pilot's logbook

5/7
Touch & Go’s, steep turns, pattern entry 1.5 hr

I apologized to Mike for trying to crack a joke about bouncing the airplane to the owners. He agreed it wasn't the best idea. On the good side, he said, no, I didn’t come in on the front wheel the other day.

We did touch and go at Bowman Field. I haven’t got it yet. I understand the pattern, what we’re supposed to do, but I’m not judging distances and I feel like I'm in somebody else's body, or using somebody else's brain. Maybe no brain. Airspeed! Can you see how high we are? Airspeed. Too far out. Need to stay parallel, can't be angling out. What's wrong with this picture? Nose down. Airspeed. Nose down. Nose down. Airspeed. Airspeed!

After that we went out and did some 360º steep turns. My angles and holding-altitude stink.

Coming back, Mike just said “OK, take us back to Bowman,” and I turned us around in the right direction, (small successes, what?) but I wasn’t sure what island we were over. Mike asks me does it look like six miles from Louisville? and I'm thinking Beats me, what does six miles look like? Turns out it was twelve-mile island--the long skinny one. I remember what downtown Louisville looked like from there, so maybe I can use that snapshot to say "10 miles away" (not twelve, the river curves).

MIke says doing this is like wanting to teach someone how to stop a car, but taking them onto the interstate to practice it. We're moving at 100 mph, and the plane and the setup are different every time around, so you just have to keep doing it until it clicks. He asked me if I’d been anywhere with Barry, the more time in a plane the better, and also said a flight simulator is helpful, don't I have one?

I have an old one on the Amiga, which isn’t running but has joysticks, and I have one on this macbook, but no joystick or input device and I really need to swap the hard drive out to use it anyway. Theresa has a yoke attachment. I’m going to stop by and pick it up, and maybe it will work with one of my machines.
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Nope. It looks great, but it connects via gameport, and we need USB, and there don't seem to be adapters that will work.
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Well, this is a depressing post, but it wasn't exactly a depressing lesson. Humbling. Not depressing. There were good things.

??????

It was a beautiful day, even if cloudy. I LIKE where we go and what we do. I can't wait to be competent to handle the plane and to be sightseeing and exploring. I want to explore the limits of the movement of flying, and I want to explore that whole world that you connect to from there. I like it. (Carmel told me this morning that a friend of hers says flying is like a drug addiction. It's all you want to do, nothing else matters, and then you hit a plateau, be ready for it.)

Back to good things:

I notice that I used to feel somewhat on the verge of motion sickness a lot of the time. That seems to be gone. That whole uneasy feeling of height, of being somewhere you don't belong, is gone, too.

Hey, I did check the METAR this morning and correctly predict what runway they were going to have us use. There was probably a small handful of little things that I was smoother at than last time. Til Wednesday.

I'm going to try again to digest that weather chapter.