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Jerry's 59th Lesson: Short Field Controlled CrashesTook a long lunch at work today, drove out to SJC for a lesson. It had been a week since the last one. It was sunny and hot at SJC. The days plan was to do short-field landings and takeoffs. First he did one to show me. There was an imaginary 50-foot tree right in front of the threshold. Our job was to clear the tree with height to spare, and then drop down right after it, stopping the plane in a minimum distance. The way to accomplish this was to come in way high, extra slow, full flaps, with extra power ( to keep us in the air in spite of approaching extra slow ). Then once over the "tree" we'd pull the power, lower the nose, the airplane should come down like a ton of bricks. A quick flare so it doesn't crash, and hard braking so as not to fall down the imaginary cliff at the other end of the runway. The first thing I noticed about this landing technique was that the sight pictures were all screwed up. Basically, on base and final, it looked like we were landing on a "runway" up in the air. And the nose was higher than usual because of the lower approach speed. The exciting part was after passing the "tree" - then you pull the power and the airplane just drops like a rock. Well, maybe not that fast, but pretty fast. There sure wasn't much time to judge my flare! A couple of times I came in wayyyyy high, and I just had to pull power back up on long final, even slip to get down. I wonder if those count as real "short field landings"? The tower guy was handling two runways at once, ours and another - on a different frequency. This was a constant annoyance, because I could hear him talking to people, but I couldn't hear their answers. I've gotten used to listening to the radio chatter in the environment, thinking in the back of my mind - "yeah, he's over there, that other guy's over here - and listening to the give and take - "tower-airplane-tower-airplane". Just hearing "tower-tower-tower" bugged me a bit until I figured out what was going on. Naturally, the short-field landings were complemented by short-field takeoffs - you stomp on the brakes, rev the engine up, then let go of the brakes, and take off with 20 degrees of flaps. Climb out at 55MPH - good LORD the nose was high - and lower the nose to Vy at 150 feet. I was not able to get the tail up before the airplane started moving - what a disappointment :-). One good thing this time - at 7 hours with the new instructor, the downwind checks are coming easier - I don't have to struggle as much remembering what to do, where to touch - and DONT FORGET TO FLY THE PLANE! High-speed taxi continues to be a problem. Especially when I have to brake. Swerve! NOT SO MUCH RUDDER, JERRY! Going back to parking, he had me recenter the trim while I taxied. The trim wheel is between the seats, and the indicator is buried down in there, hard to see without bending over and looking down in it. So it was flip-flip; take a quick peek down there - taxi the plane - peek down. I managed it by using real quick peeks. After the trim wheel was in place, I put the remaining taxi time to good use by practicing raising and lowering the flaps handle. Waste not, want not.... Twice my instructor mentioned a "second supervised solo", and some kind of signoff for "unsupervised solo flights". - Jerry "77.9 hours" Kaidor |