Flight Debrief: 6th Lesson

Time this lesson: 1.7 hours
Total Time: 11.4 hours
Landings: 40

So today's weather was much like the previous lesson, strong winds out of the south, sunny skies, and haze. My FI recommended that we stay at Mettetal and work on landings. I had no problem with this, as I wanted to get my "mojo" back after having left remnants of it along runway 6-24 at ARB the other day. The winds were pretty gusty at the beginning of my block time, so my FI and I sat down and went over the course syllabus and checked off areas we had worked on, and talked about what we would be doing next.

Our extended pre-flight discussion allowed for the winds to die down a bit, so we headed out to the plane and prepared to get into the pattern. We ended up flying 10 circuits of left traffic for runway 18, with a new kink added to my technique... noise abatement. The noise abatement procedure for departing to the south calls for a turn to a SE heading of 145 as soon as possible to lower the amount of noise heard by our neighbors to the south of the field. This is no biggy, it just involves turning to the proper heading at about 900 ft, or around 200+ AGL. The only complication is that the early turn away from the runway heading eliminates the crosswind leg, and you must fly a climbing turn to downwind.

The other change we found necessary was to climb at Vx, or best angle, which corresponds to about 65kts. This was necessary, since today was a record setting temperature kind of day, and warmer air is less dense... and provides less lift. There were only three circuits of the pattern where 00Q actually made it up to pattern altitude (1700ft) at or before "abeam the numbers" on the downwind leg!

So what about the approaches!? Well, my FI said I was making my turns in the pattern at consistent locations which is good, and I also managed to get in the habit of re-trimming the plane after each configuration change (flaps, power, pitch). I can remember two of my turns to final being wide, but that was at the beginning, and all the rest were gentle turns that I started earlier on my base leg. The first approach was with full flaps, all the rest after that were with only 30 degrees. It was interesting to note the different pitch attitude that resulted from this small change in flap setting, as well as the extra speed the aircraft carried as a result of the reduced drag compared to hanging all the barn doors out.

I tried many different permutations of power reduction, round out, and flaring and got some good results... though I never seemed to combine all the right elements into one awesome landing (I think this comes with alot more practice). My touchdowns were vastly improved over my previous lesson, as I concentrated intensely on not having "dead feet" right before my wheels hit the tarmac. Focusing on rudder inputs all the way to the point just before the nose gear touches down does wonders for keeping the nose pointed in the right direction. I can think of two or three landings where I still ended up askew of the center line, but nothing that made my FI think "uh oh" <---his words!

Overall I gave myself a score of 6 for one landing (I bounced and recovered correctly), and 7 (out of 10) for 7 of my landings with two 8's where I seemed to get more things right than the others.

Coming up: Emergency procedures, takeoff variations (if the winds ever cooperate), and ground reference maneuvers.