Too late to edit – the bolded part was supposed to say “wind shear,” not “crosswind.”
I’ve had this conversation with a lot of flight students, so I hope you’ll take this to heart:
Don’t worry about it.
Most flight students, no matter how enthusiastic, run into something that makes them think twice about what they are undertaking. Lots of times it’s a bad experience in wind or turbulence* as you’ve described. Try to schedule another lesson soon in more serene conditions. If you really do enjoy flying, this will pass.
That being said, it’s a good idea later on in training to go up on days where the wind is sporty. Do it too early on - as in your case - and it can be disconcerting to the point of alarming. But it’s good to see some wind and find out that it’s usually more do-able than you might think, if not always pleasant. I make a point of taking students (if they’re game for it - no pressure) flying in winds of up to 25 knots. They work their butts off, it’s not really “fun”, but it’s valuable experience for when you find yourself in that situation as a rated pilot with no CFI aboard.
- Stalls often spook students (including me back in the day), as does instrument flight. I had one student become alarmed at turns-around-a-point. Almost nobody has a bad reaction to that maneuver, but in my view he was quite correct. I think ground reference maneuvers are among the most dangerous because the airplane is flying low, often away from an airport. Lots of pilots and instructors don’t appreciate the hazards there because they are viewed as routine training maneuvers.
Asimovian, let me congratulate you on showing excellent judgement and doing exactly the right thing.
You ARE cut out to be a pilot. Knowing your limits, and when to go home (or not leave) is as important as anything else in aviation.
I’ve been flying out here in the Midwest since 1995, where high winds are much more common than many other places. It would still give me pause to go up in those conditions because I know it won’t be a lot of fun. I know I can handle it, because I’ve flown Cessnas in 30 knot winds with near perpendicular crosswinds successfully, but I don’t want to launch into gusty winds because it’s not really fun. The worst trip I came home in winds that had picked up more than predicted and by the time I landed I had bruises across my hips and shoulders from the safety harness, it was that bad. Still, I was on my own and had to deal with it, as there was no other choice. The airplanes can handle it, so it comes down to whether or not the pilot can handle it.
Right now, where you are in the learning process, you can’t handle it. You recognized that fact very early on. You did exactly the right thing. That is fantastic.
At some point in flight training everyone bumps up against this sort of thing. It should provoke some thoughtful reflection. Again, you are doing everything you should do.
One day I went to VNY and it was drizzling. I lost a screw out of my glasses. Strike one.
I found a pice of wire for a field repair, and started the preflight. Someone had torqued down the oil dipstick. I don’t remember how I got it off. I may have gotten a wrench out of the car. Not a good sign. Strike two.
I took off in light rain. My carb heat gauge, which warns of potential icing – which you don’t want in a helicotper – was fluctuating wildly. I did not want to fly if I didn’t have warning my engine would suddenly stop. Strike three. I returned to base.
Sometimes you just have to look at the situation and make the best decision.
Am I making sense? The scotch it hitting me…
It’s important, I really need to go.
It’s not so bad, I’ll just go on a little farther.
I really want to just get home.
Those three thoughts probably have killed more GA pilots than all others combined.
Like Broomstick & Johnny said, being able to recognize and act correctly for what you, your plane & the weather are able or likely to do is the most important thing after you get your license.
Go get your license and then keep learning…
fighting a plane all the way to the runway is actually quite fun once you’ve logged enough hours. I would qualify this by saying not all airplanes do well under gusting conditions. You’d have to know the limitations of the plane. A low wing tricycle gear is generally going to do better than a high wing tail dragger. Landing is the last thing that gels so obviously it seems intimidating when getting tossed around as a passenger.
My first long distance flight after my license was a complete test of my flying skills. It started out as a flight that was going to be chased by a storm. Preflight was done on the run as the front was on the horizon. by the time I got to the runway I could see it raining on the far end of the airport. I took off parallel to the line of rain. I wasn’t 100 feet off the ground when hit with a wall of rain and the tower asked if I wanted to return. Hell no I don’t want to return. I banked into a lovely tail wind and left for blue skies.
