Lesson 27 - That was a bit rough...

I try to find the good in every lesson I take, so not to dwell on the negative or the frustrating. Flying is understandably a very hard skill to learn, and I'm used to days when things don't go so great. Finding the good keeps me going.

Today's good - I didn't break anything on the airplane.

Okay, that may be a bit harsh, but any thoughts I may have had after my last outing that that landings might start to "click" with me shattered on my first attempt today in a hard thud as I pulled power to idle and the plane slammed onto the runway. 

"That was a bit rough." 

Fortunately the landing gear on a Cessna 172 is quite resilient. Apparently they're used to abuse by new students. 

Truth be told, I'm not surprised today went as it did. On my last outing, I was thrilled that I was able to finally land the plane without my instructor helping on the controls. It proved that I could do it and was quite a confidence booster. What I couldn't do was really explain how I was able to do it. I just kinda did. It wasn't accidental that I was able to do it, but it wasn't the result of any repeatable skill, either. Today's lesson was to hone in on that, to make that "blind squirrel finding a nut" landing from last time something I could repeat consistently. To do that, you've got to make mistakes, analyze what you did wrong, and figure out how to correct it. Suffice to say we didn't get to the "figure out how to correct it" phase, but boy did I have my share of mistakes from which I can build a long list of what doesn't work. 

There are two things that are messing me up at the moment. First, there's the notion that you don't want to do sudden control movements in the plane when you're flying. It just doesn't work. Make small changes and be patient enough to let the plane catch up with you. I've done that with increasing success in the pattern, but when it comes to that final round-out and transition to landing, I'm still not as smooth as I need to be, and I'm not giving the plane time to respond to my control adjustments.

There's a reason I think this part is proving particularly difficult. Put quite simply, it's self-preservation. When you're landing, your nose is pointed towards the ground. You spend a lot of time lining up the landing looking down at the ground as it's approaching. When you get down to that last 10 - 20 feet, you realize how bloody fast that ground is approaching, and your nose is still pointed towards it. When you're driving and there's an object in front of you, your instinct is to sharply turn the wheel to avoid it. It's a reflex. Your body knows it doesn't want to hit something, so it acts to get you away from it. When the ground is approaching like it does when you're landing, your body instinctively wants to pull back sharply on the yoke to get the nose going higher so you don't hit the ground. That's instinct. It is, however, counterproductive to landing. You want the plane on the ground, and pulling the yoke back that sharply causes you to gain a bit of elevation, but also stall. When that happens, you drop like a rock. When this happens 5' above the runway, you slam onto it instead of gently gliding down. 

The trick (at least as my instructor explained it to me) is to slowly apply a bit of back pressure to gently raise the nose just enough so the nose wheel is higher than the main wheels. "Gently" is the key. Let the plane respond to the controls. You'll have the advantage of ground effect giving you a bit of extra lift already, so your descent will be slowed once you get to around 10 - 20' above the runway. When that happens, the point you were aiming towards on the runway will actually pass beneath the plane, and you raise your eyes to look down the runway as you apply back pressure to change the pitch of the plane. 

So that's what I've been working through in my mind all this week--how to be a bit more proactive and controlled in that last phase of landing. If I can do that, then I know I can train my mind not to freak out that the ground is getting closer and closer. It's just going to take time and repetition.

Adding to my grumbling about this lesson, I totally brain-farted on one of my go-arounds. Throttle needs to go to FULL. For some stupid reason I only pushed it in about 2/3 and started to decrease flaps. It wasn't pretty. I didn't lose any (much) altitude and we were not in danger, but--geeze--throttle to FULL!!! Then get the nose to horizon, reduce flaps one notch, let airspeed build, establish positive rate of climb, then retract flaps. I know this, but it needs to be more automatic. 

On the plus side (See, I told you I always look for a positive!) my altitude and airspeed control on climb-out is getting a lot smoother. If I got to pattern altitude on my crosswind-to-downwind turn, I was able to level off mid-turn. Also, my use of the trim is getting smoother. I'm also getting to be a better judge of how high I am off the ground at various points in the pattern, so I can make quicker, more even adjustments to that. It's sight-picture reinforcement. The more I do it, the more I get used to the visuals. 

Lesson 26 - "That was all you"

 

After my last lesson and my somewhat dismal attempts at landing with a 7 knot crosswind, my instructor and I agreed that what I really needed was a good calm day with clear skies to just stay in the pattern and bang out 8 - 10 landings. That would, hopefully, give me a good sense of the basics needed to confidently land the plane. The weather report for the day of my next lesson had winds gusting out of the west at 25 knots. That clearly wasn't "calm," so we scrubbed for the day and waited for the next lesson.

