Lesson 36 - Back in the Saddle Again

 

They say that the key to learning how to fly is to fly as often as you can. Twice a week or more if you can swing it. That way you retain more of what you learn from lesson to lesson, so less time is spent trying to figure out what you learned last time. Alas, most folks who work 40 hours a week are lucky to get up once a week, so we're already at something of a disadvantage. Then, there's the weather and other issues. It's June. Prior to today, I have flown a grand total of 4 times this year! That's not even once a month. February and May were "no-fly" months for me. Not exactly the repetition one would like for honing important skills (like, you know, landing?) No, you can't control the weather, but this was getting ridiculous. 

When today dawned with sunshine and no perceptible wind, I was jazzed. No weather cancellation today. No sir-ee-bob. We're getting up in the air and will hammer away at landing. Then I check Foreflight, which is the software I use to check airport conditions, navigate, log my lessons, and track my flights. Big red screen: NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) - Runway 17L/35R closed. Crap. This meant no touch-and-goes at Centennial, and everyone and their brother will be headed over to Space Port instead. Seriously??? I'm finally back in the air, and the universe has found another wrench to throw into my plans. 

My instructor and I decided to fly east and see if we could get in at Space Port anyway. If not, he'd put me through a mock stage-check to make sure I know all the other maneuvers. Better than nothing, but not working on what I need to work on. Having said that, I was in the Grumman today, and today was only my second time flying the Grumman so a little more time in the left seat of a new airframe wasn't going to be wasted time. I prepped the plane and we struck out east towards Space Port. 

As suspected, when I called Space Port, everybody and their brother had already beaten us there, so they did not have room for us in the pattern to practice landings. Okay, so much for that. Let's head south and work on maneuvers. Stalls and slow flight to get things started. We did a few of each, and I didn't have much trouble with them at all. My instructor suggested we check in again with Space Port and see if they could squeeze us into the pattern. As luck would have it, they could. I'd get my landings! We turned back north, and I got set up for a series of touch-and-goes.

I did 5 touch-and-goes at Space Port. They ran the gamut from pretty decent to abysmal. Flying the pattern worked well for me. The Grumman handles very nicely and I felt I was able to get lined up with the runway without much trouble, better than I have in the past. Granted we didn't have much wind, so that helped. I had two buggers to work out today, and both had everything to do with not having done repeated landings for a few months. 

First was altitude control on final. That's partly a "getting used to the plane" thing, and figuring out how much power to apply. If I was high, I found it relatively easy to add flaps, drop power, and get back on glide slope. Granted I shouldn't have been that high in the first place, but that was me trying to figure out landmarks on a 5-mile straight-in final to set my altitude. But that far out, you've got time to compensate for being high. Where I needed work today was the fine power applications on the last 100' of elevation to keep you on the glide slope. I'd add too much power then be a bit too high then pull out too much power and drop like a rock, and back and forth. I can't really blame that on flying a new type of plane since I have had the same issues in the Cessnas. It's just a finesse thing and comes with practice. 

The second thing to work on is the final flare, and that's a bit of a "feel" thing. I felt better about where I was flaring in terms of being the right height off the runway (at least mostly), but it was more a matter of controlling how much. I wasn't as smooth as I needed to be in transitioning from the nose-down decent to the nose-up touchdown. I wouldn't pull back enough and land flat, or I'd pull back too quickly and balloon up a bit before pushing the nose down to level off. I seriously bounced one attempt prompting my instructor to add power and just go around. But again--the last time I was in the pattern was three months ago! I'll take that. We left Space Port to return to Centennial. My landing there was pretty decent by today's standards. 

I will note that although I hadn't been up in the air flying touch-and-goes "for real" in three months, I have been flying a thousand or more landings on my home simulator. It is not the same, but it does help to keep the muscle memory from waning too much. How much of today's landings were the result of me working the simulator as hard as I have been versus a new airframe that may be simply easier for me to land versus just skills developing, I really can't say. All-in-all, I felt pretty satisfied with how I flew today.

Due to my instructor's desire to get me in the air more often, and his increasingly full schedule, I have signed on with a second instructor, with whom I will start flying next week (weather permitting). This way I can play the averages a bit better. Even with weather cancellations, if I book twice as many flights, I will hopefully be able to get airborne more than once every 4 or 5 weeks and I can get through this process sooner. Both instructors suggested that I pick one airframe or the other as I work through the solo stage check process. After today's flight, I opted to focus on flying the Grumman for the foreseeable future. The Grummans and Cessnas are very similar in many ways and I could have gone either way, but the majority of my scheduled lessons over the Summer months were already in the Grumman, so I switched the three or four that were in the Cessna over to the Grumman for consistency. I can always go back, and may opt for the Cessnas for my cross country stuff if they have better GPS navigation equipment. But--hey--green is my favorite color, so there's that.

Lesson 35 - The Cross-Country

Let me start off by saying today's lesson marked a milestone in my journey--the one year mark of me flying. So it was fitting (though entirely coincidental) that my lesson today would be another milestone--my first cross-country flight. The reality is that we were supposed to fly this trip three weeks ago, but my past three lessons have been cancelled due to high winds. 

The term "cross-country" conjures up images of family road trips to other states, but in the eyes of the FAA, "cross-country" merely means a flight to an airport 50 nautical miles or farther away. It's something that might sound cooler than it really is, but it's also far enough way to where the student pilot has to demonstrate the ability to plan a flight that may not be a direct straight line flight, choose waypoints along the way to keep you headed the right direction, determine fuel consumption, calculate wind course adjustments, and other things you'd need to do whether the airport was 50 miles or 500 miles away. This is the "logistics" aspect of flight training. 

