Category Archives: Flight

Instrument Flight 2

[yes, the entry is backdated to the end of the lesson. cope.]

This morning was my second instrument lesson. Friday’s weather was beautiful in the morning and choppy and hot in the afternoon. I was hoping to get the same thing this morning, and was lucky to be right. We took off on 22 and headed to the northwest practice area (just north of KAEG). Takeoff was a bit harrowing — I had the engine leaned a little too much and wasn’t making full power. I had a 100 foot/minute climb which is way low, but at least survivable. Scanning instruments, the EGT (exhaust gas temperature) was high, so richened the mixture and we were able to establish a good climb rate (600-800 foot/minute) at Vy. Much happier.

Instrument flight was uneventful – I was able to keep the plane mostly where it should be. I still drift a bit more than I’d like when I’m trying to deal with cockpit resources (like tuning and verifying the right VOR or ILS). We then came back to KAEG to do the ILS 22 approach. Until about .5 miles before the middle marker (about .5 mile from the end of the runway), I had it nailed. I started losing the glidescope (the vertical guidance) a bit, but was probably +/- 100′ or less and I could have gotten it back together. however, someone decided to start using runway 4 and everyone else switched just as quickly. The runway numbers are magnetic heading rounded to the nearest 10 degrees, with the last digit dropped. So I’m coming in on 22, people are departing on 4. Those good at math have probably figured out that planes were coming right at us. So we broke off the approach early and offset for traffic.

“breaking out of the clouds” (removing the view limiting device) at 300-400′ was an interesting experience. The ground looks *really* close and coming up faster. I had practiced a VOR approach at Bloomington and an ASR (airport surveillance radar) approach at Terre Haute, but both of those go missed at 1000′, so you’re still a long way from the ground when you “break out”. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but kind of weird.

We then spent some time doing touch and go landings so that I could get the feel of the 172 again. I finally got to the point where I was comfortable in the flare, but still was coming in high and fast. Each one was slightly better than the last, so I think there’s progress being made. It’s amazing how much different the sight picture out of the 172 is compared to the RV. And just as remarkable how much slower it comes out of the sky compared to the RV.

Next week is navigation, which should be fun.

Exhausting Flight Home

Today was a tiring flight home. Winds were directly across the runway at 14-18 knots, occasionally swinging to a headwind. It took a little while for the winds to calm down enough that we could roll (18 is pretty high), but we caught a break after sitting at the hold-short line for 5 or 10 minutes. The plane was squirly once speed came up, so I did a soft field technique and got off the ground early, then nosed over (in some good chop) to pick up a bit of speed. There was a choppy 20-25 knot tailwind on the way home, so we had to stay under Va (about 120 knots in the RV) on the way home.

Winds in ABQ were from the Northwest / North, so runways 26 and 30 were in use. I’ve landed on 3, 8, and 26 but never 30 (17/35 is almost never used). To land from the North on 30, you fly over the numbers of 17 at 7000′ (about 1800′ above the ground), make a left turn and enter right traffic for the runway, staying above 7000′ until south of runway 8/26. So now you’re heading southeast away from the airport, then make the 180 turn to head back towards 30. The 180 part isn’t unusual, but it’s odd that there’s nothing to the southeast of the airport. It’s just desolate wasteland, so it’s hard to judge. So I ended up high and fast on approach. Got it figured out and pointed at the touchdown zone with slightly high speed with a massive crab from the crosswind. Tower called winds at 360@10, so there would be about a 8-9 knot cross-wind. Coming down the crosswind bled off a bit as expected, and I was all setup for a nice crosswind single wheel landing. A little fast, but when you’re slipping to keep aligned with the runway, you bleed of speed really fast in the flare. So get down, start flaring, and the cross-wind drops out on me. No problem, throw out the rudder, put it down on both mains, and roll out (but fast). Not a great landing, definitely a tiring approach, but the plane is not any worse off than before so it’s all good.

Now that I’ve seen the approach to 30, I think the next one will be much better. I think I have a better idea on where the waypoints are and how high I should be before starting the turn to base. But I suppose I won’t know until the next flight requiring me to land on 30. Yippie.

How to get the FAA mad at you…

Mom – nothing in this entry involves me or the plane. Sorry, but they still let me fly…

ATC (Air Traffic Control) is responsible for controlling traffic around busier airports. This includes everything from a tower at an airport like Santa Fe or Bloomington making sure only one plane at a time uses the runway to controllers using radar to positively control both IFR and VFR traffic at busy airports like Denver or LAX. And you talk to ATC while you’re flying around, either for routing (IFR) or traffic advisories (VFR), although VFR doesn’t really have to talk to ATC in route. But it’s a good idea.