Thursday was by all measures ideal. Clear skies, cool temperatures, and most importantly to the task at hand, no wind! No excuses. I was going to get this. By now, it had been another three weeks since my last lesson, but the cobwebs are getting fewer, so I don't worry so much about that as I did earlier on in the process. Since my landing skills last time were anything but sharp, there wasn't much for me to "forget" between lessons anyway. I got to the field, prepped the plane, and fortunately traffic was light enough to where they let us do touch-and-goes there. I don't mind flying out to Colorado Spaceport, mind you, but there are more landmarks at Centennial that I can use to gauge my position in the pattern, and it saves me time getting out there which means I can do more landings. While I've written in the past about liking that time flying to the practice areas or the Spaceport to get my mind together, today was different. I was ready to hit the ground running. I was really champing at the bit.

I spent the time since my last lesson watching many YouTube videos on how to land a plane. I knew the theory. I dissected my performance in my previous lessons with and without crosswinds to figure out weaknesses in the process. I had a game plan in place. The first part of the plan was to form a good sight picture of what the runway needs to look like on a proper glide slope. One of the things I picked up from watching the videos was that what I had in my mind as a proper glide slope was really too low. The "ideal" glide slope is 3 degrees from horizontal. This does not sound like very much, and when you look at it on a protractor, it's really not. However, when you see that three degrees from the air looking down at the ground, it's a different story. It looks visually a lot steeper, so it's easy to think you're too high when you're really not. So getting that sight picture burned into my mind was the first step to success. 

The second part of my game plan was to get a better handle on maintaining that proper glide slope. We had done slow flight training on a good number of my previous lessons. This is where you put the plane into a landing configuration with flaps fully extended, nose pitched up to keep your airspeed constant, and apply throttle to keep you from losing altitude. (You're not gonna gain altitude very easily if at all in this configuration, certainly not in a trainer.) Landing is really the same kind of thing. Flaps fully extended, nose pitched to a set airspeed, but rather than use the throttle to keep the plane at a given altitude, you use the throttle to control your rate of descent. I felt in my previous lessons I had a pretty good handle on maintaining airspeed, but my altitude control was poor. I was too high, then too low, then too high. The profile looked like a set of stairs rather than a smooth slide. I figured the reason for this was that my adjustments to the throttle were too large. I wanted to try using smaller changes and being patient enough to let the plane react. 

The third part of my game plan would require cooperation from Mother Nature in the form of minimal crosswind. I needed to get a good feel for rudder and aileron control for keeping the plane lined up with the centerline of the runway. Once I get comfortable with doing that with limited crosswind, then adapting it for higher crosswind components become easier to manage. But you need that basic foundation first. Today's lack of winds would hopefully give that to me.

We took off and immediately got to work. First attempt wasn't pretty, but I was trying to build that sight picture. The second time around, my instructor flew it to give me a sense of the sight picture and control. Third time went smoother. So it went for a few more landings. I got more and more comfortable with the sight picture of what the runway should look like, and my plan for making much smaller adjustments to pitch and power seemed to play very well. I was able to control both airspeed and elevation much better. Centerline alignment was pretty good as well, though I wasn't quite as "straight in" on final as I thought I should be. I felt like I was approaching the runway a little bit from the side. Truth be told, we have parallel runways on this field, so sliding in a little bit from the outside isn't a bad thing. ATC at Centennial is very good about staggering traffic on the runways so you're not landing right alongside another plane on the parallel, but I'd still much rather stay out of the space between the runways. 

The hardest part of the process for me today was the transition over the runway. After a few more touch-and-goes, my instructor took the controls and had me just watch out the window while he landed so I could get a sense of when in the process to begin pulling the nose up. This is totally a finesse thing. If you do it too early, you risk ballooning up and getting farther off the ground. If you do it too late, you land on your nose wheel. (Really not good.) In a perfect landing, you rotate the plane's nose up just enough to keep the nose wheel off the ground, bleed off enough airspeed so the wings stall right as the main wheels touch the ground. "Perfect" is hard to get, but we settle for "good enough" where the wings stall with the main wheels just a few inches to a foot above the runway and the plane settles down more-or-less gently on the wheels. 

I was struggling with the timing on this pretty much on every landing. In fairness, I've been struggling with that on every landing since I started this process, but the other pieces of the puzzle were so out-of-whack that this part being out-of-whack seemed far down on the list of concerns. On our tenth landing, I set the plane down on the ground, my instructor turned to me and said "That was all you. Good job!" My first landing without any physical control input from my instructor! Perhaps not a major milestone in the process, but mentally for me a significant hurdle cleared. We made one more landing, again with my instructor leaving me to man the controls without his help. This one wasn't quite as smooth, but it was still all me. I don't know that I'd say things have "clicked" for me on landings because there's a degree of "am I doing this right?" especially with the flare. Still, my confidence is boosted quite a bit. I'll take that.

