'Fess up' time.

Now that the statute of limitations is up, I can relate what Mary always
calls "your Rockford landing" (whenever I tease her about a firm arrival).

It was right after we got our first plane, and we were taking it to "The
Avionics Place" at KRFD to have an intercom installed. I had never flown
into Rockford before, and was unfamiliar with the airport layout. There
were a lot of planes in the pattern, I wasn't yet comfortable dealing with
controlled airspace, and the workload was high. Mary wasn't a pilot yet, so
she could offer little assistance.

End result: I couldn't find the runway I was cleared to land on until I was
RIGHT on top of it. It was one of those "Where *is* that damned runway?
Oh, THERE it is!" approaches, which meant too high, too fast, too close.

Of course, it was winter, and there was a howling cross-wind.

In my eagerness to get down, I literally dove for the runway. This, of
course, meant we were going way too fast to land, so I flared, trying to
bleed off excess airspeed. That howling cross wind now reared it's ugly
head, and I was being blown off into the frozen weeds, whilst waiting for my
airspeed to decay.

No problem -- I know how to counter *that* -- so I buried left rudder, and
dialed in full right aileron. Drift now corrected, we were coming down like
a load of sand. No problem -- add power! Now we're drifting again....

Up, down, side to side, this continued for several thousand feet of runway,
much to the delight of the Rockford tower crew, I'm sure. I just couldn't
get it dialed in right.

Finally, we touched down, mostly because I was getting tired.
Unfortunately, I was so fixated on correcting the crosswind that I
completely forgot to release that left rudder correction -- not smart in a
Piper product, which has the nosewheel and rudder firmly attached to the
pedals. All was well, sort of, until the nosegear hit, when we suddenly and
quite violently veered off toward those weeds again.

Thankfully, Rockford has 150 foot-wide runways. As I was sitting there,
now a passenger in a plane that had suddenly become my worst enemy, heading
toward the runway lights, my brain finally engaged and I released my frozen
rudder leg. Of course, the plane immediately corrected itself, and we
rolled out to the end of the runway.

As we taxied to the ramp, I was silently hyperventilating, and
uncharacteristically you could hear a pin drop in the plane. No one -- not
even my then-toddler children -- said a word until we shut down. Amazingly,
that Warrior nose gear took all that stress without complaint.

On that day I learned that all of my landings had been successful only
because of rote procedure ("OK, 80 on downwind, 1000 feet up. Runway over
my shoulder, add a notch of flaps. Start my left turn....") not because I
was truly "landing" the plane. I learned that when something happened to
CHANGE that procedure, I was a mess.

I then embarked on truly learning the art of landing, from ANY approach or
configuration. That took another couple of hundred hours, in retrospect.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"