Posts by Berck

It’s ridiculous. All I need to solo is a 3,000 foot ceiling, 5 miles visibility, and less than 18 knots of wind including gust factor. And it seems like it’s never going to happen. It’s either cloudy or windy. This morning it was cloudy AND windy for a change. The winds aren’t supposed to get below 20 knots until tomorrow NIGHT. They’re howling right now, and it’s after midnight.

I went up and did some maneuvers today, since I hadn’t flown in 5 days. I’m quite comfortable in the airplane, even while getting rocked around a good bit today. We probably should have worked on landings, since my stalls, steep turns and slow flight is all doing quite well. I’ve gotten to where I can fly at 40 knots in gusty conditions just fine. Not perfect, I waiver between 40-50 knots instead of holding it right at 40. Today D. kept saying, “Man, you’re awfully close to a stall.” “Well, that’s the definition of minimum controllable airspeed– the speed at which any increase in angle of attack or decrease in airspeed results in a stall…” “And yes, you’re there.” Course, he has me fly at MCA and track a river, which is bloody well impossible, because I can’t SEE the river when I’m up at 30 degrees, and can’t think straight with the stall horn going eeeEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeEEE…. “Mike, I can’t SEE the river, this is impossible!” “I know, that’s why I have you do it.”

My stalls are good. I don’t tend to maintain coordination perfectly, particularly in power-on banked stalls, but I can react to a wing dropping off just fine, and I can recover in less than 100ft in a power-off stall and not lose any altitude in a power on stall.

Quick power on stalls still weird me out a bit. I find myself bracing for the inevitable yet unpredictable break. I haven’t gotten used to the feeling of the plane just snapping to some weird attitude with the ground taking up my whole field of view while I consciously have to fight the temptation to apply opposite aileron. I’m not really scared per se, it just feels a little like bracing yourself for a shot with a hypodermic needle. It’s gonna hurt, but you don’t know EXACTLY when or where or how much.

My steep turns are okay. I can maintain altitude within 100ft although not as smoothly as I’d like. Mike covered up the Altimeter, and I found that actually helped me maintain altitude. Kept me from staring at the bloody thing in anticipation of it pronouncing failure.

My landings still suck. They’re safe enough, but I need practice. I have a hard time seeing the needed wind correction. I keep thinking I’m straight when I’m not, and keep trying to hold the centerline with the rudder pedals instead of the ailerons. I did three landings today… I was a little side-loaded on the first two, but got the vertical part right. For the third, I finally got the wind correction right just before I plopped down on the runway (although rather upwind of centerline), unfortunately I wound up a little high and slow and simply dropped the plane from about 8 feet for a rather nice bounce. I just need lots of practice.

KOUN 111731Z AUTO 17018G22KT 10SM SCT029 27/18 A2988

Finally, almost a nice-ish day with just a scattered layer of clouds at 2,900ft…. but now that the clouds have lifted a bit, the winds have picked up to 18 knots gusting to 22, well above what I can solo in. They’ll probably get stronger as the pressure drops and thunderstorms roll in this afternoon.

Yesterday morning, I got up at 6:30am, got all ready to go, then decided I should get a weather briefing. After doing that, I realized I could have just opened the bloody window and looked outside. Ceiling at 900 feet, overcast. Oh, and of course the winds were nice calm in the morning, only 8 knots at the surface. But they were 50 knots at 3,000 feet, all thanks to that nice early morning temperature inversion so common in places like Oklahoma. The wind difference was bad enough that there were low level wind shear advisories out. A 50 knot wind shear isn’t something I’d generally chose to fly in, and certainly not on my first solo. I called D. who hadn’t yet checked the weather. “It’s cloudy?” he asked. “Yeah. 1000 feet.” “Oh… I’ll call you later today.” That was yesterday, and I haven’t heard from him yet. I would call him, but there’s not really any point. After things warmed up and the overcast layer lifted and the temperature inversion dissipated, the surface winds picked up to 30 knots. The weather forecasts look crappy for the rest of the week with convective activity likely.

So I may never solo. I’m not really able to do anything to further my flight training at the moment. Maybe I’ll take the private written test and get that over with. I haven’t yet, because I need to practice some of the problems that require plotting things–but all of the online test-practice stuff (including the ones at the flight school) just have the figures on-screen. Which works fine unless you need to lay a plotter over it. You can’t really hold a plotter up to a CRT… I was going to buy one of the test prep books, but they’re like $30, and D. said he’d just let me borrow his, since he said he’d hate to see me buy it just for a few questions. But he hasn’t remembered to retrieve it from his apartment yet.

