Prince Nymph

Our annual fishing get-together in Montana is traditionally on the first Fall weekend with snow, so I was afraid when we moved it to late August. Would it really snow that early? But I confidently reserved the Archer and did some flight planning. Flight planning for this trip is silly, not because I have done it many times but because the high terrain means that there is really only one route: I-15 to US Highway 20 to US Highway 287.

Even sillier was the the AOPA Internet Flight Planner, which proposed a 2001 NM odyssey that went well into British Columbia.

Not so silly was the long term forecast. The same high terrain that makes the flight planning easy rules out any kind of IFR flight in something like an Archer. Ennis, where I was headed, has no instrument approach, and the MEA on the airway overhead is 15,000' MSL, clearly out of reach. Dillon might be an acceptable choice; the MEA there is "only" 12,000, which is within reach but leaves you no options.



So I drove. Call me chicken, but I had to had to had to be back at school on Monday, and the probability of a successful VFR flight was way too low.

Sunday saw lots of thunderstorms with hail and high winds. There was a short window when I could have made it from Dillon but that would have been at a price; the headwind was so strong that my car's gas mileage was decreased by about 10%. To the east I could see the Madison Valley, where Ennis is: the valley was blocked by thunderstorms all evening. I would have been stuck.

My reward? I caught more fish than anyone else.

Enunciate, please

It seems that night currency time is the only time I get these days to work on improving my own flying. This evening, my son's Cub Scout meeting was cancelled, so I grabbed the opportunity to run out to the airport and do my night landings. It was a Moonless night, too, so night really meant night.

The three landings make me legal, but I wanted to do something to keep me proficient. It was too late to call anyone to ride along as a safety pilot for instrument work; I decided to do a short cross-country and play a little game. So I got a DUATS briefing and headed out. [I know a lot of experienced pilots who don't think that they need to bother with a preflight briefing, although I have to say that I don't understand their reasoning. I mentioned last month the pilot who neglected the briefing and flew to an airport with an active Flight Restriction.]

The game is this: you are alone in the airplane, but you can't do anything without asking for someone to do it, out loud, and saying "please". It's a variation on "Simon Says" or "Mother May I?" I developed it a few years ago when, under the wrong-headed impression that I wanted to be an airline pilot, I used it to practice for interviews.

It's even more fun with a British accent, so I listened to the BBC in the car.

So here's how it goes.

  "500 feet, landing light off, please."

  "1000 feet, fuel pump off, please, and mind the fuel pressure."

  "Set the heading bug to 016, please."

  "Tune the Idaho Falls VOR, please."

You get the idea.

While it sounds silly, I have found that playing this game really makes my flying smoother. There must be some fancy explanation of the cognitive benefit of multi-modal expression in relation to the neural pathways. Whatever; it works.
It really was a lovely night.

---

After my third landing I let myself into the FBO (I have a key, but the lineman had left the door unlocked and the coffee pot on) and put my flight bag in its locker. I was looking forward to flying with my students tomorrow, but that short time alone talking to myself gave me some wanderlust. (This is ironic, since I have visited the East Coast twice already this month, but I want to be a pilot, not a passenger.) "I want to go somewhere," I said aloud, not impolitely but not saying "please", either. I looked at the flight tracker, counting arrivals strung out on a path from Lovelock, Nevada to San Francisco. I stood by the big map on the wall, pulled the string to San Francisco, and sighed: too far, for now. Maybe Reno? Rapid City? Bozeman? Alas, no big trip for me, at least for a while. So I turned off the coffee and locked the door and listened to the BBC on the way home.

At least my mind could travel.

Red, Blue, and Grumpy

I am not a fan of the current style of political debate. The labels "Red" and "Blue" reduce complex issues to mere cartoons. This stifles thoughtful debate, which is rare these days. My rule about the columnists in my local paper is that I read until the first insult. I generally put the column aside before I finish the first paragraph.

I thought about my previous post while flying a 172 down to the glider club. It consisted of a lot of petty stories about other people trying to stretch or break aviation regulations. But pointing out the mistakes of others is a destructive act, and I want my contribution to be constructive. So I deleted it. I hope nobody read it.

So let's be constructive. Why was I flying a rented 172 instead of my beloved club Archer?

Today is the last day before school starts, and I was determined to spend as much of it in the air as possible. I reserved the Archer, and contacted my students and the tow pilot. In fact, a lot of my friends planned to fly today; it was bound to be fun.

I got out to the airport and preflighted the Archer, but I did not see the "ELT not installed" notice until I went to start it. The ELT is the Emergency Locator Transmitter, which is designed to activate in a crash and send out a rather distinctive signal on the emergency frequency, 121.5 mHz. A functioning ELT saved the life of the passenger in this accident guiding a helicopter to a dramatic nighttime on-the-ice rescue using night vision goggles. Or, think about the Learjet (jets were not required to have ELTs until recently) that disappeared in New Hampshire. Here is the accident report. Notice that it took three years to find the wreckage.

