Short and soft

In preparation for my checkride it’s time to tie all the loose ends in my training. Among of them are short and soft field operations. I’ve trained them few times and Terry says I’m doing fine, but I simply don’t feel I’m good enough to comfortably go for a checkride. So I went to the airport to practice. I was able to make 7 takeoffs and landings plus one go around (too high approach). Some notes to myself to enforce what I have to work on:

• Short field takeoff – this is the one I’m most confident I can do properly. I have no problem keeping the airspeed within few miles from POH values. And although the attitude is way to steep for my comfort level the stall light never comes on again and the HSI shows up to 800ft/min climb. Which is nice.
• Soft field takeoff – no really problem here. I still have some troubles with gently lifting main wheels off the ground, looks like the plane wants to jump off the runway and then it quickly climbs to about 15-20 feet. I’ll work on that more but I don’t feel like there is much left to be done
• Short field landing – actually at our airport all of them are short. I’m always trying to do as short approach and landing as I can. I still have the problem with nice, positive flare execution without causing plane to float. Even if the speed is dead on 80mph over the numbers and I see it dissipating during the flare the plane tends to eat up several hundreds of feet before she settles down. Down slope runway doesn’t help here either
• Finally soft field landing – those will need a lot more work from me to satisfy myself. I still have problems executing slower than usual approach with a tad of power at the end. Even though I was able to put some really nice greasers yesterday and I finally am quite pleased of the outcome. I definitely will focus my training on those. How about making all landings ‘soft field ones’ till the end of training? That should help.

All in all it wasn’t bad at all. I’ve definitely noticed and improvement compared to the last time I trained those. And that’s most important.

GPS track

0.9h/0.0h inst : 7 to/ldg logged
53.2h/2.0h inst : 285 to/ldg total