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.