The final destination was one state over and I called 25 miles out. My instructions were to call a 5 mile base leg for a particular runway. this was back before GPS’s and I had to actually find the airport first since I was flying off a map. when I called a 5 mile base the tower yelled at me. “who are you and why didn’t you call before entering this airspace”. Good God what did I do wrong? when I said I made the call he remembered and all went well.
The return trip was the decision maker. I needed to get home. Flight service kept telling me that VFR flight was not recommended. Seemed OK to me. A little bumpy maybe but doable. I took off and fought my way through the cloud layer and finally got on top. Blue skies and smooth sailing. So there I am fat and happy with full fuel tanks and I look down through the clouds and notice the trucks on the highway are moving faster than I am. Huh. that’s interesting. must be a pretty big headwind. Pretty smooth one at that.
And then I started to fly ahead of the plane which is where I should have had my head in the first place. At this ground speed I’m going to have to cross triangulate an airport in the dark, fight my way through the clouds and rough weather and land with heavy gusts at night. Yeah, that’s not going to end well. I landed soon after and got a hotel room.
I’ll chime in too, Asimovian. I’m another one who doesn’t enjoy flying in gusts and turbulence quite as much, but it’s still flying, and in this part of the world you just can’t fly very much if you put those conditions outside your personal minimums. You can certainly be happy flying recreationally with your personal minimums requiring clear, calm, and uncrowded skies, many pilots are, but many pilots also enjoy stretching themselves and learning more about how to handle other conditions.
What you just did was to expand your envelope. You’ve experienced this stuff, you know what you have to do to handle it safely in the future, you are no longer scared of it (are you? you shouldn’t be, and you are now a better pilot for it. Your basic stick-and-rudder skills are now better, and your judgment will now be better too. This was a necessary part of learning how to fly, and you did just fine.
Thank you all for the feedback and encouragement. I will approach future flights with a more open mind. My co-worker friend, who is further along in his lessons, also told me that it’s possible to come back and feel much differently about experiencing that sort of turbulence once you’ve already been through it. I won’t count myself out of the game just yet.
Elvis, just to be clear, I never took the controls during this flight, which was less than 10 minutes total.
The pilot ALWAYS has the final say in ‘go’ or ‘no go’ but when you fly for pay, the pressure can be real intense.
That said:
I was flying checks at night as a second job and it was most interesting in many ways but as far as this discussion goes, you hired on knowing that the company had these two requirements.
To refuse a flight there had to be:
- A tornado ON the departure airport.
- Airline class aircraft reporting sever icing on final approach.
I never ran into those conditions so I always flew.
Prior pipeline patrol experience, an instrument rating with actual use, much experience with the airports ( and a good rapport with the local controllers ) time in the types of aircraft I had to use ( Piper Arrow retract, 601 AeroStar, Shrike ) I was using all helped…
So do not worry at this time as you are just learning & you will probably never have or be in a position to do something like that. The point is that experience and your personal limits will allow you to have a good & lasting time as a pilot. Make good ‘go & no go’ decisions but in the long run, you will hopefully always make them with real forethought & continue to learn.
Aside:
The P 47 was used after the war to do thunderstorm research.
They eventually had to go to a reinforced T-28 Trojan. The pilot would deliberately fly into the worse storms they could find & get to.
They did not use a C-150.
Hurricane hunters tend to use the C- 130
There is a lesson in this I would think.
If you weren’t flying the aircraft then you had no sense of situational control. Rest assured you will feel better if you’re controlling the plane. My uncle is claustrophobic to the point that he doesn’t like to fly commercially. I took him up and let him fly and it didn’t bother him despite being in a smaller space. Being in control of the plane made a huge difference in his perception of the flight.
