Archive for the ‘Flying’ Category

The weather’s been icky the past couple of days, which I’m sure isn’t helping. I need to study, but I haven’t done that today either.

I got a new flight instructor last week. After my current one had annoyed me to no end, and it didn’t seem like I was getting anywhere, I got another one. He thought my maneuvers were fine and signed me off for a stage check. I’m not sure which one of them was right, but I like the noises the second one makes a lot better:)

I did another grass strip landing at Chickasha on Wednesday. That was fun. There’s not a lot to it, although I did it with a tailwind, something I’ve never tried before. Only about 4 knots, but still, it’s amazing how much difference 4 knots can make on your tail. I forget exactly, but a tail wind increases your landing distance something like 4 times as much as a headwind decreases your distance. I’m also not exactly sure why that’s the case. But the end result is that landing with a tail wind is not recommended. But I’m glad I’ve done it, so now I know what it feels like. You just fly down the runway and float forever. And then to do that on grass as well…. There’s nothing like a real soft field landing to help work out your soft field technique.

The interesting thing about Chickasha these days is note on the AWOS. (Automated Weather Observation System). In Norman, there’s a computer voice reading out the weather and it updates every minute. At Chickasha, it’s not as automated… There’s a human reading the weather, it’s not updated as often, but they also include airport notes. Like this one. “Runway One Seven Three Five is Closed. Landing is on the Taxiway. It’s 35 feet wide.” Yay. I landed on it with a 16 gusting to 22 knot DIRECT crosswind. By direct, I mean that it was perpendicular to the “runway”. I’ve never landed in a crosswind like that, but it was fun. That’s a lot of crosswind. To put it in perspective for you: The maximum demonstrated safe crosswind component of a C-172 is, I think, 12 knots. All that means is that someone demonstrated that the plane can be landed with a 12 knot crosswind. Doesn’t make it can’t be done it more, just that all that’s every been demonstrated to the FAA is 12 knots. It’s generally a pretty conservative number. To make it better, I did on a 35 foot taxi way. Which means that there’s really no room to get blown off centerline, unless you want to land in the piles of dirt. And that would be bad.

I was so impressed with myself, that I decided to do it again. I landed to the north the first time, and then landed to the south another two times.

Anyway, now I’m signed off, so I’m waiting around for a stage check. If I pass, it’s on to learning to fly a “complex” airplane, which is only like 10-15 hours of flight.

I should be taking these bad weather days to study for my oral. Maybe I’ll do that today.

I’ve been feeling restless lately. This has been giving me strange ideas, which I may or may not execute. Mostly depends on whether or not Joanna is similarly inclined. I’ll just let you guys guess, since I don’t want everyone to try to talk me out of it if we do manage to do it.

Now I have to go complain to the apartment people that our garbage dispose-all is garbage.

As you’ve probably noticed, things look a little different. I’m a little annoyed by the fixed-width thing; it seems that web people feel this strange need to specify pixel widths for a page. I can’t find a theme I much like. I tried to adapt the old one, but it broke the comments page, and I’m too lazy to figure out how to fix that.

I took the FAA Commercial Airplane Pilot written exam yesterday. I answered 95/100 questions correctly, so my 90% and above record is maintained. I’ve still got two flights left in this stage, minimum. If I can perform all my maneuvers within the appropriate tolerances next flight, then I’m going to fly with another instructer for a “mock stage check” to make sure I can pass, then off for the real thing. The third and final stage of this program should go much more quickly than the first two.

Maybe, just maybe, with a little luck I’ll finish at the end of April. That means I’ll have been here a year which is still way longer than I’d hoped. And then comes the job search. If I get a job somewhere other than Norman, that means that Joanna will be forced to look for other work. I’m thinking this is a good thing, because this warehouse stuff is getting old– and I’m not the one doing it!

We ate breakfast at the airport on Saturday because Jonah wanted to. The food was only mediocre, but it’s all you can eat for $5, and it’s not a buffet.

Jonah was talking about my “obnoxiousessity” last night. No, I don’t get it either.

I would have gotten one of those two flights out of the way today, but it seems that the airplane is down for maintenance. Maybe they’ll fix the stall warning horn? Both it and the plane I flew on Friday had innoperative stall horns. To be fair, the horn in 8091E sounded right as the plane stalled– but it’s really too late then. I did a half-dozen stall in 76067 and didn’t hear a peep out of it. Maybe it’s good for me– get used to judging my proximity to a stall without the horn. Still, there’s a reason just about every sort of plane has some kind of a stall warning system…

On Friday, I passed a party balloon on climbout at about 600 feet. I was close enough to clearly make out the string tied around it. It’s so very weird to have any reference frame other than the ground. The balloon appeared to be hanging out in one place as I climbed above it and flew past it just off the left wingtip. Yesterday, I got pretty close to a flock of birds that was higher than I’ve ever seen birds– about 4,500ft MSL. It was such a big flock of birds that ATC advised me of “Traffic, 10 o’clock, intermittent return, slow moving, altitude unknown.”