Lesson 5 - Bad Landing

Flight Time: 1.6 hours
Total Time: 6.2 hours

We headed towards Bremerton again today, where we practiced more slow flight and stalls, which I did with moderate success. Flying right by stall speed still makes me nervous because of the work involved with maintaining coordinated flight and avoiding a stall. Stalls are also still making me nervous, which keeps me from starting really solid stalls. A few of the times, I ended up with the plane sinking at 1000 feet a minute, the nose up, but no stall warning at all – just a sinking while still flying slowly. Years of instinct have taught me that stalls are bad and will lead to a quick, terrifying plunge from the sky. It’s taking a bit of work, but I’m slowly coming to realize that this isn’t the case.

After a bit of work with that, we headed south towards Tacoma for some touch-and-goes. While entering the downwind leg for the first landing, we got a call from the tower that there was another small plane on the final leg. In this situation, you have to wait until you and the other plane pass each other before turning onto the base leg – this prevents any chance of collision. It was also a chance for Ed to show me when slow flight is useful. If you’re flying at cruising speed while waiting for the other plane to go past, you’ll fly much further away from the airport than if you’re going half the speed or less. When the plane finally did pass us, we turned into base and had a barely longer than normal final approach.

I’m glad we had the extra time, though, because the Tacoma Narrows Airport is intimidating to fly into at first. Rather than flat ground leading up to the runway, you are flying over the Puget Sound, where a 300 foot cliff rises out of the water with the runway at the top of it.

Tacoma Narrows Airport on Google Earth

We did six touch-and-goes at Tacoma, and things were going well until the second to last one, which is when I was starting to feel fatigued. I was coming in a few feet to the left of the center line and overcorrected on touchdown, causing the plane to bounce a few times and veer right. I realized the landing was not going to work, so I pushed in full throttle to get the speed up and go around, but – and here is where I made my mistake – I then raised the flaps. This was not good at all, because while it meant we were accelerating, it also caused us to lose a considerable amount of lift and drop right back onto the runway, bouncing, accelerating and now veering off to the left.

“Help please,” I told Ed, who obliged by lowering the flaps again. Almost instantly we rose off of the tarmac again and after a little bit of overcorrection, we were finally flying nearly straight out on our upwind leg. Ed later told me that the only help he gave with to lower the flaps again. He said I had good instincts to go around on a botched landing, but that flaps are a good thing – they let you get off of the runway with minimal speed, giving you time to recover, gain speed and slowly raise the flaps.

It was a bad way to end the evening, and even though I knew I was tired, I did one more touch-and-go to end the flight on a better note. We then flew north over the sound in the twilight, while Ed showed me how to steer with the rudders in trimmed flight – a skill he said is useful in cross country flight when you only need minor course corrections.

We did a “long” landing on the long runway at Boeing, which means we glided over most of the runway and landed near the end – saving ourselves two miles of taxiing. Boeing’s long runway, by the way, really is long – two miles. I played around in Microsoft Flight Sim X recently and found out that I could take off, fly up to 300 feet, land, and still have room to take off again without using the entire runway. Yeah, it’s long. This also makes me feel a bit safer if I ever have an engine failure on takeoff.

The landing, though, was uneventful, other than the tower rushing us off of the runway to clear some space for a cargo jet. Even with two good landings after my botched landing, I was still a little bit skittish, and was glad to be finished for the day. This was the most stressful day of flying so far, and I drove home kicking myself over my mistake with the flaps on the go-around.