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Jerry's 25th Lesson: "Just one of those days...."Why oh why did I wake up at 0600 yesterday morning? Whatever the reason, that's what I did. And it definitely wasn't enough sleep. I went down to the airport, sleepy-eyed and ragged out. The sky was nearly cloudless; robins-egg blue. Ow! I grabbed my sunglasses out of the rucksack. Whew, that's better. Preflighted the airplane, we set off for HWD. Have you ever had one of those days when nothing went right? Well, yesterday was mine. I swear, I couldn't have walked and chewed gum at the same time! I'd hold altitude and lose coordination. Or hold coordination and loose altitude. On the way out, we did some more slips. He said, "OK, do one to the right". Huh? Did he want the rudder right and ailerons left, or the other way round? I slipped too fast; when I straightened us out, we were going 100MPH. He said "You need to hold the nose up while you slip. You're slipping because you want to land, right? How you gonna land at 105MPH?" I tried it again, held the "70MPH sight picture", and things worked out. One interesting thing was that in one of the slip directions, the indicated airspeed goes right down to zero, because the pitot tube just wasn't pointing into the airstream anymore. At HWD, the tower controller's voice was high-pitched and tense. She snapped at people over the radio. My CFI: "She sounds so stressed out". Me: "Yeah, well, she sounds like I feel". The first touch&go was really strange: I approached at the usual altitude, the usual airspeed, flared in the usual place... and the airplane just sort of floated down the runway without touching for, oh, about a thousand feet. Finally we touched down. I asked him what had happened, he thought we might have had a bit of a tailwind. After six touch and goes, I said "Hey, it's just not happening for me today. Let's go home". We flew back to PAO, I went home and laid around the rest of the day. - Jerry "35.4 Hours" Kaidor |