Lesson 17

I wanted to try to string a few lessons together close in time to try to get over the landing hump. So we went out on a weekday. I was worried that we wouldn't get to go because a line of storms went through overnight and the METAR showed IFR first thing in the morning. It even showed IFR when I arrived at the field, even though the sky was mostly blue. It was at least 20 degrees cooler than for my last few flights.

I filed the flight plan and asked for a weather briefing, only to have the briefer seem incredulous that I wanted a briefing for a flight in the pattern. I was really only interested in whether there were any other storms coming along and I wanted something to back up my opinion that the METAR was wrong. I got my briefing, preflighted the plan, and got the transponder code, all before the instructor arrived.

We went round and round, logging 8 landings. But that was because we lost count. The GPS track that I plotted when I got home showed 11 landings. The plane climbed a whole lot better because of the cooler temperature. And visibility was actually pretty good. We hadn't done any go-arounds, ever, so I wanted to try it. We did one. And we did a few simulated engine out landings. I had a tough time holding the right airspeed and the nose up pitch attitude without flaps on landing just seemed odd.

I had one bounced landing that was pretty ugly. But other than that, I was consistently setting it down smoothly, no drop-ins or side loads. When we finished, the instructor said that he didn't help me on any of the landings, not once on the yoke or rudder. But even more importantly, he said that all of them were safe, even the ugly one.