Went to the practice area, climbed to 35 hundred feet, and played with slow flight and stall speeds a little. I have been reading quite a bit about landings, and reviewed the videos about regular and short and soft landings last night, and I wanted to demonstrate for myself that it is possible to hold altitude at the speeds that are shown in the PIM & POH, and the ones used in the videos, which are slower than those typically prescribed by FSH.

After a couple of turns in the practice area, I forward slipped off about 1000 feet of altitude, said goodbye to Wheeler and hello to Kalaeloa. I did 6 very enjoyable landings there, concentrating more on the pattern than the landings. Every reference suggests that the key to good landings is consistent patterns. So I fiddled with elevator trim and threshold speeds to get the airplane to do as much of the work as possible. I did a couple of soft-field landings, a couple of short-field landings, and a couple of vanilla. On the landing back at HNL, I set it down nicely, and rode the wheelie all the way to Echo taxiway. A pretty good, confidence builder, all in all.