Lesson 28: Cancelled – Blue Sky, Cross Winds

Blue Sky - High Winds

The weather was looking so good, nice and hot with blue sky, my one fear was what would the wind do?   It’s something non-pilots find hard to understand, if it looked like “a really nice day” you’ll get quizzed with confused looks as to why you couldn’t go flying.

As a rule in this training, when all you need is altitude, you’ll get low cloud base and zero wind.   When all you want is no wind, you’ll get masses of altitude with high crosswinds 🙁

Such was the case today, 3:30pm, just before setting off for the aero club, the phone rang.   One look at the phone number and I knew “This can’t be good….”

As my lesson goal was to do glide approaches flying solo, with a ~9 knot crosswind, straight across the runway (Crosswind Component = 9 knots).   There was no point coming in.

Good advice to anyone aiming to start learning to fly:  Book more lessons than you want, book more than you can even afford.    The weather is going to cancel about 1/3 of all your lessons at best and at worst will wipe out the whole month.   As today shows, during training you’re after specific weather conditions, in a 2 hour window, the odds on getting the conditions you need, are often slim.

Try again next weekend……

I’ll end this post with a video from someone at the aero club who did get to go flying the day before:

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