This morning was a perfect one for flying.
My normal craft of choice was in the shop due to blowing a tire on landing last night so it was time to try for the first time, N757MK, another one of the flight school's Cessna 172s.
Mike Kilo pre-flighted just fine, and was no problem at all to fly except for a nose gear shimmy that was more annoying the instructor than it did me. Quite a nice plane, though the instrument panel is setup a little differently from N73445 so finding stuff was not as automatic but it was no big deal at all.
Today was more pattern work after our instrument interlude of last Saturday, and many more landings ensued.
We were doing left patterns to Runway 9L as the wind was blowing right down the runway for the most part from 90 degrees.
We had some fun taking off with a line up of aircraft waiting to go, so it was a case of "Follow that Cessna!"
On occasion, we had to length our downwind due to aircraft approaching or taking off, and I got to see a King Air and a Dassault Falcon jet come in for a landing on the parallel runway as we were landing which was kinda neat.
We did touch and goes for each landing and I've pretty much gotten down flying out a nice straight takeoff aligned with the cent of the runway, which is a good thing. I even managed that in some crosswind that came up on occasion.
A bit of an off day for landings for me overall. The landings weren't great, though a few were quite decent and no go-arounds were needed. Mainly, I was typically coming in too high and wasn't quite getting the glide path right. I thus need more practice in getting the right sight picture, which I already knew. I did get in one approach that was absolutely perfect on the glide path which was nice, leading to a perfect landings, now to do more like that.
On the last landing, the tower let us remain on the runway all the way down as the flight school is at the other end, so we carried on down. The nosewheel shimmy annoyed the instructor so he took over and demonstrated how to do a wheelie all the way down the runway, which was a fun way to end the lesson. Then we taxied on back and tied the pane down and Lesson 12 was done.
That's 10 more landings and 1.4 more hours in the log book.
3 comments:
Gotta be getting close to the big day. Can't wait to read that post.
The FBO I worked at in College had a Falcon 10 hangared there. Got to ride in it one day on a maintenance check flight. What a ride!
Older model Cessnas (like mine) have shimmy dampers that can be rebuilt with a cheap kit. Newer ones, you just have to pony up and replace the whole unit. That's likely what they were cheesed about--those things aren't cheap.
juvat: We'll see how it goes and hopefully that day will come. The Falcon was quite the sweet-looking aircraft coming in on final, and that must have been a neat ride.
ML: Are the 172M series like yours with the easy to fix shimmy damper, or do they require replacement of the entire unit? Thankfully it was shimmying well and truly before I had anything to do with it, other than that, and the shimmy didn't bother me, it was a very sweet airplane to fly.
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