Back in sunny San Jose again. My checkride is scheduled for January 20th so I’m just going to practice enough to stay as sharp as possible. Today I flew with Grainne again. Nothing too strenuous, down south along Anderson doing slow flight and some stalls. These actually went pretty well, I was expecting to be really rusty. Then a diversion to Watsonville to practice soft & short field landings. These went reasonably ok. The second time around the pattern Grainne pulled the power. I was already passed the numbers on downwind so I had 10 degrees of flaps in. There was another plane on final so I couldn’t really turn early onto base. I should have put up the flaps knowing that I was going to have to eke out every foot of altitude to make it to the runway. I didn’t and it was pretty apparent on final that we wouldn’t make the runway, so we went around. This is the first time I’ve missed an emergency landing in a while. We had a nice relaxing flight back to RHV other than Grainne covered all the Pitot Static instruments (Altimeter, Airspeed Indicator and Vertical Speed Indicator). For a change we actually had a crosswind of a few knots landing back at RHV. My landing wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a picture perfect crosswind landing either. I really would like to get more practice at these, but its just so damm rare to find them around here.
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