Its been a great week of flight standardization. We practiced up slope landings, terrain flying, air drops, emergency procedures, and much more! On Thursday we went to a large dry lake bed where we could practice a whole range of maneuvers and emergency procedures. You can see in the photo above that its over 5 miles across, so after we landed there we setup a runway using orange cones. This allowed us to practice maximum braking, aborted takeoffs and landings, as well as low level maneuvering! Lots of fun! We also setup a target on the ground to use for airdrops to see how accurate we could get. After a bit of practice I was able to consistently drop the packages within 50 ft of our target - good thing to know! The hardest part is compensating for the strong winds - they were gusting over 18 mph that day. The nice thing about practicing at the lake bed was that if anything happened at any altitude, we would just land! You can imagine how dirty the plane was after a full day of having fun!
Good to hear that all went well with your flying. Did the airdrops remind you of Nate Saint?
ReplyDelete