Thursday, September 01, 2016

Flying Lessons 72 and 73 With Winds, Winds, and More Winds

Lesson 72 took place last week. Another CFI who is thinking to come back and teach there asked to come along and I had no problem with her in the back seat. She said I did quite well.

It was Pattern work in gusting conditions - we did no flap slips to land, short and soft field landings and even a soft field takeoff in quite gusting conditions. Lots of wind correction and conditions that I probably wouldn't have flown solo in. It went quite well.

That was 1 hour and 8 landings.

Lesson 73 took place this morning with a cloud layer just above the legal limits that was at least lifting as the lesson went on.

Ray and I headed out to find enough altitude for some maneuvers and didn't quite get enough so we decided to do ground reference maneuvers. I did a decent turn around a point, S-turn across a road, which for some reason always sucks for me but this one was about halfway decent, and a rectangular pattern which was not bad.

Then for fun Ray showed me an Eights on Pylons and a Chandelle, which was quite cool.

Then back to Pontiac. Here I am expecting a normal crosswind landing and Ray announces it will be a no flap slip to land with the wind almost directly crosswind from 350 at 12 knots. Right aileron into the wind, left rudder and down we went. I needed to be a lot looser on the controls as I was bulldogging the landing too much. I got it down but need to do better. 1.4 Hours and 1 landing.