WHEN     : Friday 4th June 1999
WHERE    : SPX - GLS - SPX in N1219F, a Cessna 172N
WHAT     : Approaches, airwork, holds
WHO      : Safety pilot: Carla Yager
HOW LONG : 1.1 flight; 0.8 hood

  Today's session was a little frustrating. The weather reports were all wrong. The day looked pretty nice, and was if you didn't have pesky things like being at the right altitude at the marker to worry about. A scattered cloud layer, supposedly at around 3,500 feet (Ellington's report, a few miles north of SPX) was in fact at around 1900 ft. This frustrated my efforts at an approach a little. We still did an ILS into Galveston, but of course didn't catch the glideslope until after the marker since Carla had to keep me at a legal-from-the-clouds altitude (if I'd have known, I would have called Lee and we could have filed).

  I decided that since I've had plenty of practise at missed approaches, and virtually no landings from an approach, it was time to actually land at Galveston for a change. Since there was a stiff headwind, and I was maintaining a 90kt. groundspeed on the approach, I had lots of speed to allow me to touch down at the correct speed. This isn't as bad as it would seem: normal approach in the C172 is 60 KIAS with full flaps, and we were doing around 100 KIAS. However, you can put out the first 10 degrees of flaps at any speed below 110, so I did that. With the power at idle as soon as we "broke out" at minimums and 10 degrees of flap, the speed started coming into the white arc fairly quickly. Then I deployed all 40 degrees of flaps. With those big barn doors hanging out like airbrakes, you slow down pretty fast. So I landed in the touchdown zone at the correct speed after all.

  After this it was time for a little airwork. The clould layer did cause us a few headaches, but we found a nice hole over Galveston Bay. Once this was done, it was time to go home, and do the VOR approach back into SPX.

Conclusion.

  Pity about the cloud layer being in an inconvinient location, but the ILS worked out well, and the landing was a good one!