Finally some progress
Another day, another landing practice. My whole course is more or less on hold before I learn how to safely land completely by myself.
Today though I made quite a bit of progress. Did eleven landings, nine of those good enough to qualify for expedite go. Also as far as I remember Terry helped only on two or three of them although I think he’s way too “yoke happy”. It doesn’t make much sense to describe them in detail here, just couple of notes.
Finally started to do proper “elevator work” on final. That was the biggest challenge. I usually flared to high and to much (or to little) which resulted in ballooning or long float at best and late touch down. Today I was able to get closer to the ground and make the elevator work more fluent, precise, generally better. The biggest success for me was to be able to save one otherwise ditched flare (balloon) by quick forward elevator input which made the Cherokee to float nicely and safely down the runway and touch down just about 500 ft beyond the point I initially wanted it to.
In addition to above I started to feel the correlation between power and sink rate. I start to feel how the plane sinks down after I reduce power on to high approach without staring at the VSI. I also was able to arrest that sink couple of times with small burst of power without gaining air speed. I’m getting “the feel” of the airplane and I’m quite happy that it finally happens.
Unfortunately there is also quite a big area where improvements can be made.
Glide slope for starters. Today I consistently managed to make my approach higher and higher each time I tried. True – first couple of them were to low but why was I unable to arrest this tendency and stop getting higher and higher when third or fourth one were almost perfect?
Rigging problem in general, trim problem in detail. I still catch myself doing things inconsistently on approach. Sometimes I trim on downwind, sometimes on base or even on final. I have to make my mind, prepare clear landing procedure and stick to it. It should save my some effort later on making my approach looking the same each time.
Flare timing – still a little bit too high. Also I noticed that I tend to do too small input in final stage when I loose elevator authority which results in a little bit too hard and to flat touch down. Definitely some work needed here.
One could ask – if you know so well what you did wrong why you did it in the first place? Good question with no good answer. Probably because I know what I did wrong after I did it wrong, also maybe because emotions take lead when something goes wrong on final.
Well… practice makes perfect. See you next time.
1.1h/0.0h inst : 11 to/ldg logged
21.0h/0.8h inst : 96 to/ldg total
