Saturday was a truly glorious weather day—absolute CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited), with some light breezes. It was one of those first hints of spring and one of those days that the sky just demands you come up and play! So I did.
A good friend quickly agreed to fly with me and came to pick me up for a morning of flying. During the week, he had agreed to serve as a safety pilot for me while I did some very basic instrument flying under the hood (a goggles-like device that limits your view to just the instrument panel). I wanted to practice straight and level flight, standard turns, constant rate climbs and descents and constant airspeed climbs and descents. As safety pilot, my friend would be responsible for watching for other airplanes while I was practicing.
We took off into a beautiful sky and headed east along the shoreline, climbing above some very light turbulence below 3,000 feet. I donned the hood and spent an hour wandering along the shoreline, reversing direction a few times, making some 90-degree turns, climbs and descents at 500’ per min (constant rate maneuvers) and climbs and descents at 90-knots (constant rate maneuvers). It was a good start—obviously still a lot of room for improvement on cleaning up my scan of the instruments and immediate corrections to the control. Still, the practice went pretty smoothly—and my safety pilot said I had done well.
After an hour, though, I couldn’t take listening to him talk about how spectacular the view was, so I took the hood off to soak it in myself. We spent the next hour tooling around the sky a bit. We headed up the CT River a little ways to see if we could spot bald eagles near Essex and Haddam. Then we flew west and circled my parents home while my father waved a space blanket in the back yard. I hadn’t realized how bright yellow the house is in the full sunlight—and the reflective blanket was easy to spot as it sparkled in the sun!
Heading back to BDR, we picked up the ATIS report on weather indicating a bit of a right crosswind for the landing. The tower called for us to make an almost straight in approach to Runway 29. Everything was looking great on final approach—speeds were good, descent profile was good, crosswind correction was good. We crossed the numbers and I blew it by flaring a couple of feet too high….we slid along in ground effect (basically riding a cushion of air between the bottom of the wing and the runway) until we lost flying speed. At the last second, both of us realized we were flaring just a tad too high and I started pushing in power as the bottom fell out and we thumped down. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a pretty landing. I was mortified—and know I’ll be taking some good-natured ribbing for a while about that one…..
In hindsight, it was the first time in a few months that I’d flown a Piper (low wing airplane), having spent most of the last 3-4 months flying the Cessna 182RG (a high wing airplane), which has a bit higher perspective, flares a little higher off the ground and doesn’t have quite the same ground effect that the low wing Piper does. So note to self to watch for more closely next time.
But overall, it was a fantastic day—it was terrific to get some flying in with my buddy again and the weather was just too perfect, especially after all the snow and rain this winter season.
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