Flight School Day 9

Today, we prepared more for what I need to know in order to solo by reviewing the sectional (map) together.  I am allowed to fly within a 25 mile radius of the airport.  I don’t know when my solo will be but he makes it sound like it could be really soon.

We practiced more landings today, this time with a bit of wind so they were a little harder.  I still never landed a wheel landing very well–they all turned into bounces followed by full-stall landings.  He demonstrated a nice one where he landed on one wheel and went quite a ways down the runway like that until leveling out and lowering the tail.  The trick is the airplane MUST be lined up straight down the runway when it touches or else all kinds of craziness will start to happen.  If there is a crosswind you still have to be traveling straight down the runway but the only way for that to happen is if the airplane is banked into the wind with a bit of opposite rudder to keep it going straight.  That makes it so you’re just about guaranteed to land on one wheel at a time.  After a few failed attempts at wheel landings, he let me do some more full stall landings that all turned out pretty nice.

We practiced another engine failure from the pattern and I saved us and landed on the runway.  He gave me an engine failure shortly after takeoff and I got us lined up for a nice landing in some farmer’s field before he restored engine power and we flew around for another landing.

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