Preparing for the worst...

Yesterdays lesson was about precautionary landings... in simple terms, a landing made 'off-field' for safety reasons (ie. bad weather making it too dangerous to continue flying). Another one of those 'Proper planning and good decision making means you should never need to do this, but just in case...'-type lessons.

Not quite as stressful as a forced landing, as you still have power, so you can be a bit more choosy about where to land, and if things do not look good, you can always go-around.

It's still a little unsettling flying around at 500 feet though... but I am slowly getting more comfortable with it.

Learned some handy tricks, such as when flying past the chosen landing site on the 1st pass, to reset the Directional Indicator to north, so that when flying the 'circuit' around the field, you do not have to try to calculate unfamiliar headings on the fly, you can just reference the cardinal points (north, east, west & south)... not a huge deal, but it does reduce the workload a little in an already stressful situation.

I also found that I am not having to try so hard to keep my eyes outside... its becoming more of a natural instinct now... as Trevor said 'You want to be looking outside the majority of the time, and only use the instruments to confirm attitude and performance, not set it!'

Also, with daylight savings starting to kick in and ECT (evening civil twilight) getting close to 9pm, Trevor suggested the possibility of midweek evening flights. I am happy with that, as jade often works late, so I'm just sitting round the house waiting for her to come home anyway... may as well make use of the daylight!

This flight: 1.3 Dual
Total Hours: 73.3 (58.2 Dual, 15.1 Solo, 3.2 IFR)