Tue Jun 07, 2022 9:14 pm
#1914261
Today's update - I have completed another 40 minutes of circuits revision this evening, since we couldn't do it on the day of the mock skills test due to wind. It was a pretty warm and calm day, with less than 5 knots of wind, from approximately 050° - which would be nice, since that's aligned with the runway, but ATC decided that 23 was the active runway as there was less than 5 knots of tailwind! I could of course have asked to use runway 05 instead, but we decided that we could live with 23, there wasn't that much wind, and it gave me a chance to learn a bit about how to adjust circuits for a slight tailwind.
We started off with a standard touch and go, it all went fine although was interesting to see just how low we were as we left the airfield boundary on climbout - normally we'd easily be above 500' with a bit of a headwind, but we were at about 350' with the gentle tailwind! After a week and a half off, I was pleased that everything came to mind fairly easily, and the landing was fine - no real crosswind to adjust for, just making sure I was a bit lower on the approach compared to a normal headwind circuit. Was a little bit fast early on final (70kt rather than 65kt) but easy enough to sort out.
Second circuit was for a flapless landing - to start with, I left a bit too much power on in the turn to downwind, and ended up at about 100kt before throttling back (this also brought me up to almost 1100'). Sorted it out on downwind, base was fine, although I overshot the turn to final a bit, but it was easy enough to get back on track while making my radio call for final. This time I thought I was too low at a couple of points on approach, but instructor reassured me that with the tailwind, we were at just the right height, and indeed we flared just over the threshold as required. Landing was fine again, although in common with all my landings today, there was not a peep of stall warner - but at least it was smooth (even if the lack of stall warner suggests it was a bit faster than it could have been).
Third was a high glide approach from 1500' - the climb all went fine, but then lots of other people turned up on frequency for the whole downwind leg, so I couldn't make a downwind report or hear my instructor easily! He ended up pulling the power as we came abeam the runway threshold, and made the radio call while I started my turn for the glide approach. This is where the tailwind made itself known - I could see I was very high and rapidly getting closer to the runway as soon as I started the turn, and despite putting all of the flap on as early as possible, we were still high on final and aiming for more than a third of the way down the runway, so went around. The go-around was not perfect, it took me a few seconds to raise the drag flap and then I didn't really leave enough time to get a positive rate of climb before removing the rest of the flap, but it was not too bad overall - I haven't done one of those for a month or more!
Fourth time round we did another glide approach, this time my instructor recommended continuing to fly downwind until descending to 1300' when there's a bit of a tailwind - I followed this advice and this time we came in at a much better height, landing was good.
Fifth circuit was to be a "bad weather" circuit at 600' with continuous turn to downwind (70kt, 2 stages flap) and then continuous turn for final with full flap from late downwind. We got a rather worrying "juddering" vibration for a few seconds in the first crosswind turn - at first instructor was worrying it might be the engine, but that seemed smooth to me and we both then decided it was almost certainly a flap briefly vibrating. This was quite unusual, we were only going an indicated 70-75kt (well below Vfe of 85kt), but decided that it was because we were doing a full power climbing turn and the combination of the airflow in the turn and propwash had caused the temporary judder. It went away as soon as I started to roll wings level for downwind, and so we decided to continue with this circuit and then see if it came back (which it didn't). The downwind leg of the bad weather circuit started off a bit tight to the runway, which was pointed out by instructor, but widening it a bit on downwind did the trick and the full-flap turn to final worked out nicely, ending the turn just as we came over the threshold at the right speed.
The final circuit was back to a normal one (also to check the flap wasn't wobbling) and this went fine with a smooth landing, although instructor pointed out that I could have pulled the power a bit earlier before the flare to land closer to the threshold. Still, we could get off at Charlie as usual so not too bad.
Overall a good refresher and especially good to have the glide approach and bad weather circuit practise, since I haven't done a huge amount of those to date. Benign weather conditions overall, so the landings themselves weren't so challenging with the lack of crosswind, but it was good to see how even a small amount of tailwind significantly changes the approaches.
Now I have a couple of evenings of chair-based revision (maybe with time for some Flight Sim practise) before the actual skills test on Saturday morning if all goes to plan... weather looks like it might be a bit windy but otherwise not too bad, looking forward to it!