I myself don’t mind the wings rocking back and forth in the wind but don’t like the violent changes in altitude. You can mitigate this in flight by slowing the plane down. I don’t know the physics behind it but a nose up attitude negates a great deal of the bucking. Also keep in mind that this occurs at lower altitudes. If you can get above the haze line the air tends to smooth out. You’ll experience more of this as a student then when actually flying somewhere because you can get above it on a long flight.
While flying pipeline patrol, we did not consider how rough it was, because it always was but if we hit so many bugs we could not see out the front. That was what we called a rough day. :eek:
The Arlington Fly-In has come and gong. We attended the last day yesterday. Beautiful day. Not too warm, and there was a nice breeze. The SO isn’t rabid about planes (as I am), but she liked it.
It was a pretty low-key event. There weren’t as many planes as the last time we went. SO was disappointed they didn’t have a B-25 on display as they did two years ago. They did have a P-51B and a P-47 on display, and they flew some passes later in the day. There were aerobatic acts, including a Sukhoi Su-29 (with an ‘intrusion’ event’ by a hang glider); a father-and-son team flying a Yakovlev Yak-55 and a Yak-18T, sailplane aerobatics, and a woman whose plane I don’t remember. Fly-bys included half a dozen V-tail Bonanzas in formation, and a baker’s dozen of RV-6s in formation, both before the ‘airshow’ started. A Stinson Model O, 1933 Fairchild 24, and a 1915 Nieuport 11 made circuits and circuits. (The Stinson was a replica, as there are no actual survivors; and the Nieuport, alas, was also a replica.) The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department put on a demonstration with their UH-1H. (The SO, a former Black Hawk pilot, said ‘Pretty whop-whop’ when we walked by it on display.) And there were the afore-mentioned P-51B and P-47 fly-bys.
Now, I’ve been to a lot of airshows in my life. Compared to… well, just about all of them… the Arlington Fly-In is… sedate. But it has its charms. The others are ‘open houses’ and ‘airshows’. Arlington is a ‘fly-in’; so there are lots of people who fly their planes to the airport and camp out for three days. I enjoy the diversity of GA aircraft, and seeing what ‘real people’ fly. There’s the highly-polished aluminum-and-blue Cessna 170 that’s so pretty. You could smell the polish. Beautiful. There were other bare-metal-and-trim Cessna taildraggers there, too. And lots of Vans, Long-EZ/Vari-Eze/Cosy canards, LSAs, and whole sections of ‘in regular use’ Cessnas, Pipers, Beachcraft, and others.
My favourite was a 1969 Cessna 172K flown by a retired-looking couple. I think you all know I have a soft spot for the 172K. Their’s had its original paint, like this one – only not nearly so pretty. No, this plane was dirty and streaked. The paint was faded, and I saw bare aluminum around the cowling edge. They both came right out and said it was dirty. The wife said her husband flies it every day. (Apparently he’s not retired, but uses the airplane to work or get to work.) I reminded them that time spent washing is time not spent flying. 
The husband said he didn’t like the colour (which I call ‘baby-shit yellow’ – though I didn’t tell him that), but it’s grown on him over the years and he likes it now. Walking around the field, I was like 'Oh, there’s that pretty 170. Look at that old Bellanca. Lots of Cherokees over there – say, there’s a gold Comanche from the ‘50s…’ But I just totally dig this 172K for what it is, and that it’s flown daily and the guy would rather fly it than wash it.
All in all, a pleasant day. I hope one day I’ll be able to fly in to a fly-in. 
I found a picture of that dirty old 172K I like so much. I’d forgotten that it was fitted with the Powerflow exhaust system.
Did Glasair/Glastar even bother to make an appearance?
Stoddard-Hamilton: How to take a cutting-edge product (first pre-molded composite airplane kit, 1980) and then:
- Sit own your ass while a sleazeball upstart takes the market (painting any composite product red is irresponsible unless it stays in the shade its entire life).
- Declare yourselves Holier than your customers, but assure them you will lower yourselves enough to take their money.
