Slight change of plans for Sunday. I had planned to go into the club early to write the PSTAR before my lesson but it turned out I still haden’t finished studying by the time I left the house in time to make it for my 1400 lesson. No big deal though, I was able to write the test after my lesson.
Anyways, got to the club, secured a plane (XAM, yay!) and proceeded to start flying more circuits. There was much more of a crosswind on Sunday than I had experienced so far (exept for my first day in the circuit) and to be honest, I was having a little bit of trouble with it.
Brad tells me I’m still over controlling the plane when I try to make corrections. Trust me, I’m trying not to do that, but it seems I just can’t help it! ARGH! Talk about frustrating. Once again my last landing of the day was probably my best.
We had something interesting happen on Sunday. Instead of the planned touch-and-go, the controller told us to make a full stop and wait on the runway because he had some conflicting traffic passing across our take off path. That was the original plan, but just after we touched down and started slowing down he gave us the go ahead to take off again. We didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of runway left so we ended up climbing at the ‘best angle’ speed to ensure we cleared the trees. That meant we were climbing at around 60 KTs which was pretty freaky to me.
Anyways, it’s plain to me that I need quite a bit more practice in landing the plane. Brad tells me I’m doing well and not to worry about it, but I can’t help it.
As for the PSTAR, that was a breeze. I’m not sure what my score was on the test, but I’ll be surprised if I don’t get 100% on it. Huge thanks to Andy for lending me his A.I.P. and CFS so I could study. I’ll get those back to you soon Andy.
I’m not scheduled to fly again until Friday of this week. Hopefully that’ll give me some time to think about what I’m doing wrong with my landings.