A windy time

I went up this afternoon for my first flight in about 3 weeks. It was pretty windy today, with gusts up to 21 knots when I took off from runway 2. The winds were out of 310 so there was a pretty good crosswind but the takeoff was only a little more interesting than usual.

I kept a bit too much left aileron in at liftoff so I started to slide over to the left side of the runway after the wheels came up. A little correction had me back over the center line and I rode the bumpy roller coaster on up to 3000 feet.

I just flew around the local area for almost an hour, seeing the sites. I was happy to have the autopilot working for me because it was a constant struggle to maintain altitude. I encountered plenty of 300 ft/min updrafts/downdrafts but the autopilot stayed on top of it very nicely. I would not have wanted to do a check ride on a day like that.

I flew the ILS to return to the airport and had a 13-15 kt crosswind to work against. On approach my airspeed was all over the place, but I kept it above 70 to offset the gust factor. I crabbed down to about 100 feet then kicked in some right rudder and dropped the wind to the left as I neared the pavement. Landing on the upwind wheel first I was able to hold the other wheel up for a couple hundred feet before setting it down (no doubt I had excess speed to get rid of).

It took plenty of control inputs to keep the airplane where I wanted it, but the airplane handled the wind quite well - better than I expected really. I was thinking the high wing might catch of a lot of the wind gusts but it was a fairly docile touchdown and roll out.