Sloppy dog
First lesson outside the pattern since… as long as I can remember. I preflew the plane, set up camera (yes, first usable video from Piper) and departed. If you remember from last lesson I had a small problem with landing gear being fully extended. This week for a change the bird went for some other maintenance and having it in the shop they fixed the gear so it was back where it should be. I figured out one or two landings to get familiar with it would be in order. And… disaster, two first completely botched, ended with go arounds. Third one acceptable, I flared a little bit to high and touched just a little bit too hard, but as they say – ‘every landing after which you can reuse the plane was a good one!’.
After next take off I decided to fly to the practice area and …practice some maneuvers. Funny thing how fast you forget things not trained.
For starters – communication. This time I was prepared and wrote down the sqawk code, then read it back to the controller and set it up as a last thing. And I didn’t loose more than 50 feet of altitude in the meantime. But then things started to be uphill and stayed this way to the end of the lesson. There was another airplane practicing maneuvers in the area so next controller’s call was ‘..Cessna xxxx stay at 3000 or above, factor traffic directly below you’ promptly followed by ‘Cherokee 79J stay at or below 2500, factor traffic directly above you’. Oh! What should I say? Should I just roger it or read it back or what? And was it actually 2500 or just 2000 (I was flying at 1500)? I decided, that reading back whole thing will be the safest option and apparently it was OK as controller didn’t say a word later on. Another problem happened during my return to the airport. Before I can switch back from CID’s approach frequency I’m supposed to terminate the communication. But after I called ‘Cedar Rapids approach, 79J going back to Green Castle’ nothing happened. The controller didn’t answer to me, actually he wasn’t answering to anybody or about 30 seconds. I wasn’t worried at the beginning because I knew that it’s not only talking on the radio that controllers do. But then things started to be more interesting as I was already approaching pattern and it was high time to switch to our CTAF. What should I do, uh? “Think! Thinking has a future!” one of my teachers used to say. So I spend a little time thinking and it worked – apparently the controller seeing my transponder happily closing to the airport recalled hearing my call and now get back to me and the usual exchange of greetings happened. Uff….
Now let’s get back to flying itself. What a disaster. First my bird is heavily left wing heavy. Having me on the left seat alone didn’t help either. Even with full right trim it still doesn’t want to fly straight. It’s constant fight between me and him. The level part of straight and level flight also was quite questionable. Cherokee’s are very trim sensitive and I don’t have any experience in it flying solo outside the pattern. I think I spent about 10 minutes tracking roads before I was able to flight straight and level with just small inputs to correct wing heaviness. Then the time has come to do some maneuvers, s-turns, turns around the point… The works. It went out quite well with one exception – I had very, very big problem keeping the altitude. This was very strange feeling because so far I usually kept it nailed at 1500 having my ground track being far less than nice. Today it was the opposite – despite quite a wind the ground track was acceptable but the altitude was jumping all over the place between 1400 and 1700. Definitely more work needed here.
After about 45 minutes of flying I checked the weather again and it turned out that the wind is becoming more and more directly cross to the runways and I was quickly approaching my endorsement’s cross wind limit so I decided to end sooner and headed back to the airport. This landing wasn’t much better, but at least I stayed on the pavement whole time. Well….. As my brother says – we’ll talk again when I get to 100h.
Two landings described above are on the video below. All comments very welcome.
1.0h/0.0h inst : 2 to/ldg logged
28.5h/0.8h inst : 156 to/ldg total
