⚠️ Limitations Limitations

Think of this section as "the law" — the numbers you don't argue with, negotiate around, or round in your favor. It's all Section 2 of the POH, approved by the FAA under Type Certificate No. 3A19, and none of it is a judgment call. It's just execution.

The speeds worth knowing cold

Notice V A (maneuvering speed) isn't one number — it drops as the airplane gets lighter, because it's built around how much abrupt control input the airframe can absorb at a given weight. Lighter airplane, less structure needed to protect, lower the threshold. POH 2-3

Engine limits

These are the ones that keep the O-235 alive long-term — cross them and you're borrowing against the next overhaul. POH 2-5

Weight & center of gravity

POH 2-6

The baggage numbers are the classic trap: Area 2 alone allows 40 lbs, but stack that on top of a full 120 lbs already in Area 1 and you're over — the combined cap for both areas together is still just 120 lbs, not 160.

Maneuvering & load factors

The 152 is certificated utility category, which buys you a short list of approved aerobatic maneuvers: chandelles, lazy eights and steep turns up to 95 knots entry speed; spins and stalls (except whip stalls) using slow deceleration instead of a hard speed number. POH 2-6, 2-7

Design load factors sit at 150% of these — the structure meets or exceeds design loads in every case.

Fuel limitations

POH 2-7 Approved grades: 100LL (blue) and 100, formerly 100/130 (green).

🚨 Emergency Procedures Emergency Procedures

Section 3 of the POH. These checklists are short on purpose — under stress you won't recall a paragraph, you'll recall a shape. So learn the shape of each one, not just the numbers inside it.

🛬 Engine failure — three different checklists, three different reasons

POH 3-3, 3-4

• During the takeoff run — you're not flying yet. Throttle idle, brakes, flaps retract, mixture idle cut-off, ignition off, master off. The whole point is stopping on the pavement you already have.
• Immediately after takeoff — 60 KIAS, mixture idle cut-off, fuel shutoff OFF, ignition OFF, flaps as required, master OFF. No restart attempt here — you simply don't have the altitude to spare on one.
• During flight, with altitude to spare — 60 KIAS, then carb heat ON, primer in and locked, fuel shutoff ON, mixture RICH, ignition BOTH (or START if the prop has actually stopped). This one, you try to restart.

🔥 Fires — four checklists, each shuts down something different first

Engine fire in flight, electrical fire in flight, cabin fire, wing fire — four separate situations, four separate first moves. POH 3-5, 3-6, 3-7

An engine fire cuts mixture, fuel and master, then glides at 85 KIAS toward a forced landing — no restart attempt afterward. An electrical fire cuts the master switch first, then works back through switches one at a time to hunt down the short. Both fire-in-the-cabin checklists (electrical and cabin fire) carry the exact same warning:

🔋 Electrical malfunctions

POH 3-8, 3-13

☁️ Losing the gyros in the clouds

If the vacuum system fails and you're stuck relying on the turn coordinator alone: a 180° turn is a standard rate left turn, held 60 seconds. An emergency descent stabilizes at 500–800 ft/min, 70 KIAS. And recovering from a spiral dive brings you back to 70 KIAS too — hands off the wheel the whole time, rudder only. POH 3-10, 3-11

🌀 Spin recovery, in order

1. Ailerons neutral.
2. Throttle idle.
3. Full rudder opposite the direction of rotation.
4. Just after the rudder hits the stop, control wheel briskly forward to break the stall.
5. Hold everything until rotation actually stops.
6. As rotation stops, neutralize rudder and recover smoothly from the dive.

POH 3-12

🔧 Rough engine, low oil pressure

Carburetor icing shows up as a slow, creeping RPM loss — full throttle, full carb heat until it smooths out, then remove heat. Spark plug fouling and magneto trouble look almost identical: switch briefly from BOTH to L or R and see which side gives you an obvious power loss. But this next one is the one to really remember:

POH 3-12, 3-13

📡 The ELT

Activates on its own at 5G or more when its switch is set to AUTO, transmitting on 121.5 and 243.0 MHz simultaneously. A hard landing with nothing actually wrong can trigger it — check by listening on 121.5 MHz, and if you hear the tone, cycle the switch OFF then back to AUTO to reset it. POH 9-7 to 9-9

✈️ Normal Procedures Normal Procedures

Section 4 — the everyday flying. These are the numbers your hands should reach for without stopping to think.

