It has been more then 28 days since i flew Terry’s PA28. The Cessna 172 is still in the maintenance hanger awaiting some parts. Thus, i had to have a check ride with Terry to make sure that my flying skills are up to scratch – I was given the all clear. I took my friend Edward flying this time and he loved it, except for when we were doing spin recovery, he felt a little sick…he was also intrigued by the crab landing approach style. My briefing room room in my home..charts, flight board, and printing off weather and notams from computer
After parking i noticed Brian Catchpole’s wheelchair and knew that he must be flying or was the one in the circuit practicing his landings – he tells me how much he is enjoying being at Cranfield. Something that i can relate to… 
As soon as we started the engined, the tower called all station to tell us the airport was in effect closed and not licenced. I could see fire trucks on the main runway 21. A aircraft landed and had caused a oil leek – no one was hurt. This meant that everyone would be using the smaller cross runway 18. First time for me to take off from this much shorter runway. Nice take off, and at 1000 ft QNH, fuel pump off, right turn to 330, and once over Olney, set VOR to 030 and headed away from CFD towards Peterborough. We carried out the check flight around Gratham Water which is a nice area of uncontrolled airspace to be doing all the checks. Gentle and steep turns, spin recovery, stall recovery and so on…
There was no way we could do any circuits back at CFD. listening to the radio, sounded like a lot was going on due to rwy 21 being closed and lots of traffic…I made my joining call at Olney VRP and above and below us were other planes who were told to wait in the local area before they got called to join. Thus i expected the same instruction and had already set my QFE having heard it being said to others. I was told to wait in the local area so i did my holding pattern west of Olney alongside the M1..Giving my 3 mile final notice once instructed to join for landing, I was now going to be doing my first short field landing – with a new approach to a runway i have never used. a slight crosswind, my approach was fine, the one thing i would have done differently would have been to reduce my approach speed by another 5 kts so that once i was over the threshold, i would be at 70kts and start throttling back and land just past the numbers at 60kt – we floated a little and landed but used more runway then i wanted. 
