Our Dumb Blog

Well, the gerbil died today. He apparently committed gerbilcide. We found him stiff in his water bowl, as if he’d drowned, but the bowl wasn’t deep… he could have stepped out of it easily. So we’re not really sure what happened. Berck thinks he might have had a seizure and fell into the water bowl and drowned before he stopped seizuring.

I think he faked his death so we’d put him in the dumpster and he could be free to roam the parking lot once again.

I should write about my job at the warehouse, but I’m too exhausted at the end of the day to do much.

This last weekend, we finally got the last of the things unpacked or put away. And the vacuum cleaner arrived, so now it doesn’t look like we’re living in squalor anymore.

Berck trimmed his beard last night, so he doesn’t look like a mountain man anymore.

So groundschool today was all about weather. Doesn’t really interest me much, even though there’s a whole lot I don’t know that I need to. I wonder how much of it we’re going to be questioned on. I find meteorology only slightly more interesting than geology.

Don popped his head in the ground school class to tell me know that we’d be flying at noon. After the plane got back in, we did indeed fly. Winds were still out of the south, at 18 knots gusting to 22. Windy, but under the 25 knot limit so we could go. Like Dale says, “If you don’t like flying in the wind in Oklahoma, you can wait until June..”

I found Westheimer tower as well as OKC approach live streamed on the web and listened to it for several hours yesterday. Which was a good thing, since Don had me make most of the radio calls today. I’m all fine and good when it comes to who I’m talking to and who I am, but the actual getting out what I need to say is hard. “Westheimer tower, Cessna eight zero niner one echo on bravo for south departure runway two one.” That one was easy, I had lots of time to think about what I had to say. But the ATC guys all talk so darn fast, I’m still learning how to listen to them. “Niner one echo, left turn to the south approved, cleared for takeoff.” While I was departing, Don contacted OKC approach and asked for traffic advisories. Without flinching, the controller responded, “Niner one echo squawk four zero six and ident.” I had no idea you could request traffic advisories 10 miles south of their airspace. She never contacted us again, and I didn’t exactly catch what you’re supposed to say after you no longer need advisories and are switching back to tower frequency.

We spent most of the flight doing not so interesting, but hard enough for me to do things. He had me climb to 4,500 feet and had me practice flying different airspeeds while maintaining altitude. It’s harder than I would have thought. He had me flying right at the stall warning at about 45 knots with 10 degrees of flaps, “eee….eeee..eEEEeee…” That ended up being good practice, and I need lots more. To maintain altitude at 45 knots you fly along pointed something like 20 degrees upwards and just mush along. Since there was about a 40 knot wind, when we turned into the wind, we were just hovering over the ground, going nowhere. Then, it ought to be fairly easy to maintain the same altitude, retract flaps, add power, and return to 100 knots. Hah. I generally gained 250 feet every time I tried.

Don covered a bunch of the instruments with little rubber things, which was certainly kept me from looking at them. Later in my training, I’ll have to wear a hood or foggles to keep me from seeing outside the plane.

After lots of this sort of thing, we flew back to the airport. The controller told me to report on 2 mile left base. Which was helpful for where I was, but that was the only lefthand pattern turn I’ve ever flown. Years ago, they established righthand patterns for runways 21 and 17 to keep planes over the west side of Norman, which used to be uninhabited. Now there’s just as many people out west as there is downtown, but the right patterns are still there. Since the wind is always out of the south these days, I have yet to fly left traffic, except the first day, which I don’t remember anyway. We did a touch and go, flew the pattern and came back for a full stop. I could fly the pattern all day and practice landings until I get it right. Which I’ll get to do, but not for awhile yet. Don would apply corrections as I destabilized us.

Taxiing in 20 knots of wind is a lot of work. Full rudder deflection wasn’t enough to keep us going straight when we were crosswind. I had to use the brakes just to keep us in a straight line.

I get to sleep in tomorrow. No ground school on Saturday, and I don’t fly until 1600. Yay.

Winds are 22 knots gusting to 31 at OUN right now.

