High-performance disappointment.

Today's mission: Earn my high performance endorsement and the right to rent the Piper Dakota. I had the Dakota and CFI reserved yesterday as well, but would not have passed I'M SAFE so I rescheduled for all day today, and hoped to get my 5 hours in.

The plan: One flight VFR, bang out some airwork, a bunch of landings, then go on a cross country using NDB nav and shooting NDB approaches at both ends to burn up the rest of the required 5 hours.

The reality: CFI injured himself somehow and showed up way late. (No problem, he's cheerfully waited for me too - Plus that gave me time to sit in the Dakota and find everything.) Didn't depart first flight until about 12:30, came back down at 1:45 to get food before the Jet Room closed, back up at 5:15 (!) for some more landings, second (OK, would have been third) flight scrubbed. :-(

Believe it or not, the flights actually went pretty well despite my subject line. By the time Joe arrived I'd preflighted and we went up almost right away. I'd flown an SR22 before so I knew I'd need a legful of rudder on the takeoff roll - No surprises there.

Climb rate was around 1500fpm. It sure felt different being at 500+ AGL by the time we reached the opposite end of the runway! Departure cleared us up to 4,000 right away and it was off to the Southeast practice area for some airwork.

First was slow flight. I pulled power, pulled more power, rinse lather repeat, and finally got it down to 55 KIAS, well behind the power curve. Holy rudder force, Batman! I was about to make my leg fall off when I decided that I might as well use the rudder trim. That made things much easier.

The sight picture out the window and down the wing was rather interesting. It seemed like an extreme pitch-up attitude but was in reality less than 15 degrees.

We spent quite a bit of time in slow flight, including turns, climbs, and descents. Next, power off stalls. The Dakota stalls like any other PA28, but I had to learn a bit of a different recovery technique: Rather than letting all of the yoke pressure out right away, I had to slowly relax it to prevent the heavy engine from pitching us down too much.

Now, to power on stalls. I've been eager to do power on stalls in a high(er) performance airplane. I keep reading on here that you can't stall a plane that isn't heavily loaded with full power without exceeding 30 degrees pitch up.

WRONG. Slow to rotation speed, FULL power, 20 degrees pitch up, hold for about 5 seconds, stall. (2612 pounds at takeoff, MGW is 3000). I have yet to find a plane that won't stall at full power and less than +30 degrees when the proper entry technique is used.

We headed back in. I heeded Joe's warnings about not having much to slow the plane down with, and managed an almost-perfect approach: Down from 4500 feet at 130+ knots, level off at TPA long enough to slow to 102 and drop the flaps, and that put me right at the VASI glideslope. I began descending again and only needed a single minor power correction the whole way down.

Any good feelings I had about the approach were erased upon landing, though. I flared just a hair high (maybe two feet higher than I wanted to), then started to let her down too fast, began to recover, bounced lightly once, and then stuck the wheels to the pavement. Not too pretty. But hey, it was my first landing in type - That's a good excuse right?

After eating in the Jet Room and planning a flight (which we never took) to PVB via NDB's only, we went back up a few minutes before sunset for some pattern work. We were tossed back and forth between runways 21 and 14 so much it seemed like a new pattern! Takeoff from 21, left traffic to 14, right traffic to 14, left traffic back to 21, etc. I got in 9 total landings, including 3 at night. (All were stop & go's.) We did some normal, some short, and some soft. All of them were better than my first, but only a couple were real greasers.

My worst problem, however, ended up being the flying part: I'm so used to not reaching pattern altitude until at least the turn to downwind that I blew right through by 100-200 feet more often than not. This plane is to pattern altitude by the time you roll out on crosswind! My patterns weren't the prettiest either, but that's really getting picky. I did one forward slip to land, one engine-out approach and landing, then one greaser with no flaps and we called it a night.

The disappointment part: CFI says he wants to see me do everything we did today again tomorrow before he'll sign me off. *grump* Kinda makes me feel like I didn't accomplish anything today, when I know I did.