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.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Glad to see you're keeping up with it! The winds have been pretty bad down here as well. Sounds like summer to me!

Keep up the good work on the blog

Jason
www.m0a.com
April 13, 2009 at 12:57 PM
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