The camera bloody well does lie…

My camera does not film the same flights that I experience. I am 100% sure of this fact.

Let us take last flight as an example. I was having a horrible time with the cross winds, just icky. I was fighting the plane and couldn’t even seem to get my approach speed anything close to acceptable. I badly wanted to bail out of my first approach. It didn’t even feel remotely right.

I was mildly peeved at Bob for forcing me to carry it through. I wanted to overshoot, he was adamant that I could do it. We landed. A bit squirly and me a sweating wreck but most importantly the plane in one piece and on the runway. When I look at the video of the landing, it is so not the landing I experienced.

Yes it was a bit wonky, yes I made the approach hard work and yes we were a little distant from the centreline but it was genuinely passable. Nowhere near as disastrous as I perceived it at the time. In fact all the landings were like that. If we ignore my apparent dislike for the centreline (see this post), all my landings were ok. At the time it felt like I couldn’t get my approach speed anywhere near the needed 65 knots. I constantly felt like I was way too fast.

When I view the video, I was maybe at 75 knots at some point on the base leg.

High? Yes. Disastrous? No.

So apart from the fact that I was whining like an ungrateful teenager what actually went right? Well according to the camera I can draw comfort from the following achievements:

·         Approach angle much better, not a single instance of dragging it in under power and no masts sticking up through the plane’s floor!

·         Only one landing per attempt, Captain Kangaroo seems to have taken a vacation. I hope he stays away.

·         Good spatial awareness of the traffic around me and what I need to do in order not to ram it from behind

·         Pretty sweet simulated engine failure in the circuit. Forced approaches are a lot easier when there is a runway at the other end of them.

·         I’m making the decisions now. I may ask a question out loud, but it’s really me I’m asking not Bob.  At one point I had a bit of a question about whether I actually had take-off clearance after my back track. I asked Bob; he paused for a moment, without waiting for an answer I was on the radio to ATC confirming what they wanted me to do.

Still to work on

·         Centreline- this post – enough said

·         Committing to the landing – although it is laudable to approach every landing as a potential overshoot, I need to have faith in my ability that I can see this through. I make mistakes. I correct them, we can still land this thing just fine.

 

Ah, Hmm yeah which one of us is lying then? It’s got to be the camera,

hasn’t it?