Some more pictures! I’m so tired after three hours of training… My instructor started now with emergency drills and he sets me a bit more under pressure. Or maybe I set myself more under pressure. Anyways here some pictures of a sandy beach at Pitt Lake:

My landings got a lot better. Only one of ’em wasn’t nice at all. I misjudged my height and touched down with the forward part of the floats. The airplane began to wobble a bit to the left and right. It wasn’t severe but I don’t want this to happen again… I think I did the same mistake as the Beaver Pilot who accidently crashed his plane in a movie. But I won’t give you the link to youtube here… 😉

The other mistake happened on the last landing. I didn’t realize there was glassy water until I was twenty feet over the water. Then I mixed up a glassy water landing with a normal landing and came down too fast. Shortly before touchdown I saw wood floating in the water. In this moment I didn’t think, applied full power and went around. I guess my instructor didn’t like my reaction in the first place (it was a long day and we wanted to go home) but I just wasn’t comfortable with the whole approach. Normally a piece of wood is no problem, since you can get down wherever you want. But in this case it made me think “Screw it”. The thing I didn’t like was that my instructor instantly called the tower to tell them we’re going around. Since he had to press the button on the yoke there were too many hands on the controls. I hesitated to raise the flaps and wasn’t sure who’s on the controls. As a pilot you have your priorities: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate – above all fly the airplane. During a normal go-around you think “Screw it”, apply full power, raise a notch of flaps and establish a climb attitude and then you tell the tower you are going around. Today I got confused because I didn’t expect any action of my instructor.

In retrospective I must admit that Tom recognized many risks I didn’t see. We were just in front of the departure end of runway 18 during the go-around. There could have been an airplane taking off at the same time and same height, coming from my right. That’s why I should have touched down a lot earlier. However…I learned a lot thanks to this mistakes and I prefer doing things wrong with an instructor by my side than if I’m alone… 🙂

Oh and sorry about all the aviation terms… next time I’ll keep it more simple.