Preparation – Week 10 – 4/27/2024
Luke P -
Everything really feels like its coming together. These past 2 weeks I’ve been doing a lot of pattern work trying to perfect my landings and I really feel like I’ve been nailing it. I’m almost always on centerline, they’re almost always smooth, my flare has gotten a lot more precise and I’m not floating my landings anymore. I was soloing and I got like 8 different landings in over 2 seperate flights and I was a little scared that my good landings were a fluke.
So, I went to fly with my instructor and it was a really gusty windy day, so we decided not to practice manuevers and we stayed in the pattern. The first landing we praticed was a soft field landing and even in the gusty conditions I felt like it was rolled on. Next we did a short field landing which I can’t normally get to be accurate and smooth at the same time but I was on a roll that day so I got it on the runway smoothly and had really good stopping distance. After, that we switched to more emergency procedure focused training. We tried a no flaps landing, which is a pretty different thing because you have a shallower descent angle and you come in a lot faster. I definitely floated that landing further than what I wanted, but that’s super common for no flaps landings due to the higher approach speed. It was otherwise a pretty good landing. I was afterwards given a really difficult scenario: power failure. That isn’t the same as an engine failure, in this case the engine is still producing power, but you can’t change the power setting. It’s really quite terrifying because you really have to do everything to lose energy and slow down the airplane. My landing was almost a really bad landing but luckily I was able to catch it at th last second and it worked out alright. It definitely had my heart racing though. I’ve been doing a lot of studying recently trying to get ready for my checkride. Unfortunately we couldn’t get anyone to come to Flagstaff until May 13th so I will be studying and practicing until then. I really feel like it has all come together at the right time and I’m feeling pretty good about the checkride.
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