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Jerry's 60th Lesson - More short fieldNot really much to tell this time. This morning we took off from SJC and went to South County to practice our short field landings. South County is an uncontrolled airport about XX miles south of San Jose. It was a really beautiful flying day - absolutely Severe Clear - not even any haze obscuring the city. Going out to the field, I got some practice flying to magnetic headings and VOR radials. The compass work is starting to come a little easier now - turning the tail around the compass didn't seem quite so unnatural. One strange thing - from several miles out, and 3500 feet, the field was easily visible. It stood out like a big square brown sore thumb. Then when we got closer; really, almost in the pattern, it just - sort of - *disappeared* - into all the other stuff on the ground. Funny the tricks your eyes can play. I finally started to get comfortable with uncontrolled radio procedures -
And, of course, listen to everybody else's self-announcements, as well as the self-announcements for other uncontrolled airports in the area... This time, I did the base legs at 60MPH and approached at 55. You really have to choke the yoke to approach at 55. In fact, I ran out of trim, and had to hold airspeed by pulling on the yoke. The first landing was really satisfying; we made the first taxiway. In general, I think I was doing better at short-field than during the last lesson. Well, there was one pretty bad one, with too much airspeed on short final, flare a bit too hard, and we ballooned ... sure didn't make the first taxiway on that one. "You can't hit the brakes until the wheels are on the ground". And speaking of brakes, during this lesson I was, for the first time ever, able to apply heavy brakes without having the machine swerve all over the runway. YES! The landings were all full-stop, but that wasn't so bad, because it's pretty fast to taxi back from the first taxiway. The last landing at South County was especially interesting. He pointed at a freeway interchange just north of the field - "I want you to be at least 500 feet up when you pass over that overpass. Then you can come down further". Now, that overpass wasn't all _that_ far from the field. And 500 feet is a long way. But I managed it, somewhat to my own surprise. Then we headed back up to San Jose. The adventure wasn't quite over, though. We landed once at Reid-Hillview airport before going home. Reid-Hillview has been a bone of contention between the local aviation community and the City of San Jose for many years. The City has been trying to shut it down, and the GA folks have been resisting. It didn't help when somebody landed on the Macy's some years ago. You know, the one on the approach to runway Three-zero. We took great care to land on the airport instead of the Macy's. We took off from Reid-Hillview and called SJC on the climbout. They told us to head right to the field, cross midfield at 1500 or higher, and swing back around to downwind. This last was interesting - we wound up in the pattern, abeam the tower as usual, but 600 feet above TPA. A large rate of descent was called for :-). After landing, my teacher congratulated me on a job well done, or at least not screwing up too bad :-). We taxied back to parking, buttoned up the airplane, and went into his office to do some book work. There, we sat together and did some flight planning for our upcoming dual cross-country. We drew lines on charts, played with whizz wheels, filled out navigation forms, and discussed simplifying assumptions:
I had practiced the time-distance functions of the E6B, and the wind-triangle ones too, so that was no problem. On the other hand, I decided I really need work on the Pressure-density-AirSpeed stuff. - Jerry "79.2 Hours" Kaidor |