So as a rule I like ELTs.

And in fact the rules require an ELT: see 14CFR91.207. Actually, there is an exception to the requirement when the ELT has been removed for repair (I forgot about this, but did not have enough information to decide to launch without it, even if I had remembered), but remember that night vision goggle rescue. I prefer to have one.

So I did not take the Archer; I rented a 172 from the local flight school, which fortunately had one available for the day.

In aviation we spend a lot of effort avoiding things that may never happen. Sure, I could fly without an ELT, and it would probably be OK. But it would not definitely be OK. And if you're wrong? As Phillip Larkin wrote of death, "Most things may never happen: this one will."

As it should be...

Friday was one of those aviation days where everything goes right.

The morning started around 9am with a presolo student in a 172. He has been making steady progress in the pattern, and now can reliably deliver himself to the threshold on speed and in configuration. The flare itself is eluding him, but it won't elude him for long at the rate he's going.

The flight school was having a pizza party, so he and I ate and talked with some other pilots, good airport bum time. But it was time to go: I was headed to the gliderport in my club's Archer. Heading from business-on-the-airfield to business-on-the-airfield, is there any other way to go?

The flight was just miserable, steady turbulence and lots of up-and-down drafts, so I had a big smile on my face when I landed. It was going to be a good soaring day.

(In a power airplane, you blast through the thermal, each one giving you a little slam. In a glider, you circle inside at least some of the thermals. The turbulence comes from passing through the thermal, not from being in it.)

We got my Jantar ready and I launched. The tow was rough, and once I was very surprised to see that I was above the tow plane but in its wake. WTF? The tow pilot thought that I had released in one of the bumps, so started to descend with me attached.

I had a student due at 4pm, and I kept calling down to see if he had arrived. "No sign of him, enjoy your flight," Adam reported. Brad was in the 1-34 and we thermaled together for a quite a while.


But I had more than enough altitude to explore, and headed north. I got about 10 miles from the airport, still above glide path, alternating between dolphin flight and circling. I called on the radio; André still wasn't there. But I did not not want to stray too far.

André finally arrived, but said that it would take some time to get ready, so I began to circle the field well above pattern altitude. I headed south to a thermal, then made a high-speed run back to the airport to see how André was coming with the Blanik. It hadn't moved yet, so I did a chandelle and headed back to the thermal. Another run to the airport ended in a pair of steep turns, then back.

Finally I saw the Blanik moved and headed in to the airport. I ran the speed up to 90 but was only sinking at 2 knots, and even found some zero sink. I was way too high for the downwind, so I did a big wide circle around the airport to enter downwind, still a little high. Gear down, dive brakes out, a nice pattern and an absolutely rotten landing. Yucko.

André is post-solo but it had been a few weeks so I wanted to ride around the patch with him in the Blanik once before sending him off. He flew the pattern well, so I had him take a high tow and headed to the FBO for an ice cream. We watched him release, right in the thermal I had been working, so I was sitting in the FBO office for a while enjoying the ice cream.

When we came back out he was entering the pattern. He had not been able to stay in the lift. Since the tow pilot had left, he was done for the day.

We put the Blanik away and I headed back to the Archer for the flight home. I took off at 8pm, exactly, and ended up with a 12 hour duty day by the time I landed. Charter regulations limit pilots to 14 hours, and I have gone longer on ferry flights, but on autopilot in the flight levels is less work than centering a thermal, so I was pretty tired.

On paper, it was a lot like a charter pilot day: 12 hours of duty, 5.2 hours, 10 landings. But, I flew four types in two categories, and I really flew, rather than sitting back and drinking coffee.

One more thing. A charter pilot would have been paid, and while the students paid a little for my time, I still had to pay for the Archer, so there was a small net loss. But who cares? I did it for fun, after all.

Night Currency and History

It is June 23. I started this blog on March 12, and on March 14 I wrote about going out to get night current. This means two things: first, that I have managed to find enough interesting (to me) things about aviation to sustain a blog for 3 months, and also that I am no longer night current!

First, about the blog. I imagine that most bloggers track readership, and I do, too. While mine has been small it has been eclectic. North Carolina, Tennessee, France, Canada...One of the wonderful things about aviation is its international character: the laws of physics are the same in all hemispheres. My only complaint is that these readers don't leave comments; I would love to hear what you have to say, and about your adventures.

Second, night currency. I flew with a student just before sunset, and the air was so deliciously smooth that I decided to hang around after he left to get night current again. There was still some glow to the west, but the field itself was dark, waiting for moonrise. I was wrapped in the coccoon of an Archer.