Anyway, for what not to do, there’s a guy in the news for being escorted down by F-16s after controllers thought he had been hijacked. Ooops. I’ve been in close proximity of F-16s and F/A-18s (they fly in and out of the Sunport), but never when one was escorting me. That would be double-plus not fun. There isn’t much information yet so it’s not clear whether he accidently scrolled through the magic code on his transponder or if he used one of the code words. Should be interesting.

There was an e-mail from the FAA Safety Team in my inbox when I got home from work today, a report on runway incursions for the last twelve months in the local region. The summary is:

12 - Entered runway or crossed runway hold bars without ATC clearance* 
11 - Issued and read back hold short instructions, then entered runway 
4 - Landed without ATC clearance 
10 - Departed without ATC clearance* 
2 - Departed from wrong runway 
* A single aircraft is responsible for multiple (2) RIs

So the 12 entered runway or cross runway hold bars is a difficult one. Clearly one guy took off that way, which is double-plus bad. But on complicated airports like KABQ, it’s not too hard to get lost and end up crossing an active runway. Not good, but you can almost understand how it happened. But 11 times, someone got instructions to NOT enter a runway, read back the instructions to NOT enter a runway, then entered a runway. I’m not sure how you do that exactly, but they did. *sigh*.

Flying “blind” (Instrument Flight 1)

I need to find cheaper hobbies. The next logical step after getting a private pilot license is either to get a bunch of endorsements (taildragger, high performance, complex, etc.) or an instrument rating. High performance around here means a T-41 or a 182RG. The T41 is a 172 with a huge engine and not that interesting. It goes slower and uses more gas than the RV-7. The 182RG is high performance and complex, but really expensive and anyone who rents one would want lots of hours before they’d let me go alone. The only taildragger for rent in all of central New Mexico is a Pitts at Bode, but it’s ungodly expensive and not a fun plane to fly straight and level. It is, however, an awesome plane to fly acro. It’s also $300+ an hour, so not in my price range. That left instrument training. Today was my first lesson. I’m training in a Cessna 172 with a Garmin G1000 glass panel.

We went up for about 1.2 hours, about 1.0 of which was under the hood (wearing one of these things, so all you can see is the panel, not the outside world). We worked on level flight, turns, climbing, descending, and turning to a heading. While I can do all this from muscle memory when I can see out the window, even in something as “quick” as an RV. But when the outside world goes bye-bye, all the normal clues to what is going on are gone. The scan for the G1000 is definitely easier than the scan in with steam gauges (we have to do 3 hours of instrument training for the private pilot), as everything is much closer. On the other hand, the G1000 requires a lot more focus than steam gauges for setup. It’s not just dial in a VOR and hope for the best, it’s add a flight plan, blah, blah, blah. Thankfully, most of the interaction is very similar to the GNS430 in 813T, so it wasn’t too bad. But I definitely need a couple more hours before I feel comfortable.

Next weekend, I have my second lesson. More getting the flow down and possibly a couple of ILS approaches at KAEG. So sometime this week I need to read up on ILS approaches. Hopefully, I can get Galen to safety pilot for me for a couple of flights this week to further practice. Even 0.1 or 0.2 hours of instrument flying will really help keeping me in shape. I hope :).

Quickies

  • Bought some fun stuff recently:
    • An ICOM IC-A24 handheld nav/com aviation radio. Nice backup to have on long cross-countries, and even on local flights, since Albuquerque International (Class C), Santa Fe (Class D) and Los Alamos (special restrictions) all require a radio to enter their airspace. And with Double Eagle II about to go Class D, a radio out would mean either waving at the tower in one of the Deltas to get lights or going to Belen. Neither are fun when you just want to land. Most of the radio was paid for from gift certificates Mom and Dad gave me for Christmas and my B-Day. Thanks Mom and Dad!
    • A fryer. Somehow it’s Pete’s fault, but it seemed like it would be fun to have and was only $20.00 at Target.
    • One Six Right, in principle a movie about the history of Van Nuys Airport (KVNY) but is just as much about the history of General Aviation in the United States. There’s a lot of beautiful birds in the movie, and it is extraordinarily well done.
  • My car went in for its 60,000 mile service today, as well as a new set of tires. She’s apparently aging well and there’s nothing big that needs to be done in the near future. Woo! We’ll ignore the 60,000 mile service waited until 65,000 miles on the car. Wow, almost 5 years and over 65,000 miles. Doesn’t seem like it’s been that long!
  • Weather has been sucking lately. We didn’t get to fly up once this week and it looks like next week is going to be just as bad. Hopefully we’ll catch up on some squawks while we can’t fly.
  • FInally getting around to some much needed web server maintenance on marvin, the server that hosts bbarrett.org. Trying to setup some of the services like bug tracking that worked at one time or another…

Which way am I pointing?

