High Performance Endorsement And Dakota Checkout Achieved

So yesterday, after the debacle of the trial,  I headed off to the airport, preflighted the plane,  and met up with Mike.

I got to play with the GFC 500 autopilot  and put it in Take Off/Go Around mode and esenetially pre loaded the route and once we hit 800 feet afdter taking off form pontiac and being cleared on course, I hit the autopilot button and the plane got on course and climbed at 500 fpm to the selected altitude.  Piece of cake.

We again headed to Lapeer so as we neared Lapeer I put the autopilot ion heading mode and by adjusting the heading got it ready to enter the downwind and descended via the vertical speed feature to pattern altitude.  Piece of cake and I was right where I needed to be.  I can get used to this.  Then I disconnected the autopilot, entered the downwind and got to work on landings.

The landings and some pattern work were even better than those I did on Monday. I was nailing the speeds and settings. Pretty much had the place to ourselves and I got a lot of good practice in - short field landings and takeoffs, soft field landings and takeoffs and regular ones as well. Lot of good practice and I was making some smooth landings with great airspeed control.

Then it was getting dark and we headed back to Pontiac and I handled it via autopilot as well.

There were some unwanted visitors at Pontiac airport - a flock of Geese had decided to land between the runways and migrate around willy-nilly which led to some issues.

We first were told to enter a right base for Runway 27R but got changed to 27L due to Geese threatening runway incursions on 27R.

Did a landing, then stayed in the pattern and did a couple more on 27L.  By then it was getting rather dark but wasn't an hour past sunset so I couldn't use them as credit for night landings, but in reality they were at night so good practice indeed.

Then for the last landing we switched to 27R, I greased it in perfectly and taxi'd back to the hangar and shut the plane down.

Mike then endorsed my logbook with the high performance endorsement and let the club secretary know that I was now fully checked out on the aircraft.

That's 1.8, 9 landings, and the high performance endorsement in the logbook!