Posts by Berck

I’m going to Virginia and, once again, am not going to see an EFO concert. They play there every other weekend–why not whenever I’m there? Oh well. “Sweet, sweet Virgina always keeps an open door…”

I flew yesterday and today. I’ve now spent the last three lessons and nearly five hours flight time doing nothing but landing. 40+ landings. And you know what? I still suck.

I very consistently make mediocre landings. My landings are all reasonably safe (at least considering that I’ve got a mile long runway to play with) and aren’t horrific. But I’m not getting much better. I’m better at crosswind landings than I was a couple of weeks ago. If the crosswind is steady, I can land straight and hold the centerline. But lately the wind has been varying about 140 degrees in direction and ranges from 5-20 knots which makes it really difficult because each landing is so unpredictable. On one hand that’s good because it’s more of a challenge. On the other hand, I suck.

And it’s not like there’s any one thing I’m getting wrong. Some times I flare too much, sometimes not enough. Sometimes I land sideways, sometimes I’m straight. Sometimes I come in fast, sometimes I come in slow. I almost always come in a little high, but that’s because D. likes approaches steep and gets twitchy otherwise. I wish they’d fix the VASI on runway 17. It’s not that I need it, it’s just that it would be nice to have some sort of reference to a 3 degree glide slope. I seem to do better when my approaches are less steep than what I generally do. D. admitted to teaching his students to come in steep, but he’s right, it’s safer that way. And in a Cessna 172 with 40 degrees of flaps, you just stick those barn doors out and point the plane at the numbers. A power off approach with 40 degrees of flaps looks like it’s about a 20 degree glide slope.

The past few lessons I’ve been supposedly working on short-field and soft-field landings. And all that does is make things more difficult. Today we did nothing but just land. I was supposed to make them as soft-fieldish as possible. I did manage to hold the nose wheel off the ground for a good long time on one of them. I think in the past few days I’ve made… 3-4 GOOD landings. I should be doing better than that.

I confessed my frustration to D., who hasn’t been terribly helpful. He’s master of pointing out the obvious. Yes, I know I was fast. Yes, I know I was too slow too high. But what am I doing WRONG? I mean, I can see the after-effects as well as he can. Mostly we just fly in circles (well, rectangles), and he doesn’t say much. I suppose there’s probably not a lot he can say.

In any case, he decided that it’s probably in everyone’s best interest to send me up with one of the gurus until I can land. Either the chief flight instructor or the instructor who they refer to as their “landing expert”. I’m all for this–especially if I get a ride with the chief. He’s got well over 10,000 hours and supposedly radiates aviation knowledge. I know who he is, but I haven’t met him yet.

So that’s supposed to happen next week. I need to be able to make good normal landings so I can make good enough short field landings to pass a check ride.

Holy cow. I just looked outside and, well, I was flying an hour ago and it was beautiful. Now it’s hailing and looks really rough. I’d estimate 50+ MPH winds.

HAH. The storm center picked it up TWENTY minutes ago. It came out of nowhere:

AT 306 PM CDT…DOPPLER RADAR DETECTED A LINE OF SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS
FROM 11 MILES EAST OF SPARKS TO NEAR CHOCTAW TO JUST SOUTH OF
BETHANY TO EL RENO…MOVING SOUTHEAST AT 35 MPH. THE STRONGEST
STORMS WITH THIS LINE ARE LOCATED OVER CHOCTAW AND JUST SOUTH
OF THE VILLAGE AND BETHANY. HALF DOLLAR SIZED HAIL IS POSSIBLE WITH
THESE STORMS ALONG WITH 70 MPH WINDS. ELSEWHERE WINDS OF 50 TO 60
MPH AND HAIL TO THE SIZE OF NICKELS AND QUARTERS ARE LIKELY.

Hopefully the inbound plane will actually land and we’ll get out of here tonight.

Man. It sounds like the hail is going to come through the windows…

I’m not exactly sure why Joanna thought I wasn’t allowed to fly in the rain… Around here I need 3 miles of visibility, and I have to stay 500 feet below, 1000 feet above and 2000 feet horizontally from all clouds. I also need 3 miles of visibility.

The ceilings were above 12,000 feet, there was better than 10 miles visibility, and light rain today. We flew.

Actually, D. didn’t think I could fly either. “I dunno about the weather,” he told me. By now I’d already bicycled there. I’d gotten a weather brief. The briefer said, yes, there was a dry line to the west of us, but that was the only convective sigmet. I told D. I didn’t see any reason we couldn’t go on the cross country flight I’d planned. There was a cloud layer, 3300 scattered at Paul’s Valley. Winds aloft were LIGHT AND VARIABLE??? D. got a weather briefing himself while I preflighted the plane. He came back worried about the convective activity west and moving our way, very slowly. It wasn’t supposed to get here for another 2 hours, minimum. We decided that I could practice my landings. I needed practice.