Galen and I went out to Belen today, to both check out some work we did on the compass and so that I could shoot some approaches. I hadn’t been flying much, and I’m much more rusty than I’d really like. I thought I was getting back in the swing of things, as I made three reasonable landings at Belen, but then had an awful landing at ABQ on runway 3. I came in a little fast, so flared a bit to slow down, over flared and was slow and high, with the nose high. Pushed the nose over and started pushing in power to go around. Air speed came back up, I had 8000′ of runway left, and was in a reasonable attitude, so I pushed the nose while pulling the power, flared again, and the back wheels squeaked on. Nose came down, and we rolled out. In the end, bad part was that I missed the F-1 exit and had to go to F-3, so I had a long high-speed taxi. Contributing factors to the bad landing were:

  • Frustration from problems flying the vectors given from approach due to compass problems.
  • EFIS going insane when I loaded a synthetic approach to 3 into the EFIS and then Galen loaded the ILS approach to 3 in the GNS430 without progressing past the IAF (lots of warnings, but should not have been an annoyance).
  • Approach to a 150′ wide runway after flying approaches to the 60′ wide runway at E80.

I’m not sure why, but I haven’t been comfortable in 813T since we brought it back from Colorado. I’m not sure if it’s having someone in the right seat (the CO time was all solo time while test flying). It’s getting better and I’m now starting to fly ahead of the plane instead of just trying to keep it doing the right thing. But all the little things built up this afternoon to me being a bit behind the plane while landing on 3. At least things are going in the right direction. On the good side, with one exception, I kept the nosewheel off the ground for as long as able. The one exception was the second approach at Belen. Galen had his foot resting on the right rudder pedal. We started drifting to the right after touchdown and I was feeling stiff resistance on the left rudder pedal when I tried to correct. I let the nose wheel down in case I had to brake the left wheel (which is touchy at those speeds). So at least that part seems to be getting better. And takeoffs were very smooth, although I still come out of ground effect faster than Galen likes. I prefer to establish a Vy climb with a shallow climb, while Galen prefers to stay in ground effect until Vy then establish the climb. I’m shallow enough on the climb that Galen appears satisfied on the point, so I’ll take that.

We’ve had a problem with the plane the last week with the magnetic heading reported by the EFIS. On both Monday and Tuesday this week, we were vectored into ABQ by approach. Both times, the EFIS reported a heading +/- 5 degrees of the assigned heading but GPS reported a very different ground track. The ground track matched what the controller was seeing, but the heading matched what the controller expected to see (so we weren’t going the direction the controller expected, which is bad). At the time, the only compass we had in the plane was the EFIS, since it’s a magnetic compass (gyro stabilizd) and that’s all the FARs require. We decided to order a traditional wet compass to help debug the problem and to make sure we had a backup in case of power failure. At this point, it’s probably worth a note on the directions used in planes:

Magnetic heading
The direction the plane is pointed, relative to magnetic north. Generally determined with a magnetic compass and/or a directional gyro calibrated to a magnetic compass. Headings assigned by approach / center controllers are in magnetic heading
True heading
The direction the plane is pointed, relative to true north. Generally determined in flight by finding the magnetic heading and adjusting with the local variance. Aviation charts are all relative to true north, leaving the pilot to convert between true and magnetic north.
Ground track
The direction the plane is actually going, almost always given relative to magnetic north when determined by an instrument (like a GPS), but in true north when doing preflight ground track planning based on charts.