I was conscious of the irony of flying an Archer: despite all of the places and aircraft that aviation has shown me, here I am twenty-five years later, doing the same preflight I learned as a student. My first solo cross-country was in an Archer. I got my instrument rating in an Archer. My Archer flights span the continent, from Santa Monica to Cape Cod to Seattle.

Here's an old Archer story. It is 1990, and I am preparing to move from Utica, New York to London, Ontario, Canada, for a sabbatical. I decided that I needed to take a trip to London to look for an apartment. (What I really needed was a flying adventure.) I was flying with the Griffiss AFB Aero Club (I was doing some contract research for the Air Force at the time), and spent a fair amount of effort doing the leg work to find out if I could take an Aero Club airplane into another country. "Yeah, piece of cake, I can take a fully loaded gunship into Canada any time I want," one of the Army guys in the club bragged in that Army way. But I went through channels anyway.

The day came and I filed IFR, V2 at 6000, as I recall. I was on top somewhere west of Syracuse.

New York Center: "N84014, traffic at 12 o'clock, 6 miles, eastbound at 7000, a B-17."

Me: "014, looking."

Did I hear that right? A B-17? I peered ahead, and sure enough there was a B-17 coming directly at me, 1000 feet above. The Sun was dazzling on its polished aluminum. I recognized it as one of the (then) Confederate Air Force birds.

Me: "014, traffic in sight."

Now, that was cool. I couldn't wait to tell my friends. It was so close, and so beautiful against the blue sky, I would never see something like that again, wow, what a privilege!

But I was premature.

New York Center: "N84014, traffic at 12 o'clock, 6 miles, eastbound at 7000, a B-29."

A what? A B-29? That can't be. But there it was, just a little to the right, shining in the sun.

I keyed my mike before I could censor myself: "014, traffic in sight. What year is this, anyway?" Center did not answer.

---

Nothing like that happened tonight. The tower was closed, I was the only airplane in the pattern. The air was smooth, and I was at home in the same airplane I flew 25 years ago. The landings were easy, my best landings in a long time, and I drove away current and satisfied.

Young Eagles Day

I am a long-time enthusiastic supporter of The Experimental Aircraft Association [EAA]. Their Young Eagles program gives kids an opportunity to fly.  For one reason or another I have never been able to participate until today.

I took the club Archer, accompanied by one of our chapter members, to Gooding, Idaho, the home of the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind.  This is the third year that our chapter has given flights to the kids at the school.  As the name implies, most of the kids have some kind of developmental difficulty, but I still believe that everyone loves to fly. 

The airport was like a mini-Oshkosh, with planes continually taxiing out, launching, and returning.  We used Oshkosh call signs too, to keep the radio chatter under control.  I was the white Archer, Mike was the Red Cherokee, Austin was the Pulsar, and so on.  We kept the pattern pretty full, and it didn't take long to give something like 50 kids airplane rides.  (The rides were substantial; mine averaged 18 minutes.)

[By the way, everyone did a full 360 before taking the runway at this uncontrolled field. There have been way too many midair collisions in the pattern this year, with tragic consequences.]

When I taught computer science, I used to say that "a good computer scientist is interested in everything;" now I am beginning to think that "a good pilot is interested in everything," too.  For example, at some point I learned sign language letters.  My friends and I used this on multiple car road trips before there were cell phones.  "Next exit," we'd sign, and the like.  Today I flew two girls who were completely deaf, so the only way to communicate with them was by signing.  I felt inept: their signing is so graceful and fluid.  But mine worked.  The girl in front was fussing with her shoulder harness during the taxi out, and not wanting to get distracted during a "critical phase of flight," I stumbled through signing "W A I T."  Which she did.

So you may never fly with a passenger who cannot hear.  But think about this: two guys I knew were flying a King Air that lost a door in flight.  They kept it flying, and landed at an airport in one piece.  In their later talk about the incident, they said that one of their big problems was that it was too noisy to hear each other.  

A little bit of sign language would have helped.

Class B silliness

I had some mathematical business in Salt Lake City, a great opportunity to fly the Archer. I invited my friend and student Dennis along so he could see what the big leagues are like. His radio work is excellent, so I knew he would pick things up quickly. But ATC kind of gave him the wrong impression...

[I will leave the Lockheed-Martin-FSS-bashing to others.]

We got flight following from Center on the way. I asked the last Center controller to arrange a handoff to Salt Lake Approach, which he promised. He sent us to the IFR arrival frequency. So far, so good.

It took a while for approach to answer, and then it was "Say request." Wasn't this a handoff? We got a new squawk code and a request for our position, but never heard "radar contact," although he acted like he saw us.