One other takeaway from the day; I'm a lot more comfortable with adjustments to the trim wheel. That's always been a weak spot for me, and I know there have been a good number of lessons where I never touched the wheel. Making 11 landings meant there were 11 climb-outs as well, so I had a good degree of repetition there to finally get a sense of when and how much to adjust the trim for climb-out and descent. That made a lot of difference in the smoothness of things as well. I could probably use a bit more nose-down trim in my descents, but then at the same time, that means it takes more back pressure on the yoke to make the flare. Since my tendency is to not pull back quite enough on that soon enough, needing more back pressure might lead to complications. 

One other area of minor concern that I need to work on, my crosswind to downwind turn and adjusting to level flight when I reach pattern altitude. I found that if I was climbing throughout the upwind-crosswind-downwind legs, I was good on both airspeed and altitude control. There were a few times when ATC had us extend our upwind leg to allow another plane into the pattern. As a result, I reached pattern altitude somewhere in the crosswind-to-downwind turn. On more than a few occasions, the plane got ahead of me there as I was juggling dialing the power back, leveling off, and completing the turn. I think in the future the plan will be to not worry about the power setting until I'm settled into the downwind leg. Just lower the nose to level off, complete the turn, and let the airspeed do whatever it needs to do. You can get faster here. That's what happens when you stop climbing without adjusting power. You want that to happen. Then you can configure for cruise and dial your engine speed to where you need it. 

All in all, this was one of the better days in the air that I've had in this process. I was relaxed, my instructor was relaxed. Nothing was "perfect" on the day, but it was definitely a day of demonstrable progress. The plan is for the next few lessons to focus pretty much singularly on getting landings down. I've got to get that flare timed better, and do it just enough to get the nose wheel higher than the main wheels, but not too much to balloon up again. It'll come. It's a visual thing, and like the sight picture of what the runway looks like on a proper glide slope, it's just something I'm going to have to burn into my mind through repetition.

Lesson 25 - Strengths and Weaknesses

 

Scheduling conflicts and vacations meant that it had been three weeks since the last time I was up in the air. At 30+ hours into my training, I've developed enough muscle memory and routine to where I don't worry about forgetting every last little thing if I don't repeat doing it often enough. This is a good thing since once I do finally get my license, there will very likely be long periods of time where I do not have a chance to fly and it's good to know that even at this early stage in the game, there are aspects that are indeed much like riding a bicycle. I'm still quite a ways off from where I'd consider myself polished, but I'm no longer a menace to everything in the air. 

The weather report showed some low-altitude turbulence, which was confirmed by one of the other instructors telling us it was bumpy up to about 7,500', then it smoothed out nicely. (Note that our field elevation is 5,885'.) Bumpy skies below 7,500' aren't perhaps the best conditions to work solely on take-offs and landings, so we opted to head to the southeast practice area for some ground reference work, stalls, and emergency procedures. Once we ran through those, we'd head back to the airport and see if they would be agreeable to let us do some touch-and-goes. That "mixed bag" approach to this lesson gave me a chance to sit back afterwards and reflect on where I am in the process and places I need to maintain focus. Note that what I'm calling a "strength" in no way implies mastery of the skill, just that it's something that seems to have found a firm nest in my mind to where I don't worry about losing the skill from lesson to lesson. 

Strength: Radio communications. Despite my instructor calling me "mean" for boldly staking my claim to the most scenic practice box in the practice area without first asking if anyone was actually already in there (they were. My bad.) my radio communications are going smoothly. (And I politely flew to an unoccupied practice box instead.) I'm not getting any more tongue-tied than I do in normal conversation (which is why professionally I'm behind the camera) and I'm getting much quicker at picking up instructions, repeating them, and (most importantly) remembering them after I repeat them. I do need to work on being a bit more informative and precise in terms of position, and need to work on getting my ducks in a row sooner so when I contact ATC when returning to the airport I have more time and distance to adjust to their instructions, but overall I'm happy with how communications are going. I read about a lot of students struggling with radio communications, so I'm glad to not suffer from that deficiency. 

Strength: Pilotage. Perhaps it's because I'm something of a map geek, or I just drive around a lot and know what's where, but I'm pretty good about looking out the window, knowing where I am, and having a fairly good general idea of where I need to point the nose of the airplane to get where I want to go. It will be interesting to see how this goes once I start working on my cross-country stuff, especially if we head east where landmarks are much fewer and further between. I still know the roads rather well, so there's that, but if the ATC at the destination airport uses landmarks I'm unfamiliar with, it could get interesting. 

