Aft GC
Today it was (probably) the last lesson with Terry. After computing WB for my checkride with Mike it turned out that we are having real problem – we will be outside envelope on the front GC side of it. To correct that I had to add 75 pounds to the baggage area. So today’s lesson with Terry was a chance to figure out how the plane behaves in such an aft GC situation. At least for me because with those 75 pounds of luggage we are still in the middle of the envelope and good 300 pounds below gross. Anyway the plane flew completely different and I’m glad we went for that ride because it would catch me by surprise tomorrow. So after takeoff we went to KCID to train soft and short field landings there. That was supposed to get me used to both new situation and extremely wide runways (75 feet which is almost four time wider than Green Castle). those runways were causing some problems for me in the past (I was flaring to high) so I was happy to go there and practice. And I’m very glad I did. Surprisingly aft GC situation seemed to help my landings. I had no problems greasing nice soft field landings with stall warning on during last four-five seconds of the flare. I also did some very nice (at least in my opinion) short field landings. I was able to touch down within 50-100 feet from the designated touch down point (which was within 500 feet from obstacle over the numbers) and stop the plane within 800 feet of the ground roll. Which probably wasn’t the best one the plane is capable off but definitely was one of the very best ones of mine. The thing that caused me problems was soft field takeoff. I had (again) problems keeping the plane within the ground effect to pick up the speed. After 6 tries I got finally good enough at it. We finished lesson with some simulated emergency landing and headed back to Green Castle. Now I feel much more competent to take this checkride. If only the weather cooperated.
1.0h/0.0h inst : 7 to/ldg logged
62.6h/3.1h inst : 315 to/ldg total
