Lesson 4 - Touch-and-Goes at Bremerton

Flight Time: 1.7 hours
Total Time: 4.6 hours

Today instead of heading east towards Lake Sammamish, we headed west, across the Puget Sound, towards Bremerton. Flying west is much more restricted than flying east because it’s closer to Sea-Tac’s Class B airspace. This means that you have to listen to Boeing’s tower for much longer, and you have to pay attention to staying below certain altitudes until you get far enough out. Once over the Olympic Peninsula, though, you’re in an open area with relatively low air traffic and amazing views of Mount Rainier, the Olympic Mountains and Seattle.

We started by practicing both forward and side slips. In both types of slips you are in uncoordinated flight, which means that you push in rudder in the opposite direction of your ailerons. Forward slips are used to increase your rate of descent without increasing speed or using flaps. They’re useful when you need to descend quickly onto a short runway after getting past an obstacle (for instance a row of trees). Side slips are similar, but are useful when landing in a crosswind. Rather than using the sideways flight to descend, you balance the turn using the ailerons with opposite rudder so that your ground track lines up with the runway, even though you’re turned into the wind.

I did reasonably well practicing slips at high altitude, but I had a hard time using them effectively in landing. I’m just not confident enough with my landings yet to add in another variable. We did eight touch-and-goes at Bremerton Airport today, including power-off, and no-flap landings. The forward slip was useful during the no-flap landing, but I as I already mentioned, I had a hard time with it since it was an extra complication on top of a normal landing, which is still complicated enough for me.

Ed also reviewed the traffic pattern with me - getting me into a routine for following the standard practice for takeoffs and landings. I won't explain the pattern in detail - there's a good description on Wikipedia, but the image below lays it out pretty well.


While flying back to Boeing Field, we flew next to Bremerton Naval Base, where we got a great view of a handful of aircraft carriers and over a dozen submarines. I’ll have to remember to bring my camera along next time we go to Bremerton, because the site is one worth sharing.

Today was the most exhausting day so far, and those touch-and-goes really took it out of me. After landing nine times total today, though, I’m feeling much more comfortable with them.