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Jerry's 38th Lesson: Sunday, May 19thToday, our California weather finally cleared up completely. The sky was robins-egg blue with just a few small puffy clouds. We went out to Hayward and did our 15 circuits. The turbulence at HWD was the worst I've ever seen. It just kept knocking us around. Worst of all, it was turbulent right down at ground level. Once, in the middle of the flare, the wind knocked the nose down. He admonished me: "Don't drop the nose in the flare!". I replied aggrievedly: "That wasn't me!". I kept bringing her in slow, reflexively pulling up the nose before the flare. With the lower speed, the flare itself was highly abbreviated. After the Nth one like that, he took the airplane, gave me a lecture. I said "OK, you show me a good one". He took it through the pattern once - and his was as bad as mine! He let the airspeed build up to 80MPH on the turn to final - brought us in short before the runway threshold and had to add power to float us to the beginning of the runway ( well, that's a useful skill...), and worse of all, touched us down helplessly sliding sideways. I could feel the ship weaving sideways as he fought to get her under control. Me: "Well that made me feel better about my landings". Him: "Well, I could show you a really bad one...." Me: "That's all right...." On that last one, he told me to "make it the worst landing ever" ( We'd discussed that Russian proverb - this was the Pattern equivalent of "break a leg" ). I responded that I'd dive at the runway at 90MPH, porpoise us up and down fifty feet, and land going 10MPH *sideways*....we both had a good laugh. That landing, BTW was pretty good. Back at PAO, I did the landing. It was OK, if not exactly stellar. I think it was a one-bouncer. It's getting hard to remember individual landings - kind of like remembering what you had for breakfast last Thursday. Not that it's boring - every landing is different. I've a feeling that landings will remain interesting even when all the rest of flying has become humdrum. The logbook shows 299 of them.... We made plans for the next lesson: I gave him the choice of early morning calm or late afternoon winds. He decided on the winds. Either my landing skills are progressing well, or he just doesn't want to get up in the morning :-). - Jerry "54.2 Hours" Kaidor |