Why is landing the bloody plane so hard?!
This is probably as much a whine and a rant as a question...
I don't think I'm particularly stupid or uncoordinated. I have a decent job and I learned how to ride a motorbike without huge trauma. I know my left from my right and I can parallel park as well as walk and chew gum at the same time. I am even good enough at multi-tasking to watch football on the TV while paying "full" attention to my wife's conversation.
But I cannot land a plane with anything approaching consistency.
Now I get that everyone struggles at first. I've also been unlucky with both weather and timing - a long holiday break over Xmas with no flying coupled with a series of met cancellations just as I'm starting to feel like I'm making progress aren't helping. And it's not like I have never put it down properly and I'm assuming that didn't happen by chance.
But it's the "guarantee" of a good landing I can't get. The first couple are always wonky as I drift off the centreline as I adapt to the wind. Then I round out too slowly or flare to early (or too late, I like to mix up my errors). The last two or three I normally get 80 - 100% but then we land and I'm away for a week and the cycle repeats.
I'm trying not to get hung up on going solo and adopt a mindset of "I get to fly a plane at the weekends for fun, that's the objective". And the instructor is great - he tells me I'm making the right progress at the right speed and still on track to get to test standard in 45 hours. And we've done a good bit of the syllabus - the variants of bad weather, flap-less and glide approaches, short field take off, EFATO, emergency landing and of course all the stall exercises. He tells me that once I've properly nailed the landing then we do advanced turns and nav and it's all practice to the test (sounds so easy when you say it like that) but it all feels so very, very far away.
So is this common? Any advice on improving? Should I do what I threaten to do to my instructor every week and just jack it in and learn to play golf instead? All thoughts and advice welcome!