✅ Before-takeoff checks, and what "good" looks like

POH 4-7, 4-13, 4-14

• Magneto check, 1700 RPM: drop shouldn't exceed 125 RPM on either magneto, or a 50 RPM gap between the two.
• Alternator check: load the system for 3–5 seconds with the landing light or flaps; the ammeter should barely twitch — within a needle width of where it started.
• Power check on the roll: engine should settle around 2280–2380 RPM static, carb heat off, mixture leaned.

Takeoff flaps: what 10° actually buys you

10° of flap trims about 10% off the distance to clear a 50-ft obstacle versus flaps up. That's also the ceiling — anything past 10° isn't approved for takeoff at all. Left down until obstacles are behind you and 60 KIAS is reached, then retracted slowly. POH 4-14

Cruise & leaning

Normal cruise lives between 55% and 75% power. For the first 50 hours (or until oil consumption settles down), stay toward the top of that, 65–75%, to seat the rings properly. Lean until RPM peaks and then drops 25–50 RPM for the book's fuel-flow numbers — and the recommended training-flight leaning technique can save up to 13% fuel over flying full rich the whole time. POH 4-15, 4-16

Stalls & spins

The stall horn gives you 5–10 knots of warning before the actual break, flaps up or down. For intentional spins: plan so recoveries finish 4000 ft AGL or more, budget at least 1000 ft of altitude loss for a 1-turn spin, and keep the ailerons dead neutral the entire time — any aileron deflection in the spin's direction can actually speed up the rotation. POH 4-16, 4-17, 4-18

Balked landing & cold weather

Balked landing (go-around): full power first, flaps immediately to 20°, then slowly to fully up once you've got safe airspeed — never all at once. Preheat is generally required below -18°C (0°F) and recommended below -7°C (20°F). POH 4-18, 4-19

📊 Performance Performance

Section 5 — actual flight-test data at 1670 lbs unless the chart says otherwise. This is what a real cross-country flight gets planned from, not a theoretical exercise.

Stall speeds — and how fast bank angle bites

Power off, 1670 lbs. POH 5-9

Now watch what steepening the bank does to that same 30°-flap, most-forward-CG airplane: 35 KIAS at 0° bank, climbing to 49 KIAS by the time you're at 60° bank. That's the whole reason a steep turn close to the ground, or an over-banked base-to-final turn, is such a well-known way to surprise yourself with a stall.

Takeoff & landing distance (short field technique)

Sea level, standard day, 1670 lbs, paved dry runway, zero wind. POH 5-10, 5-18

Wind correction runs the same shape both directions: 10% off distance per 9 knots of headwind, or 10% added per 2 knots of tailwind (up to 10 kt). Grass adds 15% to the takeoff ground roll — but a much steeper 45% to the landing ground roll. Soft ground fights you a lot harder while you're trying to stop than while you're trying to go.

Cruise performance

Published cruise numbers assume speed fairings are fitted, worth about 2 knots. One example worth memorizing: at 8000 ft, 2550 RPM, standard temperature — 75% BHP, 107 KTAS, 6.1 GPH. POH 5-13

The book is also refreshingly honest about its own limits here: mixture technique, engine/prop condition and turbulence can swing range and endurance by 10% or more. Treat these charts as a solid planning baseline, not a promise.

⚖️ Weight & Balance Weight & Balance

Sections 1 and 6. Less about memorizing figures for your specific airplane (that lives in its own W&B paperwork), more about the vocabulary — and this vocabulary gets used precisely, so a test question can hinge on the exact difference between two terms that sound almost the same.

POH 1-7 Notice the II isn't a different airplane structurally — it just carries more standard equipment, so it starts heavier and gives up useful load to make room for it.

Where the CG actually has to sit

Everything is measured from one fixed reference point — the front face of the firewall, station zero. The allowable range narrows as the airplane gets lighter: the forward limit slides from 32.65 in aft of datum at 1670 lbs in to 31.0 in at 1350 lbs or less, while the aft limit stays fixed at 36.5 in regardless of weight. POH 2-6

The words that get tested

POH 1-10

Arm is just the horizontal distance from the datum to something's center of gravity. Moment is weight times arm — this handbook divides it by 1000 purely to keep the numbers on the loading form from getting unwieldy, nothing more mysterious than that.

Standard Empty Weight already includes unusable fuel, full fluids and full oil. Add optional equipment on top of that and you get Basic Empty Weight. Useful Load is simply takeoff weight minus basic empty weight — everything you're allowed to add.

