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Jerry's 42nd Lesson: Do you know the way to San Jose?As the title suggests, we went out to San Jose International today to do our touch and goes. Now, San Jose is the largest city in Northern California: It outstripped San Francisco some years ago. Consequently, SJC is a very busy airport, with heavy iron arriving about once a minute. It's a class C airspace, so before letting us go at PAO, the tower got us a non-VFR squawk code from the squawk-code gods. Then they sent us straight over Moffet Naval Air Station at 1500 feet. In order to make it up that high before crossing Moffett, we climbed at Vx. The nose looked way high, reminded me of stall practice. SJC has three runways; 30R, 30L, and 29. 30L is the humungous one; we were relegated to 29, as befit our size and station. The pattern altitude at SJC was really high: 1200 feet, or twice that of Hayward. So each swing around the pattern took a long time. The first couple of times I came in way high. He took the plane and said "Let me show you one". Hah! He came in high, too. First he slipped it during the turn to base; then he slipped it on the turn to final; then he slipped it again on final approach. Me: "Oh, that's how you do it: you just slip all the turns Him: "Well, I got us down, didn't I?" One of the reasons we came in high was that there actually was a tailwind. Apparently, the controllers at SJC don't like to change runways much, so they'll leave it on 29/30 even if there's a small tailwind for a while. The air was bumpy. At one point on downwind we were showing airspeed of 80MPH, engine 2000RPM: just right for staying at pattern altitude. Only thing was, the altimeter was just winding up and up.... The updraft pushed us up some 200 feet before it gave up and left us alone. In general, I'd have to say that SJC is a less than satisfactory place for pattern work. In an hour and a half, we only managed six landings. It didn't help that the controller lost track of us once, and cleared somebody else onto the runway when we were on final. Had that one set up perfectly, too (sigh). - Jerry "59.3 Hours" Kaidor |