Archive for the ‘Flying’ Category

I was supposed to get my new temporary FAA airman certification when I passed my checkride, but I didn’t. Instead, I was told it would be FedEx’ed to me. it wasn’t by the time we left for New York, and when we got back last night, it still wasn’t.

I had a copy of it that had been faxed to the company, then e-mailed to me, but it was a very low resolution and would not pass for an original. I called the chief pilot this morning to find out if I could fly with it. He didn’t know, and told me to go to PHX and call him from there.

I got to PHX, and was told that I could not fly with the faxed copy. A little while later, I was told to go to Denver where I could pick up an original certificate. So I hopped on the jumpseat of a very much oversold Southwest flight to DEN. I’d rather sit up front on many flights anyway. There’s not much room in the front of a 737, even less than a middle seat, but the view and the company is a lot better. It was a beautifully clear day today, and it was just awesome crossing the rockies. Not a cloud anywhere in the sky, and the visibility was excellent.

I picked up my certificate and then hopped a Skywest flight back to Colorado Springs so Jonah didn’t have to drive to Denver to pick me up. I’m going to Phoenix again in the morning to try to start IOE again. I should be more successful this time. After the two day trip tomorrow, with an overnight in Yuma (yay), I should be able to do the rest of my flying in Denver.

This is the third sunny day out of the 10 I’ve been here so far. It doesn’t rain that much up here; I don’t know why people think it does!

My last couple of lessons in the simulator went pretty well. Lesson 6 was a sign-off for single-engine procedures. I forgot the occasional dumb thing, but my flying was solid and on track for Lesson 6.

Lesson 7 is the sign-off for special airports. We go to four airports in the Dash 8 that are special enough that the captain has to go there with a check airman and get signed off on it before he can go there by himself. Few airlines have airports like that. They are: Telluride, Aspen, Eagle County and Gunnison. You’ll note that all 4 of them are in Colorado.

In the simulator, they have us go to Aspen and Eagle and fly the engine-out procedures, balked landing procedures and a couple circle to land maneuvers. It’s all very tricky because in marginal weather you can’t see the rocks that will kill you if you deviate from the very complicated procedures even slightly.

Here’s some videos of what these approaches are like: Aspen, Telluride, Eagle County. As you can see, the terrain could be problematic, especially if it’s in the clouds. Those airports are also generally one way in, and one way out.

So that was my lesson last night. I had a new instructor, and one of the girls in the class who wanted some extra time flew with me. After practicing all the crazy engine-out departures, the circling approaches and balked landings, we did windshear demonstrations. The first one happened while I was still on the ground. We just noticed an airspeed hesitation, but weren’t really sure what to do about it. The end of the runway was coming up, so I hauled back and rotated for all I was worth. We cleared the lights at the end of the runway by a couple of feet. After that, I realized that we should have simply aborted the takeoff. I was worried about doing it because we were eating up runway, but having enough runway to abort is predicated upon getting to V1 in a reasonable time. I was reminded that we weren’t in a Jet, a Dash isn’t going all that fast at V1 anyway, and as long as we haven’t gotten there, I’m still legal to abort. We did it again, this time I aborted and still had a bunch of runway left. Lesson learned.

The next one was a huge tailwind shear right after lift off. I called for max power, pitched to the stick shaker and aimed for an angle of attack right below the shaker. I got the shaker again, dropped the nose too much, and it looked like ground contact was imminent. My nonflying shoved the power levers to the firewall (guaranteed to trash the engines, but still better than hitting the ground), and I held the nose high and rode the shaker. I was sure we were going to hit a fence. I’d never really noticed a fence in the sim before. Somehow we cleared the fence, and climbed safely. The sim instructor and my non-flying who’d done the lesson were both impressed. They said that at that level of windshear, most folks crash the sim. I think I just got lucky.

On one of the engine failure scenarios we committed a classic multi-engine mistake that kills people. We had a #1 engine failure with no uptrim and no autofeather on takeoff. It goes something like this. (I’ll do dialogue. K is my non-flying.)

Me: Set Max Power, Memory Items
K: #1 power lever, confirm and flight idle.
At this point, she’s pointing at the #1 power lever. I confirm that’s the correct one and say, “Flight idle” and she moves it to idle. We do the same thing with the condition lever.
K: #1 condition lever, confirm and fuel off.
Me: Fuel off.
K: #1 alternate feather switch selected, propeller has feathered.

At this point, the engine is secure with the prop feathered, so we concentrate on flying the airplane up to acceleration altitude, get the flaps retracted and then…

Me: Continue memory items
K: #2 fuel pull off handle, confirm and pull
I look up, she is indeed pointing at the #2 fuel pull off handle.
Me: Pull.