Weakness: Multitasking. We were doing S-turns and turns around a point today. I had no trouble maintaining elevation doing those maneuvers. I'm focused on the task at hand with few distractions. Now, tell me to make a 90 degree turn to the left while getting weather information, and I'll climb 500' in that turn before I have the first half of the ATIS frequency dialed in. If my attention is divided, things get shaky. I've got to get better at maintaining flight attitude out of the periphery of my vision and making quicker back-and-forth glances between outside and inside when I need to split my attention like that. I quipped that we needed a heads-up display for checklists so I wasn't constantly looking down. My instructor simply held the checklist up at window level and said "we have that already." Simple, yet elegant. On the ground, I need to be able to look left or right at things going on around me without drifting off the yellow centerline. This is definitely one of those "comes with time" skills, but it's also something I know to keep on top of.

Strength: General "getting there" flying; straight and level, controlled climbs and descents, maintaining heading, turns to new headings, etc. Granted these are probably the most basic flying skills and if I hadn't gotten a firm handle on these after 30+ hours of lessons, I should probably stay out of the sky. 

Weakness: Landing. This is probably too broad of a term since there are so many things that have to come together for a smooth landing, but in the most general sense, I ain't there yet. Granted I only just started working on landings over the past half dozen or so lessons. There are things I'm doing fairly reasonably well such as airspeed control and staying in position in the pattern, but other areas where I'm still getting by on sheer luck. My altitude control remains uneven stair steps. Too high, then I descend too much, then I need more power to get back on glide slope, and back and forth. I think like anything when it comes to flying, smaller adjustments are better than large ones, but I'm not confident enough (patient enough?) that my small changes are doing what they need to do so I make them bigger, which then starts the cycle over again. 

My biggest challenge with landing comes with the introduction of any kind of crosswind. Today, it was a 7 knot crosswind from the east. In the grand scheme of things, 7 knots is not much, and I'm getting better at compensating for it right up to the point where I'm supposed to be setting the plane on the ground. That's where things go (quite literally) sideways. I watch videos on crosswind landings. I know the theory of the control movements, but this is one area where the gap between theory and action remains fairly wide. It's just going to take repetition to get there. If I can get a couple of fairly calm days, I should get a good enough feel for things to where I can make better adjustments.

Strength: Mindset. My instructor typically will ask me after a lesson how I'm feeling. After a particularly rough lesson, it's human nature to be disappointed, and I often step out of the plane grumbling in my mind about what I screwed up. Yet my answer to his "how are you feeling" question is seldom "lousy" or similarly negative response no matter how poorly I may have done on specific tasks. Yeah, I may be frustrated, and maybe I'm mad at myself for a particularly bone-headed something-or-other. But I've learned not to let that define the lesson. Take today's landings as an example. They were abysmal. I touched down on one out of three attempts. But on the other hand, my go-around execution was rather smooth. Once we decided we were way out of bounds for a safe landing, it was full throttle, right rudder to match, nose to horizon, flaps to 20. I had struggled miserably with that my first time in the pattern. This time, it was much more natural. That's a tangible display of my skills improving, so while I remain frustrated about my landings, I'm given confidence in realizing I felt just as bad about my go-around skills not too long ago, and they've gotten better. 

Weakness: Foreflight. It's the software on my phone that I use for maps, airport info, etc. Today, my instructor asked me how I knew how far above the ground I was. I could look at the altimeter and know my altitude above sea level, but I hadn't a clue how to tell the elevation of the ground beneath me. GPS doesn't tell you that, nor are printed charts that accurate (and you would have to know where you were.) On Foreflight, you just put your finger on the screen and it will tell you the ground elevation. New skill learned. The company's web site has a bunch of tutorials on how things work. I've got to sit down and watch them. It's very powerful software, used by pilots across the spectrum. Certainly once I start doing cross-country planning, I had best be familiar with it. 

In skiing, they say if you're not falling down, you're not getting better. Learning to fly is similar. If you fly every maneuver in your lesson perfectly, if you know the answer to every question your instructor asks, you're not being pushed out of your comfort zone, not learning anything new. My instructor will not let me sit in my comfort zone very long at all. He's always layering new things in the lessons for me to work on. This means that there's always going to be stuff within the lesson that I just flat out mess up. As a student, you can't dwell on that. You have to see one lesson's weakness as the next lesson's challenge. If your instructor asks a question you don't know the answer to, realize that's precisely why your instructor asked you that question. Don't be afraid to say "I don't know." They're asking you questions to get your mind ready to absorb new information. Learn it this time, practice it next time. 

I wrote early on in this process that there's nothing natural about flying. But it's important for students to keep one important thing in mind. You're flying! That in and of itself is something that few people get to do. Enjoy it no matter how frustrating it might get. Take 30 seconds in every lesson to just look out the window and take in what you're experiencing. That's why you're doing this. Keeping track of those little victories along the way--large and small--will keep the wind under your wings.