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Lesson 28: More Landings....I guess I'll make this one short. I just realized, I've been learning to land for more hours than all the other flying stuff put together. Surely the rec.aviation.student public is getting bored? I was hesitant to write yet another "patterns" journal. But today somebody sent me email telling me that they enjoyed the things, so I decided to fly the text editor a bit after all. It was severe clear Saturday morning, except for a bit of haze around the edge of the bay area. I've learned that haze is a Good Thing for my present purposes: haze means that we won't get bounced around in the air going out, and the wind will be within reason once we get there. PAO was really hopping; planes lined up at the runup area like shoppers at the supermarket. My instructor remarked glumly: "It seems to get worse every year". We got across the Bay, and HWD was busy too. Had to be something going on: landing ahead of us were a Stearman, then a Luscombe, then a Taylorcraft. We did the usual 15 touch & goes. He told me to concentrate on flying the plane, he'd take care of looking for traffic. My landings were After 23 hours of touch & goes, I nailed the required speeds almost without thinking, although I still tended to bring the nose a just skosh too high on the turn to base. And I could judge pretty well whether we were too high or too low coming in on final, and apply the appropriate correction, mostly either more less power. I did tend to start my flare a bit early, and to start my turn to final early, too. Hmm, that's interesting: those are both turns. I was able to use energetic and appropriate rudder and aileron to keep the airplane pointed straight down the runway during final approach, although sometimes the wind would change as we got closer to the ground, the airplane would drift to the side, and I'd have to re-coordinate, do a quick S-turn to get centered, and then re-uncoordinate in the wind correction again. Try as I might, I couldn't stop the damned airplane from sidling sideways across the runway during the flare. Some were better, some worse than others. And once we were on the ground: he'd topped up the brake hydraulics; now my feet applied brake, even with heels on the floor! OK, no problem; just move the heels back a bit. Takeoffs, on the other hand, were a piece of cake. I'd learned to let the yoke come forward when we came up to speed, feel the tail come up, feel the airplane getting just a teensiest bit buoyant, and then give the yoke the smallest pull, and the plane would disengage itself from the ground with silky smoothness. I'd even learned to hold strong aileron wind compensation at the beginning of the takeoff roll, gradually lessening it as the craft picked up speed. After the fifteenth T&G, we made tracks back to PAO. I looked back as we left: there were three airplanes on short final. Hey, wait a second, there's only two runways! We didn't stick around to watch, we had places to go, things to do. I guess everything turned out OK, didn't hear anything on the evening news :-). I did almost the whole landing at PAO, feeling his feet on the rudder pedals only deep into the flare. ( Little tiny, windy runway they got there; not much room to play with ) I even got to do the braking up to the taxiway. Didn't make the first turnoff like he always does; but I did make the second one. We were met back at the parking space by another student, Steve. Steve's a bit further along than me; ready to solo, but just waiting for his medical to come through. And he has a few hours less than me. Oh well. Instead of another lesson on Sunday, I gave the day to my family. Well, sort of. There was a classic-cars/classic-airplanes show out at Half Moon Bay airport (HMB). Traffic crawled all the way out to the coast; it took an hour to get there. I couldn't help thinking of the 10 minutes it would have taken in the C120 :-). Pretty good show: they were selling DC3 rides, there were a bunch of C140's, Luscombes, Aeroncas ( the kind of stuff I could afford some day ) as well as stuff I'll never be able to afford, like Cessna 195's ( drooool ). - Jerry "40.1 Hours" Kaidor |