Since most of my sessions are taking place in the afternoon or evenings, it gets fairly windy. So I've been practicing patterns and approaches in 10 to 25 knot wind right on the coastline. I could sort of keep stable unless I dipped the nose with a tail wind and then the rotor disc acts like a sail and it pushed the tail up. And trying to do pedal turns constantly keeping the cyclic into the wind is a bit advanced yet. Lots of dancing on the pedals while deftly working that stick.

Anyway, my instructor kept brushing off my frustration saying that if I could do what I did with a stiff wind then I should be able to hover with little problem.

So on Sunday we took off from the airport and he had me hover and do the turns to check for traffic. We then took and went to practice patterns at an unmanned airport inland since it was the weekend, maybe 15 min away.

On my first approach, I came up 30 feet short and kind of freaked out because it looks like my airspeed was too high. It looks way fast even when it's perfect.

But I brought the Schweizer into a hover. I could hold the hover, do pedal turns, hover taxi in one direction and stop, pedal turn 180 degs left and hover taxi back to the pad, then stop. Then I sort of got the hang of taking off from a short hover, moving the cyclic forward a little at a time until the airspeed increases and I start to climb. It's awesome when you hit that sweet spot on the ETL and the machine just takes off.

My approaches still make me freak a tiny bit so I don't trust myself or the helo. I have a tendency like all students to pull too much aft cyclic so I either undershoot the spot or I start to climb. It's that juggling between the collective/throttle/fore cyclic/aft cyclic/and pedals if there's wind.

Again, I have no classmates to compare myself against so it's hard to judge my progress. I have made good progress on every single lesson, and since I've been reading/studying the physics and terminology for a few months we're covering ground lessons in less than half of normal pace.

I should've done this 10 years ago. :)