Both the soft field takeoffs and Short Field Landings need a bit of work.
I met with Marcus and we headed to Linden navigating without map or GPS. Overall I did good and managed to find the railway line even though its starting to get covered from the air by foliage and it was a bit farther north than I had originally thought. Got to Linden and started to setup for a short field landing.
With no headwind, the Archer floats -- a lot. So the first landing wasn't very short so we worked on that.
Managing airspeed is pretty huge for the short field landing as is the height and well everything otherwise you float quite a bit. Of course the next one I tried I came in low and then laded short of my touchdown point. Really shouldn't be this hard. I finally got a couple good ones in but as usual the short fields are just plain frustrating.
The soft field takeoffs were similarly annoying - I had a bad right wing dip tenancy as the plane comes off the runway during the takeoff and I need to first not release too much back-pressure as it comes off but then press a lot more forward. Feh.
Adding to the fun, a few more aircraft were there also flying around and it got rather long as you have to back-taxi on the runway after each landing as the taxiway does not extend to the end of the runway because that would make far too much sense. I got quite good at all the radio calls and was handling that aspect at least quite nicely.
I then navigated by external references back to Pontiac and then was first told to enter a two mile downwind and do a toght downwind and base, I then had the landing clearance cancelled on me and had to extend the downwind quite a bit for traffic and then come back in again with a metric-ton of float on the landing. It was a nice landing mind you, but sure as heck floaty.
1.8 and 8 more landings and still a lot more to do.
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