The traditional method for determining magnetic heading is a wet compass, a card with a small magnet sitting in alcohol so that it spins freely and points towards north. Magnetic compasses are hard to use because they move an awful lot just due to vibration in the airplane. They also spin ‘backward’. When you’re pointed north, the compass reads north. To the left on the card is the reading 30, but to turn to 30, you make a right turn. This requires more thought than one really wants in a high stress environment and if the plane is in turbulent air, getting a reading off the compass can be near impossible. So most planes have what is called a directional gyro (DG) installed. The DG doesn’t have any concept of which way is north. But it uses gyroscopes to determine if you’ve turned left or right and how much. So if you set the DG to have a known heading (like the compass reading before takeoff), it will smoothly display the current heading. And it’s mechanically set to have the proper right/left turning orientation. There are some problems, like slow drift over time, but it basically works as long as you calibrate it against the compass every now and then.

N813T doesn’t have a traditional DG, instead it has gyros coupled with a magnetometer and a computer uses both inputs to develop a stabilized heading indicator on the EFIS. If either the gyros or the magnetometer are wonky, then the heading is going to be wrong. The EFIS control software is supposed to detect this and return an error to the pilot. It had been doing this (we the pilots just didn’t know where to look for that error), which caused us to spend most of yesterday working on the problem. We got that problem fixed and so we test flew it today. On departure, we noticed that the EFIS again didn’t match the ground track or mag compass. Odd, but ok. I knew there wasn’t much wind, so I just flew the ground track indicated on the GNS430 GPS (and about 3 other places), and it was fine. On the way home, however, the EFIS heading, compass, and GNS430 all had different headings. Figuring out which to fly was problematic and the source of much confusion for me the pilot. Thankfully, the vectors were pretty simple, so I was able to guestimate with landmarks and get the plane lined up for runway 3 without getting close to other traffic.

On the rollout after the crappy landing (and since I missed the early exit, it was a long rollout), I noticed the wet compass was definitely off and started thinking about something my instructor in B’ton said — that if the compass ever seemed wrong, double check by first turning off high current electrical items. I shut off the landing light and the compass swung right back to the proper heading. Now, I always turn on the landing light when in the vicinity of the airport or when in a practice area to make it easier for other traffic to see me. Not a big deal in N813T, since it has strobes, but is a problem on the C-150 I used to fly. So the entire flight, the landing light was turned on. In testing after shutdown, there is about a 20-30 degree swing in the wet compass caused by the landing light. And the EFIS computer, attempting to compensate for the heading reported by the magnetometer, will eventually report the new (wrong) heading, similar to the wet compass.

Ok, so now we know there was something wrong with the magnetometer wiring which we fixed. And we know the problem persisted, but in a different way. We know the landing light causes that problem. So we now at least understand the problems we’re seeing. I noticed that the ground wires for the landing, taxi, and nav lights were wired to the wing tip rather than back to the central grounding block (close to where the +12V line is routed). This set off alarm bells in my head, so I started a discussion with Perk and Chris about the problem. Sure enough, Perk breaks out some math that seems to indicate that the proximity of the +12VDC line for the landing and taxi lights and the lack of a matching ground line back could cause a magnetic field in the plane that would cause a swing of a compass in the right ballpark. So it looks like we should ground back to the cockpit instead of the wing tip and this might help quite down the magnetic compass interference. Way too much time working on the plane, but it was kind of cool to see math being used to figure out an electrical problem…

In other news, I now have 60.1 hours of pilot in command time and 55.9 hours of dual received time. Which means that I have more time being in charge of the plane than I have being taught how to fly the plane. Note that these times are not mutually exclusive. I have about 9 hours of time that is both pilot in command and dual received, for things like checkouts in new planes. But it’s still fun to think about…

Friday night update

So it’s Friday night, it’s been 6 weeks and 2 days since my last update. Which is a bit pathetic, but I’m sure that everyone will survive without too much difficultly. Anyway, since I don’t remember most of what has happened, we’re going for list format.

