ORIGINAL: Kripto
The question nobody has asked yet.... How bad are you at landing? If you can control your electrics then glow should not be a problem.
Ed
Thanks for all the replies, gives me a bit to think about.
How bad am I at landing? Well....... I can grease them and land within 3' of my feet. Then again, I can dump the plane into a wing ripping unhappy ground reuniting. I would say I am 60-70% successful at landing. For the past 10 or so flights, I have done nothing but practice approaches and go arounds. I fly within a few inches, if not kissing the grass, and hit full throttle for another go around, but am not real consistent with this either as I am not always great at aligning on the runway. Here's the main problem I have with landing - from 10' on up, I have no problem at all with direction coordination coming or going away from me, but from 10' down to the deck, I can freeze and lose all coordination of left and right. The plane I'm flying now weighs about 2.5# and has a 55" wingspan. The area seems to fit it nice - about 10-12 acres. I'm sure I can fly my 56" trainer up in the air without difficulty, but bringing her in may be a different deal altogether.
In reading many of the responses and thinking about all this, the question comes to mind: What exactly will an instructor do for me when it comes time to land the plane? If I make a mistake 10' off the deck, will an instructor be able to take over that quickly? Or would an instructor be that valuable that I would naturally progress to the ability to land?