Flight Lesson #32 - 52.9 hours
I am so surprised I didn't get weathered out on this one.
Last night I was at a dinner party and checked the ADDS weather website, the forecast looked abysmal and weather.gov said snow all day every day this week for Santa Fe. When I woke up at 6 this morning, I couldn't see the mountains across the valley and it looked like the ceiling was really low. So I went back to bed for awhile. Then Michael sends me a text at 7 saying that the current weather was great and the radar looked good, despite the forecast still looking horrid. I looked back out the window to find that there was quite a bit of blue sky; whatever was obstructing my visibility before was gone. By 8 there no sign that it was going to be worse, so I drove down to Santa Fe for my 9 AM flight. On the drive down, some snow virga moved in from the south and it started looking worse again. When I arrived, it was overcast at about 6,000' AGL. But it was good enough that we felt confident in taking off and at least starting to do some work; if the precipitation started coming down or the ceilings dropped, we'd just fly back and land.
The good news is that below overcast skies the air tends to be quite calm. Such was the case this morning; no winds to speak of and no turbulence. We took off on runway 20 and headed out to the SW practice area. Did a quick refresher on some of the basic maneuvers including clearing turns, steep turns, slow flight, and power-off stalls. Had no problems other than a regular hesitancy to bring the aircraft down to below 40 knots for the slow flight.
With the maneuvering out of the way, I put the foggles on and we did a bit more instrument. A couple of basic turns, climbs, descents, and a few unusual attitude recoveries. Then we flew back to SAF with me still wearing the foggles, and simulated the ILS-2 approach. When I ripped the glasses off at minimums, I was displaced laterally from the runway by about 100', but it was easy to recover that in time and make a successful landing. We did a touch and go then made a right turn to join right traffic for runway 33. Here we practiced all of the specialty landings that I had worked on during my solo on Friday. Maybe its just because of the lack of any crosswind, but I nailed all of the landings. Put the soft field down nice and soft, kept the nose wheel off, etc. The precision landing was right on the stripes. We did a couple no-flaps landings with big slips on final, which were a bit ugly; haven't really every spent any time practicing that.
Next we made a quick jaunt up to Los Alamos (only about a 10 minute flight) so that I could get some more practice landing there. No wind there as well, so the landing was trivial. Turned around at the end of the runway and took right back off, flew back to Santa Fe, and did a final short-field landing on 20 for the day. For this one, rather than try to land the plane on the 1000' stripes, Michael had me land on the numbers right at the front of the runway. This meant targeting my final descent into the dirt preceding the runway, then flaring out over the pavement and setting it down right at the beginning. I missed the numbers by about 20 feet, but I'm happy with that considering it was my first try.
The weather was actually perfect; no wind and very smooth air. Overcast, but whatever. It always looked like it could start hailing at any moment, but it stayed very hospitable the entire time we were up.
After parking the plane and pushing it back into the hangar, we did a bit of quizzing regarding the oral exam. I didn't do great, but not horribly either. We'll be doing more of that next weekend after my next flight. Michael said he was very happy with my skills in the plane and said we should be wrapping up the training very shortly. Today's 0.4 hours of instrument time complete my requirement for 3.0 hours total, leaving only 0.7 hours of solo flight remaining in my requirements list. I have a solo flight scheduled for next Saturday morning, where I'll complete that requirement and practice those slip landings a bit more. Then a flight the following morning with Michael where we'll do a simulated checkride. I'm going to try to take my written exam a week from this coming Friday, possibly flying down to Double Eagle to take it. Once that's done, all that remains is to schedule my oral and checkride, possibly for the following weekend (if I'm not in Kazakhstan).