I called the flight school yesterday evening and they confirmed the bald tire on 1727V had been replaced, so I was good to go for today’s lesson! The forecast and weather briefing were positive, but I saw some low-hanging clouds on the way to the airport that gave me pause.
They gave my instructor pause, too. He said I wouldn’t be going up solo today, but we could work on a few things in the pattern. I snapped this picture of some expensive-looking planes on my way out to preflight:
This time I made sure to preflight very carefully, paying extra attention to the two brand new tires that had been installed on the mains.
We went up and I started right traffic for runway 8. Immediately I noticed some strips of clouds right at pattern altitude. My instructor had me fly the pattern at a lower altitude than normal to avoid them, and we requested left traffic for the next laps (the sky was fairly clear on that side of the field).
It was an uneventful lesson, but a good one. We practiced power off approaches, stuck flaps approaches (with flaps stuck at 10°), and short approaches. I still need work on my ground track — I tend to stop thinking about the wind and I don’t keep an eye on where the plane is heading. I also need to pay more attention to the overall picture out the window — terrain, altitude, etc… In one of my power off approaches I would’ve ended up in the trees short of the runway because I had extended my downwind a bit too far.
My landings are definitely getting better — now it seems I have the occasional bad landing with most being decent instead of the other way around. That is encouraging!
I have a lesson booked for tomorrow (Memorial Day), but the forecast calls for rain all day so I don’t think I’ll be going up.
I didn’t record today’s flight on CloudAhoy — in fact, I don’t think I’ll be recording any more pattern flights with my CFI going forward. I’ll continue to record solo flights and any interesting (read: away from Danbury) dual flights we take.
Flight time today: 1.5 hours
Total simulated instrument flight time to date: 0.6 hours
Total PIC time to date: 0.4 hours
Total flight time to date: 44.6 hours
Total takeoffs to date: 161
Total landings to date: 157