My instructor told me after our last lesson to plan a flight to the Fort Collins/Loveland airport, which is 54 miles away from Centennial, just far enough to qualify for a cross-country flight. If you're driving, it's a straight shot up I-25. Easy enough. Ironically, flying isn't quite as direct. You see, the term "as the crow flies" applies only to birds. They don't have to follow FAA regulations. Planes do. So while crows can fly straight lines all day long, planes have to fly in ways that they do not interfere with other planes in the air. In this case, we have Denver International Airport to our northeast, a busy "Class B" airport that has a very large airspace surrounding it that we need to avoid, and also the Rocky Mountain Regional airport to our northwest, which like Centennial is a fairly busy Class D airport.

A quick note about airspace is in order here. The airspace surrounding airports is "controlled" airspace, meaning that where there is a tower present, you cannot fly in that airspace without talking to Air Traffic Control. Class D and Class E airspace looks like a large cylinder extending out 5 miles from the airport, and up a few thousand feet depending on the airport. Class B and C airspace surrounds larger, busier airports. Their airspace is similar, but (a) extends much higher, and has different layers, with each layer having a larger radius the higher you go. Think of an inverted wedding cake. You cannot fly into Class B airspace without the express permission of the controllers in that airspace, and because they're busy commercial airports, getting clearance into or through that airspace for general aviation pilots is rare. GA pilots can fly under the layers (called flying under the shelf) without issue, but must be careful not to accidentally climb into the class B (or class C) shelf that may be right above them. I keep 500' below the elevation of any shelf I'm flying beneath.

The upshot is that when planning a cross-country flight around areas with lots of airports, you should plan your route to make sure you fly around any airspace that you would otherwise need permission to enter. I guess you don't have to if it can't be avoided, but don't count on getting clearance through a class B airspace just because you want to shave a few minutes off of your flight. I plotted a course that took me northwest, then through a narrow corridor between Rocky Mountain's and DIA's airspaces before turning northward to get to Fort Collins. 

If you're "old school," you pull out paper charts, pencils, plotters, and calculators to figure out your course, time from waypoint to waypoint, fuel burn, etc. (And it's a good idea for pilots to at least know how to do this, even if they never actually do.) Most folks today use software to do this electronically. There are a number of platforms you can use. I have ForeFlight loaded on my phone, so that's what I use. You enter your start and end points, then add waypoints as needed. The software then calculates the time between each point, estimated fuel burn, and on the day of the flight, will factor in the wind forecast to give you heading and course correction information. This becomes the "official" flight plan that you would submit electronically to the FAA if you were going to file a formal flight plan for your excursion. (Not required for VFR flight.) My instructor liked my plan and bumped us over to a Cessna 172 which had a more user-friendly GPS than the one I was originally scheduled to fly in. This way we could transfer my flight plan into the GPS and use that as opposed to having to use my phone. 

The reality is that I really "should" be working on my landings. However, a few factors--again coincidentally--made today a better day to do cross country stuff. First, the primary runway was closed for repairs, so all traffic was using the secondary north/south runway. This meant no touch-and-goes at Centennial. Second, today felt like the first calm-wind day in a long time, so everyone and their brother decided to go flying today. This meant that Spaceport was already crowded with folks from Centennial trying to get in pattern work. So, yeah. Let's go to Fort Collins and get my feet wet in flying long-distances. 

We took off (after what seemed a long wait due to everyone using the same runway) and started climbing out. I started heading west (per ATC instructions) and began climbing to 7,500'. It wasn't too long before ATC told us to descend to 6,800' to avoid oncoming traffic. My instructor took us down quickly, while I looked for the oncoming traffic. It was there, about 200' directly above us. Did I mention that it seemed like everyone and their brother decided to fly today? Yeah. Once he passed overhead, we resumed our climb and turned towards the first waypoint, Mile High Stadium. (Sorry, er, "Empower Field.") I checked my time, and I was right on schedule. I turned north towards our next waypoint. My instructor worked the radio since this was my first cross country so I could get a feel for how to talk to the various controllers along the way as I had not done that before and had enough to do keeping track of waypoints, time, etc. 

We made our way up to the Fort Collins/Loveland airport and I began my descent. I was thrown for a loop because we took off to the north, so in my mind I had us also landing to the north, as the airport runway faces the same general direction. No. They had us landing to the south. "Expectation bias." Once I got my bearings straight, I got us lined up for a touch-and-go. We had a bit of a crosswind, so my instructor had me land with just 10 degrees of flaps as opposed to my usual 30. This meant I was going to land a bit faster than normal, but not too bad. I was more concerned with countering the crosswind, which has thrown me for loops in the past. I think I did a pretty decent job of it, but it was a team effort.

Once back in the air, we turned south. My instructor was going to have me fly to Rocky Mountain airport (southwest) and I started to get us set up for that. We couldn't head straight south because of DIA's class B airspace. ATC instead had us turn east for traffic. And more traffic, and more traffic. There were definitely a lot of folks flying today, and they kept having to have us make adjustments to avoid them. A few minutes later, we heard "three-niner-mike" (our callsign/tail number) "climb and maintain 8,500 direct to Centennial." This meant we were to fly pretty much straight south through DIA's airspace. This doesn't happen all that often, apparently, but due to the high volume of traffic, Denver's controllers figured it was easy to just have us fly straight through their airspace so they didn't have to worry about routing us around other traffic. The "big boys" were still going to be high enough above us as they approached DIA, so we were well out of their way, and at 8,500' and well within DIA's airspace, we were going to be clear of everyone else, too. We got some cool views of downtown from the east, which my instructor pointed out was a rare vantage point for GA pilots. 

I found Cherry Creek Reservoir through the haze, which is a landmark just north of Centennial Airport I use for approach. Winds had picked up and were gusting by the time we got there. We flew a wide loop to the east and lined up for runway 35L. Centennial ATC advised us of winds gusting to 17 knots, and because of the amount of traffic, told us to "keep our speed up." This meant flying the pattern at 100 knots instead of my usual 75 - 85, and no flaps due to the heavy wind gusts. Let me tell you, when you're used to the pace of flying an approach at 75 - 85 knots, all of a sudden doing it at 100 knots means things sneak up on you quickly. I was not used to this pace. After we landed, I quipped that I did not like no-flap landings. My instructor assured me that I'd learn to like them when it's gusty. He hasn't been wrong yet...

