that my airspeed was rapidly bleeding off and dropping way below where it should have been. Just as I was telling my instructor that my airspeed was dropping like crazy he and I noticed that the flaps had fully extended to 30 degrees. I was already pushing the nose down more to keep my speed up and adding throttle to keep my altitude where I needed it to be. My instructor started messing with the flap control switch trying to get the flaps up but they had failed and jammed in the full-down position. He said this is a pretty bad situation because it of course throws everything off but mostly because you can't do a go-around with the flaps stuck like that and that we only had one shot at the approach. I told him I had it under control and had already compensated and rolled some nose down trim to ease some of the pressure I was having to keep on the controls. I told him it was no problem and that I could get it on the ground just fine. My instructor trusted me and sat back to let me handle it. I set it down with the smoothest landing I've had yet. It honestly didn't bother me or freak me out when I had a failure like that. I just did what my instructor always said to do "Just fly the plane." I was glad when my instructor said I did everything perfectly and he was very impressed with how I handled it and flew the plane. I'm glad I am lucky enough to have a great instructor who has taught me how to handle and work through the unexpected like I encountered tonight.