Apparently every one else had the same idea. The controller said there were already four people in the pattern, and he didn’t really want another one. So we decided to go to a nearby airport and do touch and go’s. After we were climbing through 3,000 feet, it became obvious just how beautiful a day it was to fly. The air was perfectly smooth. The visibility cleared up quite a bit, and I could see farther than I usually can when the sky is clear. D. decided that we should, after all, fly my cross country.

There was quite a bit of rain falling from the clouds, most of it didn’t reach the ground. (The name for this is virga, but Joanna didn’t know this word, so you might not either.) Little holes in the clouds opened up every so often, allowing the sun to blast through in a little circle on on the ground. It was all very pretty, and a nice change from the clear skies, sun beating down on you days.

I got us to Shawnee okay, using nothing but my sectional, the compass and landmarks. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, but I’m getting better at it. I was rather frustrated that I couldn’t find the airport, until finally I saw it, clear as daylight, a little to the left of where I thought it was. Why I couldn’t find it, I don’t know. We did a couple of touch and go’s there, then flew to Paul’s Valley, then back to Westheimer. As I rolled out on final, the controller said, “Winds…calm.” No WONDER. I couldn’t figure out why it seemed like I was going so fast. It was really weird landing without wind, but actually fairly easy. So easy I wanted to go do a bunch more. I’d never landed in much less than 10-15knots, and it’s usually 20-30 knots, and that’s a big difference. It looks like you’re just flying along way too quickly, but that’s just because the air mass you’re flying in isn’t moving relative to the ground like it usually.

I told D. I wanted to fly more. “Hmm. I should solo you.”

So, after 1.5 hours of cross country instruction, I went in, got another weather briefing, and took off again for the south, this time by myself.

D. told me I needed an hour. The big thing was that I was supposed to head to the practice area and come back to the airport all by myself.

“Go do some maneuvers and come back.”

“What, like barrel rolls and upset recovery?”

“NO! Do steep turns or something. Don’t do too many stalls.”

So, I did steep turns, and that was boring, so I did steeper turns. Steep turns at 60 degrees is more fun. A 60 degree turn while maintaining altitude is a 2G maneuver. I got dizzy after awhile, and played around with some negative G-loads. Just enough to start to lift me out of the seat, nothing very extreme. I didn’t like not having a specific task. I would just go have fun, sight see, and enjoy flying, but I was paranoid that I’d get lost or something. “Just fly the river, you can’t get lost if you’re on the river,” D. told me. I couldn’t fly very far out, because I was getting into some heavier rain and visibility sucked that way. I couldn’t go North, because then I’d be in class D airspace. After about half an hour, and I headed back to Westheimer and opted to do some touch and gos, since that’s what I really need some practice with. I did 4 landings. The second one sucked. The third one was beautiful. By then the wind was at 10 knots from 170 and I was landing on runway 21, so that’s a substantial crosswind. The last two landings I landed almost perfectly straight, which sufficiently impressed me. D. was flying the same time I was, so he didn’t see them. “You sound like a real pilot on the radios, though,” he told me. At least I sound like one.

I got 1.5 hours dual and 1.0 hour PIC today. Maybe I’ll get a private certificate eventually.

While I was dutifully studying for the private pilot written exam, my telephone rang. D. wanted me to plan a cross-country flight to Shawnee (SNL), then Paul’s Valley (PVJ) and then back to OUN. “Get the weather, plan it, and we’ll fly it.” I downloaded a standard weather briefing for the route from Duats, skimmed the OKC TAF, and a few local METARs which indicated that it would be getting a bit more cloudy, but the ceiling would stay pretty high. Winds were around 20 knots and were supposed to stay that way. I jotted down the winds aloft forecast and went to go plot the course. It’s about 25NM to Shawnee, 45NM to Paul’s valley and almost 30NM back to OUN. I got out my trusty flight computer, which once belonged to my Dad. It says “Copyright 1957,” and it’s probably that old. Flying hasn’t changed much in 50 years, really. Most of the planes I fly were built in the early 70’s, and some even earlier. I plotted the course, got the true course, computed wind correction, magnetic variation and filled out a navigation log with all the checkpoints I’d be using along the way. Things like, “River bend to the North.” “The town of Tribbey.” “Some East-West powerlines.” These things all sound promising or look okay on on the chart, but it’s all much more difficult in real life.

