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Jerry's 34th Lesson: Spit Three Times....PAO didn't look too busy, we thought maybe we'd work out there. But when we got to the runup area, it became obvious that PAO was _really_ busy. There were five airplanes waiting to take off in front of us. The tower controller barked monotone yet stacatto instructions at airplanes, never letting us get a word in edgewise "You, clear to takeoff, you, position and hold, You, hold short, you, wait for IFR clearance....." So we went to HWD. First landing at 28L was dead nuts perfect. A landing like in fairy tales, a landing to judge other landings by, the kind of landing that I dreamt of for 47 hours of dual. Everything went right; airspeeds, altitudes, attitudes, roundout, flare, that little bump-BUMP, first the tailwheel, then the mains. Him: "Only trouble is, now you have to do all of them this good :-)" Me: "Yeah, RIGHT." Second landing was also a work of art. Another compliment followed. The Russians have a saying: "Tfu-tfu-tfu ne sglaz". Translated, it means ( more or less ) - 'Spit three times, avoid the Evil Eye'. What it really means, is "Don't get cocky, you can still screw up." The controller got a little behind on our runway 28L, and switched us to 28R. Everything fell apart. Not only is 28R shorter than 28L, it starts in a different place, and the pattern altitude is 800 feet instead of 600. Of course, one needs to be able to land anywhere... We came in high, we came in low. We did slips. We did go-rounds. I did one landing that was quite passible except that I dropped us out of the sky a couple feet. Tailwheel first, though. Bonk! But the worst one was when I brought us in low, there was no way we were going to make the runway. I mistakenly chopped the power some 50 feet away from that threshold we weren't going to make. He reached over, applied full power, we made it :-(. Once he called out a go-around because we were running low on runway, and he didn't want to waste time taxiing back. And once I called out a go-round myself because I just didn't like the way the landing was turning out. On the way back to PAO, he told me to "Always fly a nice square pattern, give yourself plenty of time to set things up, take things slow and easy." - Jerry "48.9 Hours" Kaidor |