2nd Solo

Even when flying is bad, it's good. Today I was able to pilot that little Cessna 150 1000 feet into the air and bring her down safely 3 times. It was solid, but far from perfect. I just wasn't hitting on all cylinders and generally felt "behind" the plane the entire time. This is no more evident that in my second landing. But to explain Ill have to give a little background.
So there are 4 things to keep in mind during the decent and final approach of a small airplane. The first is something called carburetor heat. Its basically a work around to fix a quirk about carbs, their inlets ice up! They may even ice up on a perfectly nice sunny day since what matters most is humidity. To protect for this a knob in the cabin is pulled to duct warm air from the engine into the carburetor. Simple enough. It works except it robs the engine of power. The warm air is less dense and produces a leaner fuel/air mixture. I learned this first hand today.
The next thing is flaps. Flaps are awesome. They are slowly lowered throughout the decent to lower the airspeed and the stall speed. Like everything it has its drawbacks though. They can be summarized in this cheesy sentence. Flaps make the wing more lifty at the price of being more draggy.
Then there is engine power. It must be adjusted to account for the vertical speed or decent rate. This keeps the so called glideslope in check. If you are to high come off on the power to come down... to low then bring it in to climb back up.
The final thing is AIRSPEED. Airspeed is the key to everything and must be monitored very carefully. Unless you were born on a plane, it comes as a shock that airspeed is controlled primarily through attitude. If you nose the plane over you speed up, pull up and the speed quickly bleeds off.
Ok so the carburetor heat knob is pulled when the decent is initiated. On my first time up by myself that day I pulled the POWER all the way out instead. The plane went abruptly quiet and the plane nosed over. SHIT I said out loud and over my headset. This is an amateur mistake. I knew exactly what I had done and quickly pulled heat out as well. On hindsight this wasn't so great since that robbed the engine of even more power and sure enough I had nosed a little further down... causing airspeed to build further. I pushed the power back in to the approach setting of 1700 RPM and threw in 10 degrees of flaps. I look back over my shoulder and the runway hasn't drifted too far back. I'm still on schedule.
I make my two turns and now I'm on final. I have 30 degrees flaps by now. There is a little right crosswind and I turn my nose into it to counter it. I'm now tracking the runway in a "crab" sort of manner, flying more out of the side of the plane. The runway is in the same position in the window but getting bigger. That's a good sign, my approach angle is right on. The speed is perfect too... 60 knots.
I get down to about 20 feet off the runway and I notice I still have power in. I normally would have chopped it a little before. No biggie, I chop it then. And then a gust from the right. No problem, i stomp on the rudder to align myself and start to pitch up for the landing flare. I pitch up to high and the plane balloons. This is a term for being to aggressive during the final pitch up maneuver causing the plane to zoom upward. Remember, I don't have power so any zoom will cause my airspeed to drop. It rose a little higher than expected and now I'm 40 feet above the runway and airspeed is bleeding off. In that split second I decide to abort the landing. I have to mentally transition to takeoff and impliment it.... and fast.
I give the plane full power and she responds by pitching up further. This is ok and expected but my speed is not building at all. No wonder, I'm still in landing configuration. I have my flaps hanging out in the flow and I hit the flaps up switch. I lose all 30 degrees in 20 seconds. It is unfortunate that this is a 3 position switch which brings them up all at once because now I'm losing lift. It is not comfortable to see the runway gently coming closer when fully expecting to climb out.
In this time frame I'm still not seeing the climb performance I expected. The flaps are almost to the top though. Why the HELL isn't my airspeed building faster.
That damned carb heat knob is still pulled out. I let out an audible UGH, and shove it in with a hard smack. I immediately feel a burst of power from the engine. It was kind of like somebody hit the turbo button on a racing game. Finally speed is building and I am climbing comfortably out.
The moral is that a go around is much more intense when it is NOT planned. I know now to give it carb heat along with power, maybe even holding both knobs and advancing simultaneously. Also, those flaps should be added incrementally. Throwing them all up is a drastic wing shape change and all the precious liftiness can't afford to be given up when that low and slow.
If anything I feel that I handled the situation well, adapting quickly to my own mistakes. Did I mention I love flying?