All in all, a very fun day in the air. I felt good about my flight plan to Fort Collins. I was able to stick to it, my estimated times were spot on, and I felt comfortable the entire time. I got a good feeling for the radio communications along the way, not so much what to say, but at least who to say it to. That will come with time. I felt with my landings, I was more doing what my instructor was telling me to do as opposed to feeling things out for myself, but given the adverse conditions, being told what to do and doing it is what gets you down safely. At least I was doing it. I'll take that for the win. 

Our next cross country will be out to Fort Morgan, which will be a lot less congested, though because it's in the middle of friggin' nowhere, finding visual waypoints may be a challenge. That will afford me the ability to ease into radio coms along the way, though, since it will not be quite so busy.

Lesson 34 - Highs and Lows (Wings)

There seems to be a raging debate among student pilots as to which type of plane is better to learn in, high or low wing. While it's not quite to the level of Ford vs. Chevy, the High vs. Low debate still stirs surprisingly strong emotions. For my part, I never gave it much thought. I had flown in my friend's Piper Warrior (low wing) and also his Pietenpol Air Camper (high wing) 20 years ago. Maybe it was because I was just too new to flying and the whole experience was so cool that I couldn't dissect the nuances between the two to form an opinion one way or the other. I was just thrilled to be in the air. I'm a photographer, so the high wing does make more sense for taking photos, but if I'm the one flying, I'm not the one taking photos so what do I care? 

When I first started training, I decided to stick to the Cessnas (high wing) because (a) I figured sticking to one type of plane for my early training would eliminate some variables from the equation, and (b) the Cessna 172s make up the vast majority of my school's fleet, so it would be easier to find an available plane. For the most part, my reasoning has proven solid, though it seems recently the school's maintenance department has determined which plane to pull for maintenance next based solely on which one I had reserved. Usually when my school pulls my plane for maintenance, they'll try to book me in another C172. Failing that, they'll move me to the simulator (in which my instructor sees little value) or a ground lesson. Such was the case with today's lesson. The Cessna I booked went in for maintenance, so I got bumped to ground. My instructor and I keep our eyes open to see if anything opens up last minute on the schedule when that happens. This time, I got a text from my instructor, "booked us in a Grumman." The Grummans are small low-wing trainers, a bit smaller than the Pipers the school also has. They look cool, though, which is always important. At this stage in my training (40+ hours), I was pretty confident I could adapt to the plane without much fuss. I was pretty stoked to try something new. 

Parallel to this, my birthday was at the beginning of this month, and my wife got me a yoke and rudder pedal set so I could set up a flight simulator on my computer. While I hadn't actually flown for real in a month, I had logged a whole lot of time on the simulator. You'll find similar debate among students and instructors as to the efficacy of simulators in training, especially at the private pilot level. As mentioned above, my instructor doesn't see a whole lot of benefit for early-on training. (Neither does the FAA, which is why you can only log 2.5 hours of sim time towards your required hours for private pilot.) Without question, the sim is different than the real thing. I agree with my instructor that in terms of teaching the basics, there's no substitute for the real thing. So much of what we learn is by "feel," and you don't get that on a sim. Having said that, I have found that one advantage of a home-based simulator is the ability to repeat things over and over again to build that mental and muscle memory. 

Take for example the "dance" between ailerons and rudder when lining up for landing. You get that wrong in the plane, you're 20' off the ground with little room for error. It's not the right time to have to mentally sort out rudder opposite aileron to stay on center. You get that backwards, and you're going sideways down the runway. (See previous blog entry.) On top of that, you have to be flying on a day when ATC is letting you do touch-and-goes to get more than one crack at it. On the sim, you can get 30+ simulated landings in an hour. You can set up a scenario and just fly it and fly it again and again and again to begin to sort things out in your mind. I think of it as chair flying with visual aids and props. You're not as task-saturated in the sim as you are in the plane, so it's easier to recognize things you didn't do when you don't get a good result. Many times in the plane after a bad approach, my instructor would ask "what happened?" I couldn't really figure out in that moment what went wrong because I was also flying the plane and concentrating on that. Here, when something goes wrong, you hit pause and evaluate what you did and did not do so you can correct it next time. And if you crash, you just hit "load flight" and go again. The FAA doesn't need to know you bent your virtual plane. 

Back to today's lesson. Having probably spent 30 hours on my home sim since I got it set up, I was anxious to put theory into actual practice. Hammering away on procedures (particularly landing procedures) trained my mind to keep track of visual cues as well as the instruments more consistently than I think I had been in the past. I wanted to apply that to an actual flight to make sure things translated well from one environment to the other. Flying a different type of plane added another layer of "let's see how it translates" to the process as well. I had something to prove to myself this flight. 

My instructor and I decided that since this was a new type of plane for me, we'd go out and fly some maneuvers to give me a good feel for the plane before heading to the airport for touch-and-goes. Alas, even without knowing what ATC was going to do, our plans for touch-and-goes was thwarted by a severely worn tire. We had called a mechanic out to put air in one that looked low, and as he was topping them all off, he asked "you doing touch-and-goes?" We said we were planning on it. He said it wasn't a good idea with the tire like that since one hard landing would leave us stuck on the runway. That happened to my instructor the previous week, and for some odd reason he had zero interest in repeating that scenario. We agreed that if we were going to do them, we'd do two or three at the most. With our plans for flying around first, that was probably all we'd be able to get in anyway.

