My Flight Journal

Saturday, August 23, 2003 1:35pm

After more than a month of being ground bound, I finally got back in the air. Did 1.2 of pattern work. Did touch and go's, stop and go's, and taxi backs.

I was surprised how well I did on the pattern work. I never had a problem with it, but I expected to be at least a little rusty. Instead I was hitting all the numbers and being exactly where I wanted to be, when I wanted to be, at the airspeed I wanted to be. Was practically flying hands-off for a lot of it.

My landings left something to be desired though. The first one I completely misjudged how high above the runway the 172 sits and flew it into the pavement. Luckily the rate of descent was very low (I thought I was doing a roundout, not expecting to make contact). It turned into a one-bouncer. The next landing I over compensated and dropped it onto the runway from about 5 feet. The rest of my landings weren't so bad, but I didn't grease any of them.

My instructor said that while they weren't pretty, they were all perfectly safe. He's thinking of soloing me tomorrow. Yikes!