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.