Cross Winds, Cross Country and Bad Attitudes

The last two weekends I have actually flown all four of my scheduled lessons. Major topics covered are radio navigation, crosswind takeoff and landings, unusual attitude recovery and planning and flying a cross country.

VORs are basically radio towers that broadcast on the 360 degrees of a compass. You dial in the VOR frequency, dial in the radial you want, and the instrument in the plane tells you where you are in conjunction to that VOR. Very handy way to create a sort of radio highway to follow. We did this both with and without the view-limiting goggles(i.e. with and without simulated instrument conditions). It's fun, but not as easy as I thought it would be.

The same day we did VOR tracking, my home airport was having some very solid crosswinds. The runway is lined up to 340 on the compass. Winds were from 270(70 degrees from the left) at 10 knots, gusting to 17. That's not much fun. The technique is to dip the plane into the wind, and use the rudder pedals to keep the plane going straight. We did three landings, none of them were very good. Two of them I'm surprised I didn't ding the plane up.

Unusual attitude recovery was pretty easy. We learn this in case you get disoriented, and the plane is no longer in straight and level flight when you think it should be. Usually the nose has crept up and you are nose high, and in a turn. Or nose down and in a turn. The idea is how to you recitfy that before it develops into something unpleasant. Especially if you've accidentally gotten into weather you shouldn't be in(read: clouds).

Last thing was a cross country flight with my instructor. We flew from Manassas to Charlottesville, Va. This was much more difficult than I imagined. Instead of just flying, this introduced a new level of work in the cockpit. Mark checkpoints, writing down flight times, adjusting headings according to wind corrections, presetting radios. It was a tiring 45 minutes down there. At least my landing wasn't too bad. We parked and took 15 minutes to talk over what went well, and what needed improvement. On the way back, instead of flying quite as direct a route, we followed Rt. 29 northeast back to Manassas. This made things much easier, as did the brisk tailwind. Our groundspeed was close to 140 knots, or over 140 mph. This leg took about 25 minutes. Landing back at Manassas was fine, nothing spectacular.