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.
- Flight Hours: Δ0.9 Σ17.7
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