And Tare: just the weight of the chocks or stands used while weighing the airplane, subtracted back out of the scale reading so it doesn't sneak into your numbers.

Weighing the airplane

All fuel and oil get drained first. Seats go fully forward, flaps fully retracted, controls neutral. Each wheel sits on its own scale rated for at least 500 lbs. Once weight and moment/1000 are totaled up, they get plotted on the CG Moment Envelope to confirm the loading actually falls inside it — not just assumed to. POH 6-3

⚙️ Powerplant Powerplant

Section 7. The O-235-L2C is about as uncomplicated as engines get — no turbo, no fuel injection, nothing electronic in the way. Which means most questions here are really just "how does this simple part physically work," not "what number does the computer show you."

Lycoming O-235-L2C: normally-aspirated, direct-drive, air-cooled, horizontally opposed, carbureted, four-cylinder, 233.3 cu in, rated 110 BHP at 2550 RPM. The starter, a belt-driven alternator and the oil cooler all mount on the front; the dual magnetos sit around back on their own accessory pad. POH 1-5, 7-14

Ignition & starting

Right magneto fires the lower-right and upper-left plugs; left magneto fires lower-left and upper-right — dual ignition for more complete combustion, which is exactly why normal operation stays on BOTH. Switch positions, clockwise: OFF, R, L, BOTH, START. POH 7-16

Induction, carburetor & cooling

Up-draft, float-type, fixed-jet carburetor — and it has no accelerator pump, so pumping the throttle while starting doesn't enrich anything, it just causes excessive leaning. Full carb heat at full throttle costs roughly 150–200 RPM. Cooling is pure ram-air, no manual control at all; the winterization kit becomes worth installing below -7°C (20°F). POH 7-16, 7-17

Oil system

Sump holds 6 quarts (7 with a filter installed). The factory-fill corrosion-preventive oil comes out after the first 25 hours; cruise at 65–75% power until 50 hours accumulate so the rings seat properly. POH 7-15, 7-16

⛽ Fuel System Fuel System

Gravity, start to finish. There is no fuel pump anywhere in this airplane — and that single fact explains almost everything about how the system behaves.

Quantity & the unusable fuel nobody thinks about

Two float-type transmitters feed two electric indicators. When one reads empty, roughly 0.75 gallon is still sitting in that tank. Total unusable fuel across the whole airplane is about 1.5 gallons — a figure actually confirmed with 30-second full-rudder sideslips in the landing configuration, not just measured straight and level. Takeoffs have never been demonstrated with less than 2 gallons total on board (1 per tank). POH 7-18

Draining before you fly

Pull the strainer drain knob for about 4 seconds before the first flight of the day and after every refueling. Find water? Keep draining — the strainer, both wing sumps, the fuel line drain plug — because one contaminated point usually means there's more of it still in the system. POH 4-5

🔋 Electrical System Electrical System

28 volts, a single bus bar, and a master switch that's actually two independent switches wearing one rocker. Once you see the split, the rest of the system reasons itself out.

Power source

28-volt DC system: a 60-amp engine-driven alternator, and a 14-amp hour battery (17-amp hour, if installed) tucked on the right forward firewall. Everything runs through one bus bar except the ignition system, the clock and the flight-hour recorder — those three stay alive even with the master switch off. POH 7-20

The two halves of the master switch

BAT (right half) is the one controlling all electrical power. ALT (left half) controls only the alternator. Leave ALT off long enough in flight and the battery drains down far enough to open the battery contactor and lock the alternator out of ever restarting — there's no in-flight undo once that happens. POH 7-20

Protection & lighting

Most circuits sit behind push-to-reset breakers under the engine controls. A handful — battery contactor closing, clock, flight-hour recorder — use fuses by the battery instead, because those three are meant to stay live with the master off. POH 7-22, 7-23

🛞 Landing Gear & Brakes Landing Gear & Brakes

Fixed tricycle gear — nothing retracts, nothing folds — but the steering geometry and the tire/strut numbers are exactly the sort of thing an examiner (and this test) expects you to have cold.

POH 7-8, 7-9, 8-11

Brakes

Single-disc, hydraulically-actuated brake on each main wheel, each with its own master cylinder at the top of the rudder pedals — the left (pilot's) and right (copilot's) pedal sets are interconnected, so either one works the same brakes. POH 7-19

Watch for the warning signs: gradual loss of braking action, noisy or dragging brakes, spongy pedals, excessive pedal travel. If one brake actually fails, use the good one sparingly with opposite rudder to compensate — don't just stand on it.