VFR arrivals from the north can choose the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake or Mountain Road, which passes very close to the mountains east of Salt Lake City. I asked the controller which he wanted, and he told us to "turn toward Point of the Mountain, make that Mountain Road, remain east of Hill AFB." Point of the Mountain is south of KSLC, 45 miles away, not an appropriate place for us to aim, but, hey, he caught the error himself.

He did not say "Cleared into the Class Bravo airspace." Dennis confirms this.

There were lots of F-16s in the air, launching from and recovering at Hill, and the frequency was busy. A Citation came on the frequency, headed to Ogden, but did not clue in to how busy it was, reading back in a slow drawl "Ohkay, y'all want Citation XXX to descend and maintain six thooouuuuuuuuuusand feet M S L?" And he was VFR! He missed a couple of turns, and the turn onto final, keeping the controller busy while we sped toward the Class B without a clearance. With two miles to go I spun myself, advising that we would circle "awaiting Class Bravo clearance." I honestly thought that his would jog his memory and he would give us the clearance, but I had done three full turns before a new controller came on. "I can't leave you on that heading," she said [WTF? We were circling!], "Fly heading 210 so I can get you west of Hill. Didn't the last controller give you Class B clearance?" I just read back "Two-one-zero, eight thousand, and negative on the clearance." I was a little peeved that the previous controller had ignored my request for clarification, sent me to the wrong place, and omitted the Class B clearance.

We crossed the Hill localizer, with lots of F-16s darting below us, while a pair cavorted in the airspace we had just vacated. Once west of Hill. she turned us back to the south, and as she handed me off to the next sector said "Thanks for your help."

That, I told Dennis, was the closest thing to an apology you'll ever get.

Things smoothed out after this, until landing. "Turn left at K7 and contact Ground point-niner," the tower controller said, using the previous aircraft's call sign. "Was that for us?" I asked, using our call sign, and he replied "Say request." I made the turn and called Ground.

Then came a mixup with a King Air, who did not understand the ground controller's request to call at the appropriate spot, as marked both on the taxi chart and on the pavement. "I cain't see no blue spot," he said. The controller told him to remain clear of the taxiway and give way to us.

We taxied closer but did not see the King Air. I guess the controller didn't either, for a while, and when he figured it out he asked with clear surprise in his voice if the King Air was "...still facing the hangar?!?" No wonder the guy saw nothing: he was looking the wrong way.

---

So, here are the results

ATC Errors

No-handoff handoff

No "radar contact"

vague clearance...

...to the wrong place

No Class B clearance, at least not out loud

long vector to correct side of valley

wrong call sign from tower

Pilot Errors

Slow-talkin' VFR Citation

Bass-ackwards King Air


All in all, not the greatest day on anyone's part.

Windy Evening

When I got home and my wife asked how it had been, I replied "Awesome!"  

Hearing the wind rumbling through the trees in our yard after dinner, it occurred to me that I was no longer night current in singles, and that this would be a great night to fix that.  Here were the METARs:

KPIH 140353Z 23020G28KT 10SM CLR 02/M03 A2978 RMK AO2 PK WND 23030/0300 SLP096 T00221028
KPIH 140253Z 23019G25KT 10SM CLR 02/M03 A2977 RMK AO2 SLP094 T00221028 55000
KPIH 140153Z 24016KT 10SM FEW025 SCT070 03/M02 A2977 RMK AO2 SLP093 T00281017

As you can see (that is, if you are a pilot), it was windy and gusty.  The peak gust was 30 knots, at 0300Z, and it was gusting to 25 most of the time.

[By the way, I was chatting with a couple of Canadian DND pilots this morning, and they  pronounce METAR more like "meter".]

It was a beautiful postfrontal evening, with light years' of visibility.  An hour and a half after sunset there was some glow to the west, but Orion and Sirius were very bright, and Aldebaran was clearly visible, although I could not pick out the Pleiades.  To the north, the big dipper was standing straight up.

I could hear and the feel the Archer's prop reacting to the gusts as I taxied downwind, and as soon as I broke ground I knew that I had made the right choice for an evening's entertainment.  There was a shear layer about 200 feet above the airport, marked by a sharp bump and a 5 knot airspeed rise on the way up (and a loss of 5 on the way down), and I was watching the lights on the ground slide by, alternately from left-to-right and from right-to-left.  The wind correction angles were crazy on crosswind and base, but kept changing on final.  

I flew a few patterns of right traffic, and then crossed the airport sideways at midfield for a little left traffic.  Crossing at midfield meant that by the time I had turned downwind it was time to turn base.

Some glider pilots think that power flying doesn't do much to improve glider flying, but I think a night like this proves them wrong.  Judging where you are in the pattern, and, more importantly, judging where you are going to be in 5 or 10 seconds, is an important skill.  You might react to these judgments differently depending on the airplane, but that is also part of the fun.  

In any case, fly the airplane you are in.  But take what you have learned into every aircraft you fly.