Day Thirty-Two – Precautionary Landings

Okay, for those of you who thought I had given up on flying due to the time lag between recent posts – never fear! I worked out my jitters and got back into the swing of things today with precautionary landings. Let’s say the weather is closing in on you, or maybe your passenger has decided to start throwing their lunch all over the back of your seat and you want to land quickly before the situation gets any worse. Southern Manitoba is covered in farm fields and nice straight roads, any one of which can serve as your runway. The challenge is that you’ve probably never landed on that particular field or that particular road before. Who knows what kind of shape it is in or what power lines might be lurking along its borders. A precautionary landing basically involves two circuits around the intended landing site. The first is a high level inspection pass designed to give you a complete overview of the area and to ask, “Why shouldn’t I land there?” The second is a low level inspection pass designed to look the site over in much greater detail and ask, “Why should I land there?” It sounds pretty simple, but it is probably the most frustrating thing I’ve done so far. My biggest challenge seemed to be to keep the correct field in sight while I performed the circuit. They all look the same to me and at least once I somehow managed to do my high and low inspection passes on two different fields. Sigh.