🕹️ Flight Controls Flight Controls

Conventional three-axis controls, cable-and-pushrod, nothing powered. The flap system is really the only piece with any complexity — it's electric, not the manual lever some pilots expect coming from other trainers.

Trim — easy to get backwards if you're not paying attention

A manually-operated elevator trim tab, worked by a vertical trim wheel: forward rotation trims nose-down, aft rotation trims nose-up. Say it out loud once if you're coming from a different airplane — this is the one place muscle memory from elsewhere can bite you. POH 7-8

Wing flaps

Single-slot flaps, positioned by an electric switch lever with mechanical stops at 10° and 20° — getting past 10° means deliberately sliding the lever sideways to clear that stop. Protected by a 15-amp breaker labeled FLAP. POH 7-9

Control locks

One steel rod locks ailerons and elevator neutral for parking, and it puts a red CONTROL LOCK, REMOVE BEFORE STARTING ENGINE flag directly over the ignition switch — genuinely hard to miss on preflight if it was actually installed. POH 7-14

🧭 Flight Instruments Flight Instruments

Two independent pneumatic systems feed nearly the whole panel: pitot-static for the airspeed/VSI/altimeter trio, engine-driven vacuum for the gyros. Knowing which system feeds which instrument is most of what actually gets tested here.

Pitot-static instruments

Pitot tube under the left wing, static port on the lower-left fuselage. Static pressure alone feeds the airspeed indicator, rate-of-climb indicator, and altimeter. The heated-pitot option runs on its own 15-amp breaker behind a switch labeled PITOT HT. POH 7-25, 7-26

To read pressure altitude off the altimeter (for the true-airspeed ring): momentarily set the barometric scale to 29.92, read the altitude, then put the original setting back before you forget.

Vacuum instruments

An engine-driven vacuum pump feeds the attitude and directional indicators. Desired suction is 4.6 to 5.4 inches of mercury — below that range, stop trusting both gyros. The attitude indicator's bank scale is marked at 10°, 20°, 30°, 60° and 90° each side. The directional indicator precesses over time, so it needs resetting against the magnetic compass before takeoff, and again on a long flight. POH 7-27, 7-28

Stall warning system

Purely pneumatic — an inlet in the left wing's leading edge feeds an air-operated horn as the low-pressure region migrates forward near the stall, sounding 5–10 knots before the actual break. Preflight check: cup a handkerchief over the inlet, apply suction, listen for the horn. POH 7-28

🛠️ Airframe Airframe

All-metal, two-place, high-wing, semimonocoque — every word in that one-line description turns up somewhere in a question, so it's worth being able to actually explain what each of them means, not just recite them.

Semimonocoque means the fuselage's formed sheet-metal bulkheads, stringers and skin all share the structural load together, instead of a steel-tube truss carrying it alone underneath a non-structural skin. The externally-braced wings carry the fuel tanks and use front/rear spars with sheet-metal ribs under one continuous aluminum skin. The empennage is conventional: vertical stabilizer, rudder, horizontal stabilizer, elevator — with the rudder's trim tab ground-adjustable, and the entire right half of the elevator's trailing edge hinged to actually form the elevator trim tab. POH 7-3

In the cabin

Seats come as four-way or six-way adjustable — six-way adds 2 inches of height travel in 1-inch steps. A rear child's seat is available but fixed, no adjustment. The baggage net ties down with six straps. Only the left door gets a key lock. POH 7-10, 7-13

🌀 Propeller Propeller

No governor, no feathering, no constant-speed complexity — a fixed-pitch propeller means RPM is purely a function of throttle and airspeed. Which is exactly why the static-RPM check back in Limitations matters so much: it's the one direct read you get on engine health before you commit to the runway.

McCauley 1A103/TCM6958: two-bladed, fixed-pitch, one-piece forged aluminum alloy, anodized against corrosion, 69 inches in diameter (worn down to 67.5 in is the limit). POH 1-5, 7-17

Small leading-edge nicks near the tips aren't just cosmetic — they create stress concentrations that can grow into cracks, so they get dressed out promptly rather than shrugged off. On gravel, advance the throttle slowly so the airplane is already rolling before RPM builds — that throws stones behind the blades instead of into them. During storage, the prop gets turned by hand through five revolutions every seventh day, and always treated as if the ignition were live, since a bad ground wire on either magneto could genuinely fire the engine. POH 4-14, 8-9, 8-13