Solo prep flight and nighttime cross-country to Astoria

Today I flew solo for just over an hour and reviewed the skills Kelly and I worked on the previous day in preparation for finishing my training. All of these are skills I will need to be able to show I can do properly on my FAA check ride, which Kely says he wants to get scheduled soon. Seems like I just started, but I already have more than 45 hours of flight time in my logbook.

The winds were pretty strong aloft in two definite layers, which meant a strong turbulence layer at about 2000-2500 feet of bumpy, kind of crazy air in places. That plus the 30-knot east wind at 4,000 feet limited my ability to do some of the maneuvers I wanted to practice. I decided that trying to do power-off stalls was just not a good idea, even into the wind, so I focused my energy on a few landings and emergency procedures as well as steep turns and a couple power-on stalls. The gusty winds made all of the above challenging, but it was good experience.

I returned to the airport and met my instructor, as we were going to get set for a night cross-country flight to Astoria, on the coast. I'd flown there a couple days before on my solo daytime cross-country flight.

Flying at night is fun. I find it easy to focus, as there are really no distractions to speak of. You have to stay aware of what's happening inside and outside the aircraft, and what you can't see is probably the most potentially dangerous part of night flying. Altitude is your friend.

The winds aloft were still challenging and a couple places near Hillsboro had some quite turbulent layers, which we climbed through as we headed toward the coastal range, which we'd need to cross on out way to Astoria. I had planned the flight to be one that took us direct from the Newberg VOR (UBG), which is located a few miles south of Twin Oaks, to the Astoria VOR (AST), which is located at the Astoria airport. We took off and intercepted the VOR radial I had planned to fly along and headed northwest with the wind at our backs.

Almost immediately I could see a flashing red light on a tower that I had noted in my flight plan was along our route. It made it easy to fly toward the correct general heading. I could also see Astoria's lights off in the distance, which meant the visibility was pretty much unlimited. You could see Portland and well up in to Washington clearly, as well as south toward Salem and southwest toward Tillamook.

We climbed to our planned altitude of 5500 feet, which carried us well over the highest terrain in the area, and then started to descend into Astoria. The winds there picked up as we descended, and I entered a crab-angled path to the north, then crossed the airport mid-field before turning to the right to come back and enter the downwind leg for Runway 8. I raced downwind with the tailwind, then turned to base, and quickly to final. I landed the airplane on the runway with a bit of a bounce and a float, because I misjudged the flare in the dark. I retracted the flaps and applied power and took off, then told Kelly I wanted to do another one because, frankly, that landing pretty much sucked. We flew around the pattern and I did a somewhat better landing before taking back off and departing back toward Hillsboro.

The flight back was uneventful and I tracked the VORs while also using the my GPS. We eventually got back and found Twin Oaks, which is nearly impossible to see at night until you're a couple miles away. As I descended we crossed into the super bumpy turbulence again, and I made an bumpy turn to the downwind leg and kept fighting the bumps as I prepped the plane to land. Once I turned to base and descended a little more the wind calmed down quite a bit and I flew the plane to the runway, where I did the smoothest landing of the evening.

It was a fun flight. I had the video camera set up, but was so busy with winds and talking to Kelly that we forgot to turn it on. Oh well, maybe next time.

Simulator flying, winds and another night delay

Twin Oaks Airpark just acquired and put into service an Elite PI-135 BATD computer simulator, which one can "fly" for $35 an hour (that's a lot less than $70 for a C150 or $99 for a C172). It's cool, and has a yoke and pedals and a whole panel with working controls and switches, plus the computer screen for the live part and for looking outside. For people doing the instrument rating training some of the hours can be flown on the sim, and even for me and my private pilot training, a few hours can be logged on the simulator.

Since I need to do unusual attitudes and "under the hood" time as part of my private training, and since the weather has not been cooperating recently, my instructor Kelly set me up on the simulator this past Thursday. I did 30 minutes of instrument "flying" that way. This was my first actual instrument training, and we were able to cover the requirements for the private license in the 30 minutes. The idea of providing basic in-the-clouds training to a private pilot is to gave them enough skills and experience to make sure they can make a safe turn and fly back out the way they came.

I think it was good to see how the instrument flying works in the simulator first - which is very sensitive and accurate, by the way. I've heard pilots say if you can successfully fly the simulator you can fly the same maneuvers in a real airplane, and now I see what they mean. It's very exact and requires you to be precise in your control of the plane. Next week we'll be doing the same maneuvers in the air, with all the real-world airplane noise and the sneaky tricks your brain plays on you when you get a real aircraft into unusual attitudes.

