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

In search of good winds

So far in my flight training, one thing I can count on is that the wind and/or other weather will not cooperate when I go for a lesson. Today was the great search for good wind.  It was just blowing too hard at Palo Alto to be able to make good landing attempts. I really need to learn how to make good landings in favorable wind conditions if I'm ever going to solo. So far, every time we've been out, Mother Nature just hasn't cooperated.

In the search for the proper wind conditions, Dave decided we'd head over the hill toward the central valley. Two more airports to add to my tally: Tracy Muni and New Jerusalem.  Both are in Tracy, both uncontrolled. New Jerusalem (1Q4) is leftover from WWII, where it was apparently a training airfield. Not much left there now but a strip of asphalt in the middle of some fields. Not even a shed standing. It seems to get the most use from radio-controlled aircraft enthusiasts, who have their own little runway laid out on what looks like a former taxiway. The main runway is pretty rough and bumpy. On the plus side, there's nothing around, and no other planes anywhere nearby. The taxiway is separated from the runway by just a stripe of paint. After landing, we basically made a hard U-turn off the runway and taxied back slowly to the approach end, avoiding weeds, loose rocks, gravel, and the broken pavement. Definitely the roughest runway I've flown in/out of yet.

My pattern and approach work is getting a little better each time, but I still don't feel like I've quite got the hang of it yet. I think I concentrate on doing one thing right, and everything else regresses. As bad as I think I'm doing, Dave seems to think I'm getting a notch better every time. It just drives me crazy... I'm always a quick learner and I've read all this stuff about the pattern and landings, but going from theoretical stuff in a book to actually doing it is so much harder than it seems on paper.  I guess it'll just take a lot of practice, concentration, time, and money to get the hang of it.

Aircraft: 669TW

Today's landings: 8

Total landings: 32

Today's flight: 2.4 hours

Total hours: 32.1 hours

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

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

Lesson #10 & Another new airport

Another day of low ceilings and mediocre flying weather, but things looked better toward the central valley, so we headed out looking for somewhere to maneuvers. We headed out over Sunol toward Livermore and Tracy, where we found clear skies and room to practice. 

It had been quite a while since I had done any steep turns, slow flight, or stalls, but we managed to practice all three. Again, I discovered that I am pretty decent at steep turns to the left, but I suck doing them to the right. I just don't have the sight picture of the horizon correct yet and I can't seem to gauge my bank angle correctly.  Stalls and slow flight went OK as well, but it had been so long since I had done any slow flight I really needed Dave to coach me through entry and exit. I'm really looking forward to better weather so I can get out and do more work on these basic maneuvers. 

It got pretty bumpy as we approached the hills on the way back from the valley. I managed to get a little queasy for a couple minutes, so Dave flew while I cracked open a vent to get some air. We decided to stop and take a break for a few minutes in Livermore, just a few miles ahead. We made a straight in approach to the comparatively huge runway 25R at LVK - more than twice as long as the runway at Palo Alto. We got directions to transient parking, struggled to chain down the plane in cold howling wind, and walked to the terminal. After 10 minutes or so, we headed back out, took off again from 25R and climbed back under the low ceiling over Sunol and back home to Palo Alto.

Aircraft: 739TW

Lesson #10: 2.0 hours

Total time: 16.2 hours

Landings today: 1

Total landings: 3

Lesson #9 - Landing practice

Finally back in the air.  Again, the weather wasn't great, but it was good enough. Headed over to SJC again today for pattern work and landing practice. I got credit for my first two landings today. To be honest, I didn't even realize I had made any landings on my own until we got back and Dave filled out my logbook. I guess I'm just too busy doing what Dave tells me to check to see whether or not he's helping me. I started to get the hang of the pattern and final approach, and even got a "beautiful" out of Dave once or twice. 

I lost track of how many times we went around the pattern. We did a number of touch and goes and got a lot of practice with "cram, climb, clean", climbing to, leveling off at, and holding pattern altitude. I think I like practicing landings and pattern work at SJC. Although a class C airport, it appears to have less general aviation traffic than PAO. Maybe GA pilots stay away because of all the heavy metal flying in and out of there. We were one of only two or three planes in the pattern, and the long, wide runway seems to make practice easier. There are just so many planes constantly in and out of PAO that it seems more stressful.

After nearly an hour of pattern work at SJC, we decided to take a break and just fly and relax, since I hadn't flown in two weeks. We headed out to the East Bay and did a nice little counter-clockwise loop around Mount Diablo. I got reacquainted with flying the plane Dave introduced me to using the autopilot in VFR flight. I learned how to set a course in the autopilot using the heading bug and use the autopilot to make descents. 

We had an uneventful flight back to PAO, did a trip or two around the pattern there, and then called it a day since I was pretty much worn out. 

Aircraft: 222MF

Lesson #9: 2.1 hours

Total time: 14.2 hours

Landings: 2