The biggest difference between the Grumman and Cessna (besides the location of the wings) is that the Grumman relies solely on the differential left and right brakes for steering on the ground. The front wheel is just like a shopping cart wheel, there to keep the nose from hitting the ground. Of course, either I didn't entirely pick up on that nuanced difference or my feet were still in "Cessna mode" so I wasn't quite as smooth on the taxiing as I wanted. I kept wanting to steer with the rudder, not brakes. Next time, I'll do better.

Once in the air, though, the Grumman proved to be very easy to fly, surprisingly similar to the Cessna. The low wing certainly gives a lot more visibility. It was a little bumpy, and the Grumman being a smaller and lighter plane than the Cessna was a bit more susceptible to those bumps and I found myself needing to really stay on top of my altitude. I'd blink and I'd be up 200'. When you're flying under a class B airspace shelf, it's important to stay far enough below so not to make folks watching the radar screens nervous. We flew to the southeast practice areas where I did some slow flight and stalls, some steep turns, then we headed west across Castle Rock (which doesn't look nearly as imposing from 8500') then up to Chatfield Reservoir and our Southwest practice area. Once at Chatfield, I called ATC and asked for touch-and-goes. They said no, so--sadly--I would only have one shot at landing the Grumman today to see if my landing work on the sim translated to the real world. I do like being able to see the runway all the way through the downwind-base-final process, though even with that I still found myself just slightly askew from the centerline and needing to slide a bit further to get better lined up so is it really an advantage? The landing wasn't quite as good as I had hoped, but I've had lots worse, too. 

Today's flight was in many ways just flying for the fun of flying. The skies were clear, the scenery was cool, the atmosphere very relaxed. On one hand, I didn't feel like I was pushing myself very hard and some might say I wasn't using my time wisely. On the other hand, it was my first time in a different plane, and that I adapted so quickly and easily to it gave me a big confidence boost. The maneuvers I was doing felt natural to me. I didn't have to think from one step to the next, it all just kind of flowed. That and I could feel myself spending more time bouncing back and forth between looking outside and inside at the instruments, and keying off of what I was seeing outside the window to stay more on top of what the plane was doing in the air. (Thanks, simulator!) So maybe an easy day in the air isn't so much just taking it easy as it is recognizing how far I've come, and giving me confidence that the skills I'm still working hard to develop will--eventually--feel as natural as the rest of my flight today.

And I'm still in the "doesn't matter" camp when it comes to the high/low debate. I'll definitely be flying the Grumman again. Always good to have more options.

Lesson 33 - LESS Right Rudder

 

Weather and maintenance issues kept me grounded for 6 weeks! On one hand, I'm not complaining because when one is focusing one's attention on landing airplanes, it's probably best to do that on a runway that's not covered in snow. That's just a recipe for sliding off the side, and being a journalist, my #1 rule is "I will not lead my own newscast." On the other hand, I had butterflies in my stomach wondering how much I was going to forget being so long since I had been up. 

My instructor and I decided that the best course of action for the day was to fly out to Colorado Space Port and do touch-and-goes out there. That would give me 15 minutes of just simple flying the plane between airports to get my mind back in the groove, then I could do a half dozen or so landings, then head back to Centennial. I'll be the first to admit that the scenery between Centennial and Space Port isn't all that exciting, but it's okay. Even boring scenery is cool from 2,000' above the ground. (Space Port is literally right next to Denver International Airport, so we have to stay relatively low to remain out of their airspace (which would figure prominently in today's "experience.") 

The flight out was about as smooth as you could want. My initial lift-off from the runway was a bit steep, but the stall horn quickly reminded me to put the nose down just a bit. Climb out, turn east when Centennial ATC cleared me, and while not quite "sit back and relax" because there was still the business of getting set up for our arrival at Space Port, enjoy the experience and don't stress. Ninety-five knots at 7,500' and take it all in. It was 15 minutes of "that's why I'm doing this." 

We approached Space Port, I told Space Port tower what I wanted to do, and she told me to expect a straight-in approach on runway 26. I pointed the nose towards Bennet to set up that approach. She came back a few minutes later with a shorter approach, so I turned a bit more north. The disadvantage of Space Port is that it's kinda out in the middle of nowhere, so landmarks are fewer and farther between. What I thought from 3 miles out was the east end of 26 was a cluster of buildings with a large parking lot, so I was not as close as I had thought. I started descending earlier than I needed to, so ended up just flying a low approach. I got lined up with the runway, brought us down, and at the last minute got a bit of a tailwind bump which I tried to compensate for with a bit of rudder. (Okay, maybe a lot of rudder.) We made it down. Not pretty, but for my first landing in 6 weeks, anything above "did we break anything?" was going to be a win. (Spoiler alert - they all were not winners today.) 

I got the sense that the controller may have been new, as her instructions were not exactly clear or at least organized. Compound that with two planes in the pattern with similar tail numbers (...2SP and ...7SP) which only muddied the waters. There appeared to be a senior controller stepping in when needed. This was a new wrinkle that I hadn't experienced. I could most certainly sympathize with someone learning new skills, though, so patience with a healthy dose of caution was the order of the day.  

My second landing resulted in a go-around. I was 15 knots too fast over the threshold of the runway, too high, and decided it wasn't going to work. Go around. Retract flaps... er... oh... they're only at 10 degrees. No wonder I was 15 knots too fast and 100' too high. I forgot to extend my flaps to 30 degrees on final. Funny how that works. On the plus side, I had been worried about being rusty on my go-around procedures coming into today's lesson, and I did this one rather smoothly. It would not be my only one.

That little goose of a tailwind I got on my first landing was apparently an indication that the winds were shifting, so the tower had us switch directions on the runway. We were now landing on 8 as opposed to 26. Remember I mentioned Space Port is right next to DIA? There's an airspace boundary about 1 mile from the end of runway 8-26. You can't cross that boundary or the controllers at DIA get very nervous. That means that come hell or high water, you had darned well better make your base turn prior to hitting that boundary. There's room for a standard pattern, but no room for longer approaches on that side. 

