Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Flying Lesson #112 - Round And Round The Pattern We Go

So today I had a lesson with the chief instructor at the flight school. A little intimidating, but hey, at least the sky was finally clear enough to fly even with a 8-10 knot direct crosswind.

I did the preflight and all was well, started it up, did the long taxi down to Runway 9L and got cleared to takeoff.

We did patterns and he was pretty picky about what he wanted and how I did things, which is good, and we worked on some areas where I was doing things not quite right to their spec, some of which is clearly due to previous instruction I had received. I'm now getting better at understanding reference points and doing a fair bit better at it.

Overall my landings were good, even as I dislike the 9L side of the field, but the 9L side didn't bother me too much this time. We had some fun in having to do a go round when another plane didn't clear off the runway and got to do intersection takeoffs (my first time getitng an intersection controller instruction - it led to some cool spacing and I think he was just having fun). We also got to land and takeoff on 9R, the big boy's fun runway. In addition we had to be cautious about wake turbulence from multiple Citation and LEar jets coming and going, and had a little rain wash the plane.

Apparently my procedures are very good, and my radio work is excellent, I just need to work on the overall reference and "feel" aspect of flying. So overall a productive lesson that increased my understanding and skills in some ways no idea if this actually gets me any closer or if I'm just spinning my hobbs meter.

1.6 and 8 more landings.

Oh, and for those keeping score at home, today I just hit exactly four, yes, 4, times the minimum hours, right on the nose, required to get a private pilot's license.

2 comments:

juvat said...

I wasn't going to say anything about that....But I was wondering.

Aaron said...

Yep, I'm wondering about it myself.