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Jerry's 61st Lesson:This weekend brought an unaccustomed luxury - two lessons in as many days! The plan was to stay in the pattern at SJC, do some more short-field landings, then soft field, and maybe even some wheel landings. I got out to the airport just a teensy bit late - I'd pulled another old car out of my stable, and had had to "preflight" the damned thing before setting out. Before we started, my instructor saw a plane almost flip in wake turbulence. They were crossing the field at altitude and went through a bigjet wake. Instructor critiqued my radio style. Really gotta get my ducks in a row before pushing that mike button! They'd faked me out by using the opposite active runway - "Uh, One-One, that's the other end of Two-Niner, right?" Almost went onto the active without talking to the tower. :-( Major, MAJOR brain fart! Instructor said "What do you think you're doing?". Ooops. Probably my worst mistake of the whole lesson. Well, of the whole week. On the first short-field takeoff, I did something I'd been promising myself to remember since the last lesson; I immediately and positively rotated the airplane to 55MPH on leaving the ground. Even if the nose did look alarmingly high. He was happy about that. He hit me with an engine out on downwind. "No, you can't have the power!". I trimmed for best glide, turned right toward the field. Well, I had way too much altitude for a straight-in approach, so I curved out a bit and turned back toward the field, did a slip - "I really don't like doing slips this low" - got out of the slip, did an OK no-flaps landing, got heartily congratulated for my effort. Now we did another sort of landing: "soft-field". My first soft-field landing was one of those greasers like you read about in books, the kind that make the whole thing worth while. The rest of them were more the normal student kind, just so I wouldn't get cocky. Whomp-WHOMP! ( Oh, darn ) Soft-field takeoffs were interesting. For the first time, the airplane seemed fast - he took off at the absolute minimum possible airspeed, we skimmed along a few feet off the ground ( boy, that runway was going by fast! ) and assumed a climb as soon as we reached Vy. Mine wasn't nearly as nice as his. First, I hopped the airplane down the runway ...sort of almost taking off but not quite ( boingie-boingie-boingie ) ... then when I finally left the ground, I overshot the proper "ground effect" altitude and skimmed along MANY feet above the ground. Duhhhh... Groun' Aeffeck? We doan need no steenkin groun' aeffeck! :-) - Jerry "79.8 Hours" Kaidor |