Short flight

The weather continues to thwart my quest for flight. After spending a mostly beautiful week sitting indoors at work, the weekend forecast called for wind and rain. I went to the airport anyway, hoping for the best, and got 669TW pre-flighted.  I went inside to find Dave, who was confident that I was going to get some good practice in the pattern today land the plane. 

So, out we go. I got the aircraft started up, called ground (I'm getting a bit more confident on the radio, but I still don't do much talking to tower in the air) and taxied to runway 31 and did the runup.  We did some extra checking on the voltage due to a bad reading on the dash display, but it looked OK and we took off.  

It was more of a crosswind takeoff than I had done before, so Dave showed me how to hold the aileron up on the upwind side and slowly straighten it out as we gained speed. Takeoff was OK but the weather still had me nervous. I just couldn't seem to get the timing right to reduce throttle, add 10 degrees of flaps and push to smoothly hit the 800 ft pattern altitude.  I kept missing it and ended up at 900 or 1000 feet. 

Our pattern work was short-lived. We had barely made it into the pattern before the rain started. It really wasn't raining on the ground at Palo Alto, but at altitude over the bay in the downwind we got rained on pretty good.  You could just see the rain coming down over by SJC, and it was looking kind of dark and ominous. We made four or five trips around the pattern before calling it a day. We had to settle for an hour or so of ground work talking about navigation and VORs.

Aircraft: 669TW

Today's flight: 0.6 hours

Total time: 18.7 hours