hey, you skipped a day!

This past Friday had just plain rotten weather. There were a series of storms coming through, and I'd hoped that my scheduled lesson would end up between a warm and cold front. It more or less did, but with the ceiling at 600 feet the whole time, I was going nowhere.

I spent the day riding around with Tim, refueling an Angel Care plane, tying down a loose plane on the field (tail number omitted to spare the guilty ;-}), and hoping for a weather change that didn't come.

I rescheduled for Monday (today) and then for the following Friday, and I'm now planning to do two lessons every week so that I at least have a back-up in case of foul weather. It seems to be working out better, as today's weather (clear blue skies, wind 270 at 7kts) was perfect.

Since the weather was perfect, there was a lot of traffic. The lesson started a little late because there was a photography flight ahead of me, so I took my time doing pre-flight.

Once I got up, several guys were up doing touch-and-goes, and there was a good bit of extra traffic (including a helicopter) mixed in for good measure. It's been quite a while since I was last up, so my first two landings were awful as expected. I had two that were bad enough that I just pushed in the throttle and went around rather than trying to fix them up. I've got plenty of time to do it right, so there's no reason to fight a bad approach.

But I got better -- ten landings total -- and even had one that was nearly perfect.

I had to vary the pattern a bit -- not just for the wind, but also because of the conflicting traffic. I feel like I need more practice spotting the traffic, especially when it's dark-colored and blends in well with the autumn New England ground cover.

I'm doing better on the base-to-final in terms of not letting the plane bank over on me. I need to get a little more consistent with airspeed, as I sometimes let the nose drop and end up going faster than I want to be, and I still round out too high, partly as a result of being fast.

Posted at 03:40PM Oct 22, 2007 by carlson in Aviation  |  Comments[3]