Yesterday, D. agreed to swap planes with another instructor because the one we were flying had a glideslope indicator, and the other did not. Since I wasn’t about to be shooting an ILS approach in my private training, not to mention that OUN doesn’t even HAVE an ILS approach (though, when you point this out, they scream, “We have a localizer, and the rest is being installed, we should have an ILS approach in July!) giving up our plane was no big deal. But the other instructor ended up taking his plane anyway, and then someone else took mine. They have real scheduling problems. The only 172 available was only available for an hour, so I asked D. if we could do some pattern work, and he said sure. We made 4 trips around the pattern. The first one D. demonstrated the appropriate places to turn and made a nice touch and go, then gave me the plane on the climbout. Runway 21 has a right-hand pattern, and there’s no way to see the field as you turn crosswind (the wing is in the way), which makes it difficult for me. I think I’m just going to use the DG for the crosswind turn from here on out even though I’m not supposed to be looking at the instruments. The other way to do it is to find a building that you should be headed toward, but that’s more difficult. (landmarks are hard to come by out here….) It’s funny, for this part of my training I’m not going to be looking at the instruments, and then later I won’t be allowed to look at anything else…. The nice thing about this landscape is everything is laid out on a N/S-E/W grid, so it’s really easy to fly a straight ground track.

The next couple of touch and goes were some combination of me flying the approach in and D. actually getting the plane on the ground. The last landing I did a pretty good job, I thought, and started flaring when D. kicked major right rudder to straighten the plane out so we didn’t land too much sideways.

It was only half an hour of flying, but it was a good half-hour, I thought. D. let me know that he’d be getting his wisdom teeth removed today and so he was going to schedule me to fly with Don DelFranco, a more experienced instructor, for the next three days.

He scheduled me for 11 today, which was sort of a pain since ground school doesn’t get out until 1130. Dale said that wouldn’t be a big deal, and he ended up letting the whole class out at 11. Then, I looked around, and couldn’t find Don anywhere. I finally started asking, and they said he wasn’t around. So I found his mobile phone number, called him, and he said that D. told him it was supposed to be at Noon, didn’t he call me?. No. Sooo… I got a weather briefing and after hearing the winds, got a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t be flying at all. With nothing better to do, I preflighted the plane and as I was finishing that up, Don arrived.

“So, does everything look good?” He asked.

“Well… other than the wind,” I replied.

“Yeah, I don’t know why the dispatcher didn’t tell you. We don’t fly privates if the wind is over 25 knots.”

I wasn’t really surprised. In fact, I didn’t untie the airplane because I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be going anywhere. He said he’d call me later today if the wind dies down enough. That’s not likely to happen until the sun’s about to set, but maybe there will be enough time to fly. I’m really looking forward to being about to fly with Don. We talked for a little while, and he seems to be a much more capable instructor. He said he started flying last February. He finished up everything in 7 months and they offered him a job instructing, and he’s been there ever since.

Bicycling in a 30mph headwind is way too hard. I thought I was never going to get home, and it’s downhill.

In ground school today, we learned how to read a sectional (a pilot map), and spent the majority of class time on Airspace. I can’t think of anything we’re likely to cover that’s going to be both simultaneously as boring yet as important as the federal regulations about airspace. And we’re not finished yet, we’ve got more to cover tomorrow.

Airspace used to be a whole lot simpler. Back in the ’20s, it was all uncontrolled and the FAA has slowly been turning more and more airspace into controlled areas to deal with increased air traffic and make it safer for the airlines. The biggest problem these days, asside from sheer density of planes surrounding busy airports, is that there are planes that routinely fly at over 400 knots, and planes like the ones I fly, which cruise at about 100 knots. As recently as the 80’s, airspace was a lot simpler. These days, with the sole exception of a few areas out west, all airspace between 1,200 and 60,000 feet is controlled airspace. Granted, much of it is only Class E airspace, which is controlled, but not THAT controlled. You don’t have to ask permission to fly inside it, but it is controlled. For everything over 18,000 feet, pretty much the entire continental US is Class A airspace, which means you have to have filed an IFR flight plan to fly inside it. (Chances are that I may never fly a plane capable of 18,000 feet, so that one doesn’t really apply to me yet…) The area surrounding OUN (the field I’m learning to fly at), is surrounded by an area of Class D controlled airspace from the surface to 3,700 feet, and that’s surrounded by Class E airspace from 700 feet up to 18,000… That’s without mentioning that the northern borders of OUN’s airspace are actually in the Class C airspace belonging to OKC and Tinker AFB. It can all be rather confusing, because many different there’s different rules for all 5 classes of controlled airspace, and I have to know them all… Crossing the wrong boundary can cost a fine or an FAA suspension, or if I’m really careless, possibly my life. Some poor prospective student stumbled in to see what ground school was like, and didn’t take him too long to wander back out.

