Lesson 32, Thruxton Two
The object today was to complete the Thruxton cross country exercise, due to last attempts dramatics. The weather today was perfect for flying, excellent visibility and 20knt winds at 2,000ft keeping the air clear, en-route there were however alot of thermals which I will talk about shortly.
The planning stage I now find very quick to do and it has become fairly straight forward to use the flight computer. Therefore after a short planning/briefing we were in the air.
I won't go into too much detail as the enroute flight was entirely uneventful, the Navigation this time was good and my radio skills have improved, I am gaining confidence now with the radio. When we had visual with Thruxton we could see two other aircraft in the circuit so I joined overhead and then to the downwind leg, we turned base and just before turning to final, a PA28 called final from 2 miles out. We had him in sight and no doubt he us but he didn't initially appear to want to give way to us and asked if we were going to land, I then turned final and called as such. This distraction was enough to screw my approach a bit I was too high and airspeed was all wrong. I recovered the approach but it gave me alot of work to do in the short final stage. Had I been solo I would have elected to go-around. Anyway the landing itself was good so no harm done. Sadly today we didn't get a chance to use the grass runway (31/13) but instead had the asphalt runway 25.
We parked and Antonio bought me a coke (I forgot to bring any money with me.. doh). We chatted awhile and watched some interesting aircraft coming and going, like a Chipmonk and some Pitts specials a Piper supercub was also in the parking area. I must fly one of those one day!
Time was getting late so we departed back to Blackbushe. Again the return flight was largely uneventful.
Conclusions today, I feel I made progress.. the Navigation was much improved as was the Radio, I made a small mistake on the way out by not descending soon enough for the MATZ Thruxton lives under, but now I have made that mistake I won't do it again. Also I need to practice just maintaining altitude, today was quite difficult as we were flying from thermal to thermal so for the same power setting/attitude the altitude kept rising and falling.
Tomorrow is my first solo land-away again to Thruxton, looking forward to it! :-).
The planning stage I now find very quick to do and it has become fairly straight forward to use the flight computer. Therefore after a short planning/briefing we were in the air.
I won't go into too much detail as the enroute flight was entirely uneventful, the Navigation this time was good and my radio skills have improved, I am gaining confidence now with the radio. When we had visual with Thruxton we could see two other aircraft in the circuit so I joined overhead and then to the downwind leg, we turned base and just before turning to final, a PA28 called final from 2 miles out. We had him in sight and no doubt he us but he didn't initially appear to want to give way to us and asked if we were going to land, I then turned final and called as such. This distraction was enough to screw my approach a bit I was too high and airspeed was all wrong. I recovered the approach but it gave me alot of work to do in the short final stage. Had I been solo I would have elected to go-around. Anyway the landing itself was good so no harm done. Sadly today we didn't get a chance to use the grass runway (31/13) but instead had the asphalt runway 25.
We parked and Antonio bought me a coke (I forgot to bring any money with me.. doh). We chatted awhile and watched some interesting aircraft coming and going, like a Chipmonk and some Pitts specials a Piper supercub was also in the parking area. I must fly one of those one day!
Time was getting late so we departed back to Blackbushe. Again the return flight was largely uneventful.
Conclusions today, I feel I made progress.. the Navigation was much improved as was the Radio, I made a small mistake on the way out by not descending soon enough for the MATZ Thruxton lives under, but now I have made that mistake I won't do it again. Also I need to practice just maintaining altitude, today was quite difficult as we were flying from thermal to thermal so for the same power setting/attitude the altitude kept rising and falling.
Tomorrow is my first solo land-away again to Thruxton, looking forward to it! :-).
posted by Chris @ Sunday, August 28, 2005
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home