Rock and roll

"Ardmore Unicom is on watch, Runway Zero Three, Caution Crosswind Two Seven Knots at Times, Caution Windshear reported on final, Automated weather information issued at Two One Two Zero UTC, Surface wind zero eight zero, one niner knots gusting two seven knots, Temperature Two One, Dewpoint one two, QNH one zero one seven, Auckland reported two thousand foot wind one zero zero, three five knots..."

A 27kt crosswind you say? with windshear on final? And a 35 knot wind blowing at 2000'? Sounds like a perfect day for flying! ;)

So I went up for some FLWOP revision with Trevor... the high winds made for a bumpy ride, but up above 2000' it settled down a little as you got away from the mechanical turbulence blowing over the ranges...

The winds also presented some unique challenges for setting up and executing a forced landing, but overall I think it was a useful flight... I still need to work on ensuring that i do not get too close to the field... and I think the secret lies in picking my 1000' reference point better... and double checking my spacing on the downwind leg...

The approach and landing at the end of the lesson was... errrr... interesting... I had the power completely at idle and the tacho was still showing 1500RPM... it usually idles around 600 to 700! but there was so much wind blowing through the prop that it just would not slow down!

Consequently, the approach was rather fast as the only way to get the plane to come down was to point the nose down which meant increasing airspeed... we hit about 100 knots at one point! Which is close to around 190Km/h... we're usually doing around 65 to 70 knots (around 120-130Km/h)....

And the 25knot crosswind and windshear made for an interesting final 50 feet... with the plane wanting to dance all over the place, but a relatively solid crosswind technique meant I got the "in to wind" wheel down first and safely back on terra firma...

Was going to try again on Sunday for some solo practice... but the weather was more of the same... so I decided it was not going to be productive. I did get the offer to go as backseat passenger while one of the other pilots did some circuits to get current in a 172 and I though it would be a great time to to re-test my homemade headset as I had had to rewire the microphone due to issues with the plugs and connectors, but unfortunately the radio/intercom system was not working properly and we had to abort the flight before we had reached the main taxiway... bummer!

This flight: 1.5 Dual
Total Hours: 84.4 (65.9 Dual, 18.5 Solo, 5.1 IFR)