Flying Lesson #126 - Polishing Things Up

Today was a very pleasant day for flying indeed. Sunny, barely a cloud to be seen and the wind pretty much from 280-300 at about 5-10 knots.

I pre-flighted the plane and got everything setup and met Marcus for the lesson. I went over the issues I was having with steep turns and the need to practice more short and soft field landings and that is what we decided to do.

So I got the plane started up and the run-up complete and then we had to wait quite awhile to get a takeoff clearance as everyone else it seemed had also noticed the nice weather.

We finally got a takeoff clearance and headed straight out west with the Tower to call the turn to the northeast for the practice area.

While doing so we got crossed over above and to the right from behind rather closely by a Cirrus that claimed he saw us prior to his doing so, but we're rather doubtful on that score.

Tower is so busy that we get west all the way out of their airspace before we turn northeast.

We then get out to the practice area and after some serious clearing turns due to the sheer volume of traffic we work on the steep turns.

Turns out I was over thinking and over-muscling them and doing too much of an angle too quickly. We got that straightened out, he gave me some good corrections to my technique and after multiple repetitions my steep turns are now rather decent.

The we headed back to Pontiac for some landings. On the first one I was too high and too fast (I'm spotting a trend here that I don't like) so we did a go-round. Then back to it and did a normal landing and then started work on the short field landings. In between we would do short or soft field takeoffs when practicable, and both of those got better as well. I'm now getitng better at reducing the power earlier and getitng the right picture for the short field approach.

By the end of the lesson with his really good instruction, I've kinda sorta figured out the soft field and the short field landings in an Archer, but they do need some more practice. Part of the issue is I'm now flaring a tad too high whereas before I was flaring too low. We may just get to just right short-field-landing-ly.

That's 1.7 and 6 landings.