steamee
Pre-takeoff checklist
- Joined
- Jun 1, 2009
- Messages
- 102
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Steamee
Hey all. Last night was my first time in the cockpit in about a month owing to lots of work travel and a weather scrubbed lesson. It's frustrating since I know I need a continuous amount of flying to be checkride proficient but I'm just not able to get the time in. But enough with the moaning...
Needed to build up my night landing counts so we lifted off around 8:30pm local. Its been a long time since I did an all night flight and I found I had to really think to figure out where I was even over familiar skies. Fortunately, it was a clear and calm night so I didn't have any weather worries. Did some time with the foggles to get more "instrument" time. I found it more difficult at night too. Part of the problem was that in my peripheral vision I could make out lines of lights on the ground from highways and cities and they were bending at all kinds of strange curved angles. This made it look like the aircraft wasn't level even though it was (mostly
).
After some time with that we turned back to the airport and proceeded to do pattern work and landings. Been struggling with getting my speed an altitude right lately so we went over my set up again. May be relying too much on intuition now and have let some of the basics slip. I felt the approaches were a bit more challenging to set up due to my unfamiliarity with relying on the lighting all the way around the pattern. All my prior night landings were pretty much just straight in. Really had to pay close attention to picking out the ends of the runways and even keeping the tower located. Flying the downwind you have all of Boston's lights in front and it's easy to be distracted. Also things I knew were far away (e.g. lighted towers I use as a reference to turn base) looked closer in the absence of the intervening landmarks.
It was on the warm humid side with about +1000' of density altitude. Could really tell the difference on take offs. Landings were kind of "meh" with one good one, 4 okays, and one harder than normal. Winds were very light and variable. The only interesting events were some jets taking off and landing which caused the controller to issue me some non-standard instructions including landings using both ends of the active runway and rapid deviations out of the pattern after lift off.
All and all probably the right amount of challenge after a long time away from the controls though and got all my PPL night landing requirements done.
Needed to build up my night landing counts so we lifted off around 8:30pm local. Its been a long time since I did an all night flight and I found I had to really think to figure out where I was even over familiar skies. Fortunately, it was a clear and calm night so I didn't have any weather worries. Did some time with the foggles to get more "instrument" time. I found it more difficult at night too. Part of the problem was that in my peripheral vision I could make out lines of lights on the ground from highways and cities and they were bending at all kinds of strange curved angles. This made it look like the aircraft wasn't level even though it was (mostly
). After some time with that we turned back to the airport and proceeded to do pattern work and landings. Been struggling with getting my speed an altitude right lately so we went over my set up again. May be relying too much on intuition now and have let some of the basics slip. I felt the approaches were a bit more challenging to set up due to my unfamiliarity with relying on the lighting all the way around the pattern. All my prior night landings were pretty much just straight in. Really had to pay close attention to picking out the ends of the runways and even keeping the tower located. Flying the downwind you have all of Boston's lights in front and it's easy to be distracted. Also things I knew were far away (e.g. lighted towers I use as a reference to turn base) looked closer in the absence of the intervening landmarks.
It was on the warm humid side with about +1000' of density altitude. Could really tell the difference on take offs. Landings were kind of "meh" with one good one, 4 okays, and one harder than normal. Winds were very light and variable. The only interesting events were some jets taking off and landing which caused the controller to issue me some non-standard instructions including landings using both ends of the active runway and rapid deviations out of the pattern after lift off.
All and all probably the right amount of challenge after a long time away from the controls though and got all my PPL night landing requirements done.
