Ground Reference Maneuvers

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I promise I haven't given up! I'm still flying and I'm still well on my way to getting my license. In fact, part of the reason I've been quiet is that I've been spending a lot of time studying for the written exam, which I took last week.

I passed!

Now the next step is a checkride with an FAA-designated examiner, but before I'm ready for that I have a few things I need to work on, like ground reference maneuvers. There are two I have to master: turns around a point and S-turns.

During turns around a point, I must fly a perfect circle around a chosen point on the ground, while maintaining constant airspeed and altitude. An S-turn involves flying an "S" shape across a straight line on the ground, like a road or the edge of a field. The difficult part in these maneuvers is correcting for the wind, which is always evil and tries to blow me off course.

On the plus side, I've totally mastered short-field landings. During a short-field landing, I must
pick a spot near the beginning of the runway to aim for and hit it right on, or no more than 200 feet beyond. I had trouble with these for a while, but last weekend I finally nailed them. I did four in a row and hit the spot dead-on.

Some of the other procedures I'm going to have to perform are a soft-field takeoffs and landing (like what I would do on a dirt or grass runway), stalls, slips, and a simulated engine failure. I'll be practicing all these for a few more weeks, and when I'm ready, I'll take that checkride!