Flying Lesson #66 - The Wind Gets Its Kicks On Lesson 66

This morning when I woke up it was VFR, and by the time I got to the airport it had become MVFR with cloud layer that finally moved above pattern level in time for the flight.

While the cloud layer was low, the wind sure as heck was not. Coming from around 280-300 and then to 330 at 10 knots moving up past 13 knots plus it soon started gusting more and we got low level wind shear just to make stuff interesting.

Perhaps a little too interesting.

I started off the flight in 757MK with a soft field takeoff, which is always fun. I still need to add a bit more finesse but it's coming along.

Then I did a soft field landing with crosswind correction and we did another soft field takeoff on the go which was better than the first one.

Next came a bunch of short field landings and the wind decided to do its best to kick me all over the place on final - massive sudden drops and gusts that were no fun at all. Not very confidence inspiring getting one's tail kicked around the sky like that. I sucked at picking an aiming point given the conditions. Had I been alone in the plane I would have done a go-round on at least one if not two of the landings, especially on one approach when the gusts and wind shift did its best to both drop the plane out of the sky and flip the plane simultaneously on final and a stable approach wasn't in the cards. Ray got it back to stable and I got the landings in ok.

We did do one go round as another plane started overtaking and cutting inside of us as we turned base to final, which added to the enjoyment of the flight.

Takeoffs were getting similarly interesting and I had to reduce my climb angle to compensate for sudden losses of wind complete with a right crosswind gusts on climb out.

Ray said given the conditions I handled it as well as he could expect any student to do and he was calling it as it was getting too frisky. Condiitons were certoanly right on the dge and the flight was more to give experience to draw on when faced with difficult condiitons.

So we landed and then taxied over to the FBO to pickup another of the school's planes. 755PR out of the shop and we taxied in order back. Kinda fun, the radio call was 755PR and company taxi on bravo to Runway 18 to Delta, and then to the flight school to shut down.

That's .8 and 6 landings and one heck of a rough lesson.