metaruss

Had a pretty good flight today.  My taxi and takeoff radio work were better this time.  We’ve started discussing emergency procedures and, as I expected, my first exposure to a simulated emergency didn’t go all that well.  I did my best to memorize the checklists before the flight, but it wasn’t all that helpful in the moment.  He showed me his flow checks in the 152 and so I’m going to head over there sometime for some dry time to practice those.

After a couple of steep turns that I overshot for some reason, we proceeded on to ground reference maneuvers.  We went around a rectangular pattern a few times and I got the hang of left traffic after a couple of laps.  However, the right pattern was a lot more challenging and I struggled to keep the correct distance from the landmarks and choosing my bank angles.  Going to need more practice with those.  Somehow I just couldn’t keep it all straight in my head while also dividing my attention between where I was, where I needed to turn, what kind of turn it needed to be, where I needed to be after the turn, my altitude, my airspeed, and keeping everything coordinated.  Multitasking is pretty much the point of the exercise, so more practice next time when we polish this and then move on to S-turns and turns around a point.

My radio work for the arrival fumbled a bit when the tower gave me a bunch of information that I then couldn’t articulate back, but it got better as we went around the pattern for a first-ever landing on runway 30 with a bit of a crosswind.  It wasn’t terrible.