About this time, we had more planes entering the pattern for touch-and-go work. Alas, our controller appeared to have gotten confused with who was where. At one point, she was advising us of traffic right were we were flying. Generally speaking, when ATC warns you of traffic right downwind midfield, and that's exactly where you are, there's reason to be nervous. I think she was confused, thinking she was talking to someone else about us. Still because she was telling me to look out for traffic right where I was flying, I was hesitant to maneuver the plane much until I had that traffic in sight. Once my instructor and I were satisfied there was no one else around us, we pulled power to idle and set up for our landing.

I got things lined up, was pretty good on airspeed and altitude, but wasn't lined up with the center of the runway the way I wanted to be. Use the ailerons to move you left and right, use the rudder to keep your nose pointed down the runway. Simple. On paper. We weren't on paper. I got within a few feet of the runway, tried to adjust my nose, and... nope... way off center and crabbing down the runway what felt like sideways. Still managed to set it down, but uuuuugly. At least I remembered my flaps this time. I think I may have caused my instructor a grey hair with that one, though. 

Next try, the controller tells us of traffic ahead of us. We can't see it, but we keep looking for it. At least this time we were confident she wasn't talking about us. Again, we can't cross the class B airspace, so drop power, descend, and line up for landing while being very cautious. As I'm getting set up, I finally see the traffic in front of us, basically just one step ahead. He's turning final when I was turning base. He was just crossing the threshold when I was on final. I'm not a big fan of having two planes on the runway at the same time, so after a brief conference with my instructor, we opted to go around. I side-stepped to the left, applied power, and started climbing while my instructor kept his eye out for the plane below me which was now lifting off again. 

I'd love to say the rest of the landings went smoother. Alas, they didn't. My approaches were solid. My speed control was (for the most part) good. I'd get down to those last few feet and all hell would break loose. I think I had a better handle on flaring, but I was focusing more on keeping lined up with the centerline of the runway, which is where things (literally) went sideways. Apparently there is such a thing as too much rudder. And I was using it. 

Early on in this whole "learning to land" process, I wasn't using the rudder at all, focusing on airspeed and altitude. As I've progressed, I've added more and more layers to the process, and now it's working on the dance with the rudders and ailerons. If the last time I wasn't using them quite enough, I think I more than compensated for it today. I know I was really stepping on it, and the plane was really responding, which is a bad thing when you're 3' off the ground about ready to set down. The trick is to find that happy medium and also (at this stage) not be quite so OCD about setting the planed down right on the centerline. I have an advantage other students may not have--a 100' wide runway. On a 100' wide runway, there's some wiggle room. Finesse can come later.

Overall, though, I'll take today as a win. I was very comfortable in pretty much all phases of flight, which is what allowed me to focus so much on the rudder and aileron control despite it kicking my butt. There was definitely some rust (forgetting flaps on final?) but for not having flown in 6 weeks and the butterflies I was having on my way to the field, I did better than I was expecting. I've got another 3-week break before my next flight, but then should fly more regularly as Spring arrives. 

Lesson 32 - Once More into the Pattern

Getting up in the pattern is getting to be somewhat routine, and that's a positive thing. That's not to say my landings are remotely smooth, but what it does mean is that I can better analyze what is different about each approach and landing, then work to figure out what may have contributed to the success or lack thereof on each one.

It's been said time and time again--the key to a good landing is a stable approach. Today's lesson was exhibit A on that front. What threw me for loops this time out more than anything else was actually starting the descent. Once I was configured for landing and on the base and final legs, I felt I was at least maybe somewhat ahead of the plane and it was responding to my control inputs as I wanted it to. Getting to that point was unusually rough. Part of that had to do with a somewhat busy pattern, so there were time when ATC called my base as opposed to flying a "standard pattern." A "standard pattern" begins with dropping power when you're abeam your touchdown point on the runway on the downwind leg. "Slow down before you go down." So you reduce power, bleed off some airspeed, extend 10 degrees of flaps, then pitch down for around a 500fpm descent while keeping your airspeed in the neighborhood of 85 knots. As you turn your base turn, you reduce your speed to around 75 knots, extend flaps to 20 degrees, then turn final. On final, you want your speed to be around 65 knots, so you extend to 30 degrees of flaps, pitch for 65 knots, then use the power to stay on glide slope until you're over the runway. Once over the runway, pull power to idle, settle down over the runway, flare when you're just a few feet off the ground, then let the plane set itself smoothly down. Writing it makes it sound easy. Doing it is another story. 

Truth be told, when I flew a "standard pattern," things went okay. My approach was stable, and while I still absolutely stink at judging how high I am above the ground to begin my flare, leading to some rather interesting touchdowns, my approaches were at least descent. In looking back at things, what threw me this time out was the "non-standard" approach. Because the pattern was busy, ATC had me extend downwind on a number of landings. "Extend downwind, I'll call base." That means you fly the downwind leg until ATC tells you to make your base turn, and only they know when that's going to be. Therein lies the issue that plagued me most today. ATC says "Six Mike Echo, turn base" I'm still in a cruise configuration at this point; around 95 knots at 2300rpm. ATC is expecting me to make that turn, though. So do I slow down and extend flaps before making that turn? Do I try to slow down in the turn? Do I extend flaps in the turn? (No on that one!) These are questions that are running through my mine when ATC tells me to make that turn. Am I far enough out to where when I make the base and final turns I'd be on a 3 mile extended final? In that case, do I need to slow down or can I fly it at cruise speeds? My head was a jumble of inexperience and second guessing myself getting into my approach set-up, and it showed. That time spent second guessing myself put me behind the curve and I spent too much time playing catch-up before I felt I was back where I wanted to be on short final. My instructor could sense I was a bit unsettled and unsure, so he took over radio coms for much of the lesson. This left me to concentrate on getting set up for approaches, which did help. 

