Arlo Gilbert's Blog

Ok so perhaps I didn’t quite land the plane like this but there were times that it felt like it!

After three weeks off from flying I was quite suprised that the flying wasnt so hard to pick up. I just gave myself permission to have a crappy flight if necessary and it turned out great. I owe a lot of that to my flight instructor Al. One piece of advice I can give to future private pilot students is that when you come to critical repetitions maneuvers like landings and cross wind landings… stick with one single instructor. Bouncing around between instructors is very frustrating for many reasons. During early training multiple instructors can be quite helpful, but for repetitions use one guy (or girl).

In any case, a cross wind landing for those who don’t know is as such:

Normally when a pilot lands a plane it is preferrable to have no wind or to have wind directly heading at you. This head wind helps to generate additional lift and resistance which both helps to slow the plane and to keep you nice and comfy on a cushion of air. A cross wind landing is when the wind is coming from either your left or right… this is particularly challenging because at any point a nice gust of wind from the left or right can force your wings up in the wrong direction and make landing very challenging… if this happens on the ground it can actually flip the plane and damage your wings.

Regardless though, we had some nice 25knot gusts and I got to practice some cross winds, it was fantastic, the landings were good, the flying was a bit bumpy but pleasant, and as always I am a wiz with the radios. I feel confident that I will be ready to begin soloing (means flying the plane alone without an instructor to save you) soon.