Thursday, May 5, 2011

Still Flying

The weather in Oklahoma has been pretty terrible for flying lately, which is more or less to be expected. Unfortunately the Flight School's insurance will not let a student pilot check out an airplane for solo flight if the weather report includes the word "gust", or if the steady winds are over 25 knots. The typical day for the past month has been winds above 10 knots, and gusting from anywhere between 15 and 30 knots.

I managed to get a Saturday morning flight in two weeks ago, got in 10 landings and just over an hour of solo pattern time before the wind started to pick up again.

This past Saturday I met up with Bob for the first time since March, and we went up in the Cessna 152 for some maneuvers practice and IFR Simulation. The wind was at about 12 knots across the runway, but once we were airborne it was really quite smooth. We headed west of the airport where I did some stalls and slow turns, then steep turns and engine-out procedure for emergency landing.

"Under the Hood" to simulate IFR flight, we headed back toward Riverside airport. The latest weather information had updated the wind speeds, still a crosswind for the landings, and a little faster than when we left.

The first landing went fairly well, we taxied off the runway and back to the start. Bob called for a "soft field" takeoff so I dropped in 10 degrees of flaps, we rotated off the runway at 50 knots and leveled out still close to the runway until we got up to out normal climb speed of 67 knots, then climbed out and raised the flaps. Since we did a soft field takeoff, we would be doing a soft field landing, the idea is that if you are landing on a grass or gravel "soft" field, you want to keep the weight off the wheels as much as possible to prevent the tires from sinking in.

We got around the pattern with no incidents, and I started in on Final, we were a little high, so I performed a forward slip to drop some altitude to the proper approach path. To land in a cross-wind, you point the nose of the plane into the wind a little, to crab, so you are approaching the runway looking slightly off to one side instead of straight ahead. This maintains a straight approach over the ground. As you approach the runway, you have to straighten the plane out so the tires are lined up with your actual direction of travel.

Just as we touched down, the wind gusted just enough with our nose-high soft field attitude, to lift us back into the air momentarily, which combined with the steady crosswind started to push us to the side of the runway. The plane settled back to the ground and we were able to get back on the center line of the runway, but it wasn't a very pretty landing at all.

Hopefully the wind will start to die down again as we approach summer, and I can get my cross country solo done. I did take a practice written test after the flying lesson, and got an 80% on it. Good enough to pass, but I would like to brush up on some of the topics I made mistakes on before taking the real one.

It sure is nice to be back in the air every so often though, I really miss flying when I am grounded.