  • I now have 99.5 hours of flying time (so close, yet so not 100 hours), including a bunch of flights since my last update:
    • A flight with Branden and Kyle to Taos and back in N80790 just to fly around and log me some cross country time. Branden took some pictures
    • A flight with Laura in early December to Taos for lunch (yummy Mexican) and log me some cross country time. There was still snow on the north sides of the slopes from the November snow storm, so it was really pretty.
    • A bunch of test flights in N813T, Galen’s plane. It’s a blast to fly — very responsive and very quick. The most fun I’ve ever had while flying.
    • A long (~300 nautical mile) cross country flight around Colorado in N813T, solo because it was a test flight. The entire flight was only about 2 hours, since the plane is so fast.
  • Arun, Shelece and I drove down to White Sands in December in hope that Discovery was going to land there (it was looking promising). Just as we arrived at White Sands National Monument, it was announced they were going to land at Kennedy. Good for the NASA budget, not so fun for us. But we did get to run around White Sands, which was fun. We stopped for lunch at a place along the way Arun and Shelece had read about and had one of the best green chili cheeseburgers I’ve ever eaten. Fun trip, but would have been better if there was a shuttle landing overhead.
  • I went home for Christmas break, just barely escaping the giant snow storm in Denver to get to Chicago. Getting home was delayed by yet another snow storm in Denver, but it wasn’t too bad. Just had to spend a boring New Years in South Bend. We spent Christmas afternoon in Detroit, and got to see the Barrett clan, which is always fun. Also got to see Anne while we were in Grand Rapids visiting Cathy and Dan.
  • Rich Graham (the group/team/project leader I was working for) announced that was leaving LANL for Oak Ridge. Adolfy Hoisie took over the group effective January 8th. While a bit scary for a while due to the uncertainty of change, the change should work out pretty well for Galen and I. We’ve been able to re-align what we’re working on to more match our interests (and for me, my thesis work), so that’s happy.
  • I discovered that Pete is still updating his log, so now I have another log to read when I’m wasting time. Yay Pete.
  • It’s ski season! Mary took my skis from B’ton to South Bend and I brought them back from Christmas break with me. Went skiing last Sunday at Ski Santa Fe, which is about an hour drive from my apartment in Los Alamos. My legs remembered what to do much quicker than I expected. Snow wasn’t great, but I won’t complain for such a short drive.
  • I’ve been working with Galen on getting Open MPI to operate properly on heterogeneous environments, particularly using OpenIB between Linux boxes running PowerPC and Opteron processors. This was mostly motivated by the Road Runner machine purchased by Los Alamos, which is a combination of Opteron and Cell blades, likely connected with InfiniBand. It’s been a month long process, with lots of code audits about padding, alignment, and endian swapping. I’ll write a post about the gory details really soon.
  • On Friday, January 19th, I’m moving to Albuquerque. My stuff should show up from Bloomington a week or two after that. I’ll be commuting up to Los Alamos every day in N813T. Woo. One thing this means is more compute time. Another is that I can finally get high speed internet. Working at home with dialup has been interesting and I think I’ve adopted pretty well, but I can’t wait to be able to download stuff *now*, rather than while I sleep.
  • Thesis proposal is going entirely too slowly, but I’m still working on it. Hopefully get the proposal scheduled next week, for sometime in early March. Depends on how travel falls out.

Flying is Fun

A couple weekends ago, Kyle and I went for a short flight around New Mexico. So that I could count it as a cross-country flight, we flew from Santa Fe to Taos and back. The flight was pretty smooth and the route was pretty basic. For my first cross-country flight since getting my license, I thought it went pretty well. Kyle took some pictures, available on his website.

Random updates

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted an update. So some random updates…

  • I’ve started trail running again over the last month. My ankles hate me.
  • I’ve done just a bit of flying since getting my license:
    • An hour in B’ton with Willis to get checked out in a C-172SP so I could take my parents up. Fog prevented the ‘rents flight.
    • An hour at Santa Fe in a Dacathalon, which was awesome
    • 45 minutes or so in the back seat of a Vans RV-4

    I clearly need to fly more.

  • I was in San Francisco at the beginning of August for the Apple World Wide Developers Conference. The conference was cool as usual. Hanging out in San Francisco was awesome, also as usual.
  • I’m going fishing in Canada with my dad in two weeks. 10 days of no computer access and almost no cell phone access. Woo!
  • Galen’s building a Vans RV-7a, which is an awesome plane. I went up with him to Colorado Springs, where it is being built, last weekend. We put the panel together, and it’s going to be an awesome plane.

Brian Barrett, Private Pilot

As of approximately 1800zulu today, I now posses a Private Pilot, Airplane Single Engine Land certificate. Woo!

