The weather’s been icky the past couple of days, which I’m sure isn’t helping. I need to study, but I haven’t done that today either.
I got a new flight instructor last week. After my current one had annoyed me to no end, and it didn’t seem like I was getting anywhere, I got another one. He thought my maneuvers were fine and signed me off for a stage check. I’m not sure which one of them was right, but I like the noises the second one makes a lot better:)
I did another grass strip landing at Chickasha on Wednesday. That was fun. There’s not a lot to it, although I did it with a tailwind, something I’ve never tried before. Only about 4 knots, but still, it’s amazing how much difference 4 knots can make on your tail. I forget exactly, but a tail wind increases your landing distance something like 4 times as much as a headwind decreases your distance. I’m also not exactly sure why that’s the case. But the end result is that landing with a tail wind is not recommended. But I’m glad I’ve done it, so now I know what it feels like. You just fly down the runway and float forever. And then to do that on grass as well…. There’s nothing like a real soft field landing to help work out your soft field technique.
The interesting thing about Chickasha these days is note on the AWOS. (Automated Weather Observation System). In Norman, there’s a computer voice reading out the weather and it updates every minute. At Chickasha, it’s not as automated… There’s a human reading the weather, it’s not updated as often, but they also include airport notes. Like this one. “Runway One Seven Three Five is Closed. Landing is on the Taxiway. It’s 35 feet wide.” Yay. I landed on it with a 16 gusting to 22 knot DIRECT crosswind. By direct, I mean that it was perpendicular to the “runway”. I’ve never landed in a crosswind like that, but it was fun. That’s a lot of crosswind. To put it in perspective for you: The maximum demonstrated safe crosswind component of a C-172 is, I think, 12 knots. All that means is that someone demonstrated that the plane can be landed with a 12 knot crosswind. Doesn’t make it can’t be done it more, just that all that’s every been demonstrated to the FAA is 12 knots. It’s generally a pretty conservative number. To make it better, I did on a 35 foot taxi way. Which means that there’s really no room to get blown off centerline, unless you want to land in the piles of dirt. And that would be bad.
I was so impressed with myself, that I decided to do it again. I landed to the north the first time, and then landed to the south another two times.
Anyway, now I’m signed off, so I’m waiting around for a stage check. If I pass, it’s on to learning to fly a “complex” airplane, which is only like 10-15 hours of flight.
I should be taking these bad weather days to study for my oral. Maybe I’ll do that today.
I’ve been feeling restless lately. This has been giving me strange ideas, which I may or may not execute. Mostly depends on whether or not Joanna is similarly inclined. I’ll just let you guys guess, since I don’t want everyone to try to talk me out of it if we do manage to do it.
Now I have to go complain to the apartment people that our garbage dispose-all is garbage.