More landing practice

Several firsts today: longest flight (3 hrs), most airports visited in one flight (five), and most credited landings (12). As usual, my luck with the weather is bad. The wind was blowing about 13 knots at KPAO, so we only did one trip around the pattern there before heading off to Tracy Muni (KTCY) in search of better winds. Tracy was better, but not great, so we headed off to New Jerusalem (1Q4), a little strip in the middle of nowhere. We made several landings there before heading to Byron (C83) then to Livermore (KLVK) and then home.

The good: 

- I'm getting pretty decent at radio comms with the tower. I'm getting more onfident talking to ground and the tower at Palo Alto. On the way back I contacted Palo Alto with a nearly flawless landing request: "Palo Alto tower, Cessna six-six-nine-tango-whiskey descending through two-thousand one hundred over Leslie Salt with information Uniform."  The only thing I always do wrong is that I forget to use "niner" instead of "nine".  Oh well, I'll get that one of these days.

- Landings are getting better. Although I had a couple rough patches, by the end of the day while we were working the pattern at Livermore, I was doing a much better job at controlling airspeed and altitude in pattern and making stable approaches.  

The bad:

- Sometimes feel like I just can't do anything right for landing. It was pretty bumpy, and it is really hard to keep my approach point stable when I'm getting bounced around on final.

- Just staying ahead of the airplane and being able to plan ahead and keep all the parameters in control is a challenge. If you concentrate too hard on one parameter, the others get all out of whack. Definitely a learning curve there in trying to keep everything balanced.

- I feel like I am taking forever and will never get the skills or confidence to solo.  Dave says he's seen people do it quicker, and people take much longer, so I guess that's OK, but I still feel like I'm not doing a good job. 

No flying next weekend, Dave is out of town, so we'll see if I can hold onto these skills for two weeks without much regression. 

Aircraft: 669TW

Landings today: 12

Total landings: 44

Today's flight: 3.0 hours

Total hours: 35.1