Flying Lesson #90 - Gusting Winds Of November

Since I already had a lesson booked with Ray at Flight 101 I figured I'd go with it.

This would be a long lunch type lesson with some practicing for the checkride to come - maybe, eventually, someday, yeah.

Winds were gusting first around 8 knots at 200 then increasing to 12 knots at 200 then settling on around 1618 knots at 170 to 180. Lot of nasty rollers and other bits of fun.

I did 3 very good crosswind landings at KPTK and felt quite happy with myself. Ray seemed impressed as well. I guess that lesson with Don paid off.

Then we headed out to the northeast do some maneuvers and I hadn't done those in quite awhile.

Starting off with steep turns, which are a personal fave of mine now, I did them quite well.

Then on to the FAA's new definition of slow flight which does take some getting used to, and I did climbs, descents and turns in slow flight.

Then on to power off stalls and I was overly aggressive in breaking the stall on the initial try so we worked on that and I simply relaxed the back-pressure rather than forcibly pitching down.

Power on stalls were next and it was extremely hard to get it to a safe break in that configuration without standing the plane on its tail, so we tabled those for another day.

Then we did an emergency engine out and I sucked at that, having not done it in about a year or so. In short I didn't keep it at VGlide which would be a fail. I then did it again with better results locking in the airspeed but need practice estimating the whole gliding distance aspect so I don't overshoot the chosen field. It needs some work.

then we headed back and I did a cross-wind soft field landing which was ok but sporty with the way the winds were gusting and blowing. Then we asked for runway 18 as the winds were 19 knots at 180 which is one heckuva direct crosswind using 27R.

We got permission to do so, and I did an overall ok short field but messed up the ending with a sudden crosswind that messed things up. Then Pontiac got too traffic-y, lots and lots of planes coming and going all over the place, and we had to do a go-round on the next final as a helicopter had decided to sit on 18 and hadn't cleared it in time for us. Then we did one more short field on 18 and that was that. I need to work on the short field landings more.

Overall I'd say that one flight with Don had a salutary effect on my landings and is getting me back on track. I figure I'll take another lesson with him soon.

That's 2.5 hours and 10 landings.