I write this knowing it sounds like the lesson and my landings were absolute flops. In reality, things are definitely trending in the right direction. My control is getting more and more confident, and the after-the-fact awareness and analysis of things helps give me more confidence next time in my decision making. I need to have the confidence that I am in control of the airplane, and while I'm expected to respond to ATC's directions, it's my responsibility to make sure I do so safely and thoughtfully. Hindsight is 20/20, but the good thing about hindsight in the pattern is that the last landing's hindsight becomes the next landing's foresight. You've seen it before, you know what to expect, you know what to do. The more you fly, the less you'll be second-guessing yourself because you know what works. 

I'm going back up in three days (as of this writing and weather-permitting), so I'll be doing lots of chair flying in my mind of what to do and when to do it for any of the approaches I was handed this past lesson. We'll get there.

Lesson 31 - Remember to Verbalize Everything

 

I talk to myself. A lot. Most often just a series of conversations in my head about steps I'm taking in whatever it is I'm doing. If I'm driving to work, it'll be mental thoughts like "get in the right lane," or "don't forget your exit." Sometimes they're philosophical discussions with myself (which invariably lead to me forgetting my exit). But I'm almost always conversing with myself about something. Which leads to one of the key takeaways from today's lesson--talk. 

Our goal today--same as it has been for some time--get me more comfortable landing the plane. And today's landings weren't all that terrible. They weren't butter by any definition, but at no point did my instructor scream in horror, though there was a slight gasp of correction when I momentarily forgot to retract the flaps before going to full throttle on one touch-and-go. I felt more consistently in control of the process than I have before, even if my controls weren't perfect. It wasn't a matter of "this time I got lucky." I felt good in that I was making conscious decisions in controlling the plane and it was responding to what I was doing. I just need to make that "doing enough to land properly." I'm still skittish about pulling power all the way out to descend, so have a tendency to be a bit high on final, even if I'm a touch low on the base leg. It's coming along, and it just takes more and more practice to give me the comfort of knowing the plane will not fall out of the sky if I yank the power to idle at 300' above the ground. 

That's not what I want to concentrate on with this post. I want to talk about what I didn't do, and that was talk. My last lesson, my instructor chided me for not running checklists. They're an important aspect of keeping track of your flight tasks. We have them for every phase of flight, even if we can't always pull out the checklist to run them. Some things we do by memory, we call them "flows," rather than checklists. They're in the checklists but when you're landing, you can't be distracted by a piece of paper telling you your airspeeds and elevations or where your flaps need to be. You kinda need to know them as part of the process. On climb-out, it's similar. You're busy applying back-pressure to the yoke to get the plane off the ground. You're not going to pull out the checklist and read "rotation speed 55 knots." 

I'm pretty good about running the checklists or flows while I'm flying. What I do not do well is verbalize that I'm running them; especially the flows during take-off and landing. ATC clears me to take off. My mind says "apply full throttle." It says "check the gauges to make sure they're alive." It says "rotation speed 55 knots." On climb-out, my mind says "airspeed 78 knots, flaps up." That's my mind saying it. Not my mouth. Why is this important? Two reasons. First, verbally saying things out loud reinforces that you're actually doing them. In journalism, we have a saying "say dog, see dog." It means write to the video you're seeing on the screen. In flying, it's "say dog, do dog." If you say it out loud, there's no excuse not to physically do it. Second, as students, we have an instructor sitting in the right seat. They may be watching us, but they're not mind readers. Our verbalizing what we're doing is how they know we're in control of what's going on in the plane. If we don't tell them what they're doing, they're left to wonder if we know what we're doing. 

Many times, I've made conscious decisions in flight that I fail to communicate to my instructor. If I'm flying back from the practice area to the field, I'll fly a slow descent from practice elevation to pattern elevation. What my instructor sees is a gradual loss of elevation with no explanation as to why. Or sometimes I'll climb a bit higher than pattern elevation if I have to extend downwind because the terrain rises south of our field. My instructor sees me flying 300' above pattern elevation. My climb out flow is by-the-book straight out of the checklist. I just don't verbalize it out loud as I'm doing it. That needs to change. When you're cruising, you have the opportunity to check the checklist. Check it and verbalize it as you go. Every time you're in the air, treat the person sitting next to you as a co-pilot to whom you want to make sure is 100% on board with everything you're doing. Keep nothing secret. That's how your instructor or DPE will know you know what you're doing. Yeah, they'll see what you're doing, but they may not know why you're doing it. If they have to wonder why you're doing something, they don't know you know what you're doing. 

A few other takeaways from today's lesson... Be ready for anything when dealing with ATC. You can expect to do certain things, but you need to be ready to not do what's expected just as a precaution. For example, ATC had me fly a few 360s south of the field while they sorted out other traffic before they let me enter the pattern. They had given me instructions to enter the pattern, but last minute asked me to hold. No problem, but had I been too focused on following their instructions on entering the pattern, I may have missed the instructions to hold. Second, watch for geese. I had a small flock of them off my left wing. Cool to see, but would have been messy to hit. Third, listen to what ATC is telling other pilots, especially weather updates. Getting the latest ATIS or AWOS is one thing, but that's updated only every hour. ATC will give pilots up-to-the-minute wind information, especially when it's variable. Forth, don't forget that information when you're landing. If ATC says winds are 280 at 6 knots and they vector you in to 35R, don't forget that means there's a 6 knot crosswind you're going to have to deal with on your landing. Lastly, don't forget to take a minute or two of every flight to just take in the view and enjoy being up in the air.

Lessons 29 and 30 - Airspeed is King (and don't forget your checklists!)

 I'm combining two lessons, partly because with the Holiday madness I haven't had time to write the first one up, but also because the two lessons ended up being remarkably intertwined. The two lessons aren't so much a matter of "night and day," but more one of "questions and answers." 

