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Jerry's 40th Lesson: Now for something Completely DifferentGot out to PAO at 0845 local time for my 0900 lesson. After the last lesson and its high afternoon winds, we were hoping for some lower ones early in the morning. I preflighted the aircraft, he arrived, we got going. "Make this one a _left_ Dumbarton departure" "Oh, where are we going?" "Out to the coast to do some airwork..." We went out to the Pacific coast. It'd been 40 hours of continuous landings since I'd been out there. We did steep turns, turns around a point, emergency engine-outs. On the way out, he hit me with one of those "Now I want you to look up something on the chart" thingies. Crinkly paper all over the cockpit! I successfully unfolded the thing and found the requested information without changing our attitude ( we were climbing ) or even stopping my scan for traffic. But there's a lot to be said for doing chart work on the ground as much as possible. We did a couple of those. Then we did steep turns. After 40 hours of landing practice, these were easy. I'm not convinced that a single 90-degree clearing turn gives me full 360 degrees of visibility, though. Then we did stalls. The power-off ones were completely trivial: I just pretended to flare for a landing. The power-on ones were easy too. Then turns around a point. Still need some practice on these, although they were a lot easier than back then at eight hours when I learned them the first time. There was *lots* of wind out there today; I almost had to do a reverse bank on the upwind side of the point. We also did a couple emergency engine-outs; I need to review the "chant", but finding a field and aiming for it was easy, thanks to all the practice landing on real airports. I tend to think there's not much use trying to learn to land in a field until you've already learned to land on a runway, and know what a glide angle looks like.... Coming back over the hills, the Bay Area looked really different than it had 40 hours ago. For one thing, the airport immediately jumped into view. When we came into PAO, there was a crosswind from the right. Whereas 99 percent of all the other landings I ever did were in a crosswind from the *left*. That's just how the weather here in the Bay Area usually works out. He had me put in a crab correction down to about 50 feet, and then kick it out and do a slip. I slipped the wrong way for a moment, and the runway slid *thataway* :-(. He took the plane and did the landing. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, it would have been nice to have done three or four trips round the pattern, to gain the unique experience of a right crosswind. - Jerry "56.5 Hours" Kaidor |