Temporarily demoted to passenger

Yo!

I really hate Swedish climate... Recently it has become cold, windy and rained a lot, and because of that we've stayed on the ground most days. There are mainly three weather properties that highly affects flying small airplanes by visual flight rules (VFR): visibility, cloud height and wind. While driving a car in heavy fog usually only means you should slow down a bit and be careful, flying in fog is a larger problem since there's no road to follow (you don't know where you are) and on collision course without another aircraft you will often not know it before it's too late. Legally we usually need 5 km of horizontal visibility to fly, while preferably we want much more – 20 km to be able to navigate without difficulties.

Since we're not allowed to fly inside clouds by VFR, we need the cloud height to be higher than our planned flying altitude with some margin. In the end that means the clouds must be around 500 meters above ground or more. Finally, the wind can make a very good-looking day for flying (blue clear skies) a bad one. But while we must fly for a longer time in headwind, or be heading for a different place than we want to go to in side-wind, the only moment the wind is a flight safety issue is at landing (and sometimes however seldom on take-off). Since we want to come to a quick stop on the runway while we can't fly slower than our current stall speed in the air (because then we'll simply fall down), an airplane always land and take off in headwind (so that the speed over the ground is as low as possible).

There's always two directions in which you can land on a runway, but how to do if the wind is coming from the side and there's no different-angled runways? Then we have to fly partly sideways and just before touch-down we turn fast so that the wheels come down straight. This is a little tricky, why we are not allowed to fly unless the wind from the side is extremely low (maximum 2,5 m/s) until we have more experience. Anyway, lately the wind has often been strong and in the wrong direction, why most days the lessons have been cancelled.

While I'll explain that later, the opposite to VFR is instrumental flight rules, IFR, which allows airplanes to fly in clouds and in fog, but only exactly the paths that the air traffic control tells us. We will learn such flying much later on.

Photos:

Klippan from above soon after take-off

Approach Ljungbyhed. The short runways are out of use, but 10 years ago when they weren't Ljungbyhed had four paved runways – more than Arlanda!

 

 Last week most of us could ride in the back seat on another's flight lesson because we practiced flying with maximum weight allowed. This is my classmate Petter's first touch and go-landing of three. We often practice landings by landing and then quickly taking off again without stopping.

 Myself flying, the footage taken by Niklas in the back seat. Just level flight.

How to land in crosswind.