It's been more than 2 weeks into January now and I'm getting closer and closer to my private pilot check ride. I took the written exam last weekend. It took me about one hour to complete the test and passed with a 90% score. Reading that ASA Test Prep twice did help a lot. I've also finished all the required trainings for my part141 syllabus earlier this month. What I need now is a couple weekends of good weather so that I can polish(or I should probably say recall) my skills and take the check ride. After all, I haven't practiced maneuvers like slow flight and stalls for more than 2 months.
The weather in Puget Sound is not very cooperative in January, I am forced to reschedule my trainings due to the snowstorm, otherwise I would have my license by the end of this month:(
However, the not-so-good weather is not all about setbacks, it did give me a great chance to practice crosswind landings during the first weekend. I was on a solo cross-country trip from S43 to BLI and then round robin back with landings at BVS and AWO. Winds aloft is about 40kt and there are quite a few lenticular clouds above the Cascade mountains. It's the most bumpy trip I have ever had in my life and I was being tossed up and down in every minute! Besides crosswind, I also experienced some windshear and downdraft when landing at BLI and BVS. I landed at BLI with about 4-5kt crosswind, and landed at BVS at about 10kt. It's pretty gusty crosswind considering that Cessna152 is a really light airplane. I had to crab and sideslip with no flaps to land the plane on BVS. I was amazed and proud of myself that I was able to maintain center line in that condition. After the challenging crosswind practice at BVS, there are some light rain between AWO and S43, which calms the wind down a little bit. I checked the OAT and it's well above 40F, so no need to worry about structure icing:) But it's extremely frustrating to fly in a 40kt headwind situation. So after monitoring Harvey CTAF for more than 10 minutes and figured no one is practicing patterns at this moment, I declared an extended right base approach for runway 15 to save a big trip shooting for that 45 downwind. Another fun thing about this trip is that it's the first time that Seattle radio wished me "a safe landing" when I was closing the flight plan before landing at Harvey, lol. It turned out that the wind on the surface at Harvey is actually pretty calm :)
Since the snow is preventing me from flying these days, I started editing some videos I shot during my first two solo cross country flights and I have uploaded them on youtube.
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