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Between several weeks of downtime at the avionics shop and a bunch of personal distractions, my piloting skills had accumulated a layer of rust back at the end of 2023. By then, what I and a few million of my closest friends had hoped would be a dry and benign Florida winter turned soggy, overcast, and windy.
It was OK weather if you wanted to climb to altitude and go somewhere, especially somewhere downwind with better conditions. But the kind of flying I needed wasn’t the straight-and-level-in-cruise kind. Instead, I drastically required some basic pattern work, along with a few more approaches, all of which is done down low.