And, apparently, I can’t go any further in the flight training until I solo. I can’t start working on cross-country stuff until I’ve passed my check-ride, and I can’t take the check-ride until I’ve soloed, and I can’t solo until the weather gets better…

I’ve been surfing the web a bit. The number of people compelled to keep what they call blogs astounds me. I’m not really sure I understand the phenomenon. There’s a lot of bloggers out there that have real blogs which might be of interest to the random passer-by because they point to current sites of interest (what a blog is supposed to do). Then there’s people with journals (much like this one) that call them blogs. As it is, I’m not really certain why this journal still exists, much less the hundreds of thousands of others. I created this one so people could follow our trip across the states. There seems to be continued interest in our current activities, so I’ve kept it up… I guess my feelings about them are nicely summarized by someone’s slashdot sig line I ran across yesterday. It said, “weblogs suck. here’s mine: [link]”

I’ve got about 18 hours and it’s time for me to solo, D. says. Unfortunately, I need winds of not much more than about 10 knots before I can do it. So lately, it’s just been sit-and-wait. It’s been 20-30 knots lately. Since the winds are typically calmer in the morning, I’m scheduled for Monday morning at 8am. I have my doubts, though.

I still can’t land crosswind very well. I understand how, I just need much, much, more practice doing it. But, I’m comfortable flying, and I do just fine as long as the wind is mostly down the runway. All my landings have been safe for the past several flights. None of them have been perfect, though.

I learned to fly a short approach the other day. We were in one of the planes with 40 degrees of flaps. Barn doors, they are. There’s really no need for 40 degrees of flaps in a 172, but it does allow me to descent at about 1200 feet per minute at 65 knots. It’s like falling out of the sky, dive bombing the airport. It’s fun. My short-approach landings and simulated engine-out landings were really much better than my normal landings. I think having all that time to mess up an approach means I’m likely to do it.

After I successfully solo, I have to undergo a check-ride with one of the Airman’s check-airmen. I’m not really worried about it, and it’s no big deal if I fail it. (I have to go review whatever I failed and do the ride again) D. thinks I’m well-prepared. I’m a little less than convincing on my emergency procedures, but I don’t think it will be a big deal. Picking a field to simulate landing in is only hard because there’s so many to chose from out here:)

When I showed up for my lesson yesterday, D. said, “Today is the day for operation Landing.” We stayed in the pattern, doing touch and go’s for what seemed like an eternity. It doesn’t really bother me since I’m the sort of person who can do something a few hundred times in the effort to perfect it without being terribly bothered. In fact, I find the repetition almost calming. Flying in circles (or rectangles to be precise) can get somewhat dizzying, though.

About 200 feet AGL on approach, I heard a THUD and caught something dark out of the corner of my eye. “Bird-strike” said D., somewhat unconcerned. I asked D. if we should look it over. He sort of shrugged, and didn’t seem to care. Since I was the one flying, I went ahead and told tower it was going to be a full stop, we had a bird strike and wanted to check it out. We taxied back to the ramp, and D. said he thought it hit the leading edge of the right wing. No indication of a bird strike there, but the right flap (which was at 20 degrees at the time) appeared to be suffering from something of a depression. D. agreed, but said he didn’t think it was enough to stick the plane in maintenance. These planes suffer from a rather large number of airframe abnormalities, none of which seem to make much difference in airflow characteristics have any structural significance. Satisfied that nothing appeared amiss, we called tower, who kindly offered to let us take off on runway 21 (crosswind) and transition to 17 (the active) to save us taxi time. I thanked him, and performed another 10 landings without much incident.

While there was a lot of wind, most of it was down the runway, so it didn’t concern me too much…. until I realized that EVERY TIME the airplane seemed to be side-loaded as I touched down. Looking down the runway, it LOOKED like the plane was going straight– and in fact it would be pointed straight down the runway, but it happened to be moving sideways as well as forward. It took awhile for me to be able to actually pick up on the visual cues that this was happening. While I know that you’re supposed to apply aileron deflection into the wind and opposite rudder in order to keep the plane flying straight (though wing-low) and touch down on the upwind wheel, this is all much easier said than done. Establishing a slip is pretty easy, even though the plane doesn’t like being cross-controlled. The hard part is applying the inevitably necessary corrections.

At one point, D. chastised me for lowering the nose and unnecessarily increasing airspeed. Since I was a little high, it wasn’t THAT big a deal, since I WAS going to be simultaneously apply flaps, which tends to make the nose pitch up. Certainly, this should have been done simultaneously, so the plane remains in the same attitude, with an increased descent rate and airspeed maintained. I was slow getting to the flaps, and then I got distracted because D. was yakking at me, telling me what I already knew, and kept me from adding flaps, since I was convinced something was actually wrong. “I know, I WAS going to add flaps until you distracted me!” I protested. “Okay, fine, I’m not saying another word,” and he started humming. I got the plane a bit sideways 50 feet over the runway, and had trouble getting stabilized again, when I said, “Ack, what do I do???” D. maintained his silence. I thought I could sense a snicker. So I fought with it a little bit, and was just about to initiate a go around, when suddenly everything lined up and looked good. Shocked, I put the plane down quite nicely. D. was suitably impressed, though I knew that luck had more to do with it than anything.