We did get to fly for a little while on Thursday, as well. Since it was quite windy (12 knots) and the wind was highly variable in terms of direction (changing constantly from crosswind to a headwind for Runway 20), and since the active landing runway is not the typical one, Kelly wanted me to get some time in the air after a few weeks of almost no flying, and to get some valuable cross-wind landing practice.

Runway 20 at Twin Oaks is not the standard-use runway. It's only used when needed sue to wind direction. It requires you approach on the final leg over some taller trees and then drop in a bit to the threshold of the runway. When you add to that the stronger winds on Thursday and how much they were changing direction, it was a very challenging - but doable - environment. I would certainly not fly in those conditions on my own (it would be too much of a crosswind component for me for sure, and is beyond my established solo crosswind component limits right now anyhow), but when flying with Kelly it's a good learning opportunity.

And learn I did: From the first landing the winds were close to getting the best of me. On the first one Kelly helped me at the very end because I was not using my feet nearly enough to keep the airplane pointing straight down the runway. The fact that the runway slopes downhill landing in that direction adds to the complexity: You tend to "float" more, and combined with any gusting headwind you can imagine the process of landing the plane could be interesting. Not dangerous, just challenging.

Kelly flew the second pattern and landing and I followed along. That was good after being out of the seat for as long as I have been. He even had a little difficulty with the winds landing, although not nearly to the same extent as I did, so I didn't feel too bad. I then flew another pattern and did a go-around because the winds pushed me around and I wasn't feeling confident, then landed it a little better, but still not what I would consider good. We were thinking about calling it quits, but I said I thought I should to do one more and try to land it cleaner. Better to end on a positive note anyhow, I figured. Plus, I was improving little by little.

The last landing was far from perfect but given the conditions not too bad. I'd call it a relative success.

On Friday night we were hoping to fly that night cross-country flight to Seattle's Boeing Field that we've schedule a few times before, but once again we were prevented from doing so by the weather. It's just not burning off the way it needs to these days, so we seem to consistently end up with fog, haze and low cloud decks at night at least somewhere along the route, if not the whole way.

Next week looks pretty great weather-wise, though and I have scheduled quite a bit of flying: The night cross-country for Monday, my long solo cross-country on Wednesday, a daytime lesson for instrument work on Friday and unusual attitudes, and I'll probably another block on the weekend for good measure.

More solo practice in stronger winds

On Thursday I flew for just over 2 hours in one of the Cessna 150's at Twin Oaks Airpark, which is where I am training. I was on a solo flight day again, and spent my time first at the Portland Mulino airport, where I did two takeoffs and landings into a strong quartering headwind. The crosswind component on approach was a little stronger than I had expected due to some gusts that came up, but I handled it pretty well. My crab angle to fly the right lines in the pattern was extreme due to the winds aloft. On the ground the wind was not as pronounced, but was still plenty strong enough to present a good challenge.

From there I few over to Aurora State Airport, which is not too far away. I got there quickly since the wind was at my back. I crossed over the runway at midfield about 2000 feet above the traffic pattern, flew west a little ways so I could lose some altitude, and then did battle against the wind while turning back toward the airport to enter the traffic pattern. I did three or four landings at Aurora, all touch-and-go's. The wind at Aurora was also a very strong headwind, coming slightly from the right side. On climb-out, once the aircraft reached about a hundred feet above the ground the airplane would climb like crazy thanks to the strong wind, and my indicated airspeed would quickly reach 90+ miles per hour while the GPS showed my groundspeed was only 68 miles per hour - quite a difference. I kept the nose a little low since it climbed on its own and I wanted to be sure to avoid propellor stall problems at a high angle of attack.

After playing in the winds at Aurora for a while, I headed back toward the hills between there and my home airport. I did a few ground reference maneuvers and then entered the traffic pattern at Twin Oaks. I spent the rest of my time doing several landings and takeoffs, practicing flying in the windy conditions on the smaller runway and working to clean up my landing routine a bit more. By the time I did my last few landings, I had improved things quite a bit, and the last landing of the day was as soft as they come.

The one thing I was not able to work on (due to the high winds aloft) was practicing stalls and recoveries. So, I will have to do that again sometime soon, since I have yet to practice them solo. It turns out I now have exactly ten hours of solo time, so I don't need a whole lot more before I complete my private pilot training, but regardless I need to practice those, either in another solo practice session or perhaps while on my long solo cross country. I have a night cross country left to do with my instructor, Kelly, as well as my solo trip and a small amount of additional dual instruction "under the hood," simulating instrument flying conditions.

