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Drove down to Palo Alto this morning for my lesson - WX looked pretty
bleak. Low clouds, rain, wind... surely it wasn't VFR! My instructor and his airplane were both gone. I waited a while, he came back with another student. "Things are clearer across the Bay". We listened to the ATIS, "Are we VFR?". Nope, I said - ATIS visibility is only 2 miles. He said, "That's funny, the rotating beacon isn't up - no problem, we'll go out SVFR." He called Ground Control, they told us things had changed since the ATIS, we could go out normal VFR. We taxied out, took off - I muffed the takeoff, as usual - this time I let the airplane swerve too far on the runway. Instructor: "You shouldn't need to apply left rudder at all during the takeoff run. All the forces are trying to turn the airplane left. All you need is varying amounts of right rudder." Oh. Sure enough, things cleared off a bit on the other side of the Bay - although getting across the Bay was, *ahem*, "interesting", and we set off to do our turns around a point. Same point as last time, too. This time, he set out to break me once and for all of looking at the panel. He covered the whole thing with a rag. "Look at the point - Look at the nose - look at the point". "No-no, back at the nose...". After five or six turns, we'd lost 200 feet. At one point, he took the plane, said "Don't concentrate so hard, it's supposed to be fun" :-). We flew around for a couple of minutes, I relaxed a bit... then back to that point. Well, I managed to keep my altitude pretty constant... but that wind was just blowing me all over the place. I'll give it hell again on Friday. So how did the rest of you do on your presolo ground reference maneuvers? You probably just went out and did them, no problem, right? - Jerry "10.1 Hours" Kaidor
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