Let's start with the first lesson. First, it was cold, around 28 degrees. It was the first day I've flown in sub-freezing temperatures since I started back in April. In fact, I don't think it's ever been cooler than 45 degrees for any of my flights, and certainly my most recent ones have been in 60-degree temps thanks to an unusually warm Fall. Anyway, one of the first things you learn in ground school when learning about airplane performance is the effect temperature has on performance. Planes fly better in the cold because the air is denser. I was about to learn how much better, and learn it very quickly. Like as soon as I pulled back on the yoke to take off, and we lifted up so quickly I almost stalled. Oh crap! Nose down a bit, find that nice 75 knot climb-out speed. 

I did find that sweet spot for a proper 75 knot climb-out. Problem is, in cold air, that meant a very nose-high pitch attitude and darned near 1000 feet per minute rate of climb! I was not used to that, and I found it easy to lose sight of my alignment with the runway because my nose was pitching so high above the horizon. Fortunately I was consistently veering off to the left, away from the parallel runway. I was reminded later to lower the nose periodically to make sure you were still pointed where you want to be pointed. Still, with that very robust rate of climb, I found myself at pattern altitude about halfway through my crosswind leg of the pattern, if not before, and it got my rhythms off just a bit. 

I mention this because in hindsight, I didn't realize that's what was happening at the time; I just knew my airspeed/pitch control was definitely off kilter all day. If there's one piece of advice that is almost universal when it comes to landing, it's "start with a stabilized approach." If you've got that, the rest is "easy!" A stabilized approach to landing means that you've got your airspeed under control and are on a good, predictable glide slope. Airspeed is controlled primarily by the pitch of the airplane--how high (or low) the nose is relative to the horizon. Glide slope is controlled by power. It stands to reason that if I had to pitch my nose way up to maintain 75 knots under full power on climb-out, then what would have been a "typical" pitch attitude on warmer weather days would result in a slightly faster airspeed on the descent. They say "Airspeed is king" (or "... key" depending on who's saying it.) It was obvious today why. On landings where I had my airspeed more-or-less in check, I had an easier time on the approach. For my scientific mind that likes to dissect cause/effect of control movements in the airplane, this was pretty clear-cut. I did better when I had good control over my airspeed, which was something of a rarity today. 

More frustrating to me this lesson was my inability to properly time the "flare" (aka "roundout," or "transition" from CFIs who don't like the term "flare"). I floated. A lot. I ballooned. I gave the landing gear a proper stress test. There was absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind when I was on the ground. Seismometers detected it. The line "I may bend your precious airplane, but I'll get it down" kept replaying in my mind, because I was sure I bent something. It was not pretty. They say "any landing you can walk away from and still use the airplane is a great landing." Perhaps that's true in the purest sense of the term, but my instructor has higher standards. On the plus side (I always try to find at least one gem), I'm getting better at trimming the plane for climbing and descending. That, and upon inspection at the end of the lesson, I actually didn't bend anything.

That night, I lamented to the student pilot group on Facebook about my rather dismal landing performance of the day, and asked for advice from other students and instructors in the group for getting things right. The answers were varied in terms of techniques to try the next time up, but one thing was abundantly clear--I was not alone.

I was eager to try some of these new techniques on my next lesson. Alas, wind gusts to 25 knots grounded us that day, so my anticipation would have to wait another week.

The day of my next lesson dawned equally cold. Because the lesson was at 9 am and we were the first to fly the plane, we had to preheat the engine with a hot air blower. This warms the engine to get the oil flowing faster. By the time I got onto the ramp to get the plane prepped, there were a dozen or so other folks warming up their engines, so I had to wait my turn for the heaters. I finally got my plane warming up, and I watched as one by one, the others left the ramp for the clear blue skies. 

Alas, because I was the last horse out of the barn, that meant that the pattern at Centennial was full, so no touch-and-goes for me here today. No problem. We'll fly east and head to Colorado Space Port. Yeah we weren't the first one with that idea either, and Spaceport nixed us for the day as well. So no touch-and-goes for today, despite that being pretty much the sole point of what we wanted to do. We opted instead to head south to the practice area to work on slow flight, since that's pretty much what pattern flying is. It turned out to be a good exercise. I spent pretty much the entire time working to maintain a given airspeed and maneuver around, climbing and descending without changing the airspeed too much. After a bit of that, we decided to head back to Centennial on the off chance the pattern had opened up and we could do touch-and-goes there. No such luck. They vectored us in direct to the east/west runway for a full stop. 

So, here was my one chance at working a landing today. It was a straight-in approach to runway 28. Straight-in approaches are nice in that you have the runway in sight for pretty much the entire time you're landing. This makes it easy to make sure you're pointed the right direction. The downside is that in a typical pattern approach, there are mental targets for altitude and airspeed on each leg of the pattern. Your downwind leg, you start by dropping your engine to a low RPM and extend flaps to start slowing you down. You begin your descent, make your turn to the base leg of the pattern, meeting your airspeed and altitude targets for that leg, which for the Cessna is 75 knots and 500' above the ground. From there, you make your turn to final, extend more flaps, slow to 65 knots, and land the plane. 