I totaled up my pilot's logbook today, to see where I'm at in terms of accumulated flight and training hours. Here are the results:

Total Flight Time: 38.7 hours
Flight Training Received: 28.7 hours
Solo Flight: 10 hours
Cross-Country Flight: 4.4 hours
Night Flight: 0.6 hours
Day Landings: 148
Night Landings: 3

I've had a number of people requesting that I post more cockpit video. I have some new video from portions of my last couple flights, but I need to get it transferred to my computer, which takes some time due to the cheap-o software I have. I will post some edited video in the near future to show some more of my flying activity. What the heck, everyone loves watching cruddy landings on video, heh.

Cross country, new airports and wow what a wind!

One of the "benefits" of living in the Portland, Oregon area is the wide variety and unpredictability of the weather around here. In addition, there are a variety of airports of varying classes and sizes, from small grass strips to Portland International and at least a few examples of everything in-between. Plus we have terrain and land features that quite literally make their own weather: The Pacific Ocean to the west as well as the Columbia river to the north and the Columbia River Gorge to the east (with its notorious winds). Mt. Hood is to the east and then there's the Willamette Valley to the south with its winter mist and haze as well as spectacularly beautiful summer days. Fog, rain, mist, rain, haze, winds, rain, more winds, some sun, snow above 1,000 feet in the winter, the occasional ice storm, and lots of clouds... Name your weather, it probably exists somewhere around Portland on any given day.

On Wednesday morning I met my instructor Kelly at the air park for some ground learning and my next dual flight lesson. The conditions were IFR (instrument flight rules) when I arrived, but it appeared the sun was just starting to burn though, so it looked like we'd be able to fly.

I had, per instructions after my solo flight on Sunday, planned a three-leg flight from Twin Oaks east to Valley View airport, and from there north to Troutdale Airport (which is just east of PDX). From there we would cross over the Portland International Airport at mid-field (with permission) and return to Twin Oaks via a flight over downtown Portland.

For the ground lesson portion of things, we discussed the different classifications of airspace and the operating requirements of each type. After a while the mass of information about the different classes of airspace gets to be a little like oatmeal on the brain. There's just a lot of stuff to remember, and it seems to me that experiencing each will be the best way to cement it in my mind. We also discussed tower-controlled airports again and the differences in communication at those airports. Twin Oaks is an uncontrolled airport, as are the majority of the airports across the country.

The weather improved substantially during the ground lesson, and I pre-flighted the airplane. We got underway and taxied to the run-up area, then got into the air. I'd put together the route plan for the day's flight, so I was able to start my climb and line up on the bearing I needed to fly to get to the Valley View Airport in Estacada.

While en-route, we had time to do some extra stuff, such as checking out how to use the fancy color moving-map Garmin 296 aviation GPS in the airplane. It's a pretty amazing device, with great resolution and lots of cool capabilities to make it much easier and safer when flying distances or to places you don't know well. Then I asked Kelly about the airplane's ability to self-correct for disturbed elevator movement when trimmed for level flight. Essentially, if you have the control trim set up for your speed and attitude to keep you flying straight and level and you then push or pull on the yoke to go up or down with the nose, the plane will "porpoise" or oscillate, nose up (climbing) to nose down (faster and descending) and then back nose-up, over and over, until it returns to straight and level flight. Pretty cool stuff.

I learned a lot today, including the fact that sometimes you just can't see an airport until you're practically on top of it. Valley view is a skinny airstrip tucked between the trees. The runway is really long, but it's also very narrow. It's almost impossible to see from a distance, so it was good that the GPS helped me fly right to it. There was no traffic there, but that was more than made up for by the fast, gusting and direction-changing winds. Coming out of the Columbia River Gorge, the winds shifted in the surface a lot, and gusted substantially 1,000 feet above the ground. In fact, I looked at the windsock and decided to land to the north based on the direction of the sock, but once I got down and started my approach, it became apparent very quickly that I was heading for the wrong runway. Sure enough, I looked at the windsock again and it was pointing the exact opposite direction thank it had been a couple minutes earlier.

So, I switched gears and entered a downwind for the opposite runway. I had to fly with my nose turned about 45 or 50 degrees to the right, into the crosswind, in order to track over the ground in a straight line. The base leg was really fast, since it was with the wind, and then I turned to the final approach and adjusted my crab angle to make sure I would stay on the centerline. I got it down low, had to fight shifting and gusting crosswinds, and put it on the runway after a little swinging around. Not a bad landing - I'm getting better at this.

