1 Hour, 6 Takeoffs and Landings, Slipping, Crabbing
Weather Study Pays Off
My first order of business today was to obtain weather information. I’m happy to say that my studying has paid off, with both the METAR and standard weather briefing finally sounding less like a foreign language I’ve never studied. My instructor sort of explains things after you ask questions about them, or after he has you do them once. This teaching style is fine most of the time, but didn’t do me any favors on learning the weather! I just kept feeling like I would never get it. So, after some studying and reviewing, I feel better equipped.
Here are some of the resources I used:
I like Cessna Chick’s Blog , specifically this post on How To Read a METAR
How To Obtain a Weather Briefing a pdf from the FAA. Boring, but informative.
If you feel like testing your knowledge, here is Bold Method’s Can you Answer these 7 Weather Questions?
First Crosswind and Pavement Landings!
This was 3rd Saturday EAA Fly-in Breakfast, so we ate before the lesson which was nice. After preflighting the plane we took off and flew over pretty cotton fields, some of them full of white and ready to be harvested, and others with curving and zig zag lines of small bits of cotton left after harvest. These fields had the cotton bales lined up at the edge of the fields near the roads. The cotton, the fields, and the clouds were gorgeous. Enjoying the view was over pretty quickly as we arrived at Madison Executive to do touch and gos. It was my first time on a concrete runway, and first crosswind landings. My landings were uneventful, and while I didn’t grease it in every time they were consistent, until the last one which I bounced in a bit (but that was back at Moontown, on the grass, at least). I did 4 at Madison Exec and two at Moontown. We also practiced slips which I haven’t done before, so that was new too and will definitely need practice.
Apparently my son, frantically waving at me on the first landing at Moontown, was very torn up that I took off again and had to be bribed with a rock to calm down (to load into his toy truck, not to throw at him) until I landed for the final time. He was so excited to sit in the airplane for a few minutes after the lesson and “fly.”
I had fun in the lesson today, it’s been weeks since I’ve been out of the pattern due to practicing pattern work and canceling a lesson for the plague we had! Wednesday at my lesson Mr. King told me we would go over to MDQ and I was wondering if landing on pavement would be strange, but it was fine! It was odd to be able to take off and land without back taxiing. The advantages of a 6500 foot paved runway versus a 2180 foot grass strip, I guess.
Waving At Airplanes 