A few days ago, (after my checkride but before my last solo) D. had me fly by pilotage (looking at stuff on the ground) to Chickasha which is about 20NM away. This was rather embarrassing. I was fairly certain I was going in the right direction, but it’s so hard to be sure. If you’re staring at a chart which has an unidentified road intersecting another road with a bend that just might be the same kind of bend that you’re looking at, it must be the one you think it is, right? The trouble is, it’s hard to know for sure. You can be certain that one road is another road, and not find out for a very long time. “Am I sure this is the right road?” “Well, there’s a town up here, on the left side of the road, and there’s a town on my map on the left side of the road…” But how do you know you’re not at a completely different road, which also has a town on the left. Everything in OK looks pretty boring. Lots of fields and roads on a grid. Judging distances is easy. Roads exist pretty much at every mile mark. Sometimes there are roads on the half mile mark. And fields are generally quartered at .25mi x .25mi.

I didn’t see the airport until I was nearly flying over it. We did some touch and go’s there. Landing at a different runway is nice for a change. Then we flew to Purcell. This was easier because a road goes between Chickisha and Purcell. I had some difficulty being sure I was at Purcell, but there’s a river and stuff. Then I flew the river back to Norman, and I was able to find it because it had gotten dark enough the beacons were on. Beacons are good. And traffic is so much easier to spot on a clear night than it is on a clear day.

I’m not completely lost even though I have a hard time with landmarks. I can tune up a VOR or a couple of NDB’s using the nav radios and come up with a fairly accurate idea of where I am. And there’s a nice strong NDB sitting at OUN, which makes it easy to know which direction it’s in. But… I’m supposed to be able to fly completely without reference to instruments… You know, in case I lose them. Or I’m flying a plane without them. (Uhh… Handheld GPS?) D. insists it gets easier. He said he flew his entire commercial cross country to Little Rock, AK and back using nothing but pilotage. Course, I-40 will take you there pretty easily. That’s a really long trek for a Cessna 152. 6.5 hours of flying round trip.

Anyway, I dutifully plotted out the course. I had all wind correction, headings, speeds and so on figured out. Then I looked outside and noticed that it looked like the weather gods had gotten bored and decided to stir things up… “But I checked the weather!” Then I realized that I hadn’t yet read the SIGMETs, or even the summary, or the severe weather warnings…. Rather than sifting through them, I simply pulled up the National Weather Service’s, Norman’s weather for dummies page. The local radar looked particularly nasty. Then I went and read the text weather more closely:

******** Convective SIGMET ********
MKCC WST 242155
CONVECTIVE SIGMET 53C
VALID UNTIL 2355Z
TX OK
FROM 60W OKC-10E CDS
DVLPG LINE SEV TS 20 NM WIDE MOV FROM 24020KT. TOPS ABV FL450.
HAIL TO 2.5 IN…WIND GUSTS TO 60KT POSS.
OUTLOOK VALID 242355-250355
FROM BRD-GRB-30SSE TTH-30NE
MSL-BUM-SJT-MAF-ICT-PUB-CHE-BFF-OBH-BRD
REF WW 273 275 276 278 279.
WST ISSUANCES EXPD. REFER TO MOST RECENT ACUS01 KWNS FROM STORM
PREDICTION CENTER FOR SYNOPSIS AND METEOROLOGICAL DETAILS.
DNB

Oh. right. As if that wasn’t good enough:

DISCUSSION…DEEP MIXING ALONG DRYLINE IS EXPECTED TO RESULT IN
ISOLATED SEVERE STORMS DURING THE NEXT FEW HOURS. STRONG DEEP LAYER
VERTICAL SHEAR PROFILES AND VERY UNSTABLE AIRMASS INDICATE A RISK OF
SUPERCELLS CAPABLE OF LARGE HAIL AND DAMAGING WINDS.
AVIATION…A FEW SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS WITH HAIL SURFACE AND ALOFT
TO 2.5 INCHES. EXTREME TURBULENCE AND SURFACE WIND GUSTS TO 60
KNOTS. A FEW CUMULONIMBI WITH MAXIMUM TOPS TO 500. MEAN STORM
MOTION VECTOR 25030.

Oh, dear. I felt rather silly for missing it before. But, the problem with text weather is that there are pages and pages and pages of it, most of which has nothing to do with me. And, if I’m leaving the pattern, I usually actually talk to a weather briefer anyway before I leave, so it’s not like I wouldn’t have noticed. Still bothered me.

I called D.. “So, uhh, have you looked outside?” I asked. “Yeah, we’re securing all the airplanes as best we can right now… I’ll put you in the schedule for tomorrow.”

So all that planning for nothing. Now I get to do it again tomorrow. Actually, the weather might well be crap tomorrow too.