Some context

From the previous post.

Girls at work discovered it was my birthday and took me out for a drink

The Whiskey was a very welcome gift

I drank lots of “blue drinks”.

I have no idea what was in them

I went to go home

We ended up in another bar

I drank red drinks this time

Now my head hurts and I have to interview students about their “Health for Life projects”

This is not a good combination.

A good night

dodgy 80s band

 

 

Seasonal issues this lesson, mainly involving a dodgy 80s band.

Confused? Meh, maybe a tad obscure. The fine folks above formed “A Flock of Seagulls”

I’ve noticed, even sitting in my condo, a big increase in the amount of bird activity around the airport in the last few weeks. Big flocks of the buggers dive bombing around the place.  I have a turbulent relationship with creatures of the avian variety. Last year, much to the amusement of my friends, there was a bird that lived in some trees on my way home. It used to dive bomb me. It drew blood once. I used to walk home carrying an umbrella; hell bent on beating the living crap out of it, if it came close.

This lesson, on top of the workload caused by a reasonable crosswind, I had to deal with ATC pointing out the location of every single bird in the vicinity of the airport. Now while I appreciate them doing this, I’m not exactly sure what they want me to do with the information. Believe me if I can’t fend off one solitary blackbird on my way home from work, when I’m walking and reasonably agile. I have no freakin hope of avoiding them while I’m in the circuit. And if they do decide to pay me a visit; well a flock of them brought down a commercial airliner.

My Cessna ain’t gonna stand a chance.

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?

 

 

Getting cross with the wind

Low cloud base and dubious weather over the practice area today, so I was confined to the circuit. Bob, as usual, had a plan so that we got something productive out of the lesson.

A 6+ knot crosswind certainly gave us something to work with , coupled with the fact that my circuit practice is a little rusty. Bob summed it up nicely by saying “If I send you out to the practice area on your own. I need to know that you can land it on the way back.” No arguments here.

Bob had a list of things he wanted me to concentrate on. Mostly eliminating the kangaroo impressions I’ve become so good at. I agreed that this wasn’t a bad idea. I also wanted to work on my approach angle. Dragging it in under power is bad technique and given the summer harbour traffic could see me impaled on the top of a dinghy!

The above was on top of the crosswind practice we set out to achieve. My technique of choice is to use a slide slip. I find it tricky though. Not the technique per se but I find it difficult to bring myself to maintain the aileron input all the way down. My mind still says the yoke should be straight when you land. Consequently I am pretty much fighting the plane all the way down. I make life hard for myself, nothing new there, unfortunately.

Still with the requisite amount of complaining and moaning from me, I did actually manage to pull off some reasonable landings. With one minor problem. My old nemesis. That fricken centre line.

It hates me, officially hates me! I fly a plane equipped with a built in centre line repellent. There is no other explanation.

At one point I landed, took a brief look around me to judge that I was Ok to continue with my touch and go, I winced. “Hmm I’ve heard rumours that there is a centre line round here somewhere.” I tentatively joked in half apology. I was waaaaay over to the left.

Now you know things are bad when mild mannered Bob resorts to sarcasm “yep I heard that too, lets taxi over there and see if we can find it, eh WMAP?”

Next time, determined to do better I found myself exactly the same distance on the right side of the runway. “this isn’t even funny anymore” I complained.

Bob made some joke about a “Goldilocks landing” next time but the truth is I never did get it “just right”!

I think my head might be on crooked or something!

 

 

Yay, I'm useful!

I’ve blogged before about how easily flying can make you feel very very stupid, very very quickly. Sometimes it’s kind of nice when you feel slightly more than useless.

I was browsing the interweb the other night and noticed a strange email in my localflighteast account. Now LFE doesn’t get much in the way of email, I separate out my aviation newsletters and stuff so that they get delivered there but there isn’t very much in the way of unsolicited or surprise stuff that goes there, and touch wood, no spam so far. Obviously people have realised that WMAP has no need for Viagra, Cialis or anything else of that nature!

Once I’d established that this message (received via my YouTube account) was actually genuine I set about answering. Turns out it was from a guy coming up to visit CYTZ from Chicago and wanted some advice about the airspace and procedures. We exchanged a few messages back and forth. I answered some questions about flight plans and itineraries, passed on some advice about obtaining VTAs and a copy of the CFS. I was also able to advise him on how to request the “city tour” and how ATC tend to handle sight-seeing tours.

I started off our conversation with the huge caveat that I was a student pilot and thus my answers should be judged as such but then it occurred to me. Holy Hippo, I actually know what I’m talking about.

Yay I’m actually useful. And it is so damn cool to talk to other pilots. The interweb is a fabulous thing.

There’s no TSA here!

One of the things that made me chuckle slightly at Lindsay was the complete lack of definition between airside and the rest of the airport. The said barrier was a flimsy gate that said “pilots and passengers only”. It was wide open and didn’t look like it had ever sported a lock. This is probably the case for most General Aviation airports and is probably the thing that stands out the most to people when going in a small plane for the first time. No one searches you or your baggage, no one tries to grope you in the name of security* and no one gives a stuff about what you take on the plane as long as it’s within the weight and balance limits. As an aside here when RTH was learning to fly, the stupidly strict liquid restriction was on (the one where they wouldn’t let you take any liquids airside). RTH got into a bit of a discussion** with the port authority staff who saw his bottle of water and were adamant about the fact he wouldn’t be allowed to keep it.  I don’t recall how it played out but I can imagine that RTH was equally as adamant in his belief that they should mind their own business.

The GA side of CYTZ plays some lip service to security. The door to the apron requires a code to open it, if someone has pulled it shut properly in the first place!

It is a much more casual environment and I hope it stays that way.

* If dispatch try, it is time to find another flight school ;)

** RTH doesn’t argue, he doesn’t lose his cool, he just succeeds in making the other person look very stupid