Today there was some bad weather down at New Orleans moving north, so we stayed close to the airport and just worked on improving my landings. We practiced short-field and soft-field and combination short/soft-field landings, and I definitely felt myself getting more comfortable with them. One maneuver which gave me trouble was the soft-field touch-and-go.

In any tricycle-gear airplane, the nosewheel is more fragile than the main gear, so you do your best to protect it as much as possible. When landing on a soft field (meaning grass or dirt), you set the plane down on the two main gear, and keep the nose wheel up as long as possible while the plane slows down, before finally settling it down gently just as you slow to the point where you couldn't keep it off the ground any longer anyway.

Conversely, when taking off from a soft field, you hold full backpressure on the yoke from the beginning of your takeoff roll to pull the weight off of the nosegear as soon as possible, and then you continue holding that backpressure to lift the plane off the ground as soon as possible. Once airborne, you won't have enough airspeed to fly out of ground effect, so you put the nose down and stay in ground effect and fly level just a few feet off the ground to build up speed, before finally pulling up again to climb out.

So when you perform a soft-field touch-and-go, you land on the main gear, and then you keep rolling on the main gear and hold the nosewheel up off the ground while you clean up the airplane (retract flaps, turn off carb heat, reset your trim, etc), before finally adding power to take off again, all without ever letting the nosewheel touch the ground. It's not as easy as it sounds :)

So Mike had me practice that a few times, and finally on the third or fourth attempt, I managed to get through the whole thing without the nosewheel touching the ground. It feels like a good way to improve your control of the airplane when it's near the ground. Until now, my landings have never been as smooth as I'd like, and I usually land hard enough that, although I touch down on the main gear first, the downward momentum of the plane carries the nosewheel down to the ground immediately after. Working on those soft-field landings definitely helped me get a better feel for how much backpressure you need to hold on the yoke to keep the nose up when the plane is slow and the elevator is less effective than during cruising flight.

The other interesting thing we did were forward slips, in which you intentionally point the plane away from your direction of flight and use your rudder to keep the plane from actually flying in that direction. The end result is that the plane continues to fly directly towards the runway, while angled away from the runway. Since the plane is essentially flying partially sideways, the oncoming wind hits the entire side of the plane, causing much more drag than straight forward flight. This lets the plane descend much faster without gaining airspeed, so it's a good technique to use when you find yourself too high or too fast on final approach. It's a technique used often by glider pilots, since gliders are designed to slip effortlessly through the air and so they don't slow down very easily. It was also famously used by the pilot of the so-called "Gimli Glider," an Air Canada 767 that ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet and glided down to an airport in Gimli, Manitoba, Canada. The captain, who was an accomplished glider pilot, found himself high as he neared the runway, so he used a forward slip to bring that big 767 down safely.

On an ordinary landing in a regular powered airplane, you start your descent from the 1000-foot pattern altitude when you're still on your downwind leg, flying in the opposite direction. This way, by the time you line up with the runway on final approach, you're down to about 400-500 feet, and you can glide in on a nice, gradual, standard 3° glide slope.

When practicing forward slips, we stayed at 1000 feet until we turned onto final approach, just a mile or two from the start of the runway, and then we slipped our way down to the runway. It's pretty impressive how quickly the plane drops when you've got it flying sideways into the wind.

So the day was productive, and I feel like I definitely made progress in my control of the airplane during landings. Towards the end of the flight we started to get some pretty strong crosswinds, so I managed to get some more crosswind practice as well.