Sunday, June 11, 2017

Flying Lesson #130 - Frustrations With Flying

Well the winds weren't quite so bad today, blowing about 10-15 knots out of 230-240 so a bit of crosswind correction was needed but no wind shear to speak of.

So, I got things going with Ray as the instructor today.

We get up to the hold line and he announced we would do short field landings and takeoffs. So I do a nice short field crosswind takeoff which I'm rather decent at and we start heading around the pattern.

Then we setup for the landing and it's a complete mess as I'm too high so I go around. The next one one sucks rocks with decaying airspeed and he has to push the nose forward as I'm too fixated on the runway and the speed is dropping too quickly, was I having fun yet?

So we taxi back and do it again and I do it ok, still not a perfect short field, we do it three more times and I get ok at it but his technique is to have it on final at 64 knots with a high nose pitch and just control the descent with power which is different form some other instructors techniques of aiming ahead of the touchdown point. Then we have to do an expedited takeoff per the tower and I do a normal takeoff and a normal landing which is fine and another regular takeoff and landing and that's the lesson. Basically everything is great except my landings, most especially my short field landings.

Lots of frustration and while he says I'm doing ok and am really close, I'm about a minute away from deciding on throwing in the towel on this whole thing.

1.6 and 8 landings.

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