On a straight-in approach, your benchmarks for airspeed and altitude don't change, but you do it all while flying the same heading. This was only the second or third time I've flown the approach to 28, so I didn't have a good sense on visual landmarks to gauge distance from the field. For instance, when I'm landing on 17, I know when I pass over Arapahoe Road, I better be at no more than 500' above the ground and 75 knots or slower with flaps being extended to slow me down to 65. If I'm landing from the south on 35, Lincoln Avenue is my landmark for that. Nope, no such mental landmarks on 28 for me today. (I will be looking at the map before my next lesson.) The end result, my speed was okay-ish, but I was way too high. My instructor put us into a forward slip to bleed altitude and get us back on a proper glide slope, then handed the controls back to me for the final approach. With a stable approach re-established, I worked through some of the mental reminders I had read from my Facebook group for that final transition onto the ground. Easy, but firm on pulling the yoke back. Wait for the runway to get wider quicker in your periphery, transition your eyes from the aiming point to further down the runway and aim your nose there instead. And I managed to pull it off. My second "that was all you" landing. And it wasn't even that rough, not like the seismometer-rattling hits of the last time. I was really bummed that I wasn't going to have a chance for a second landing this lesson, but at least I was walking away from the lesson with a feeling that I was able to land the plane because of conscious actions I was making with the controls. I felt in control of things. Perhaps not confidently in control, but it was a landing where I felt I was flying the plane, as opposed to it flying me. 

I was feeling pretty good about things after this lesson, and my instructor shared my sentiment about how things went. However, he's also a stickler for details. And he has a way of catching and correcting bad habits in a way you don't easily forget. He spends a lot of time watching me fly; counting seconds between when he notices something happening and when I notice it, or watching my eyes and my head to note where I'm looking or not looking. He's very observant of mannerisms and things which affect how I fly; things I don't necessarily think about as having much of an impact. It's actually quite fascinating to me the things he picks up on. I don't know if they teach that in CFI school, but when he says "this is what I've noticed," it's rarely something blatantly obvious, but small things that have big impacts. Correcting them pays dividends. During today's debriefing, he says "I'm going to send you a picture I took while you were landing." Okay, I think to myself. He's taken some cool scenery pics while I've been flying, because--let's face it--I'm learning in a pretty scenic place. Or maybe he got a cool shot of me looking intent while landing or something.

 

He continues, "I want you to tell me what's wrong with it."  That wasn't what I wanted to hear. Oh, s***. What'd I do now?  I look at the photo. My hand's in the proper place on the yoke (which he taught me by slapping my wrist like my old piano teacher used to). I had the weather written down, my right hand was on the throttle, my fly was zipped. He stumped me. "Zoom in," he says. "Look at your checklist." 

Yep, that's my pre-takeoff checklist. He took that photo as I was on short final. That little piece of laminated paper we're supposed to refer to during various stages of flight was still clipped to my kneeboard, undisturbed from before we took off--a clear sign I hadn't referred to it in a good long while. Checklists exist for a reason. They're there so we have a written description of what needs to be done at various stages of flight. It might be something as simple as calling out your engine RPM and airspeed when cruising in straight and level flight, or making sure your fuel tank selector is still set to "both" and that your seatbelts are still fastened. Did I run my checklists? The proof was right there. No denying I had not. It wasn't that I hadn't thought about those things, but I didn't run the checklist which serves as a reminder to think about all of "those things" so that nothing gets missed. 

So, yep, another bad habit I need to break. And hopefully one I break before he resorts to slapping me topside the head with it mid-flight. Though I wouldn't put it past him, nor would I remotely blame him. 

Lesson 28 - The Simulator

 My instructor told me early on in this process that he didn't really think simulators were all that valuable as a teaching tool for private pilots. For more advanced training, definitely, but for the basics of flight, he felt those lessons were best taught in the air. Alas, my scheduled plane got grounded for maintenance, and the school bumped me to the simulator for the day. At this stage in the game, we're focusing very hard on me learning how to land the plane. Last time was rough, but we're getting there. This lesson would focus on procedures. Making the radio calls, calling out the specific steps in the process, and just getting a firm handle on the flow and process. And toss in an emergency or three to see how I deal with that.

Let me start by saying it's a simulator, and despite it being a pretty darned expensive piece of technology, it's not the same as flying the real thing. There's a near complete difference in feel. The controls mimic the real ones, but the tactile feedback is different. The rudder pedals don't move cables and springs, they move potentiometers. And that took some getting used to. Trying to just steer the plane with the rudder pedals brought me back to my first time ever trying to taxi the real thing--I was all over the place, with no real tactile feel for when I was centered. "In the air," the response was much closer to what I've experienced in the plane. The throttle and yoke controls combined to give a pretty good simulation of what really happens. 

Despite the differences in control, I thought the lesson was very productive. Not necessarily where I was hoping it would be (timing the flare at landing, for example) but we worked through some other things that until we could just pause "mid flight" and discuss what was happening, hadn't quite clicked. Landing is all about proper application of pitch and power, but that also applies to cruising speeds and correcting errant elevation changes, etc. These are things I never thought I was necessarily struggling with, but in hindsight wasn't doing correctly, either. (If you want to lose elevation, point the nose down. Don't just rely on a reduction in power.) 

Other benefits included emergency procedures. A few times in the process, my instructor all of a sudden threw a cloud right in front of me so all I had to go by was my instruments. A bit unnerving at first, but once I had my bearings straight, it was easy to keep things under control. That will undoubtedly help when it comes to learning instrument flying down the road. My engine "died" on approach, and my only goof there was continuing to fly the pattern as opposed to immediately turning to the runway. I landed just short and to the right of the runway, but I did land safely. And I caught the inoperative airspeed indicator on take-off, and successfully aborted the take-off. Taxiing back to the end of the runway was a disaster (rudder pedals) but overall, I thought my emergency procedure work went fairly well.

As far as it being a good tool to teach landings? Not so much. I could fly the patterns and stay lined up with the runway easy enough, but the response to changes in pitch and power weren't as predictable as they are in the airplane, and without the 3D depth, it's very hard to judge where you are in relationship to the ground to know when to start your roundout to land. I had a few go-arounds, and I was able to set the plane down on the runway in all the other cases, but really hard to say how well I did it. There's no "you just crushed your nose wheel" error message that comes up. 

I think there's a reason the FAA only allows 2.5 hours of simulator time to count towards your requisite hours for PPL. It's not the best tool for the job. To borrow a line, "ain't nothing like the real thing, baby." 

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.