We taxied back and took off, fighting a headwind and some crazy gusts on the way uphill. After another circuit and landing, we took off and got out of there and headed north to Troutdale.

If I thought the winds were heavy at Valley View, I was about to be shown what real winds are like at Troutdale. This airport is right alongside the Columbia RIver, and at the opening to the Columbia RIver Gorge. Winds scream up and down the Gorge all the time, making for some of the best windsurfing in the world and some of the most interesting wind flying of my short career in the air. The runway we were using had us pointing straight up the gorge and into the wind, which was running about 20 knots and gusting to 29 knots. The result was a turbulent approach and a very slow ground speed.

I caught myself today proclaiming that landing in the winds was fun. Yeah, I said it: FUN. Something must be wrong with me, right? Just a few weeks ago the winds were scaring the bejeezus out of me, and today I'm actually enjoying the challenge of maneuvering even bigger winds and gusts. When departing the runway at Troutdale, the wind speed indicator showed we were moving though the wind at 50 knots almost immediately after rolling, and the headwind allowed me to take off after traveling down only about 300 feet of runway. Of course my ground speed was very slow, and in fact I was able to climb to traffic pattern altitude and barely made it past the end of the runway. Another 15 or 20 knots of wind aloft and I could have been hovering!

After playing in the wind at Troutdale, the tower controller there set us up for a departure along the north shore of the Columbia River toward PDX airport, and handed us off the the PDX tower so we could transition right over the big airport at an altitude where we'd be out of the way. It was really cool to fly over PDX and see what it looks like to a pilot. Seeing it out the side of an airliner isn't a very good view at all, but from the seat in the little airplane it was pretty huge and awesome looking.

Once out of the PDX area, we flew over the city and crossed the Willamette River approaching the West Hills alongside downtown Portland. Out my window I saw all the Portland downtown bridges in a row, quite a cool site. I flew us over the West Hills ridge, between two sets of TV and radio towers, and then over Beaverton and toward Twin Oaks.

I entered the downwind leg for Twin Oaks, where it almost calm winds. After a quick run of the pattern, I made what I must say was a pretty nice, soft and silent landing on the runway. A great end to the day. We parked, debriefed, and planned my homework, which consists of reading in the FAR/AIM about classes of airspace, as well as planning two cross-country flights: one to Salem, which we will fly on Saturday during my next lesson, and one to Corvallis, which is for practice and we'll review over lunch in Salem this weekend.

After that, we'll be planning a longer trip and I'll be flying solo in the general Twin Oaks vicinity, practicing my skills and doing some landings at neighboring airports. I also need to pick up my studying for the written FAA ground school exam, which I committed to taking before mid-December. I have my work cut out for me!

Saturday's lesson will be in a Piper Cherokee 180, which I'm looking forward to. It's another of the Stark's rental planes and this will be my first flight in a non-Cessna aircraft. Betty Stark suggested I ask Kelly to take me up in it for a lesson, and he agreed. It has a lot more power and flies like a bigger plane, so it should be fun to experience.

Breaking on through

After more than a week off from flying (I was overseas for a work conference), I got back home and caught up on sleep over 48 hours, then headed to the airport for a Monday flight lesson. I showed up early and did a little dry flying in the hangar, just to get my mind back in gear.

Sidebar: While I was out of town, my student pilot and aviation medical certificate arrived in the mail. It was in a review state for a month or so, while the FAA requested medical documentation and it sat on a desk. The people on the phone at the FAA office were very helpful, and I'm relieved it's here since you have to have it in place before you can solo (and obviously before you can be certificated as a pilot).

The airplane I'd scheduled for today turned out to have a flat front gear strut (it happens, maybe a hard landing or it just went low), so we parked it on the ramp and got a different airplane so the crew could do the gear maintenance (and so I could land safely). Once in the new airplane (I've flown all the Cessna 150s at the school, so I am familiar with them all), we got the checklists out of the way and taxied to the active runway, two-zero.

It had been a little while since I'd actually flown, and prior to that I was flying two to four times a week. So after getting off the ground I started to get the feel of the airplane and headed out to the east.