Flying was less of a surprise today than it was yesterday. Now that I’ve had my frustrations with taxiing, I’ve got that down and didn’t have any trouble… Mike made the radio calls again today, though I’m going to start doing it tomorrow. It’s frustrating because the way this particular plane is wired you can’t really hear the other pilot talking over the radio on the intercom, so I don’t have another pilot to listen to so I can get used to the radio calls. While I’m not so much worried about what I’ve got to say, I’m a lot more worried about being able to understand what the controller is saying.

I performed the take off and, well, it’s a whole lot harder to keep the plane going straight down the runway than it looks like. It wasn’t terribly pretty, but I got us off the ground in relative safety. I discovered what the beginnings of an accelerated stall are like while making a climbing turn in the traffic pattern. I didn’t stall, but I did get the beginnings of the warning horn, and when you’re 500 feet off the ground, that’s not a good thing. I knew the plane stalled at higher speeds in a bank, but at 75-80 knots I thought I was quite safe. Accelerated stalls are quite bad because they lead rapidly to spins. After flying out of the vicinity of the airport and climbing a bit, Mike had me work on steep turns. Mike did a rather poor job trying to demonstrate them, losing 250 feet and banking closer to 50 degrees, and then said, “Uh, just do what I tell you instead of what I do.” My first try, I made a circle in a 60 degree bank instead of 45, because I misread the attitude indicator. Whoops. I thought it looked rather steep, but it sure was fun. I also discovered what the beginnings of a spiral dive are like… I let the nose drop too much on roll in, but kept banking while trying to correct. Since I ended up banking to 60 degrees and kept pulling back, that actually kept tightening the turn and increasing my descent rather than helping things out at all. After a couple of tries, I seemed to do okay with steep turns. To the left, they don’t seem to require much rudder at all, but all sorts of rudder is needed to the right. Left turns are also easier since I’m on that side of the plane and have a better view of what’s going on.

After turns, it was time to fly back to the field. While heading toward David Perry, a little airport close to Norman, we were about to call OUN tower and ask for landing clearance when we heard someone, “…over David perry, requesting landing clearance.” We couldn’t see them at all. It was hazy, and spotting traffic was difficult. We requested clearance, and were told to follow the other Cessna in, but we couldn’t see it. So we asked where she was, and she was supposedly right out over the river, which was a bit in front of us. Then tower asked the other Cessna to make S turns to slow down for a Cherokee. The Cherokee had been complaining that he couldn’t find any of the traffic he was supposed to follow in, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Finally, we saw the Cessna on final, asked the tower if the Cessna that jsut landed was the one we were supposed to follow. She affirmed, and repeated that we were clear to land. I had us stabilized in the approach, though a little fast. No problem since I was only at 20 degrees of flaps. Added the last 10, which slowed us down a bit much, so I added some power to compensate. I was in a noticeable crab, since the wind a 6 knot crosswind. I tried to sideslip instead as we got closer, but that then got a little off course. It’s a little plane and a big runway, and Mike wasn’t complaining (He had his hands on the controls since it was my first landing, but I was flying) so I kept at it. I pulled the power and started to level out, but the left wing was coming up. About then Mike could tell I was pretty much in over my head, so he applied judicious amounts of right rudder and flared. The downwind wheel hit the pavement first and bounced off, which actually helped straighten us out and then the plane landed the rest of the way, and I taxied back to the ramp. Considering it was my first landing, it wasn’t half bad. I get to fly the landings from here on out as best I can…

While we were landing, the controller was busy yelling at someone for cutting off another plane, who he couldn’t see either. The weather service kept insisting 10 miles visibility, but it was really hazy. Being a controller at this airport has got to be a rough job. It’s pretty busy during the day, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that something like 90% of the traffic is students. Today, I heard someone request a touch and go, to which she responded, “Denied, the pattern is too full, state your intentions.” A rather hesitant, “uhh… I’ll just hang out here for awhile…” in response.