Yesterday, the only plane available was N75958, which I hadn’t flown before. It’s a C-172N, instead of a 172P like the one I had been flying. (As for just what the difference is, I’m not entirely sure… The engine is subtly different, it only takes 6 quarts of oil instead of 7, and all the P’s we’ve got are certified in the Normal category, whereas all the N’s are certified in th Utility Category, and are rated for spins…) I complained that the control pressures were much lighter on 75958, and finally someone explained that was because 94AV had an installed (though deactivated) autopilot… For whatever reason, (partially due to it’s new paint, lack of a rear seat, and endless other minor variations) 75958 is widely known as the fastest of the 172’s, where as 94AV is definitely the slowest. 94AV hardly ever seemed interested in cruising over 85KTs, but 75958 will top 100 no problem. It also flies much straighter, which is nice.

The biggest difference, though, is the throttle. Most of the 172’s have a push-pull type control mechanism for the throttle. All you have to do is push it in for more, pull it out for less. For whatever reason, 75958 has a very non-standard sort of throttle. Its throttle is identical to the mixture control, only it’s coloured black instead of red. This is frustrating. The mixture control is set up so you can make fine adjustments, and expect the adjustments to stay put unless you go out of your way to change them. You have to push a button in the middle of the knob and push or pull. You can also twist it to make fine adjustments. When you’re used to being able to just push or pull on a lever, but have to push a button to activate this one, that seems rather dangerous to me. I find it hard to believe that this is an FAA-approved configuration for an airplane, but apparently it is. In addition to the weird knob type, it’s also very finicky. Making an adjustment of 100 rpm is all but impossible, even when twisting instead of pushing/pulling.

On one of my approaches today, I tried to reduce power while on downwind, only to have the engine slow down to a sputtering idle, when all I wanted was a reduction to about 50% power. Severely annoyed, I pushed it in until the engine started running back up, but then it just went all the way back up to 100% power. After repeating this escapade 3 times in probably just as many seconds, D., rather frustrated and sputtering, said, “What the hell are you doing?” “This throttle sucks!” I protested. “That’s because you’ve got the mixture control!!” Oh. Right. But, see, in a NORMAL airplane, this wouldn’t be a problem, because the throttle is supposed to FEEL very different from the mixture control. So, there’s yet another reason why it’s a dangerous configuration. I suspect this won’t be the only time I make that mistake flying this plane. And I’m sure I’m not the first one to do it, either. D. fussed at me for not slowing down to think about what I was doing, but I maintain that while it was pilot error, it had a severe contributing factor of an improperly configured airplane. Sure, I probably should have slowed down, but I shouldn’t have to LOOK to see that I’ve got the throttle control. It didn’t happen because I was going too fast, it happened because of non-intuitive controls. Fortunately, provided you simply push it back in, pulling the mixture in flight isn’t really that big a deal. I mean, if you look at a jet-liner, there’s a reason the throttles are shaped quite differently from the gear handle which is very different from the flaps lever, which is very different from the spoilers, and so on–in spite of the fact that all of these things are simply glorified electronic switches these days.

Today, we spent most of the hour doing slow flight, ground reference maneuvers and engine-out procedures. I did one touch and go before the final landing. The first touch and go was okay, the second was even better. The wind was 21 knots gusting to 27 knots 10 degrees off the runway. It makes landing easier, although it’s weird looking since your ground speed is so much slower. The second landing, I actually almost the right amount of wind correction in… Admittedly, it was only a small crosswind component, but the fact that I didn’t land too side-loaded was nice….

Having Joanna back is nice, but Bob Edwards is still gone…

I’m done with my private ground school class. This is good, since I doubt I would be able to stay awake if I had to go to class after getting up at 4:30am tomorrow to take Joanna to the airport. Dale finished up talking about Stability today, which is what he started talking about the day I started. So now I just have to concentrate on the flying until I get enough flight time and skills in order to pass a checkride.

D. and I stood outside and talked awhile, and I figured we probably wouldn’t fly. But, I got the weather and the sky was 2700 broken, winds were 15 knots gusting to 21. Below the 25max allowable for privates. D. left it up to me, so I elected to do some pattern work. I executed three fairly decent and one pathetic touch and go. I was getting tired, so I told the tower the next one was going to be a full stop. The winds had picked up a bit, and we were getting knocked around a good bit. D. mentioned that he hadn’t landed a plane in something like a month, not counting his salvage of my landing the other day. I went ahead and let him land the last one, and sat back. I figured it would be a good chance to watch a good landing. D. didn’t do such a good job and we came in way low, skimming across the grass, and then wound up fast at touch down. It was still good to sit back, my feet on the floor, and let someone else fly for a couple of minutes.

Basically, the goal now is just to get me proficient enough, particularly at landing, that I can solo. I don’t feel at all ready yet, but I’m starting to see that maybe it won’t take the 100 hours I was sure it was going to take when I started. D. said he thinks I’m a lot more ready than I think I am. I’ve got just over 10 hours of flight time, and D. said students are usually ready to solo around 15. I’ll probably be a little over that number before I feel comfortable enough, but we’ll see. Basically, I just don’t feel as comfortable at being able to make the plane do exactly what I want yet. But I’ll get there.