Not much to report. I headed down to Hollister today (after some schedule juggling) to fly. I had one of the 2-32s reserved for two hours. But it was foggy in the early AM so I waited until roughly 9am. I arrived just after 10am.
Drew went over my log book to verify that I had a 7 day solo sign-off and then called the tow pilot. In the meantime, I did the pre-flight checklist for glider 64E. We pulled the glider out near the runway, pulled out a coupe of runway lights, and chatted with the tow pilot.
In a few minutes I was on the runway and flying my first flight. All three flights were pretty uneventful. The weather was great. Clear, clam, and warm. The air above 1,000 feet was quite clear.
I released at roughly 5,000 feet on each flight and practiced a lot of low speed maneuvers, turns, and even attempted some thermaling. One one of the tows I practiced tow signals a bit too.
The most interesting part of each flight, of course was the landing. I found that the air started to get pretty bumpy below 800 feet, making my pattern a little sloppy. The good news is that my landings are improving. I touched down very close to the centerline at a reasonable place and stopped quickly without control problems.
It was a nice quiet day of flying. While nothing terribly noteworthy happened, the flights helped to get me used to flying alone and helped to build my confidence. I'll surely do this many more times in the coming weeks.
Posted by jzawodn at January 29, 2003 11:14 PM
Congratulations on your recent solo! I hope you will get as much enjoyment out of this sport as I have over the years. I found your main blog via links from other Linux/MySQL weblogs, and was pleasantly surprised to find we have another interest in common.
Maybe we'll see you up at Truckee one of these days...
