Friday, September 23, 2016

Flying Lesson #77 - Short Field Fun

For certain degrees of fun - about 40 degrees of flaps worth of fun - that is.

So today was to get up and shake off some of the mess from yesterday.

Again nice calm stable air and we departed off Runway 9L and from the downwind headed west to Brighton.

Brighton (45G) is a pretty short strip with obstacles at both ends. At 3,120 feet by 24 feet wide it appears as quite the short and narrow strip, not to mention a quite displaced threshold. Yes there were 50 foot plus real obstacles on both ends. We used Runway 4 as the winds were calm.

Overall I did pretty good, the first approach and landing wasn't great but they got better as the practice went on.

I did short field takeoffs and this strip pretty much needed it. For the last takeoff however, Ray had me do a soft field takeoff, which I did pretty well. We then headed back to Pontiac.

By the time the lesson was done the cloud layer had started dropping around Pontiac, and fast. We were almost IFR inbound to Pontiac at Pattern altitude and had lots of fun trying to find a Cirrus that was similarly inbound. We found the Cirrus and after it overtook us we followed it in and did a fine landing and that was that. The field was MVFR when we landed and went IFR within 20 minutes after we landed and the cloud layer there is now around 700 feet.

1.3 and 8 more landings.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Short field is good exercise, but remember to add in PA, especially if one is flying south of the Mason Dixon line. Temps run the PA up in a hurry!

Murphy's Law said...

3100 feet is NOT a short strip. 1800 feet is a short strip, esp. on a hot day. Lotta 1800ft strips out there.