camwyn | Helicopter practice continues.

This weekend was my third lesson with the new instructor (my old one, Markus, has moved out to Arizona or Nevada or something to fly tours of the Grand Canyon). Eric is a great guy, but he's only just gotten to know my flying, and it's been driving me crazy that he would vocally indicate when I needed to correct something- and then do it himself before I could. He seems to have stopped doing that during my lesson this weekend, thank God. I was trying to remind myself the whole time that a, he's only barely seen me fly at all, and b, if you get snarly at your instructor because you think you know what you're doing, you probably won't learn very much. We spent this lesson practicing pickups, putdowns, hovering, very slow travel up and down the runway for the sake of hovering stops/starts/putdowns, pedal turns, and the like.

A thing I need to remember: it is only airplanes that have to keep moving forward until they stop completely. A helicopter that needs to land on a particular spot, so long as it is not turning around or hovering backward on the main active runway, can pause in midair and adjust its downward trajectory if need be. Because it's a damned helicopter. Stopping midair is sort of what we do.