Flight 8 - Saturday pattern work, 4 landings, GPS track

The GPS track overlayed on top of Google Earth above says it all :) 4 times around the pattern, and lots of Saturday morning traffic made for an interesting hour of flying. Nearly every pattern was different due to instructions from ATC to extend the pattern one way or another. Two patterns were following another Cessna which was doing the same thing (see the middle two patterns which look the same).

Another pattern involved extending out to the Dumbarton bridge, "Crosswind at Dumbarton" wasn't a weather warning but in fact an instruction to make the turn onto the crosswind leg when we reached Dumbarton. Looks like I might have turned a little early as the next instruction was a "360 degree left turn" so that we could spend longer on the downwind leg as ATC made some space for other planes. This same pattern extended all the way out to Moffit Field, the NASA air base which has lots of interesting things to look at from the air.

Weather is still hazy (from the smoke), and this morning the sky was overcast first thing, clearing out later in the day. With the overcast sky the best thing to do was to have an extended ground lesson then some pattern work.

Final approach was tricky as there was a good crosswind component today; this required a good slip correction with crossed controls (right aileron, left rudder). This is much trickier than it sounds! With the extended patterns the descent is delayed until you get closer to the runway. You can see from the diagram on the right that each of the 4 landing approaches looked pretty similar, though the starts were different based on the pattern that was flown.

Flight stats: 1 hour hobb, 4 landings (1 touch and go), lots of traffic!