A Student Pilot Blog by David Jen
Landings. Let's do this.
My response to screwing up is usually to have at it again, and have at it again soon. I've found that if I give myself time to dwell on my mistakes, my self-confidence drops and drags my motivation down with it, which begets more mistakes, and that's never good. Though I'm not sure I would call landing practice on Friday a screw-up, it wasn't successful and it felt frustrating.
Citing tiredness late in the day as a contributing factor to said frustration, I scheduled an early afternoon flight for today. We flew a right Dumbarton departure over the bay and headed over to Hayward Executive (KHWD) for practice. This was nice in that it gave me a couple minutes to get used to the plane in straight level flight before the more precise landing maneuvers, and also because Hayward has a bigger runway than KPAO, which makes all airplane occupants breathe a little easier.
KPAO tends to be the busiest little airport around on the weekends and landing practice there can be a chore because planes end up waiting in long sequences for takeoff and landing clearances. I don't know why the other airports nearby like Hayward have so much less traffic, but if it means I can circle around and do my thing unmolested, that's fine with me.
We did six or seven touch-n-gos at KHWD before heading back for a full stop landing at KPAO. Although not quite there yet, the landings felt much better than Friday. It will take me some while more for the concept of sideslips to sink into my muscle memory, but it's getting there. I still find myself thinking, okay now the rudder works backwards, sometimes during slips, but if I concentrate there are some brief moments where I can decouple the rudder from the ailerons and understand what each needs to do independently.
- Flight Hours: Δ1.2 Σ18.9
- KHWD 211954Z AUTO 27007KT 10SM CLR 28/07 A2991 RMK AO2 SLP138 T02780072
Everything was squirrely tonight. And by everything, I mean me; and by squirrely, I mean imagine a squirrel flying a plane through a hailstorm but instead of hailstones it's raining nuts. But enough self-pity, let's try to debrief a bit.
Tonight was my first lesson of landing practice since restarting flying. Landing practice amounts to landing and then immediately taking off again without losing much speed on the ground roll. This is called a touch-n-go and lets pilots bang out multiple landings efficiently. We did about seven of these (I wasn't really counting) at KPAO.
I didn't feel like I was on top of things at any point during the lesson. Trying to juggle the radio while maintaining my bearings in the pattern kept me task-saturated. There was also a decent crosswind from the right, and I'm still very clumsy with sideslips, either swinging the nose too much or noticing too late when the wind has changed and finding myself with the wrong amount of correction.
A couple specific factors come to mind:
Briefing. I should've asked at the beginning of the flight what landmarks we were looking for for our turns in the pattern. Instead, it look me a couple circuits to figure out how to define our legs. This was exacerbated a bit by the number of other planes in the pattern, which is common at KPAO, but can result in the controller telling us to extend our downwind until he's ready for us to turn. In other words, every circuit was slightly different. It also took me a while to realize that pattern altitude is at 800 ft east of the airport (it's 1000 ft west of it). All of these confusion points could've benefited from some quick research beforehand. I kind of went into the lesson already behind, not ready to lead the events, but just waiting to see what would happen. That can begin a psychological snowball where not feeling in control creates stress which loses more control, and I need to guard against that.
Precision. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but didn't adhere to it tonight. Flying is about precision: holding an altitude, holding an airspeed, holding the centerline – somewhere kind of near the target isn't good enough. Imprecision should be shown no mercy.
Energy. Today was a long day at the end of a long week at work. The flight lesson was delayed so it didn't start until almost 1900. Skipping dinner to go flying when I'm tired doesn't yield good results. I forget what the IMSAFE acronym stands for, but I'm pretty sure being awake and fed are both in there.
It occurred to me that I should probably find out how Joanna reacts to small planes since, if for some reason she was terrifically frightened or sickened by them, that would change how much energy I should invest in flying. Aviation opens a lot of exciting opportunities, from camping at secluded backcountry airstrips, to acrobatics, to the Civil Air Patrol, but one of the primary "missions" I had in mind was simply taking the family from point A to point B.
So I asked Joanna about doing a discovery flight, a first lesson that flight schools sell for cheap to try to get someone hooked on flying. She sounded excited. My flight instructor suggested the three of us go together and make an afternoon of it: we would fly from Palo Alto to Half Moon Bay (KHAF), with me having a lesson on the way there, Joanna having her discovery flight on the way back, and a nice lunch in the middle at Half Moon Bay.
When the day came, clouds were threatening to sock in KHAF so we decided to go to San Carlos (KSQL) instead. A minor bummer since that route wouldn't include flying over the hills and along the ocean, but adapting plans in response to weather is a big part of flying, so might as well drive that point home from start. I took off on a left Dumbarton departure out of KPAO to do some maneuvers before heading over to KSQL. Once we got up to 2000 ft though, we could see that KHAF was actually clear. It's easy to forget how close the ocean is to us in the south bay. The only roads leading there are small twisty ones that go over the hills to the west so driving always takes at least 90 minutes. And the hills block the view, so the illusion is that the ocean is this far away place. But in a plane as soon as you have enough altitude to see over the hills, the ocean is right there, a deep flat blue with white surf where it meets the land.
Seeing it and not going was too much to bear. Also my instructor was taking his job as aviation salesperson very seriously and scenery scores mucho sales points, so I pointed the little plane towards the ocean and we began to climb over the hills. Half Moon Bay is pretty easy to spot with its distinctive hook of land. The airport is untowered and almost right on the ocean. We landed and walked to Mezza Luna, an Italian restaurant right next to the airport.
As planned, Joanna flew her discovery flight on the way back. She loved it and my instructor and I breathed a sign of relief – no one's hobbies were being grounded any time soon. People are always surprised how much control a person with no experience can be given on a discovery flight. But in the air, there are not that many things to hit and a lot of room to correct yourself if you get into something funny. Joanna's flying was fairly smooth and lacked the over-controlling over-adjustments of my first flights, but the video later showed she had a pretty mean death grip on the yoke, the natural response to realizing that for the first time you're in control of an airplane.
The weather had used the lunch hour to increase the updrafts at the hills and there was now a cloud bank solidifying rapidly. If we couldn't find a clearing in the clouds to get over the hills, we would have to continue south along the coast, out from under the 4000 ft bravo shelf, before we could climb to get over the clouds. But we found an opening and were soon back in our familiar valley, crossing the particle accelerator (SLAC), overflying the Stanford campus, and into the KPAO airspace. Joanna continued flying all the way to the runway threshold, then my instructor took over and landed.
For the record, Joanna logged 0.5 hrs PIC time.
