• Soft field takeoffs and landings
  • Dealt with lots of traffic. The Skycatcher is a slow plane so dealing with, and not impeding, other traffic is a bit of a dance. I was finding it difficult to keep track of who was where so it was good to have another set of eyes in the cockpit. We had one plane cross in front of us as we were on the departure leg but we both turned right; he moved out to give me room in the pattern and I turned to assure we stayed away from him. Good communication during the encounter but it's a bit unnerving to not see another plane until it's nearly in front of you (and no...not close enough to be dangerous and not on a merging trajectory).
  • 1 of 7 landings would have passed a check ride
  • 6 of 7 landings would probably have resulted in some excitement but I might have saved the plane
  • Pattern work. I was high and fast most of the time. I discussed this with Rick after the flight and the issue is I'm flying too close to the runway on downwind, not always parallel to the runway (I'm flying toward it), and turning base too soon so I have too little time to set up for a good landing (slow down and get lower).
  • The good news is that I finally turned on tracking with the ForeFlight app and can now go back and really look at what I'm doing. I can also export the log to a KML file and get good 3D data in Google Earth. You can see exactly what's going on. I need to play with this a bit but I think this could turn out to be very helpful debugging problems.
What I need to work on:
  • Next flight, don't turn base until 1.4 miles from the center of the airport (1 mile from end of runway) and learn to associate that distance with the '45 degree angle from end of runway' (which I thought I was doing) and fly a bit further out on downwind.
 Prep for next flight:
  • Review short field take-off/landing procedure and try and have that committed to memory.
Flight path:

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