I’ve been flying out of Santa Fe with Larry from Sierra Aviation once a week or so since I arrived in Los Alamos. I’ve spent a bit longer than expected getting ready for the checkride out here, but had to adjust to the differences between a Cessna 150 in Bloomington and a Cessna 172 in Los Alamos. For one thing, the air is so much clearer here that everything looks much closer than it actually is. The main runway at Santa Fe is also extremely black (it was refinished last year, apparently), and heats up really quickly in the western sun. This causes some interesting rising air on the runway, and equally entertaining downdrafts somewhere near the airport (generally off the end of the approach runway). So you end up with a large downdraft on final, followed by a constant updraft during flare. This can make a precision 200′ short field landing difficult, and mastering it took significantly more effort than I would have expected. A couple lessons ago, I flew a practice checkride with another instructor at Sierra and did really well, so I got a sign off for my real checkride, which was scheduled for this morning.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. The weather in Los Alamos is sucking, and not in the afternoon monsoon way. There’s an actual front moving in, bringing storms into the area. Which basically means that the weather for this morning is going to suck. I was fearing yet another no-go on the check ride, which would have been a major bummer. I had to work up a flight plan for Santa Fe to Double Eagle in Albuquerque to Grants, then back to Santa Fe. Grants is a good ways to the west of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and was right in the path of the severe weather. During my weather briefing, the briefer strongly discouraged VFR flight to Grants, but that’s not a deal breaker because we weren’t going to fly that far anyway. I’d either pass or fail the cross-country section of the checkride by the time I got to Double Eagle (and, in theory, long before). The weather between Santa Fe and Double Eagle was iffy, but good enough to fly until noon-ish (which should be enough time). There was going to be a short period of borderline marginal VFR, but it would remain legal and safe to fly. I probably wouldn’t fly somewhere I didn’t know in the conditions, but it’s a pretty easy flight to Double Eagle, basically follow I-25 for a while and make a right turn once you get to the city.

The checkride itself was pretty straight forward. It started with an hour of oral testing, mainly going over flight regulations, flight planning for my cross country flight, and reading sectional charts. Nothing too horrible, and I did pretty well. There were a couple of things that I didn’t know, and one that I’m not sure the examiner had completely right (I read the regulations slightly differently, but these things are bit confusing). Then we went flying (yay!). We started with a cross-country flight towards Double Eagle. I was a bit off on my first checkpoint, arriving two minutes early. This was at least in part because it was much colder than I had planned for and I hit top of climb much earlier than expected, so I was going faster than planned. No biggie – I knew where I was and the first checkpoint is always a bit further off than the others because of climb and which runway is in use and all that. The second checkpoint I was about 30 seconds early to, but that’s well within rounding errors. That was enough for the examiner, so we went and worked on flight maneuvers.

Flight maneuvers went pretty well. Simulated instrument flight was fine. I was a bit more wobbly on altitude than I would have liked, but I kept it within the limits and never lost control. Unusual attitude recovery was ok, although he had some advice on improving my recovery technique to put less load on the wings (not a problem for these situations, but could be a problem if the attitude was really, really unusual (like, say, a spin or a steep developed spiral). Stall recovery was fine. Steep turns I pretty much nailed, although I didn’t do a positive enough clearing turn into the first one, which got me yelled at. The simulated engine out was transitioned into a simulated engine fire almost as soon as I hit best glide speed, so I nosed over into a 100 knot descent to “put out the fire”, rolled into a spiral, slowed to 80 so I could put down flaps and establish a maximum descent rate. That concluded the maneuvers portion of the checkride (yay – still alive and kicking).

Flight back to Santa Fe was slightly eventful. As I was climbing up to gain altitude before coming over the hill (still 8-10 miles out), a plane on the tower frequency was heading our way. I called in right away to give a position report, but didn’t have ATIS yet (I was just about to get the lasted report). Instructor wasn’t happy that I caused the tower to have to read the ATIS, but when he asked for explanation, he accepted my thought process that it was more important to make sure the very fast plane heading our way knew where we were than it was to save 30 seconds of tower radio time (tower wasn’t that busy anyway). First approach was supposed to be a soft field landing. I came in a bit high (mainly because there was not the standard downdraft off the end of 20 to suck my altitude away), so I decided to go around. The instructor was ok with that, and I nailed the soft field (with a nice cross wind) on the next attempt. Nothing like a soft field landing on one wheel, but it all worked out. The soft field landing went pretty well – it helped that the runway wasn’t a giant updraft. I hit in the first 50′ beyond the point, one of my best short field landings in the 172. The examiner didn’t like my technique for stopping. Larry (my instructor out here) goes by the book for short field – get the mains on the ground, lower the nose wheel, then pull back on the yolk while breaking. The examiner didn’t like the intentionally lowering the nose part, but wasn’t “fail me” unhappy. And it led to an entertaining discussion between Larry and the examiner after the checkride.

Everything is signed and it’s official. I’m a private pilot. I can now fly passengers in whatever little plane I can afford to rent. Hopefully, I’ll be able to start working towards my instrument rating in the fall.