Mr. Hat

The Cirrus has one of those little hat switches on the sidestick for electric aileron and elevator trim (just like the yoke for my sim). It's nice that it has both types of trim, and that it's in a convenient place on the stick, but it's touchy, especially with aileron trim. It's taking me some time to get used to it, and I'm learning that you have to use a lot of slight nudges in one direction or another to slowly converge on the correct trim without causing a major upset. But getting trim correct on this plane is important — it's barely dynamically stable, and has a bunch of oscillatory modes that manifest themselves as altitude swings or subtle turns, and flying it manually with the sidestick can be tiring over longer distances, especially as the control stiffness can cause you to jerk the bloody stick too far to one side or another, with predictable results.

So the trim hat switch has become something of an obsession for me: I find myself thinking of it as "Mr Hat", an alter ego at the end of my hand that seems to have something of a life of its own. Maybe I'll start talking to it with a Mr Garrisonesque accent. I dunno. But it's true that during this evening's hand-flown ILSs in the Cirrus I actually found it easier and more productive to keep Mr Hat at arms length (sorry), and only work on the finer points of trimming after almost everything else was taken care of. This does seem counterproductive, I admit, and it's something I need to work on more.

(And if you don't know who or what Mr Hat is, oh well, never mind).

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Anyway, this little … wrinkle … aside, after another flight or two whose details I won't bore you with, I'm signed off for renting the club's Cirrus, I've maintained my instrument currency (but not necessarily my proficiency…), I'm 80% of the way through my BFR (just need to do the oral part), and I'm night current. Woohoo. Now if only the weather would improve….