Posts by Berck

When I showed up for my lesson on Thursday D. sent me up with Ed.

I’m not sure if he said something that helped, but my landings were much, much better. I made several good landings and no bad landings. I’m not sure if it was Ed that helped because even my first landing with Ed was better than I had been doing. Maybe it was the time off.

I still need practice, lots of practice, but I can land with a crosswind just fine.

On Friday, I took D. on a cross-country. I plotted a course to Paul’s Valley and flew down there solely by reference to landmarks, flying my predetermined heading. My predetermined heading seemed to be fairly accurate, but it’s hard to tell since I don’t tend to hold a heading all that well. Finding Paul’s Valley is quite easy, since both I-35 AND a set of railroad tracks go right to it. I’m supposed to be able to time the distance between checkpoints and come up with estimated groundspeed, fuel burn, time to arrival, fuel remaining, etc, etc. Such calculations really seem pointless when you’re flying somewhere 30 minutes away and you’ve got 4 hours of fuel. 6 gallons of fuel per hour.

I found Paul’s Valley, though I probably should have seen it long before I did. It’s an uncontrolled airport, so I made the appropriate radio calls. I entered the pattern downwind at a 45 degree angle and did a decent touch and go. As I was climbing out, D. was like, “What are they waving at?” There were a couple of golfers waving their arms over their heads at us.

“Uhm. Do you suppose they realized that we just flew right traffic for a left-hand pattern field?”

“Oh. Maybe.”

So now the two of us have managed to screw the same thing up twice. I guess it’s good there was no one else in the pattern; that could have gotten somewhat messy.

As we were climbing out, D. said, “Okay, now divert to Lindsay.”

For my next check ride, I’ll have to plan out a cross country and start flying it. Before I get very far, the check airman is going to divert me somewhere, anywhere. And after he tells me where, I have to tell him what heading it’s at, how far away it is, how long it’s going to take me to get there, how much fuel I’m going to burn getting there, and so on. I’m a bit worried about being able to do that satisfactorily AND fly a plane at the same time. It’s hard to do.

This time I had a railroad to follow, supposedly. Only, it became rather obvious that the railroad didn’t really exist after awhile. There was what looked like a line through a field where it seemed like it ought to have been. But there was no railroad. I did find a road and kept a pretty good idea of where I was.

Which is why I was getting quite frustrated when I realized I was nearly over the town of Lindsay and STILL couldn’t see the associated airport. D. was thoroughly amused.

“It’s… rinky-dink,” he said. “First time I got diverted to Lindsay I thought I was never going to find it.”

“It’s not THAT LITTLE ROAD is it?”

“You tell me.”

It was. I could tell, in fact, that you could just barely read “19” painted on the “road”. I’ve seen roads in much better condition. I’m not sure how wide the runway is, but it couldn’t be wider than 30 feet. And however wide it once was, it seems to be shrinking. It’s weed covered. It’s also really short.

“Lose the centerline, and you’re in the grass,” D. cautioned.

After coming in a little high, I decided that while I could put the plane DOWN on the end of the runway, I certainly couldn’t do a whole touch and go. So I went around. As I was climbing out I screamed, “WE DID IT AGAIN!!!”

“Huh?”

“I JUST FLEW ANOTHER RIGHT PATTERN.”

“This is pathetic.”

I mean, I’m supposed to make mistakes. But not the same one over and over again. AND MY INSTRUCTOR IS SUPPOSED TO CATCH THEM! We were both feeling frustrated as I flew the correct pattern to try for another touch and go.

I ended up making a pretty good landing. But then the crosswind picked up right about the time I gave it full power to take off again. I started drifting left, and I applied right rudder, but I really needed more aileron correction. The plane felt way too squirrelly for any more right rudder than I was giving it, skipping across the runway a bit, and I was nearly at rotation speed. And I did, indeed, have one wheel in the grass. And couldn’t get it back on the runway. So I took off.

“That was… interesting,” D. said with a queer expression.

“Well, you warned me,” I told him.

