Shortly after beginning flight training, a friend and former private pilot asked if I had “scared myself”, yet? I really didn’t know what she meant - until today. I’ll spare you the ugly details, but basically I was practicing circuits this morning (solo) when one of my landings went bad. Real bad. Let’s just say it involved a bounce, a crosswind gust, a bit too much pitch down attitude and the nose wheel. I’ll leave it to any pilots reading this entry to imagine the sequence of events that followed. In the end, I did as I was taught and stabilized the situation, applied full power and performed an overshoot. My aircraft and I emerged unscathed.
The sketchy landing itself wasn’t really what scared me. Okay, yes that really scared me, and technically it wasn’t a “landing” per se. What scared me was the amount of time it took me to make the decision to overshoot – and we’re taking mere seconds here. I’ll never know if I simply got lucky today, but I know that my decision making will be a whole lot quicker next time.
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