Ground school, and a surprise

Ground school was all that was scheduled for today – to go over some weight and balance problems, performance problems, and to do some final review for my phase check on Friday. Turns out this took all of 20 minutes. When Richard said “So, do you want to go fly around a little?” – what was I supposed to say? No? Impossible. I checked to be sure the plane was available, and off we went.

Van Nuys has two parallel runways – but the short one (if you can call 4000′ short) that we normally use for touch and goes is closed until Friday. The result – the place was loaded with traffic. The tower eventually ended up not authorizing any touch and goes due to traffic. We decided to head over to Santa Monica (SMO) to see how it was over there. The wind and ceiling were great, but it was hazy – maybe 5 miles visibility. I had a hard time even FINDING the airport once we were over the hill. I was cleared to land about five miles out, and suggested to Richard that as long as we were there, and it was lunchtime – maybe we should eat. He agreed. It might have been a nice lunch, except I came in WAY too high, and had to do a go around. Once we were off the south end of the runway, we noticed a cloud layer moving in rapidly. Good thing we didn’t stop for lunch – we might not have been able to leave – at least not VFR, anyway!

We headed back to Van Nuys and were cleared on the downwind as number 5. The place was a zoo. Lousy landing, but safe. Oh well – any flying is better than no flying.

1.0 hours/31.2 total