“Yeah, but I’ve never seen anyone actually do it! Well… not unintentionally anyway…”

I got vaguely lost on the way back to Norman, although not really lost. I knew I was flying toward Norman somewhere north of Lindsay. Also, the ADF was pointing right at the OUN NDB, so I had a pretty good idea. But there was absolutely NOTHING on the map to identify where I was with a landmark. So I tuned up the nav radios to find out exactly.

Hopefully I’ve got the traffic pattern thing straightened out.

It (was Friday when I started writing this) and I’ve only flown twice this week. Weather, weather, weather.

Monday, it was raining. Tuesday, I called D. to find out if I was in the schedule. The clouds were really low, but it was still VFR. He said I was scheduled to fly at 4pm. A few minutes later, my phone rang again. “Can you come fly now?”

“Well, it’ll take me 15 minutes to get ready and half an hour to bicycle over there…”

“I’ll pick you up.”

So he did. It turns out that one of of the instructors had dropped a plane off at the nearby airport (Wiley Post) for radio maintenance and someone needed to pick him up. Rather than simply send D. out alone to get him, they figured a student might as well get some dual time in.

I had already roughly checked the weather but hadn’t gotten a brief. I certainly hadn’t plotted a course. I told D., but since I wasn’t PIC, I wasn’t really worried about it. The ceilings were at 2500AGL, so I knew we’d be flying pretty low whole way.

After takeoff, we turned northbound, and I called up OKC approach. We decided we’d plan on actually flying below the Class C airspace, which was more or less necessary for clouds. While we didn’t HAVE to contact OKC Approach, it makes sense to do so. I’m always a bit apprehensive talking to OKC approach because the frequency is always so busy, and there’s like… real traffic and stuff. Something like 85% of the traffic at OUN is student ops, so when I screw up, the controllers are expecting it. My calls to OKC are between calls from people like Southwest and Comair. I stumbled a bit but eventually managed to get it out that I wanted flight following to Wiley Post. The gave me a squawk code which I completely failed to catch and which D. dialed in wrong. After we got that straightened out, they complained that our transponder wasn’t giving off any altitude data. After cycling the switch between ON and ALT they got our altitude and told us to stay below 2500, and turn over downtown headed for Wiley Post. Wiley Post is just north of OKC, so I pretty much got to fly right to OKC, which was neat. I’ll be doing lots of instrument work there, when I start my instrument training. (But, by the time I start instrument, hopefully the ILS will be completed at OUN)

I did my best navigating by pilotage. Wiley Post is kinda hard to miss though.

When OKC handed us off to Wiley Post tower we were flying west, and were just the southeast of runway 35. The controller told us to report on a downwind for runway 17.

D. acknowledged tower then started complaining to me. “What? That’s ridiculous! Why won’t he let us approach from this side? There’s no traffic!” I was confused and trying to figure out where a downwind for 17 was. So we needed enter a downwind for runway 17… Which meant we needed to fly to the west side of the runway, fly out, then turn back in to enter on the 45 for a downwind, then make two righthand turns to land on 17. I confirmed this with D., who agreed. So we kept flying, perpendicular and toward runway 35, about to cross on the approach end of 35. As we were about to cross runway 35 the controller asked, “Uhh… Cessna Niner Zero One, have you got the field in site?” Uh-oh. This was clearly a nice way of saying “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” About then it hit me. All runways, unless otherwise posted, are lefthand patterns. OUN is righthand pattern, and unfortunately I’ve flown almost NOTHING but righthand patterns. That’s just the way that I think about it. D., on the other hand, was confused in an entirely DIFFERENT manner, as he demonstrated in his next radio call while I banged my head on the dashboard out of embarrassment for the both of us… “901 is just crossing the threshold of runway one seven, we’re going to enter on the downwind.” Ho boy. Tower snapped back, “You’re crossing the threshold of runway THREE FIVE, that’s runway THREE FIVE.” I was already turning at this point and it took another second or two for D. to realize his mistake. The fact that my mistake was entirely different was the weird thing. We got in okay, albeit rather embarrassed.

I’ve got much, much more to write about. But I’m taking the private written test tomorrow afternoon, so I need to study a little bit and sleep.