Get Your Nose Down Bruce (Lesson #9)

I didn't record any PC notes for this flight on the day I took it (today is 7/14/99). This was right before I left for Japan on 6/20 and it was a busy weekend! I flew with Kern to North Central Airport in RI (SFZ), my first takeoffs and landings away from 1B6. SFZ (shown here) is the nearest uncontrolled airport that has good size runways suitable for early landing practice (and taxiways too - 1B6 requires back-taxiing after every full stop landing). I'll add more later (there are a lot of hand notes in Flight #17, mostly done on the flight to Osaka the next day).

This is where I adopted the Native American name "Get-your-nose-down-Bruce" because I had a tendency to hold too much back pressure when the nose was supposed to be slightly down for the gliding descent in the landing pattern. This was perhaps an "instinctive" attempt to keep from going down too fast, but of course it would slow down the airplane more (not a good thing when you are slow for landing anyway, and close to the ground). I guess I did it a lot.

Time: 1.4 hrs dual, TT 11.5 hrs, C152 at 1B6

Editor's Note: Blogging this ancient history in October 2006, I note that SFZ ended up being the airport where I finally took and passed my check ride in May 2001, so it's interesting that this is where I first started to work seriously on landings. Maybe I'll dig out my old paper notebook "Flight #17" and update with those notes sometime, but probably not! The reason that it was #17 so early in my flight lesson career was that I had been keeping notebooks on my various flight sim experiences since 1994. Flight sims and a lot of reading were the reasons I knew so much of the basic flight stuff even on my intro lessons in 1997, though my practical skills lagged far behind my formal knowledge!