Thursday was flight 18 in the quest to get a private pilot certificate. The goal of the day was more solo pattern work. The weather was pretty nice – clear, low 40s, and wind at 9 knots from due south. Started with two landings with Willis, then off on my own for the rest of the hour. Did 5 solo landings, 4 of which were touch and goes (the last obviously being a full stop to get back to the ramp).

Still having some trouble coping with the behavior differences of the plane with and without Willis. I’m getting better, but I still let myself get a bit slow on approach because I’m not trimmed as well as I should be. As the day went on, I improved on my trimming of the plane for the approach speeds, so that’s good. I was also coming up a bit short on the first few landings and having to apply power during final because I wasn’t compensating for the wind coming directly up the runway. The last couple of approaches, I shortened the length of the final (as I should have done in the first place) and the approaches didn’t require so much power to make the runway. The one possible problem for my checkride was that I was too slow getting off the extra power when I had the long final and wasn’t smoothly getting off the power once I started the landing flare, so I was carrying too much power (and therefore too much power) on flare and floating it down the runway. Not a big deal when the runway is 6500′ long and the goal is a safe landing. But can’t float the runway on a checkride.

Next time up, the wild blue yonder calls. Which is good, because I desperately need to work on turns about a point with a wind. On one of the landings, I had to circle while on downwind to give a plane on instrument approach time to land and clear the runway. My turn looked like a joke — I was not happy about that.