Last Sunday I wrote a post about Weight and Balance in which I described a pretty scary situation where a plane, seemingly over loaded, took off, bounced on the runway, took off again and made what I thought was an impossible turn back to the runway and landed again. This is just a quick video that was shot by my Garmin VIRB camera while I was preparing for that flight lesson. Maybe if you have eagle eyes like my instructor, you can see if the plane is heavy or not. The right side of the screen is pixelated due to privacy concerns for my instructor. Sections of the video are sped up for brevity. I’m not sure you can see much from this, but I thought it was kind of cool that I did get the plane taxing, taking off, landing and taxing back.
A Lesson In Weight & Balance…The Hard Way
I had a nice long flight lesson scheduled today. Truth be told, all I wanted to do today was fly the pattern. The plan was to take off from KPLU, head over to KTIW, go a bit West of the airport and practice a couple of maneuvers then do touch and go’s at Tacoma Narrows. I was going to get more practice on the radios talking to the tower, I was going to get to practice forward slips and simulated engine out procedures, the day was going to be great! One step closer to solo! Or so I thought. When I got up this morning, KPLU was reporting VFR conditions, but KTIW was reporting Marginal VFR with a pretty low ceiling. I got to the airport a bit early to work on my presolo written exam, and walked in right at 9. I told Meg about the weather, and she … Read More