Saturday, June 11, 2016

Flying Lesson #55 - The Long And The Short On Landings

Today's lesson began with Ray announcing that we would be doing more performance landings - no flap forward slips to land and short field landings.

Another instructor still had the plane out so we started a bit later, I did the preflight and called for fuel, then added some oil and all was well.

Taxiing to the run up area we had the fun of being cut off by an idiot in a Mooney. The pilot who didn't give way as instructed by the tower and then she also blocked us from getting into the run up area as she failed to pull into it far enough and decided to stop and copy an IFR clearance preventing us from getting into the box at all especially with other planes around. Nice.

Ray was un-amused and had us do a run-up where we were, announce to the tower that we were ready to go and line up on the runway hold line so the Mooney could cut us off any farther. Mooney was also clueless in listening to the tower as well so she got a bit of a short talking to. We got to takeoff first and then she was thankfully off and out of the area. The area was quite busy today so they went to twin towers to control the field.

My patterns are getting nicer and we started by doing no flap forward slip to landings. A bit of a wind was gusting form the right making it a bit more challenging.

Overall I'm doing better with them, still not 100% sure I'm ready to do them on my own solo even though I did a couple without Ray touching the controls at all. We also had one where I had it perfectly setup and a strong gust of wind started to try and flip us so we got out of the slip pronto.

Then we did short field landings. I'm going to need more work on these to fully get them. While I get the theory the practice is harder than it looks.

Airspeed is king on a short field landings - you need to hold it at 61 knots on final and then glide it past your aiming point to the touchdown point.

By the end of the lesson I was doing some acceptable ones but more practice is needed.

Also the sunglasses worked out perfectly - I could see all the instruments perfectly clearly and see outside in the bright sun with no problems! This made for a,lot happier throttle adjustments and a better sight picture to boot.

That's 1.0 hours of flying and 8 landings, and if the weather is good I'm going up again tomorrow to get more practice in.

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