A Student Pilot Blog by David Jen
I am endorsed… as far as the FAA is concerned, as a solo student pilot. We met up for a three hour ground session to review the student knowledge test and all the necessary papers are signed and pasted into my logbook. Still remaining to actually solo is a phase check with the club's chief pilot and Rimas's final thumbs up. I don't feel quite ready for either, but I now honestly think that both are within two or three more lessons. Maybe even more important, it's finally settling into my head that yeah, I can handle a plane by myself.
I learned a new term today. Engineer's Syndrome: where the student feels the need to try out all the wrong things for himself instead of just listening to his instructor.
Rimas got himself some extra instructing time this week so I jumped on it and booked a bunch of time with the intention of getting me to solo this week. I think I'm losing ground during the off weeks, so one concerted push to get my landings smoothed out should be all that's needed to get me solo.
I had never been to KOAK so we decided to go there. KOAK is a cool airport in that it's really two airports in one: the international/commercial side and a general aviation side. There were a lot of comms getting into KOAK and Rimas had to pick up slack when I simply didn't understand half the instructions. At the last minute, the tower offered us the commercial runway. The big, 10,520 ft. runway. We had to slow down and descend pretty rapidly to get down, but we accepted the clearance because chance to land on freaking two-miles of runway. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good landing. I got fooled by the huge size, flared too high, and dropped the plane in.
More pattern work on the GA side, then depart to KSQL.
KSQL was a circus. We could barely get the tower to respond to us and when they did, they just told us to hold doing three-sixties. Everyone was being told to do three-sixties. Tower was simply task-saturated. We eventually got in there, did our one full-stop, and got the hell out of there.
KPAO was almost just as busy and we came very close to their delta without a response from the tower. Thankfully we were acknowledged before having to do more holding. My landing was crappy. The ol' big runway to little runway trick, I flared too late on KPAO's small runway and landed hard.
- Flight Hours: Δ1.1 Σ38.5
- KPAO 291747Z 35007KT 10SM FEW012 SCT020 18/14 A3003
- KOAK 291719Z 26006KT 10SM FEW008 SCT010 BKN200 16/12 A3004 RMK AO2 T01560122
- KSQL 291747Z 02007KT 10SM FEW008 SCT200 17/14 A3003
- Flight Hours: Δ0.4 Σ37.4
- METAR KPAO 212347Z 33010G20KT 10SM SKC 23/17 A2996
Four week hiatus because of work/travel. Landings, no flap landings, simulated engine out landings, engine out on takeoff.
Flaring is getting better. I had three really solid landings. Another two were acceptable. The other two got kind of crazy. It would help if I work on stabilizing my approach better; glide slope still varies. Keep the nose centered through the flare and rollout. Keep the elevator back during rollout. Lining up on centerline is getting better. Was difficult sometimes keeping track of orientation with runway during crosswind and downwind legs; it's easy at KPAO because I have all my landmarks memorized, but at KHWD, I don't know what to look for and there are more distractions, like airliners in the KOAK charlie only one-thousand feet above me and traffic on the parallel runway. I should bug the runway heading as part of initial descent.
Feel better managing stress with engine out.
- Flight Hours: Δ1.2 Σ37.0
- METAR KPAO 190047Z 34010KT 10SM SCT200 23/16 A2993
- METAR KHWD 190054Z 30011KT 10SM FEW020 FEW180 22/14 A2992
