I just happened to check the schedules when I woke up this morning and was delighted to see somebody had canceled for the day, right between my two classes! Off to the airport I went, again crossing my fingers that the weather would be just enough to go. The first six flights, which culmintated with Saturday's progress check, all deal with learning your aircraft and how it handles. The next section is titled "Polishing Your Landings and Emergency Procedures". Lesson #7: Crosswind takeoffs and landings. Nothing new really, I've had stiffer crosswinds to deal with on previous flights. Today's wind was 13 kts, gusting to 18, but literally right down the centerline of Runway 34. The gusts provided maybe 5 kts of crosswind.
There must have been a mouse or something scampering around the approach end of the runway, becuase every time I came around we had to dodge a red-tail hawk that was circling in our flight path. I don't know what it is about Easterwood, but the birds love to hang out around here. On the second approach Dave throws me a curve and calls out "go around, go around" - aborting the landing was part of our briefing, but he wanted to make it a surprise to keep me on my toes. We requested to land Runway 4 so I could get some tough crosswind practice, but about this time a bunch of Navy guys from Corpus started calling in saying they were making straight-in approaches, so our request was denied. After the fourth TC-12 called in (and our second denial) Dave decided to call it a day.
The next few lessons are all pretty short and simple, so they'll probably be rolled into one... which means the solo is even closer!
Flight #7: 0.7 hrs
Total Log Time: 7.4 hrs
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment