flight 7 (aka vomit comet): ground reference maneuvers and more landing practice, in N824LB, 1.8 hours

Well, today's flight was, umm, interesting...

So the plan was to practice rectangular flight, s turns across a road, and turning around a spot. The point of these practices is to control your ground track in wind, so we needed some wind for them to be meaningful. The wind wasn't strong but strong enough. 25 knots of wind really should be nothing. But when it blows over the ridge you are trying to fly over it creates enough turbulence to throw the plane up and down quite a bit -- bad news for someone who's prone to motion sickness, e.g. me.

We made right Dumbarton departure, then headed towards Sunol Colf Course and San Antonio Reservoir. I had planned this course into the G1000 on the ground so following it in air was quite straight-forward. From there we headed towards Byron Airport (C83) through Livermore Airport(LVK)'s airspace. We could have overflown it but chose to go through it so I got to talk to tower for permission, a little practice on radio communications. We then passed Brush Peak to the flat terrain near C83. There're some rectangular fields on the ground that made good references for ground maneuvers. We descended to 1000 feet and practiced the maneuvers. I did OK tracking the rectangular lines, crabbing about the proper amount. The turns I did less well. The changing wind made it hard to make smooth changes in banking.

As we were getting ready to do some landing practices at C83 my airsickness caught up to me. I was trying to ignore it since we flew over Sunol pass but it's getting worse and I got the feeling that I was going to throw up. I asked Mark if he had any plastic bags with him but he didn't. I gave control to him and fought my urge to throw up for a couple minutes. Finally I couldn't hold it any more and threw up in my mouth, and swallowed it back (yes, yuk), which of course induced a bigger one that I manged to swallow back, too. A couple minutes after that I was well enough to take controls back from Mark. Meanwhile he had climbed the plane to 5000 feet where the air was smoother. We aborted landing practices at C83 and headed back. I recovered quite fast though so we decided to do the landing practices at PAO. The first landing was a bit bumpy. I flared a bit too early. The 2nd one was even more bumpy, and I did a go-around before Mark asked. I think he was going to try to save the landing actually :P but I already went ahead with the go-around. The 3rd one I still flared too early and it felt as bumpy as the first one. I also overshot my turn to final consistently. But I was still quite happy with those landings. I didn't feel tense as before and I remembered to extend my sight forward as I got close to ground. I think that's good progress. Next time need to remember to turn to final earlier and flare just a split second later.