Archive for the ‘Flying’ Category

I flew, all by myself, to Ardmore, OK, did a touch and go there, then flew to Paul’s Valley and did a touch and go there, and then flew back to OUN. Total Distance: 120 NM, Total Time: 1.8 hours.

Admittedly, it’s a very simple cross-country. I-35 goes ALMOST all the way to Ardmore, and where it veers off my course, there’s a railroad. The railroad is kind of hard to spot, and Ardmore is just on the other side of what is the first hill I’ve ever seen from the window of a plane I’ve piloted. There aren’t many hills there, and when you’re used to seeing COMPLETELY flat ground, this thing looks like a mountain.

The weather wasn’t perfect, there were just a few scattered clouds between 4-5 thousand feet, and central OK was surrounded by warm, unstable airmasses. After looking at all the weather, the radar pictures and talking to weather briefers, I decided it was okay to go anyway.

I flew down to Ardmore at 3500ft. It was a little hazy but not too bad since the sun was more or less behind me. There were just a few clouds at 4,000-5,000 feet. I called OKC approach and got flight following all the way to Ardmore. I’m not required to do that, but I feel much safer as they’ll watch for traffic for you. While they’re not responsible for separation, it’s nice to get advisories. (More about this later.) They transferred me to Fort Worth Center about 15 miles south of OUN. I heard quite a few planes with the callsign “Candler” talking to Center– it was the first time I’d heard it as a pilot. “Candler” is ASA’s callsign, and with a hub in Dallas, it’s not unsurprising to hear quite a few of them on Fort Worth Center.

I didn’t get lost at all. I was able to navigate exclusively by pilotage, i.e. landmarks. I flew over Noble, Purcell, Wayne, Paoli, Paul’s Valley, Wynewood, Davis… All these little towns I probably wouldn’t think about even if I drove through them. Little towns are kind of neat from the air, the way you can see how they have all the need to be a little town, the ways they’re all alike, yet how you can tell one from another… (VFR pilots have been known to fly around looking for water towers with town names on them when they get lost…)

As I was nearing Ardmore, center told me ADM was 12 miles at 11 o’clock and asked if I had the field in sight. I looked at 11 o’clock and saw a clearing, on which I thought there was an airport. I told him I had it in sight, he told me squawk VFR and contact Ardmore tower. Which I did, after getting the ATIS. Tower told me to make a left base for runway 13. About this point I realized that the clearing I THOUGHT was the airport wasn’t the airport at all. No matter, I immediately found it at my one o’clock position. I’m not terribly sure why tower thought it was at my 11 o’clock. Admittedly, I was crabbing a little, but not very much, and I was crabbing to the RIGHT. But I should have been tracking straight to the airport, and I think I was, until I started flying to the airport that wasn’t the airport. And if I was tracking straight to the airport, the controller should have said it was at 12 o’clock. In any case, visibility wasn’t good enough for me to have been able to see it 12 miles out anyway. I did, in fact, set myself up for a LEFT base, just like I was supposed to. I reported one mile left base, and was cleared for the option. I made my touch and go and asked for a north departure. I called up Forth Worth Center and got flight following back to Paul’s Valley. Everytime I ask for flight following for a 30NM flight, I can just hear them snickering.

After he told me he had radar contact, I was nearing 4,000 feet. I was supposed to fly at 4,500 or 6,500 on the way back. (VFR traffic eastbound flies at odd thousands+ 500ft, VFR westbound flies at even thousands + 500ft and IFR traffic flies even/odd thousands). That scattered layer, which thinned out toward Norman, was such that I wasn’t sure if I could find a hole big enough to climb through it. And by the time I got up to 6,500 I’d have to fly circles to land at Paul’s Valley. Since the cloud layer was right about 4,500 I decided just to stay at 4,000. I figured if there were IFR traffic, Fort Worth Center knows about me, and they’d tell me.

I made LEFT traffic for Paul’s Valley, did a sweet touch and go there, and called up Fort Worth center for flight following back to Norman. They were rather rude, said I should call OKC approach, I was too far north, blah. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to know for sure, since OKC approach handed me off to Forth Worth Center well north of Paul’s Valley, and Forth Worth Center was the last person I talked to. And then it took me a good 10 minutes to actually get through on OKC approach it was so busy.

I need to find out about handoffs. I was withing a couple of miles of OUN’s Class D airspace without having called them, even though I was on with OKC approach. I’m required establish radio contact before entering their airspace. But OKC approach is supposed to hand me off to them in time. Since they hadn’t, I asked if I could switch to tower. “Niner One Echo contact Westheimer Tower one one eight point zero.” Right.

Anyway, I landed without incident. And I felt like the coolest guy in the world.

I’m not sure why, but mostly because I’d been dreading my first solo cross country. I was sure I’d get lost, or I’d make some other stupid mistake. But it all went just fine. And I did it!

(My solo was on Wednesday. Today (or what was today) I did my first night flight. I’ll catch up with the journaling soon.)

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.

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.