I was disappointed with one of my landings yesterday as I came in a bit hard, following an unexpected crosswind up-draught just before I touched down, which I didn't control as well as I'd like to, so I wanted to spend some time working on them today. I decided to take an instructor up with me, so he could critique me and narrow down anything that he thought wasn't quite right. As sod's law would have it, my first landing was a greaser (that's a good thing) and he couldn't find any fault with it. This built my confidence after it had taken a knock yesterday. We did a couple more circuits including a soft field landing where you hold the nose so high, you touch down at just under 50kts, and keep the nose off the ground as long as possible, and with his reassurance that my landings were fine (it's his aircraft so I'm sure he'd mention if he wasn't happy!), I headed back off down the taxiway to line up for a flight to Chino.
Chino is a fairly large airfield just on the other side of some hills around 50nm east north east of Long Beach. As it is fairly close to the hills you don't get a good view of it until you are fairly close, but the circuit pattern and layout is very similar to Long Beach so it was easy to plan my approach. After what was probably my best landing ever (I barely felt us touch down), I followed their taxi instructions to what I was told would be the restaurant but after parking up and looking around, I'll be damned if I could find it. Maybe they were winding up the foreigner? I did get a chance to see some of the other aircraft that call this field home, including some ex-USAF jets and transport planes, up close.
On the way back to Long Beach, I headed out to the coast, and followed it along to the harbour to get some pictures of the Queen Mary from the air, before turning back in towards KLGB. The circuit was very busy, and I inadvertently cut ahead of someone in the queue for landing as he was on a very long final, so after touching down I had to expedite vacating the runway to allow the following aircraft to touch down. I was happy with this landing as the same type of crosswind gust that caught me out yesterday hit me again, but I controlled the aircraft much more smoothly and landed gently.
This afternoon I'm off to the CBS studios to watch the taping of one of the late night talk shows here - the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (who?) featuring Jeff Goldblum today.
Chino is a fairly large airfield just on the other side of some hills around 50nm east north east of Long Beach. As it is fairly close to the hills you don't get a good view of it until you are fairly close, but the circuit pattern and layout is very similar to Long Beach so it was easy to plan my approach. After what was probably my best landing ever (I barely felt us touch down), I followed their taxi instructions to what I was told would be the restaurant but after parking up and looking around, I'll be damned if I could find it. Maybe they were winding up the foreigner? I did get a chance to see some of the other aircraft that call this field home, including some ex-USAF jets and transport planes, up close.
This afternoon I'm off to the CBS studios to watch the taping of one of the late night talk shows here - the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (who?) featuring Jeff Goldblum today.
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