My butt is really sore from all this bicycling. I’m flying tomorrow at 3pm, which probably means I’ll hang out at the flight school studying for 3 hours rather than bicycle an extra 8 miles…

Well, I didn’t sleep very well last night because I’ve gotten used to going to bed at 2am and waking up at noon. So I’m pretty tired after getting up at 0630 this morning, then bicycling 35 minutes, sitting in class for 3 hours, flying for an hour, then bicycling back.

Ground school was fairly interesting; I didn’t find myself falling asleep despite how tired I was. The teacher, I believe his name is Dale, is between 40 and 50 years and looks like he weighs over 400 pounds, which can be somewhat distracting at first. Although generally well spoken, he has some amusing grammatical quirks. For instance, something he might say when talking about someone who crashed, “The only thing he coulda did to get out of that was…” And he never says feet, at least I’ve never heard him say feet. Usually foot, every now and then foots. e.g., “Traffic pattern altitude is about 1000 foot AGL…” He finished up talking about aerodynamics, and then moved onto airport signage and the like which was far less interesting.

After that, I found Mike and we went flying. After I took an eternity to get the preflight done since I’d never really done it before, Mike had me do a bit of taxiing. I wouldn’t have figured it’s all that hard, really. The 172 has only two methods of steering, and they both involve the rudder pedals. Push the right pedal, the plane goes right and vice versa. The nose wheel is connected to the rudder cables by a sort of bungee system, which is hardly very precise, and at best turns the noise wheel 30 degrees right or left, a few seconds after you ask it to, provided you’re already moving. So you’ve got to stay ahead of the game. Fortunately, for tighter turns, you can also use either brake to turn in the direction you want by pressing on the tops of the rudder pedals.

Well, it turns out that the first bad thing is that everything else I’ve driven I steer with a mechanism in front of me. Right in front of me is a control yoke which, of course, is utterly useless on the ground (aside from trying to keep the plane from doing bad things in really gusty conditions) and of course, I know this. That doesn’t stop me from grabbing it and turning it to no avail.

Since there’s a monster propeller sitting in front of me turning clockwise, the plane does its best to turn left, both on the ground and in the sky. This takes some getting used to, because what it means is that the plane doesn’t turn to the right or the left the same way. The end result to having two different methods of turning the plane, one which requires stomping the associated rudder pedal to the floor and the other which requires delicately touching the tops of the pedals is that I had a fair amount of difficulty getting it to do what I wanted remotely gracefully. Mike kept insisting that I was doing just fine. “It’s not THAT big a deal if you don’t keep it on the line, and you’re a long way away from the grass…” Still, I thought that part would be easy! And the nice thing about a plane was that if I got it too far off, Mike could just straighten it out for me, at the same time helping get a feel for the right inputs.

