Bingo.
Not sure what you mean by "resistance." The wind is airmass. The airplane is in the airmass. It moves with the airmass, not "pushed" or "pulled" by it. Upwind, downwind, and crosswind are all references to the relationship of the wind to the ground.
I think you are right. Hopefully my follow-up post clarifies it.
That's not how it works. Read the text starting on page 1 because the background information necessary to understand any GRM starts there. Read about the rectangular course and s-turns as well.The book doesn't say anything about resistance.
"Upwind half of the circle" is exactly that - it is with respect to the circle, not the airplane. While the north and south sides are upwind and downwind, the east and west sides are tailwind and headwind. While it may be confusing, it is not incorrect, and I think there is a purpose behind labeling it like that -- to get the point across that the airplane is drifting away from the point any time it's on the south half and drifting toward it any time it's on the north half.
Sometimes it is easier to picture oneself on a boat when thinking through some of these maneuvers and to get a good understanding of ground speed vs airspeed. The illustration in the book makes perfect sense if I picture myself in a small boat trying to turn around a buoy in a river.. you'll be making the most aggressive turn when you're going straight down with the current.. if you kept that aggressive turn constant, rather than shallow it out as the book describes, then you'd pretty much end up turning around, instead of making a nice circle
I'm thinking a solid ground session on ground reference maneuvers and then doing the series in the air, including the rectangular course would help a lot. There really isn't any inconsistency between the pattern and the maneuvers. The traffic pattern is a rectangular course, being asked to do a 180 or 360 by ATC in the pattern is a turn around a point, and S-turns on final for spacing are, well, S-turns, although the circle and the S-turns are less extreme in the pattern.
Learning the terms the way they're used in aviation (downwind is when you are pointed with the wind, not a point on the circle or pattern, for example) helps a lot. As does actually getting in the airplane, like you noted.
There's always this big discussion about whether to complete ground before flying. My opinion has always been doing both together gives context which makes both more relevant and understandable.
We'll, this post, for one.
Well, then, I'm really not understanding what you meant by "downwind is when you are pointed with the wind". To me, when doing a circle about a point, that happens at exactly one point on the circle. To be clear, there's a downwind component of your velocity on one entire half of the circle, but you are not "pointed with the wind". Are you saying that in aviation, heading "downwind" means going at any angle further off the wind than 90 degrees? I guess that would liken it to sailing, where anything below a beam reach (perfectly crosswind) is going downwind, but going in the wind direction is "dead downwind".
