Every time I went out and the wind was questionable, and if I flew, well, I had problems. Often, I would say "Hmmm.. should I really fly today? Well, I'm here so I'll give it a shot". Mistake #1.

Usually attempts to make a decent approach and landing results in something that is less than what I expected.. the plane wallowing around on approach because I was not flying it with enough throttle authority. Mistake #2

So I land it, walk out, pick it up, notice that I probably broke the darned prop, and pack up and go home. No more mistakes.. I finally made the right decision. The plane is intact (minus a prop) and is ok to fly another day.

But, that hasn't always been the way things happened. The first time I found this out was when I was fairly new. I had a real favorite plane, a Skylark 56 (classic revisited by Goldberg) with an OS 52 Surpass four stroke. It flew great on maiden and a few subsequent flights. Well, that one day, I went out, and it was blowing pretty good, but fairly constant and almost straight down the runway. I took off and immediately realized that I was not prepared to fly in those conditions with that plane. I made a few orbits and decided to come in for a landing.. I made the requisite downwind, turn to base, then turn to final and dropped the throttle to idle. The plane immediately climbed and went inverted headed in the opposite direction. Before I realized what was going on, it was headed in the opposite direction, upside down. I was new and wasn't sure what to do next.. all I really had to do was add throttle and go right side up and come back in, but I was confused and disoriented.. it self corrected, went inverted again, and spun in rather hard. It was totaled. Lesson learned, he hard way.

CGr.