Marginal Ceiling

Tuesday April 14th
Today was another cross wind day at Blue Ash. I had been monitoring the weather all day, radar and visibility were good, winds were around 10 knots at 300 degrees and the cloud ceiling was up and down all day. By flight time, the ceiling was reported at 1400 feet so we decided to just do some landing and traffic pattern practice. The plan was to go to Butler County regional for some takeoffs and landings with a better direction for the wind. After departure, we tuned the radio to Butler County weather and the ceiling there was reported at 1200 feet. Since the cloud coverage looked pretty uniform around us and the ceiling was decending, we headed back to Blue Ash to make a couple cross wind landings. My first approach I made all the radio calls after Cameron reported our position at 3 miles out. The pattern was pretty good and I lined up on final on the upwind edge of the runway and held a good crab angle into the wind to maintain the glide toward the runway. I maintained a good glide all the way to the roundout point and made a pretty nice landing. We taxiied back to runway 24 and took off again for another trip around the pattern. The clouds were decending even lower so we began the descent at the end of the downwind leg and made a turn to base and a quick turn to final to stay ahead of the wind. I got downwind of the runway centerline anyway and had to correct with crab angle during the final approach. This landing I fought just a little more and I did not get all of the crab angle correction out by the point of touchdown, but still not a terrible landing for the conditions and my experience level. We tuned to the AWOS and the ceiling at Blue Ash was reported at 1100 feet, so we were done for the day. So far I have only had one good weather day. I suppose that it is good to learn in challenging conditions, it will make the good days even more enjoyable. I'm thinking about setting up a video camera for some of my upcoming flights. I'll keep you posted.