Flying The Pattern

The weather report I got the morning of May 26th said that there were few clouds below 12000ft, light winds and unlimited visibility. Well as the song says, "two outta three ain't bad." They got everything right except for the visibility part. While conducting the preflight I noticed that the sky seemed to be hazy. I commented to my instructor that I was confused about what "unlimited visibility" actually meant. He assured me that it meant what I thought it did and that the weather report was wrong. Based on his experience he thought we would be staying close to the airport due to the visibility issues. After taking off from runway Two-Eight I could see that he was right. The hazy sky I saw on the ground translated into very poor visibility in the sky. But...it was a good time to do pattern work. Up to now every entry in my logbook showed X.x hrs of instruction and "1" landing. Today would be different. We were going to fly the left closed traffic pattern for practice. That meant takeoff, climb to pattern altitude, 1000ft MSL, turn left to crosswind, turn left to downwind, fly parallel to the runway, turn left to base leg, begin a descent, turn left to final, descend, and hopefully...land, full stop. Then taxi back to the runway and do it again.



It was now the time I had been waiting for. Up until now I could takeoff, climb, descend, turn, fly slow, stall, and some other things with reasonable competence for my low hours of flight time. But up until now I hadn't really had much chance to work on landings. And if you are going to takeoff, you better know how to land. Landings are the hardest part of flying and account for the most "mishaps."



Each time we ran the pattern it seemed like when I was able to correct one thing, I messed up on another. All in all we got the plane down each time in reasonably good shape. I had a bounce, a mildly hard drop, a floater, and a drifter, among others. I'm glad we have 3000ft runways because I used almost all of it. One time I was concerned that the "01" number from the end of the runway was coming up too fast. Fortunately the brakes allowed us to stop and taxi off with no problem. It was fun when it was over but it was very mentally tiring. I have a lot more work to do on my landings.