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Jerry's Thirty-Seventh Lesson: Saturday 5/18It was a wet, drippy week here in California. I'd had a lesson scheduled for Thursday morning. I woke up, looked out the window, and called my CFI: "Looks pretty wet out there" "Yeah, I was thinking the same thing" "Why don't we just do it Saturday?" So here I was, rolling out to PAO at ten-thirty this morning. It was cloudy and warm out; the kind of day when you can get a sunburn and never see the sun. When I got there, the Cessna was sitting in its parking spot, and my instructor was waiting for me. I threw my knapsack into the baggage compartment, and started doing the preflight. There was a new item laying on the baggage shelf; a curved piece of gray plastic with a strap on one side. "What's that?" "Uh, that's called a 'hood'. You'll be seeing it soon enough." "Looking forward to it!" We buzzed off to Hayward for the customary 15 touch & goes. The air was bumpy, the winds were squirrely. We'd get knocked all around as we came down. The wind would slap us from the side....*bap* and the Cessna would lean wayyyyy over. Most of my landings were pretty good. Well, there was that one where I dropped us out of the sky from four feet or so. And there was that other one where we bounced so high that I decided to go 'round, hit full throttle. "DONT DO THAT! We were really down, we didn't have enough speed to go around, the airplane was totally stalled out. Next time if you want to go around, decide further up front."
Click-click-click.
( That was the sound of Jerry's solo ratcheting farther away.... )
At one point, they switched us to 28R, the smaller runway, the one without VASI. I did well. That's good practice, landing without VASI. On short final, back at PAO, he remarked, "That's a really stiff crosswind." I could see his fingers nervously inching toward the yoke. I said, "Why don't you take it - show me a wheel landing". After we were down, I said "Well, if I was solo, and the winds were this extreme, I guess I could always just go back to Hayward" He answered, "Well, you'll be able to land in this wind. We'll do some crosswind landings practice before solo. But if you decided to go to HWD instead for safety, I'd never fault you on it." - Jerry "52.8 Hours" Kaidor |