Saturday, April 25, 2009

A tailwheel endorsement!

Doug has "received the required training of FAR 61.31 (i) in a 7KCAB and is proficient in the operation of a tailwheel airplane". Admittedly, I still have a few more lessons to really consider myself even close to that but it's a start and having the endorsement is neat.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

my little logbook

I've been entering my logbook into a MySQL database and writing a little php to query and update it. That's working reasonably well now so here are my current totals:

landselxcnight
233120.226.411.4


The columns are: landings, single engine (land) hours, cross country (hours) night (hours).

For my tailwheel work, here are my totals:


indexdatefromtoidenthr_sel
1 2009-02-28KVKXK2W5N537581.6
2 2009-03-08KVKXK2W5N537581.4
3 2009-03-14KVKXKVKXN537580.4
4 2009-03-21KVKXKXSAN537581.8
5 2009-04-18KVKXMD14N537581.7





6.9

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Another Citabria lesson

I just finished another lesson in a Citabria for my tailwheel endorsement. This time it was 6 landings on two small grass strips in the area. The shortest one was 1,600 feet and there were trees just short of the runway that you had to clear and then put it down pretty quickly. I had one go-around (which was good for practice) because I was a bit too fast. I also got a couple of slips in to lose altitude on final. My first landing was ok but the second was much better. I think that the reason for the improvement is I started aiming for a road just before the strip rather than looking at the strip. The weather could not have been better today. All in all it was too much fun to describe adequately.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Another weather cancel, this time winds

I had to cancel a tailwheel lesson again today because of winds:

KADW 041755Z AUTO 31018G27KT 10SM CLR 17/M03 A2972 RMK AO2 PK WND 32032/1730 SLP067 T01711027 10171 20091 50000

The winds from that are:

from the NW (310 degrees) at 21 MPH (18 knots; 9.4 m/s) gusting to 31 MPH (27 knots; 14.0 m/s)

If I tried it I suspect I'd flutter around kind of like a plastic bag in the wind. Maybe someday and maybe in a much heavier plane.