Wild Card

That's what today was....if the winds were good, another bit of soloing....if the winds were up too much, a day of "under the hood" practice with instruments. It was again borderline right up until flight time, and I'm glad it took the fuel truck an extra five minutes to get the plane filled up. In that time, the wind went from wishy-washy calm to a clear crosswind. We still decided to do a couple of patterns to see how it would work out, and indeed, it was going to stay at about a 10-knot cross.

The plan was to practice a bit of short- and soft-field takeoffs and landings, but with two weeks since my last flight, it took all I had to just keep things together as it was. Nevertheless, a short-field takeoff is fairly straightforward, with the primary differences being applying full power with the brakes on and lifting the nose earlier than normal, to reduce drag just a bit by getting the wheel off the ground (but not so much that the extra angle of attack slows you down again),

The main lesson I learned today (which was not explicitly on the syllabus) is that if there's a lot of crosswind, I probably don't even want to try a short field landing at this point. To do it right, you need to be going a bit slower - which is uncomfortable enough - and still battle the crosswind with reduced control effectiveness - because of the slower speed. It really is a situation that, if it were real, might dictate finding a different field to land at. So, with these being the conditions, my landings weren't that bad, but I was feeling like I was fighting it a bit more than I should have. My last few flights, I've had to concentrate on keeping the nose up during touchdown, now I had to concentrate on keeping the ailerons deflected into the crosswind (and since this was a short-field exercise, I had full flaps rather than the half-flaps of my last strong crosswind landings).

The net effect of it all was a decision to skip the solo work and do the instruments. That was just fine with me, and I was looking forward to it anyway. These exercises are meant to familiarize the pilot with keeping eyes inside the cockpit, looking at the dials. This is necessary to practice keeping control and navigating if you accidentally enter low-visibility conditions while flying under visual flight rules (VFR). This is also useful if flying VFR on a dark night, with few references to the horizon.

The basics today included holding a heading and altitude, climbing and descending turns, slow flight, and steep turns. For challenge, we also fiddled with the GPS and a few navigation functions while I had to maintain heading and follow the instructor's altitude commands. Then, we got headed back to the field, and I got the Foggles off as we entered the tower-controlled Class D airspace. I discovered on this flight that looking toward the sun with Foggles on really blinds you, and I just about lost track of my attitude during one of our steep turns. On the other hand, steep turns actually seem a bit easier when I'm not looking outside, so I guess it balances out.


After the instrument practice, I went down for a soft-field landing, which again, is hard to do at low speed in a crosswind. I got it down okay, but with a bit of bounce, and then a touch and go for one more. The last one was a bit off-kilter, but better, and I did a better job of keeping my speed down (with the stall horn whistling for at least the last half-mile of the approach). I'm wondering if it was because of our angling into the wind, but I think it's just extra-sensitive.

My next flight will likely be a "stage-check" with the chief instructor. This is a flight to make sure that the instructor and I have done our jobs and I'm officially set to use one of the school's planes to go off into the wild blue yonder (or at least to the wild blue practice area, which is kind of "over yonder").