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Jerry's 33rd Lesson: PAO at Last!We were going to have a lesson on Monday afternoon, but when I got out to PAO, the wind was twenty knots and gusting. My instructor left the decision to me, and I decided to go for Tuesday morning. "Takeoffs are Optional!". Monday night I didn't get anything like enough sleep; I woke up with a slight sore throat and just a touch of runny nose. Went down to the airport anyway, but once I was there, decided I was in no shape to learn anything, called him and cancelled. The sore throat never really developed into anything, I went to bed at 2100 Tuesday night, so went down to the airport for a lesson this morning at 0900. Still felt kind of washed out, but I figured that adrenaline would kick in once I got in the plane. He said "We're off to Hayward". I responded "What about here? The wind is dead calm, the airport's not too busy..." He agreed, and we set off to do pattern practice right there at PAO. All right! First thing I noticed was that we seemed to be high every time. "Why is that?" He asked.... "Well, there's no wind, and pattern altitude is 200' higher than HWD..." "And you're turning to final too early, which is shortening your path. If you're descending 500 feet per minute, and you cut off 10 seconds, that's almost a hundred feet that you didn't descend, right? Just square your turn to final." I had to fix a bunch of them with slips. None of my slips seemed to turn out quite right, and he took the plane to show me one. Mainly, my problem was not holding the nose in the same sight picture as normal flight. I'd either let it down for a dive, or start pulling it up. This last, of course, is what's Really Bad. "Avoid Spins at 400 feet for Noise Abatement". Some of my landings were really good, "After the First Bounce". It happened over and over again; I'd come in, not flare enough, hit mains first - Boing! - then reflare, with the proper attitude, and a nice tailwheel-first landing. Grrr! He said "You've got to just get that one little bit of the flare - you've got every thing else down". One thing different about PAO is that I had to really manage the plane's energy. I couldn't afford to float thousands of feet down the runway. The optimum thing to do was to flare before reaching the runway threshold. It felt really weird to be flaring the airplane ( e.g. stalling it out ) over the slough! But that was better than coming in a bit high, flaring it out, floating along, and watching the end of that runway get closer.... and closer.... We also did a couple of full-stop taxi-back landings. My problem with these was
Taxiing back to parking, he said "You almost have it. You have everything now except for that laaast little bit of the flare." "Am I going to solo one of these days?" "Sure, it'll be coming right up." All in all, it was a good lesson. I did some stuff well, and got good instruction on stuff that I did less well. And most importantly, got to start working out at our home airport. - Jerry "47.4 Hours" Kaidor |