Lesson #20 Second Solo : More Landings

On Monday I was scheduled to go up on my second solo flight. I had scheduled two hours in the plane and was really looking forward to my time in the air. As luck would have it I failed to check my calendar (my wife) and I seemed we had promised to go to dinner with some friends. Now some of you may think that I should have just tried to fly and make dinner. Those of you who said that must live closer to the airport than I do. I live in Chicago near Wrigley Field (god the Cubs suck this year) and fly out of PWK. Google maps says the distance from my house to the airport is 24 miles. Those 24 miles take me over 90 min to travel. As a result I needed to cancel my lesson. Luckily there was some open time on the plane's schedule yesterday at 7:00pm. I scheduled an hour in the plane. My plan was to go up and work on my patterns and landings. It took me the before mentioned 90 min to get up to PWK and I barely made it on time. Once at the airport I went to meet the owner of the flight school in order for him to give me the keys. After handing me the keys I got a little bit of a speech about "going around". As you have read in my previous posts, there have been a couple of incidents with students at our flight school. Basically he was saying not to try and save a bad landing but to instead "go around". That in and of it self is good advice, however, the subtext behind the speech, to me, was "a student already broke on of my planes and cost me a lot of money so don't mess up the only plane we have left". I guess I can't really blame him, but it did make me really nervous. He then drove away and wished me luck and to be safe (read don't crash my plane). I had already been listening to ATIS and had all of the necessary info written down on my handy post it note. I radio PWK ground and told then my intentions. Apparently the controller had responded to taxi to runway 16. Well I missed his reply. I waited there in the plane feeling a little dumb and not really wanting to ask the controller to say again. I quickly overcame the moment and radioed asking again for taxi instructions. The controller replied in his best annoyed voice that he had cleared me to runway 16. Gotta love cranky controllers. He must have known I was a student, although, I think my radio work is pretty good. I taxied to the runup area for 16 and went through slowly my checklist. I was really nervous about something going wrong so I wanted to be really cautious about all of my pre-takeoff checklist stuff. I tuned into the tower and was told to "position and hold" and then was cleared within seconds for take off.

Time for take-off. Full throttle, check rpm, check engine instrument, check airspeed alive. This whole time I was saying this outloud. Is it wierd to talk to yourself when flying? Airspeed 60 mph, rotate . . . and we are flying. Hold the extended center line..... tower clears me for right closed traffic follow sundowner traffic. No problem I have traffic in sight. On base to final turn find myself a bit high. . . no problem reduce throttle a bit, third notch of flaps and I get back on the glide path. Here is where I learned some new stuff. On my final I had about a 4 knot crosswind. In the past I had done all my landings using the "low-wing method". This time I, for reasons unknown established my crab to correct for the wind. I held this crab close to touchdown and then kicked the rudder to straighten out. This resulted in a fantastic soft landing with the stall light coming on at touchdown. I wish I would have known that the crab method of landing really isn't as hard as it seemed when reading about it.

The four other landings of the night were very similar. All right traffic, which for me is much harder than left. Got some good practice on the radio, and got to see a beautifully sunset. Need to work on my tendency to pull the airplane right when I look out the right window during right traffic and need to keep a very close eye on airspeed when working the radio. All in all another great day of flying. And I didn't bust up our school's last airplane. Oh and one more thing the picture in this post is from google maps and actually show where our plane is parked and I think you can actually see the plane I fly circled in red.