Not all landings are created equal.

The day after I posted my frustrations at my inability to land the plane...I manage to land the plane, four times, without instructor assistance. Needless to say, I was pretty happy that day.

I was scheduled to fly both Saturday and Sunday last weekend, but last Saturday was cancelled because of high winds. Sunday, however, was a great day to fly. It was about 35 degrees when my lesson started with no winds. I was really excited to go out and land the plane again. But before I could do that, I would, well, have to takeoff first, I suppose. Following that, we would go and practice some steep turns, slow flight, stalls, and then, finally, head over to Scappoose for some touch and gos.

As I was pre-flighting the Creamsicle (one of the 4 trusty 150s I train in), I noticed that there was mud all over the landing gear and the flaps. I wondered how mud got up on the flaps. Then it clicked. I had read in the paper that a plane rented from my flight school had to make an emergency landing in a wildlife refuge about 10 miles north of the airport. Apparently, he had ran out of gas. I don't know if he forgot to check the fuel before he had taken off or if he was flying back in and didn't quite make it. The owner drove out to look at the plane, deemed it airworthy, filled it up with some gas, and flew her back to Pearson. At this point, my flight instructor asks me if I had heard what happened to our plane for today's flight. She confirmed my suspicions. I later learned that this was the first time the plane was rented after the little incident. They wanted to see if our little Creamsicle wanted to fly back to the refuge. Fortunately, it did not.

We took off and went over to the practice area to practice some maneuvers and then headed to Scappoose. I then had three terrible landings. I think my flight instructor had to get on at the very end of each of them to get the plane on the ground. On each of them, I turned for final too late and wasn't lined up with the runway. I was also coming in too high and too fast. It was pretty frustrating. I even made mistakes on the radio calls. In once case, I said I was turning crosswind when I was really turning base. After I made the call, I wanted to get back on the radio and say, "Cessna 18661 means the other crosswind, Scappoose."

As we were flying back to Pearson, my flight instructor made the comment that I "look like a pilot." Well, at least I can look the part. I still have a lot of work to do to become a pilot.

Landings

Landings. My inability to successfully land the plane without my instructor jumping on at the last second is really beginning to frustrate me. But more on that later.

This week, the weather has been the best that the northwest has had all year. Of course, by Thursday the weather folks were predicting high winds (25-30 mph with gusts up to 50) through the weekend. Turns out we got most of the wind on Thursday and Friday, and by Saturday morning, the wind had died down completely. Today was the first day I have driven to the airport knowing that I was going to get up today. But not after a few problems.

I got to the airport about 10 minutes before my lesson was about to start. If my plan is available, I like to start pre-flighting early and get as much flying time as possible. When I got to the airport, I learned that my flight instructor was out on an IFR flight. They dispatched the plane to me and I went out to pre-flight. When I checked the fuel tanks, the plane only had about 6 gallons of fuel. The plane was on the other end of the tarmac, away from the fuel pumps. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to tow the plane over or taxi the plane over to the fuel pumps. I decided to wait for my flight instructor.

Unfortunately, her IFR flight went long, and she was about 20 minutes late. She told me that I could have towed the plane, but not taxi it. So we decided we would taxi over and fuel her up. When I tried to start the engine, the engine began to smoke. My flight instructor told me to get my stuff out of the plane and go back inside. I started going over in my mind what I did during pre-flight. I checked the oil, it was at 5 qts, within the 4.5 - 6 qt range on the 150s. I put the oil cap back on and secured it and secured the engine cover. I had primed her 3 times, as we always do when it's the first time the plane has been out for today. Mixture was set to rich and the throttle was 1/4 inch set. When my flight instructor told me to go inside, I thought she had seen me do something wrong (or not do something) and I was about to get yelled at. But it was simply to go and check to see if another plane was available. There was a plane available. I did my preflight again and off we went.

By this time, there was only an hour left in my lesson. So we flew over to Scappose to practice landings (and takeoffs...sort of hard to do one without the other). Winds were reported as variable, so I wasn't sure what to expect on landing. The first two landing attempts, my instructor got on with me at the end to help get the plane down. On the third try, she said that this one would be on my own. I lined myself up nicely with the runway on turning from base to final. I was a little low and added a little bit of power. There was a slight crosswind coming from the south (I was landing to the east), so I added just a little right rudder to keep the nose pointed into the wind. Everything was looking good for my first unassisted landing.

During this whole process, a plane that had landed in front of me was doing a touch and go and was taking off again. As I turned final, a bi-plane decided he's is going to try and takeoff before I land. In the back of my head, I start to recall what to do in case we have to go around. As I finish my turn on final, the bi-plane starts its roll. By the time I'm lined up with the runway, he is up in the air, and departs to the south immediately after takeoff. Okay...all of that's out of the way and now I can complete my first landing. Everything is going great until we are about 200 yards from the runway, we hit some heavy turbulence and the right wind starts to drop. I know it wasn't a stall because I was looking at the airspeed and we were going just over 60 knots. My flight instructor gets on the controls immediately and we safely land the plane. Since we never felt the turbulence on the first two landings, we think it might have been turbulence caused by the bi-plane taking off. Regardless of what caused it, if that had not happened, I might be writing about my first successful unassisted landing.

If the weather holds, I'll be going up, and coming back down, tomorrow.