One of Those Days

I've been flying for a while now and every once in a while I think I know what I'm doing. Then I have one of those days where its like someone removed half my brain, the important half!

I've been working on my commercial rating for a while now. We are getting near the end of introducing me to all of the required maneuvers, chandelles, lazy 8s, steep spirals, emergency descents, etc, etc. are all going nicely. The exception is 8's on pylons - I think I am going through every possible way to do them wrong but I'll get to doing them right at some point. Today was supposed to be "just" soft and short field take offs to commercial grade and power off 180s.

So I roll out on the runway the first soft field take off with my feet on the brakes! Then I bounced the plane a bit by over-correcting trying to keep it in ground effect. Then I forgot what rudders are for. The rest of that trip around the pattern didn't get much better. Let it suffice to say my CFI said very confidently, "I KNOW you can do better than that!". Yeah, I do too. I got to the point where I was doing good short field take offs with good smoothness. But, WOW! I struggled in the pattern. Airspeeds all over the place. Altitudes all over the place. Didn't get a single stabilized approach in. I even found a new "high" in being above glide slope, I've never seen white over black before!

Well... it was one of those days. My next flights will be better!