Flying On Another Nice, Albeit Windy Day

Today the sun was shining, what few clouds there were to see were all high in the sky and the wind while still at 12-15 knots from 210-270 variable was still a lot better than the 40-50 knots of yesterday, flying in which would have been no bueno. Spring was in the air, and it was time for me to be in the air, too.

I flew in N3553M today, and it's a good airplane. I had originally booked N8570F nut they moved me to N5337F, a plane that I don't like overly much as the left seat is rather sunken and you need a cushion to sit properly to fly it, and then sometime this morning they moved me over to N3553M. Musical airplanes, but I ended up with one I quite like.

I decided to fly south today as I only had a 2-hour block and decided to do a bit of fun flying and then some pattern work.

Per the tower, I crossed behind runway 25R and took off from 27L and flew to the south.

I overflew a golf course that was on the shore of one of our many lakes along the way.

Then I overflew West Bloomfield High School.

Then over Orchard Lake St. Mary's with Orchard Lake in the foreground:

Another shot of Orchard Lake, with Apple Island:

Then I overflew the remains of the Pontiac Silverdome. The Silverdome is now gone, replaced by a pit, but the parking lots remain full of VWs and Audis remain.

Then back to Pontiac Airport.

I entered the pattern with a right base for 27R and did a darn nice landing.

Then in to pattern number 2, following a Cessna, again for a nice landing.

As the airspace was getting busy they opened dual towers and had us switch frequencies to the north runway while we were on the ground. I did so and all was well.

On the third pattern I had to do a tower ordered go-around as the Cessna had failed to get off the runway in time. Not a problem.

I put the power in got the carb heat and then got the flaps gently out, sidestepped to the right of the runway and then did a tower requested early crosswind at midfield to the downwind and then was set to be number 1 to land.

A final good landing to finish it off, and I headed back to DCT to put the plane away.

N3553M however didn't want the flight to end and was enjoying herself too much. With the mixture set to the cut-off she still would not shut down put sputtered and the prop kept on turning. One of the DCT supervisors saw it and came over and he was rather surprised as well. Finally had to jigger with the throttle and mixture control a good bit to get it to shut off. Next step would have been turning off the fuel feed to run the engine out of fuel before turning it off, but it decided to cooperate just before we did that. Seems the cable to the mixture control may be getting a touch loose and they immediately took the plane in to maintenance to work on it.

A darn good flight of 1.4 and 3 landings with some excellent crosswind practice on those landings, along with a nice surprise go-round to keep me sharp.