While previous lessons have been cancelled due to weather with things such as 30 knot crosswinds or IFR ceilings, lunchtime today offered reasonably clear skies and a reasonable crosswind of around 6-8 knots.
Unfortunately my landings were not happy-making. No bending of the aircraft or anything serious like that, but stable approaches they were not. It didn't help that the crosswind decided to come and go with each approach.
I at least had better altitude and power control on the downwind, but for some reason my base turns and base to final turns were generally off just enough at times. Then when I did those perfectly and had a great approach going, I serpentined in on final by over-correcting for the crosswind. In addition, the flares were weird today, and not just for me. Ground effect seemed all out of sorts for some reason with lots of extra lift. Basically today was I can't win for losing day.
No go-arounds were needed, although I wanted to do one on the last landing as I could see it was sucking but we landed ok but by no means great. Things just were not clicking.
I did have fun watching a Cirrus in a cool-looking silver and purple livery work the pattern, including overtaking us (we had offered to do a long downwind so they could cut in and do their pattern quicker which they appreciated, as they're much faster than a 172).
I then also watched them overshoot some approaches clearly unintentionally so I wasn't the only one clowning things up up there.
We also had a large passenger jet takeoff so we had a wake turbulence warning as we were taking off from a parallel runway. Not bad watching a large jet takeoff in tandem and it was pretty cool to see and fly beside. The sky was full of some assorted nice Falcon jets, a Lear jet, twin Cessnas, single engine Pipers, Cessnas, and a helicopter all coming and going to make for a fun pattern.
On the upside, all of my takeoffs today and especially my cross-wind takeoffs were complimented as being excellent and much better than the average student, so I've got that going for me.
That's 1.0 hours of frustration and 9 more landings in ye olde logbook.
6 comments:
Butch up, Suzie. Everyone has a bad day.
ML: Thanks, I can always count on you for moral support.
Hey pal...I figure I can either affirm and validate your sucky opinion of your performance or I can lie to you and say that you're a special snowflake who deserves a ribbon just for showing up at the airport. Since both of those choices would be doing you a disservice and since ignoring your post would be rude, I figured that some "man advice" would be the best choice. You're no liberal pansy...you can take it.
John Wayne would have said the same thing if he were here today. You know that he would. And I care at least as much as John Wayne would have.
Now get back out there this week-end and show 'em how it's done.
I've been with ML when he slammed and bounced the landing and when he hit a grass strip so easy that you couldn't believe you had touched down. And been through exactly the same type landings on commercial jets. Bad landings happen.
I've been with ML when he slammed and bounced the landing and when he hit a grass strip so easy that you couldn't believe you had touched down. And been through exactly the same type landings on commercial jets. Bad landings happen.
Keep practicing... There ARE going to be bad days...
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