Briefing
G-SHWK
Take off, turn, descend, land…….flaps up, full throttle and repeat.
After a shocking last lesson in cross wind my notes clearly said we’d had some fun in crosswind.
Back flying with my ‘regular’ flight instructor (more hours with her than anyone else, but I’ve had seven instructors to date!). We’d take G-SHWK up and see how the gods of aviation felt like playing it today.
Circuits
One general improvement to report, I no longer seem to have a map or a smiley face covering up all the instruments.
I’m not going to even attempt to remember every circuit from this lesson, it’s a blur in a mad run of lessons in May (the weather turned for the better and so I was flying faster than I could stop to write it all down).
A theme of nice circuits, really nice approaches and hard landings is occurring.
There’s no way I could ever put it into words for someone else to truly appreciate unless they’ve seen it first hand, but the last 50-60ft just felt too fast. There’s a sort of ‘elbow stop rest’ and I keep finding myself pulling the control column back to this point and no further, which ultimately seems to result in landing “flat” rather than with a decent flare. I’m not sure if it’s just this, a subconscious fear of ballooning (results in having to go-around) or something else going wrong.
The quest to try and figure out what I did on the first circuit lesson that was so much better just continues – oh that isn’t to say what is going wrong isn’t being explained to me. Unfortunately if you could just read the book and then put the words into actions, learning how to fly would be a lot easier 🙂
Circuits were mixed up with a few practice emergencies and go-arounds.
Another Chance to Land on the Grass
The lesson ended with Air Traffic radioing in that runway 23 had been closed for inspection and could we land on 23 Grass?
……….we could give it a go 🙂