sean's place

On landing

One of the nice things my new company does for me (and the rest of us!) is give us the week between Christmas and New Years off. So, I’ve been using this time to catch up on some flying lessons.

I’ve been up twice this week – on Monday and on Wednesday with Craig for 2.7 and 2.2 hours respectively. The main focus: landings.

But first, let’s talk about some scary moments. On Monday, Craig and I did some stall practice. I had zero problems correcting out of power-on stalls. Power-off stalls however… well, that was scary. The first and second time (of the exactly two times I tried it on Monday), I vastly over-corrected and nearly turned the airplane into a full nose-down dive. For some reason, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the right action — and after a day or so of analysis — I realized that I was flying with 2 hands on the yoke, and when it came time to correct, I had effectively blocked myself from responding.

Today though, we practiced power-off stalls, and they were flawless. I went back to one-handed yoke-action and all was fine. Craig even said that one of my stall corrections was even smoother than his demonstration. Whew!

Like I said, though, the work over the last 2 days has been pretty much focused around landing. I’m getting very familiar with the pattern around runway 34 and the right pattern around runway 27 at GXY. Landing has always been a scary thing for me; I feared hitting the ground even at 500 feet up in the pattern! After 23 landings over the last few days, I’m much more comfortable. If I were to wake up suddenly flying a Cessna 172 in calm winds, I’m fairly confident I could put the aircraft on the ground (perhaps not smoothly — yet!) in one piece.

So far, I’m up to 13.7 hours. I go up again on Saturday and here’s hoping we have some afternoon winds for some cross-wind training.

Also: no motion sickness over the last few days!