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

Watsonville

The wind looked most favorable today at Watsonville, so I got to add another new airport to my list. It's always fun to fly over the hills to the coast so we headed out from Palo Alto toward Watsonville, pausing to do a few maneuvers on the way.  Dave showed me a trick with the trim that might help my steep turns to the right. Basically, as you start the turn, you make two quick turns of the trim wheel from top to bottom.  This helps to add some nose-up trim and makes it easier to hold the angle. For some reason, I have little trouble with left steep turns, but right always screws me up. The trim seemed to help.

Watsonville was interesting. I've actually been there on the ground for an airshow a couple years ago, but I didn't recognize it at all flying in. I'll have to go back to my airshow pictures and see if I can orient myself.

This was another good lesson on pattern work and landings, plus it's an uncontrolled airport, so lots of watching out for other planes in pattern. 

Aircraft: 669TW

Landings today: 3

Total landings: 13

Today's flight: 1.8 hours

Total hours: 24.7

Two new airports

More pattern work and landing practice, and two new airports to add to my list: San Carlos (KSQL) and Byron (C83).

Today's flight was pattern work at Palo Alto, a quick jaunt up to San Carlos, about two trips around the pattern there, then over to Byron where the winds were looking better and back home.  Nothing very exciting today. Just a lot of pattern work. 

Aircraft: 739TW

Landings today: 3

Total landings: 10

Today's flight: 2.3 hours

Total hours: 22.9

Lesson #5 - Trim practice, steep turns, slow flight

Unlike yesterday morning, today was a great day for flying. My wife, Cyndi, decided to ride along and take some pictures. Today was all flying, no ground work to speak of. I also did a fair bit of the radio work today, calling ground and tower for taxi and departure clearances at KPAO. A little more radio practice and I think I'l be OK. 

The focus today was on continued practice of trim, climbs, turns, and descents, plus the introduction of some slow flight practice. Dave went to great lengths to keep me looking outside at the horizon. He covering the instruments with a chart and had me trim for what I thought was a certain speed, then uncover and check. I started to get the hang of it, making a concerted effort to watch the distance between the cowling and the horizon and trying to burn into my brain what that looks like for different airspeeds and configurations. I practiced a couple steep turns in each direction and practiced holding altitude and bank angle in the turn and rolling out on the correct heading.

Slow flight was interesting. We went up to about 5000 feet and Dave showed me how to enter slow flight. I worked on trim, and did a few gentle turns. It was pretty weird slowing the plane down to 40 knots, just on the edge of a stall in a nose-high attitude. (We did manage to hear the stall warning horn a few times.) We did a few entries and exits from slow flight just so I could start to get the feel of it. We also did a few exercises to set up for landing configuration, adding flaps and trimming for about 65 knots while aiming for an imaginary runway in the distance.

We thought about doing a touch and go and Half Moon Bay (KHMB).  It was kind of bumpy on the way over so we decided to head back to KPAO. As we were in the vicinity of KHMB, we overheard a pilot in a Baron chew out some helicopter pilot just hovering on the runway while the Baron was on final. The Baron had been calling his position all through the pattern, and when he got to final, there's this helicopter in his way. Not cool. A few heated words were heard on the radio.

We headed back in over Palo Alto and Stanford started to get set up for landing. Dave warned me not to get under 2000 over Palo Alto or the little grey-haired ladies would come out with their stinger missiles and shoot us down for making too much noise. We descended to about 1500 over the freeway, then down to 1000 and entered left downwind pattern for runway 31. I did a pretty good downwind to base turn, but had a harder time turning and getting lined up on final. There was a little crosswind and I was over-controlling, causing some oscillation. Dave helped me straighten things out and get 669TW on the ground.

Lesson #5: 1.9 hours

Total hours: 7.0