Mike made all the appropriate radio calls, and then we taxied out the runway. He had me keeps my hands and feet on the controls while he took off so I could get a feel for what was going on. After we were barely established in a climb, and before I was really ready for it, Mike let go of the controls and had me climb out. It was quite windy, and rather gusty, up to 20 knots. He wouldn’t let me use the instruments, and just told me to keep the cowl level with the horizon. He had me make left traffic, then fly south and follow a river. I got the hang of turning, aileron input wasn’t much of a surprise, but getting the hang of the rudder was. The first few turns I made were shallow banked, and not very well coordinated since I didn’t really use much rudder input. After that I decided to go for a real turn, hauled off and banked rapidly to the right, and used a judicial amount of rudder, until I could feel it working. Curious about how I was doing, I glanced down at the turn coordinator even though Mike told me not to use the instruments. I was amazed that the ball was slammed against the left side of its little groove, and the bank was approximately appropriate for a standard turn. I’d thought I was a lot steeper than that, and certainly better coordinated. I stomped rather heartily on the right rudder pedal to try and coordinatet hings a bit. The ball didn’t move. It took what seemed like a lot of rudder to get it centered, and by then I was losing altitude rather rapidly. I discovered it took a lot more effort to keep the nose up in a turn than I expected. As I rolled out, Mike said, “My other private went for her first flight this morning… She rolled us right into a 60 degree turn, I was impressed.” That really surprised me, since it’s rather unnerving at first to be in a little box tilted over 60 degrees. Not wanting to be outdone, I turned into what I was sure was a fairly steep turn, glanced down and discovered that it needed a lot more rudder, which was fun, and then realized that I was losing altitude so pulled back and learned first hand what load factor and increased angle of attack in a turn is all about. That’s a really fun feeling, though I doubt it was more than a 1.5G turn. I was dismayed when I glanced at the attitude indicator and saw that I was in a 45 degree bank. It seemed like much more and I really would fall over. Part of it for me, too, is that I’ve spent a lot of time in airliners which seldom exceed 30 degrees of bank. After leveling out, I decided to regain lost altitude, and thought I’d try a climb at best rate of climb. Pulling back and firewalling the throttle was fun. I just kept pulling the nose up until the airspeed indicator hit 65 knots. It sunk a little below that, then Mike said I could try it a little steeper. Shortly after pulling back just a little more I got the stall warning and backed off a little. “Wanna try a stall?” Mike asked. Having never been in a stall,and seeing as how there was no time like the present, I said sure. Mike mumbled something about not usually doing stalls your first time up, then said he’d demonstrate one, then I could do it. We leveled off at 3500 feet, he reduced power to idle, and said we’d simulate a landing approach. He slowed to about 65 knots, and put out 30 degrees of flaps. After establishing a steady descent rather slowly, he pulled back on the yoke and stall warning started whining. It whined for about 5 seconds, the plane shuddered a little, then sank into a nose low attitude Mike left the nose low, applied power establishing a positive rate of climb, then gradually reduced flaps until the airplane was clean again. After reminding me not to try to use the ailerons to correct for the inevitable leftward falling (since this is a good way to find out what a spin is all about), he left it to me to do the same thing. I established a decent, slowed us down, extended the flaps, then pulled back. A whine, then the nose refused to climb higher and sunk a bit. I was a little disappointed at just how boring it was, so I kept pulling back until the plane was quite stalled, and mike said, “That’s about all the stall you’re going to get…” So I pushed the nose a little further down, went to full power and started climbing. “About like that, or should I have gained more airspeed before climbing out?” “No, that’s good, you want to climb as soon you’re able, and not lose anymore altitude than you need to.” I kept climbing, but it seemed rather sluggish. The airpseed indicator said about 45 knots, and the stall warning was starting to whine again. Confused, since I didn’t seem to be climbing that steeply, I let the nose down a bit until it stopped and looked inquisitively at Mike. “Put the flaps up,” he said. “Oh, right.” With 30 degrees of flaps, I wasn’t going to climb anywhere very fast.

Mike had me fly a crosswind heading for awhile, and let me experiment with the difference between crabbing and slipping, and I experienced the joys of trying to force a 172 to fly uncoordinated yet straight. It really doesn’t want to. Well, getting it in a slip is easy enough, it’s just that minor correction is tricky.

After it seemed like we’d only been up there for a short while, Mike called for a landing clearance, and we were cleared straight in. The runway was ahead of us, just off to the right. He had me establish the approach, which I did although I ended up a little low and fast, mostly because Mike told me to keep the numbers in the middle of the windscreen which seemed a bit low to me. In getting lower, I got a little faster, which is when Mike decided he’d better land. This is good, because I was getting a little worried that he was going to have me land it, and I didn’t really think that was such a great idea. I had a bit more frustration trying to keep the plane taxiing straight back to the tie-down area, where the lesson was over. After the lesson, he signed my logbook and said I was on the schedule tomorrow for noon was well, and that we’d do some steep turns, some more stalls, and he’d let me take off and possibly land. It hardly seemed like a 1.2 hour flight. I’ve been on 15 minute flights that seemed longer, although I did spend a very long time taxiing in circles, or trying to anyway.

I guess it’s quite a bit harder, and very much different than I thought it would be. It seems like it will take an eternity of instruction before I’ll feel comfortable enough to fly it on my own.

The bicycle riding thing is a lot of work, but I suppose it’s good for me.

Well, tomorrow’s another day, but I get to fly! Joanna left me a message saying she’d be getting off work at 530pm tonight. Overtime on her first day. I’m not sure if that’s good or not.