Saturday, December 10, 2016

Flying Lesson #93 - Crosswinds in The Cold

A rather large weather system is heading for Michigan and it seemed that everyone wanted to go flying this morning.

I was flying with Ray and first I preflighted N757Mk as it has decent cabin heat. Pre-flighting in the winter is a cold experience. Unfortunately after all that, 757Mk it would not start so me switched over N73455 and I did the preflight on it as well. I like N73455 more anyways even though its cabin heat is about non-existent. During the flight we actually were able to make it snow in the cabin as it cooled our breath to the dewpoint.

There were six planes in the run up area and KPTk switched to dual towers. Since most were going to stay in the pattern we decided we would not do so and headed to Romeo. The cloud cover was low at about 2,600 so we stayed under it at 2,000 and picked up a little ice on the way to Romeo but not very much. The winds were gusting quite a bit with a crosswind so Ray did the first landing and figured it would be challenging but good for me so I did the next two and he liked my landings and thinks I'm doing quite well. I certainly felt a lot more confident and did very nice crosswind landings if I say so myself. Then we headed back to KPTK and started picking up a fair bit more ice that was vidsible on the tires. It was more than we would like so we did the final landing without flaps just in case some had accumulated on the wings.

That's 1.2 and 4 more landings.

I need to schedule a lesson over at Howell and start getting all this stuff figured out.

No comments: