Pilot Life: Pattern Work at Albany

This morning, my uncle and I stayed local to allow me to practice some landings in his Cessna 172. This flight was a nice change of pace after the two cross-country flights we've been doing the past two days. As usual, following a pre-flight at the hangar, we hopped in, got the engine started, and taxied over to Runway 34. After doing the run-ups, we took off from Runway 34 flew the traffic pattern.

Pattern work in N5174E!

My uncle walked me through his flows and routines and surprisingly, I was able to pick up on them rather quickly! In the past, I struggled a little bit with landings in a new airplane. I like to think that even though I still have less than 200 flight hours logged, I've gained quite a bit more experience within the past year and learned a few tips and tricks that I can generally apply. I've also found how easy it is handle a Cessna 172, which definitely helps! All in all, my landings were pretty decent as I logged ten of them! The third landing was full-stop with a taxi-back because I ended up floating over the relatively short runway at Albany Municipal Airport. Otherwise, most of my touch-and-go landings were spot on.

I got the routine down and my uncle's confidence in me handling his airplane increased so we called it a good flight. My uncle took the eleventh landing to a full-stop from the right seat and landed us back on Runway 34. We taxied over the fuel pumps and topped off the tanks before taxiing the plane back to the hangar and securing it inside.

Tomorrow we'll have a long cross-country flight, so it was a good thing that we were able to get today's flight squeezed in.