- Use your production molds as loan collateral - resulting in their ending up in the lot of a plumbing supply company - yes, outside in north-central Washington.
- Go belly up
- Have new owner unable to turn a profit either.
- Be bought by a Chinese industrialist.
Maybe he can make a go - he intends to certify the Glastar - it he can do that and produce them for a Chinese price, he just might have something. Of course, he has no plans to move anything or terminate anyone.
Here’s the exhibitor list. I don’t see them.
I remember when the Glasair came out. Dad liked the Lancair better, IIRC. But he was having fun with his Skyhawk and Skylane, and he was a little soured on homebuilding after the BD-5.
ISTM that the reason people built Glasairs, Lancairs, and such, wanted the performance and efficiency not offered by then-mass produced ‘SPAM cans’. But performance costs money, and kitplanes cost time. The Lancair ES kit (no longer in production) cost $100,000. You’d have to get an IO-550 to power it, and you could easily spend $100,000 on avionics. And you have to build it. People take several years to build airplanes. Or the pilot could buy the certified version, which is now the Cessna 400 Corvalis for under half a million and save all of the time, ‘blood, sweat and tears’, FAA paperwork, flight testing, and so on; and have a certified, normal category aircraft.
I think that with the Lancair/Columbia/Cessna Corvalis available, plus the Cirrus SR22 or the non-composite (but fast) Mooney Acclaim, the market for Glasair will be very limited.
As for ‘producing them for a Chinese price’, that hasn’t worked so well for the Cessna 162 Skycatcher.
The Glastar has the advantage of not being a moving design on a moving production line.
Lancair was using Singapore for parts manufacture - so why the noise about Cessna using China?
Saying you’re going for a $100K price point and then saying “screw it - we’re going to make money on this disaster” and adding $20K blatantly labelled “profit” - why don’t they start running little Christian fish on their literature and complete the suicide?
Does anybody still even pretend that they “built” a 300 mph pressurized bullet (Lancair IV-P - yes kids, it’s an alleged kit).
Too bad Burt couldn’t have certified one of the 4-seat variants of the Long-EZ 40 years ago - the only way we got modern airplanes was by kits.
But you’re right - the high-end kit is dead - by the time you pay the guy to put together the $100K Kit, $80K engine, 20K prop and $70K panel, you’re probably over the cost of the certified Lancair ES. It is now a Cessna? I remember when the Lancair IV was using Cessna 210 landing gear - they were not amused.
So kits go back to being knock-abouts, the EAA tries ti get people to forget what the “E” was for and become another AOPA.
It was fun for a while
Cessna wanted to sell the Skycatcher for under $100,000. According to them, the Chinese can’t make it that cheaply.
If you’re referring to the 162, that’s the first I’ve heard of Cessna saying that. But then, I haven’t followed the 162 at all.
Personally, I believe Cessna aren’t interested in selling GA airplanes.
AIUI, the Lancair ES/LS-40 became the certified Columbia 300 and 400, which Cessna bought five or six years ago.
Seems like LSAs are the popular thing in homebuilts nowadays. Cheaper and easier to build than traditional airplanes. Vans has the RV series for people who want performance planes.
OK, I’ve just looked on Wiki.
They just don’t care.
Maybe Jim Bede can change his name and produce a kit version of the AA-5 (the stretch BD-1).
The Tiger is too sweet a plane to stay dead - or maybe the fellow who bought Glasair could buy the Tiger as well and see what the Chinese price is on it? Even the Mississippi price wouldn’t sell the last time somebody dusted off the production certificate.
The Al honeycomb was a brilliant choice of kit material - only the close-out bulkhead and a tailcone riveted to a honeycomb box, castering nose wheel - a stone-simple design
Although I admired everything Burt Rutan designed, I never really wanted a Long-Eze or Vari-Eze, although I did want a Quickie!
How foolish kids are.
And now, it looks like someone will take aLong-Eze across the Atlantic like Lindy…
Electrically!