I'd done reference maneuvers before on a couple different flights, but never on a windy day. Reference maneuvers include making turns around a point on the ground (you maintain the same distance all the way around and steer to account for the winds that will blow you away) and S-turns (where you choose a straight line such as a road and make turns to fly half-circles on each side of the road - right turn, left turn, wind ahead, wind at your back, etc). After failing to compensate properly on the turns around a point (and getting too close to the target as a result), I finally figured it out and made a couple decent turns. That made the S-turns a lot easier, and I had a lot of fun making some steeper turns on the downwind side of the turns and did a good job getting straight and wings-level each time I crossed the road I was using as my reference.

Next we crossed to the west and headed to the practice area that's defined over Forest Grove. That area had a nice big hole in the clouds with blue sky overhead, and I started my climb to 3500 feet. About half way there, Kelly pulled the engine to idle and simulated an engine out failure. I got the airplane to proper glide speed and checked the fuel and controls, checked the wind (which was coming from my left - or from the south), and pointed into the wind and said I was going to land in that direction. Kelly said good and we reconfigured the airplane to climb the rest of the way to the west practice area.

Next came some power-off and power-on stalls. A stall is simply when the plane's speed through the air is slow enough that the wings stop generating lift, so they "stall" out and the plane starts to fall out of the air. Of course, when it starts to fall the opportunity is there to sly again (as long as you're not too close to the ground). I found I had a tendency to try to pull back on the yoke a little too hard and to rush the stalls as a result, rather than taking it easier and letting the speed bleed off slowly and evenly. You can stall the airplane quickly and steeply, especially with full power applied, but when you do it that way the tail is pointed toward the ground, so when it starts to fall you don't get any elevator control for a few seconds when you start to recover. Once I started to do a better job of taking my time on the controls, the stalls smoothed out and were noticeably easier to control. I think toward the end of the stalling practice I said I wanted to do one more, then one more, then one more. It was good to fine tune the stalls and get them down.

After stall practice, we headed back toward Twin Oaks to practice some landings on the small runway there. Before my travel break I'd had a good experience at McMinnville airport making a bunch of landings, but that airport is pretty huge compared to Twin Oaks (5420 ft. long and 150 ft. wide), so there's a lot of room to "screw up" in any direction in a small plane and still have usable pavement under you. There's plenty enough pavement at Twin Oaks, but the runway is a much smaller target, at 2465 ft. long and only 48 ft. wide. So, the challenges continue to present new opportunities to improve.

We'd gotten an early start (since I was early arriving and so was Kelly) and had lots of time scheduled, plus I was feeling good still, so we got quite a few landings in. My first one was - predictably - a mess. I was too fast, too high (out of trim) and had to try to slip into a crosswind landing the opposite direction from what I'm used to. But I got it on the runway. Betty, the owner of the air park and the airplanes I fly, told me later she saw that landing. I think she cringed as she watched. Luckily the rest of my landings were much better.

My take-offs are really coming together. I can keep it straight and fly it off the runway without unacceptable drift in the winds, I seem to have a feel for setting a crab angle, and I've found if I speak out loud and talk my way through the steps of departure and landing, I'm focused and tend to be on task. So, that's what I do.

The winds on the ground were not too bad, maybe five knots or so initially and they died off quite a bit later, and also shifted from a crosswind to a headwind. As a result, my first landing was on Runway 2, and the rest were on Runway 20 (the opposite direction) as the winds changed. After that first landing I already described, I started to do quite a bit better and with each one I was able to apply the little things I learned on each landing to the next one. I had a high approach and one low approach but was able to correct for them and get to the runway safely.

At some point during the landings we did, the whole process shifted from stressful to fun for me. I think I even said it out loud: "Wow, this is really fun!" Heh. Kelly laughed and said he was just glad to be back in the air, since the rainy weather was pretty terrible the previous week.

We landed at one point, and were coming close to the end of the already-long session. Kelly asked me how I was doing and if I wanted to do one more pattern circuit, and since I had plenty left in me and was making progress, I decided to do another one.

By the time I completed the landing of the day and almost 1.9 hours of flying, I was feeling pretty good about my progress. Kelly said he really thought I'd had some breakthroughs in this lesson. I have another lesson scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, so we'll have to see if the weather will cooperate again. I'm looking forward to it. Kelly tells me he thinks I'm about ready to do my first solo (which consists of flying a few take-off and landing patterns on your own). I told him that with the past couple lessons I've starting to feel substantially more confident about my still-growing abilities. So, now that I have my medical certificate in hand and pretty much everything else required for the first solo, it sounds like it might be coming up sometime soon. Hard not to be nervous - and a little excited - about that.

