A Little Light From The Tunnel

First of all, I didn't bring a camera to get any pictures. I promise that I'll get some soon. That being said, I did get a chance to fly within a 2 week period, which is unheard of for me. I also have to admit that my instructor is correct in telling me that I need to fly more often. I have noticed that my skills are deteriorating every time I go a month between flights. The last time we went up, we did the usual touch and goes and as usual, I had some difficulties but managed to put the plane down. This time several of the key elements to landing were already there. I had very little trouble with wind coming straight at me.

Before all of the landing practice, we did some turns about a point. I haven't done any of that stuff since my first lesson. The winds were fairly strong and gusty so I was having a tough time keeping my distance uniform. It took a while but I finally got the hang of it. As soon as I got the hang of it I started to get a little queasy and backed off for a while. We tracked a road for about 10 miles practicing crabbing into the wind then went in for a couple of touch and goes at SWI. Finally having a good day, Richard wanted to wipe the smile off of my face with a reality check. We headed to GYI for some more crosswind landings.

The wind was out of the south (17k @ 180) so we went to do touch and goes on runway 13. It was a lot better than our last time out there. We got to do about 6 before we needed to head back to SWI to refuel and head to a lunch date. We did get to see a Cessna Citation do a touch and go during one of our rounds. We kept hearing someone on the CTAF doing an ILS approach and never did see him. Finally he announced he was on a 4 mile final and we kept looking, then low and behold, a pretty little Citation flew right under us as we crossed over runway 17.

We finally packed it up and headed back to SWI, refueled and parked the airplane and headed out to lunch.

It felt good to get back in the airplane after only being out of it a couple of weeks. I still need to be flying once or twice a week but this is still better than only twice a month then a one month layoff. Maybe I will get this finished in this lifetime.

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