Caution: Low-Flying Planes!

Today's hop was probably the most fun so far. I was worried at first because there were foreboding clouds about a thousand feet off the deck and a strong wind out of the south. When I got to the airport and went to preflight my plane, it was still in the hangar with the engine cowling off and a mechanic plugging away at sundry problematic electrical components. Lucky for me, there was another plane available: a nice, sweet-looking 172 with wheel fairings and about 1/3 as many hours as the other two.

We took off and headed south, making it to 1,500 feet, but coming back down to 1,000 because of low clouds. Today's lesson focused on emergency procedures, specifically engine failures during flight. The idea is to establish your glide speed and pick a place to land and then try to get your engine started again while you're on your way there. At 1,000 feet, you've only got about two minutes before you're on the ground, if you're careful. The first time the engine "failed" (instructor pulls the throttle to idle) I set us up on a nice clear field, but I was so caught up in it that I forgot to "try" to restart the engine. The next time, we were close to a small airport with a 2,000-ft. grass runway. I set us up in a landing pattern, and remembered to try restarting the engine.

But, to my surprise, as I pulled us through the turn for final approach, my instructor said "Okay, we're going to land here." We hadn't covered soft-field landings yet in my training, but I remembered the technique from my flying lessons in high school, so I quickly recited it to the instructor and proceeded to land the airplane on the grass. IT WAS AWESOME!!! The touchdown was soft, and to my surprise, the plane rolled just as smoothly on grass as it did on concrete or asphalt.



Taking off, I was a little intimidated by the tall trees on the south end of the runway, but we cleared them easily. After some more work up high, my instructor again "killed" the engine on me. I noticed that (unbeknownst to him) we were again directly above our little grass airstrip, so I put us right into a nice landing pattern. On short final we even had enough altitude that I put down full flaps and did a forward slip onto the runway, which really impressed my instructor.

We did three more landings at Mobile Downtown, but I think I'm definitely hooked on little grass runways!