Monday, October 10, 2016

Flying Lesson #81 - Crosswind Practice

It was a beautiful day with clear skies.

N73455 was in the shop for the brake problem from Saturday so it was time to fly N757MK.

Winds should have been 8 knots out of 135, meaning we would use Runway 9L.

Initial takeoff was fine, but it was soon apparent that the winds were going to blown stronger than 8 knots and shift around to make life more interesting.

Adding to the fun, the Attitude indicator decided to go on the fritz and was rolling around like a bobble-head. You don't need it for VFR flight, but it is handy when you're getting blown all over the place and helps to keep your turns at the proper amount of degrees. So horizon and turn coordinator it was.

We decided to get some crosswind practice done in the pattern.

Overall, while I was landing a bit flat, it wasn't too bad. Ray thinks I'm just getting ahead of myself procedures-wise and just need to slow down a bit. He figures it should all click for me eventually.

The wind continued to not only pickup but produce some really annoying rollers that kept trying to roll the plane over, and lots of pushes from the wind were experienced. It wasn't that it was a crazy strong crosswind, but it would gust at inopportune times and rollers kept coming out of nowhere to make it not very pleasant in the pattern and rather hard to fly a proper pattern.

After a few landings, Ray called it as it was getting kinda nasty out and not conducive to practice.

That's .9 and 7 landings.

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