Finally Some Solo Time

Through a coincidence of weather, workload, and aircraft availability, I hopped over to the field to fly a few circles around the pattern this afternoon. It's getting to be like skiing: when the weather's right, you just have to go (and be lucky enough to have a job that allows such flexibility).

Not much to report, since the whole idea was based around the fact that there was no wind, and with my recent crosswind challenges, it makes for easy landings...so they should have all been flawless, right? Yeah...

Out of a total of 9 approaches, I had a handful of near-perfect touchdowns, and just as I was thinking I'd finally gotten a handle on things, I didn't. I was coming down just a little fast, added a bit of power, but pulled back just a bit too much. I settled down too hard, and began porpoising, the classic error during landing practice. It only took two more bounces to know that I had to put a stop to things, power up, flaps up, and back up to try again. The next approach looked good, but I had tightened it up to squeeze in between an arriving and another departing aircraft. I ended up too high, too fast, and just went around.

The final approach also was just a bit fast, which I have identified as my biggest error through the whole training so far, but it worked out all right, and I made another smooth touchdown.

The experts discourage so many touch-and-goes, since it starts to get pretty old, and you should be working on a wide variety of tasks. But for me, landings pretty much are my weakest point, so I like to have the extra practice. I also need to simply build up some solo hours, since I'm now at about 20 hours -- technically halfway to the "end".

As it was, it was an hour well spent, because I could have easily handled a bit of crosswind, but it was a good confidence-builder to be able to settle the plane down with barely a squeak on a couple of those landings. That's a good feeling.