Windy landings and the oatmeal-brain effect

Today I flew for almost an hour with my instructor, Kelly. When I got to the air park, the winds were calm and the clouds were starting to clear. It was looking much better than over the weekend, when the weather had been pretty bad. But as I pre-flighted the aircraft, the winds started to pick up. By the time I was done with the inspection, there was wind of about 10-12 miles per hour.

We'd scheduled landing practice - Nothing but patterns and landings. Winds were within the safety limits, and I imagine Kelly was thinking I'd have to learn to do this sooner or later, and so now's as good a time as any. We got the aircraft ready, taxied and got in the air. I'm feeling more and more comfortable with the whole process each time, and "ground flying" the airplane helps. Taxiing and turning the plane on the ground is a lot easier now than it was the first day, for sure.

Once in the air I could tell right away it was going to be a different flying experience. It was bumpy and a little gusty. Holding turns at the right bank angle was noticeably more challenging than on previous flights and our speed over the ground with the wind behind us was pretty quick. Gusts tossed the plane around a bit and I had to level the wings pretty much constantly for the first part of the flight. Before departing, we'd checked the weather for the local area. Aurora, our original destination, had winds sustained at 16 miles per hour and gusts up to around 25, so we clearly weren't going there. We checked McMinneville (which was the same story as Aurora), and then Hillsboro, which was calmer with winds at 11 miles per hour and gusting a bit higher.

Hillsboro is a tower-controlled airport, and this was my first time flying into one. I didn't have to worry about radio communication, Kelly was handling that. Granted, I only have five hours under my belt and I should not expect much of myself, but I'm allowed to be nervous. Fortunately for us, this normally busy airport has only a few student pilots flying at the flight school there right now, so it was not as busy today as it often is.

Compared to Twin Oaks, which has one 50-foot-wide runway, Hillsboro (HIO) is freakin' huge. Two ultra-long runways as wide as a large freeway can be spotted easily from only 1,000 feet above the ground from several miles away. I had no problem locating it, that's for sure. I was able to look around and recognize a bunch of buildings, roads and locations I recognized, which was good. The places we've been flying over up until now have been relatively unfamiliar to me.

As I said, today was all about landings. It was clear as we flew that the winds were pretty quick aloft, since our ground track in a crosswind required me to "crab" into the wind in order to maintain a good line over the ground while in the landing pattern. Think of it as pointing off to the side, into the wind a bit so you don't get blown away and off track. From the outside it looks like you're sliding a bit sideways down your flight path. I think I got the hang of that pretty well, and after being caught off-guard in a couple turns and figuring out I needed to adjust more for the crosswinds while turning, I felt a bit more comfortable.

Landings were another story. The winds at HIO were coming toward us and somewhat from the left on runway 20, and seemed (at least to me) to shift direction quite a bit closer to the surface. The strong headwind on approach meant applying more power to maintain our altitude into the wind at a distance. I got the hang of that pretty well and found myself adjusting power on my own several times while flying today without being prompted. But getting down onto the runway was still pretty uncomfortable and as we got closer to the surface the shifting winds threw me off. Now, keep in mind this whole "landing" thing is pretty much greek to me so far, so these added wind components are a real mind-meld.

We ended up doing four landings before heading back, plus one go-around per the tower when we didn't execute a short approach fast enough for the controller. I guess that Lear jet coming in behind us was more important or something, heh.

I became slightly more comfortable with each landing attempt. Slightly is an operative word in that sentence, by the way. Kelly was on the controls with me for all of them and helped keep the plane straight as we touched down - I was just not getting it too well myself. After just those few landings my brain had pretty much turned to oatmeal - I was past my ability to go any further at the time, as far as landings were concerned. So we climbed out from HIO and headed back south, and I located the hangars at Twin Oaks, where the windsock was standing straight out and shifting between a headwind and a left crosswind for runway 20. After a slightly bumpy approach and a little extra power to compensate for the wind, Kelly helped me put the airplane on the ground and we got it parked.

It was a humbling hour. Not that I have a shortage of humility or anything, but I think it was very useful, even though it was complicated and right on the edge of overwhelming. I got to see what it's like in a good wind, which is important. I spent a little time while we completed our log books chatting with Kelly, and he told me I am doing fine and that I'll be okay, it takes time and everyone has to figure out how it feels. No one's an accomplished pilot at five hours, heh.

I need to eat a better meal before I fly. By the time I was done, I was pretty wiped out. I plan to take a PowerBar or something with me, too from now on.

I have a busy week on the calendar. Our next lesson and flight is set for Wednesday, with another on Friday, followed by one more on Saturday. Looking forward to it.