Sometimes it's best just to call it a day

The weather this morning was blustery and wet, but flyable - at least technically. After a ground school session about weather and reviewing my pre-solo written test, we headed for the aircraft. The rain had been coming down off and on, and there was a pretty strong wind from the south.

Long story short, I just wasn't in a mindset to fly. We decided to fly patterns around the airport and do landings, but the winds and my general disposition were not compatible with each other. After three approaches and some messy landings, I told my instructor I just wasn't dialed in and wasn't going to get anything out of the lesson. So, we stopped after 30 minutes and called it good for the day. I was frustrated and more than a bit discouraged. I needed to stop at that point.

Looking back at this morning before the lesson, several other things I had scheduled got turned upside down, and I had a lot of unresolved things on my mind that had nothing to do with flying. Add to that the fact that I was not comfortable with the weather (I wouldn't fly in it for fun, that's for sure heh), and the inevitable situation was that Greg was not going to perform.

Anyhow, that's over now and I have another lesson tomorrow afternoon. It looks like the weather will be better, and hopefully I can get some experience landing the plane with quite a bit less stress.

On the positive side, the takeoffs I did were a new and useful experience, because the strong headwind tried hard to pitch the nose way up high, so I had to hold the nose down with a lot of control pressure to avoid a dangerous stall attitude. Also, I got to experience for the first time in a substantial way how a strong wind aloft really pushes the plane around in the pattern and how you need to compensate by turning into the wind on legs where you're flying perpendicular to the wind direction.

Anyhow, back at it tomorrow afternoon. It's another day.