Lesson 14

Wow, 14 lessons, 12 flights. I find it hard to believe that I've reached the point where the flights are routine and the pattern is boring. Well, boring until short final. Then it's too interesting. As I write this, it's evening, cooling off, and thunder occasionally sounds. We're in a pattern of daily thunderstorms. When I got a weather briefing today, the briefer warned of storms approaching, but they were 2 hours away. So we went for more trips around the pattern. I told the instructor that I wanted to make him a spectator on at least one of my landings today. He's been telling me that I've done some of my landings on my own already, but it always seems like I can feel him on the yoke or rudder.

So in the hot, mostly clear, tolerably humid weather, we got started. Winds were light, mostly down the runway. We were in a different plane - the one from last week was still grounded because of the transponder, and the other one that I've flown had radio problems last time and the instructor wanted to avoid that one. The club has 3 152s, so we took the only one that I hadn't flown. Each one is slightly different inside and out. In addition to a slightly different panel layout, the seats were an awful red. When we started the engine, I could hear the radio but not the instructor. We switched jacks, then he couldn't hear me. We eventually discovered that this was the only club 152 with passenger isolation on the intercom. Then we got no response during the radio check. We tried transmitting with both radios. We eventually got a response, but the other aircraft said our transmission was weak. Then we figured out that we could use the microphone to transmit. So the instructor made the radio calls to allow me to concentrate on flying.

Early on, I managed a landing on my own. Really. And I'm convinced that I did it on my own because I saw that his hands were off the yoke and he said he wasn't on the rudder. It wasn't a great landing, but I got it on the ground.

We did a few more landings. I'm flaring mostly at the right time now, but coming in too fast and floating, and while floating I'm overcorrecting. So my thing to work on next time is to make smaller corrections while floating and trying to hold it off the runway. Also, I'm picking a point on the ground to turn toward, but I have a bad habit of turning more than 90 degrees on crosswind. Oh, one other thing - when it's this hot - the plane doesn't climb so well. I did a couple of normal takeoffs and we didn't have a great margin of altitude over the trees at the departure end of the runway. We did the rest as short field takeoffs and I felt a lot more comfortable with those. From now on, when it's this hot, I'm opting for short field takeoffs.