Progress Check

Progress Check
2009-08-07 13:00 MDT
Temp: 32C Wind: 30 degrees cross @ 10 kts

Having the solo under my belt, and Jory conveniently being out of town at a wedding, I was supposed to go up with Jack, the owner of the flight school, today. Just to see if I'm coming along ok. Well, Jack had a scheduling conflict, so I ended up going up with a nice guy named Tim instead. That turned out to be pretty fun.

We started off by doing just a couple of patterns, finally with a decent crosswind. The wind tried to blow me off centerline when I was coming in on final, but I was able to bring it back over. The first landing was pretty flawless, even for being in a crosswind. Went up and came around for another. Had to evade a couple of planes coming in to land in the opposite direction (They were doing ILS practice).

The second landing was slightly harder, but still straight down the line, which is what makes me happy.

After that, we went back up and out to the training area just to do a couple of air maneuvers that I've been having some difficulty with. We did a couple of stalls, both with and without power, because last time I did it all wrong and it nearly made me throw up. Today went much better. It will still require some more practice, but I think I can handle it.

At my request, I wanted to redeem my crappy steep turn performance from last week, so we did a couple of those. I lost some altitude on the first one, but not enough to go outside the standards for the checkride that will come later. The 2nd through 4th steep turns were nearly spot on. I was quite pleased with them.

Headed back to the airport, got in the pattern, and made a nice landing to finish it off.

All in all, a relatively short and simple day, but now two different people are satisfied that I can fly, and that's some validation for me :)