Saturday, December 26, 2015

Flying Lesson #32 Decent Landings

After the mess of Lesson #31 today was much better.

I had Will as my instructor today and was flying N757Mk as 73455 was in the shop for its 100 hour inspection.

I did the preflight and the plane was covered in a light layer of frost, which I scraped off the windshield and leading edge of the wings.

It's funny how planes of the same type and model handle differently. Among other things N757MK has a very pronounced break when you reduce the throttle to 1500, unlike 73455.

So with the wind coming from 070 we were using runway 9L today, with a left pattern for a nice change of pace.

We also got diverted on a pattern to Runway 9R, the nice huge runway, when another plane seemed to be having radio issues and the tower wanted us out of the way in case he tried to land without clearance. Then we got to head back to 9L, and the controller had the occasional instruction to us for modification of the pattern for other traffics, so it was good and kept things interesting.

Overall the landings were markedly better than my last lesson, so I'm either being more assertive, getting better at this, or something.

The flares were good this time, but on occasion I still pulled up a little early for some float, but no major bounces. Overall the touchdowns were pretty darn nice complete with stall horn on landing.

I got some good feedback from Will on some ideas to fix my latest error of having too low an approach.  It seems I'm diving down too much on turning downwind to base, probably from misunderstanding something Sean had said, so with that fixed its much better now but more back pressure in the turn. He also gave me some very good things to look for and some indicators to help with the landings that I had not known about before so that was very good. Ended up doing some nice stable approaches and good landings.

Either I'm getting better or being really inconsistent. Let's hope for the former over the latter. 

That's 1.3 more hours and 11 more landings.

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