Vectors To Final

When I pulled up to the airport today there was a sizable Jet on the new part of the ramp, fueling up. I was kind of surprised that he could even get into JGG and I wondered why he landed there instead of Newport News 10 minutes away. I'll never know. Today we started on holding patterns . We did a few holds relative to the HCM VOR practicing the three different entry methods: direct, parallel, and teardrop. I started to get the hang of it a bit, although I obviously have tons more to learn/polish. My instructor taught me a nice way to determine the entry method using the outbound course relative to your heading ( described here ) The ASOS at the airport was saying that there was quite a decent wind on the field as we headed back to land. It was saying a near-90-degree crosswind of about 11 kts gusting to 18. Ugh. But, the landing was uneventful. I think maybe the wind sensor was just getting some little stream of air that wasn't affecting the runway (the windsock was...

My friend Clay and I went up for 0.7 hours today. Had a ~9 knot crosswind which was good practice. The air was very smooth at 2500 and 3000 ft and we practiced some steep turns and a bit of the engine-out procedures. We stayed mostly to the NW of JGG checking out some of the local neighborhoods and lakes.

Interesting research at Duke here. They seem to have performed research showing a bumpy wing to have a higher critical angle of attack (AOA) with improved lift and LESS drag.

This guy apparently bought a new helicopter and decided he could figure out how to fly it on his own . Wow.

K and I went up today in an attempt to let me practice some steep turns and landings. However, after watching the wx closely for a while, we took off and realized that the 3-5nm visibility was not the best in the world for fun practice. So we stayed in the pattern, shot two landings, and called it a day. All 0.4 hours of it. :) We had been hoping that the wx would have been better. You can see in the pic for this entry that the north side of the airport was showing blue skies and the south was showing white. When we got in the air though, all was white - to our sides anyway. Our hope was to at least play around in the north for a bit, but MVFR was not good for that.

Charles and I did another 1.3 hours today. This time we performed an instrument take-off (with the foggles on) and practiced some VOR tracking. This was my first lesson on instrument navigation, which I am hoping will be one of the more interesting sections of the training; it is so far. We intercepted radials inbound and outbound and I got my first look at a simple VOR approach with a procedure turn. I managed to pull a way-high landing at the end, a fairly disappointing end to the otherwise fun lesson. I plan to practice some touch-and-goes and steep turns Sunday morning in an attempt to get the feel back.