I flew for the first time since months. The weather was beautiful today.
METAR forecasted calm winds at my airport. I arrived at home airport and
checked the wind stock. To my surprise, the windsock told a different story.
I called in FSS and learned that the wind is blowing 14 knots, gusting to 29
(way outside my comfortable zone) I elected not to go solo. Fortunately, the
instructor was available. As low time pilot, I decided to practice landings
with instructor under those condition (I have to build up my experiences one
way or another.) As soon as we got into the air, I was sweating. I was
trying to keep the plane stable as much as possible. But, under that wind
condition and some serious convective popping all over, it was difficult to
keep it stable. I made a quick mental note not to allow non-aviators to fly
with me under this condition as soon as I got comfortable with it. They
probably will puke 5 minutes after takeoff. Turning to final, I selected
crap approach over my usual slip approach. I had to fight with convective
while correcting the approach to runway and keeping my eyes on airspeed
frequently. Airspeed needle kept popping from 75 to 50 knot and back. I
noticed that when I attempted to land on first 1/3 of runway, the flaring
went so bad that I had to go around few times. I told instructor that the
workload is too much and wanted try a different method. I decided to use
couple feet before halfway as my target landing spot. I, then, executed my
experimental method and my landing was flawless. The reason I wanted to
share my story, I wanted to hear how the experienced pilots out there on how
to handle strong crosswinds and how they expand their comfortable zone.
Obviously, you can't jump in the plane and fly through nasty winds that is
outside your comfortable zone. Do they continue to fly with instructor and
practice with winds that is outside their comfortable zone? Or do they learn
to land by 'trial and errors', praying that they don't crash the plane?

Toks Desalu
PP-ASEL
Dyin' to soar!