Normally I try to do these writeups fairly soon after going for a flight; otherwise details tend to vanish into the ether that is my decaying memory. In this case, I’m roughly 30 hours behind the curve. I kind of got lazy after coming home yesterday… well, that and a sort of random project distracted me. I was adding the latest flight to my online logbook, and got to thinking that it would be nifty if I could display info from LogShare here in the blog, maybe in the sidebar. Long story short, what started as a “I wonder if I can do this?” turned into a few hours of annoyance. I’d elaborate, but after all, this is a blog about flying, not web development. Hopefully I will get my Wordpress plugin done soon…
OK, about that whole flying thing… this flight was essentially another airborne review session. The big goal now is, of course, the solo flight, and while my airborne maneuvers are going pretty well, good and consistent landings still elude me. The day started with an unexpected change in plans. The original plan was to fly out of LZU in 391JA and do pattern work at Monroe. But I got a call just as I was about to leave my house for Gwinnett… 391JA had a mechanical issue. Bummer. On the other hand, my old standby 546DC was back at PDK and available. Only issue was that Scott was with another student out of LZU, due back just before our planned start time of 1400, but now he’d have to make the drive from LZU to PDK to meet me. I talked with Scott when he was back on the ground, and we agreed to meet at PDK at 3.
I beat Scott to PDK, so I got the keys and went on out to preflight the airplane. The timing worked out pretty well, as he made it out to the airplane just after I’d completed my inspection- so it was pretty much just a jump-in-and-go situation. In short order, we were airborne with the nose pointed east to Monroe. En route, we did a bit of maneuvering- a stint in slow flight with a few turns, a couple of power-off stalls, and some steep turns. My altitude control on the steep turns was much improved over my last attempts, though I still need to work on maintaining a correct bank angle.
We rolled out eastbound again for Monroe, and Scott dialed up CTAF and asked for an airport advisory. The quick answer came from a King Air pilot who was dropping crazy people skydivers out. This isn’t exactly conducive to tooling around the pattern, so up to Gwinnett we went. Truth be told, LZU is a nice place to fly out of, but it is a towered airport, so things are a bit more structured than Monroe. I’m OK with this, though.
We got a nonstandard left pattern entry for the first touch&go, and I thought I actually did pretty well on that first landing. I’ve mostly conquered that early flaring tendency, but I still have a habit of floating a bit and pulling off bouncers. But that first one was pretty smooth. Second time around went pretty well also, but it went downhill from there. I followed up with a couple bouncers, and on the fifth one, I jumped the gun on the power and unintentionally did my first go-around. Hoo boy. I got things back under control for the final one; it wasn’t stellar, but at least there were no bounces.
Back towards PDK, I got possibly my most convoluted approach so far. I already suspect that there’s a chapter in the ATC manual stating that all inbound aircraft must have their landing instructions changed at least once, but this day was even better. Initially, I was told to fly a 4-mile straight-in for 20L. I was a few minutes away from turning to the runway when I was instructed to turn south (roughly parallel to the runways) due to an inbound jet. I thought that was going to be a brief stint, but instead I was about midfield when I got instructions to turn, cross overhead, and enter right traffic for 20R. Just for good measure, I was instructed to extend my downwind to clear landing traffic on 20L. Oh, and just for good measure, that parallel traffic was instructed to cross my runway while I was on final, but he got clear before I felt compelled to make a decision about going around.
Back in the office, we debriefed some more. Seems that my flaring issues are about the only thing keeping me from going solo. There’s also a written pre-solo knowledge test to knock out; we discussed the subject matter of the test so I could get prepared. I’d say that I knew about 50% or so of the subject matter well; the rest I need to brush up on, and not just for the test- this is stuff I need to know to fly in general, not just to squeak past some test.
Oh, and a final note about this flight- hopefully it’ll be my last one using the flight school’s loaner headset. It gets the job done, but gets pretty uncomfortable after about a while. After some looking and advice from Scott, I snagged a lightly used Lightspeed 15XLc off Ebay, and I should have it in hand in a day or two. The 15XLc is Lightspeed’s entry-level (read: cheapest) ANR headset. I’d originally been looking at David Clarks, but seeing that I could get an ANR set for about the same price as passive DCs, I went for the Lightspeed. I’ll probably get a better ANR set in the future, but for the time being, I need something more comfortable- and unless this set is complete junk, I can just repurpose it as a spare set for passengers once I upgrade. Look for more details on the headset in the near future…
