Wow! Talk about a windy day today, and a cross wind too! Turns out it was quite turbulent at lower altitudes today and so Brad thought it best to cancel Amy’s intro flight. I think it was a good idea because we got bounced around quite a bit and I don’t think Amy would have liked it very much.
I used to dread cross winds, but now I look at them as an opportunity to practice and get better…especially when I’ve got an instructor sitting next to me. Today was a good example of that. I think when we took off winds were 15 gusting 20, and by the time we came back in for landing, they were 13 gusting 19. Fun stuff.
We headed out to the practice area today to practice precautionary landings. As I mentioned, it was a bit bumpy and the wind was gusting, which made for some interesting flying, but all in all it went pretty good. Brad showed me an example of a precautionary landing on a farmer’s field (we didn’t actually land) and then I got to try it on another field. Everything went ok, but on my low pass I forgot to count how long the field was. D’oh!
After I tried that we headed out to the carp airport and did a precautionary landing there. It was kind of cool, buzzing over the runway at 500 feet. We actually did a touch and go while we were there and it went ok. Wind was right down the pipe on 28.
Then we started to head back and I decided that I’d show Brad where I lived, so we hung a right and flew over my place at 1500 feet. I don’t think Brad actually saw my house because I was having a hard time pointing things out. Oh well, next time.
After our little tour of Stittsville, we headed back to land on 22. As I mentioned earlier, winds were 13 gusting 19 so I got some good crosswind landing practice. The landing went pretty good, although I pulled the power out pretty abruptly at the end and we dropped a little faster than would have been ideal. :)
Next lesson, Thursday evening.