At that point I think, “Was that the correct engine? Well, it must have been, because the engine’s still—” And then it got very quiet as the other engine quit. We both felt really dumb because now we’re flying a complicated single-engine departure procedure out of Aspen with no engines.

My instructor: “All right Sully, what are you gonna do now?”
Me: Vectors to the Hudson?
K: I’m so sorry!
Me: Hey, I told you to pull it! Put it back in and and restart it!

Mercifully, I only lost about 800 feet while she got it restarted. The whole confirming thing is intended to prevent just this sort of stupid mistake. It was just as much my fault for confirming the wrong engine as it was hers for pointing at the wrong engine. In a lot of ways, I’m glad we made that mistake in the sim, because now I know how it happens, and I’m not going to do it in the plane.

I’ve got today and tomorrow off. Jonah’s flight landed in Vancouver an hour and a half ago, but I still haven’t heard from her. I’m sure she’s stuck in the many hour line to clear immigration. I hope she gets here while it’s still sunny!

Last night (this morning?) went pretty well. Having a competent non-flying pilot made a world of difference. It was the sign-off lesson for non-precision approaches, and I didn’t make any mistakes that were too bad. I got behind the airplane at one point. I’d decided to descend, configure the airplane for landing, and execute a tear-drop course reversal for the VOR/DME approach all at once. It turns out that while that might not have been too difficult in the jet, it’s way too much for me to take on at once in Dash. Especially since the instructor had failed the autopilot, so I was hand flying. Had I done things one at a time, it would have been fine. Instead, I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and ended up calling for the flaps while we were going too fast.

The failures are getting a bit more complicated. Shortly after takeoff, I got a caution light for a #1 DC GEN. I figured that was no big deal since we’ve got another DC generator, plus 2 AC generators, and it could probably wait until after we got to a safe altitude, the autopilot on, and so on. I was correct about that, but right as we got to acceleration altitude, I got a DC BUS Caution, immediately followed by a #2 DC GEN, and about 20 other lights. The important thing to note was the DC Bus fault. Along with it, all of my 26V AC powered flight instruments went dark/flagged/kaput. Generally, you have to identify whether it’s a L or R Bus Fault by looking to see which DC Gen went out at the same time–unfortunately I was starting at a #1 AND #2 DC GEN light. Luckily, it only took me a couple of seconds correctly identify it as a Right DC Bus fault that just happened to coincidentally occur right after the #1 DC GEN failure. This is a highly unlikely scenario, but I called for the correct checklists. I did a pretty shoddy job of flying in the clouds while just looking at the standby instruments. Since they’re all on the Captain’s side, it would have made sense to transfer controls over to that side, but fortunately my non-flying pilot got the instruments back online before I killed us, but not before I managed to embarrass myself a bit..

After we finally got those two things sorted out, we had a R TRU HOT. This, in combination with everything else, was proving to be quite the bad electrical day. Fortunately, we got it all sorted out, and I got us on the ground. Hand-flying a non-precision approach down to minimums, of course…. ’cause that’s just how it is in the sim.

We completed the required parts of the lesson with a little time to spare, so I got the inroduction to tonight’s lesson: V1 cuts. I mostly had the callouts, but the yaw is a lot worse than it is in the jet. The good part is that the plane isn’t as scary without swept wings, but with big engines out on the wings, and an unfeathered prop hanging out there, I need just about all the rudder there is to keep the thing pointed straight. We’ll see how I manage to do tonight!

In other news, this was the first day I actually saw the sun in Vancouver. I was started to learn that there’s some awesome mountains to look at—they’ve been cloud-covered since I got here. It’d be great if the weather were nice during my days off next week when Jonah visits, but I’m not holding my breath.

Overall, it went okay. Our instructor was unable to get on the earlier flight from Phoenix, so he didn’t get to the sim until about 2345. That still gave us an hour to brief. My sim partner and I went to the sim location early, in hopes of finding a procedures trainer where we could practice callouts beforehand. Partner had clearly not done much effective studying, so it ended up being a couple hours of me teaching him.

I elected to fly first. Normally, the person who flies second has an advantage, because you get to learn from the mistakes the first guy made. In this case, I was worried that if Partner went first, that we’d spend the whole time stuck on the ground.

I discovered immediately that my basic instrument skills were worse than rusty. Fortunately, I used to be a pilot, so my abilities are coming back. The Dash controls are really heavy, and it’s incredibly sensitive in pitch, but rolls like a pig. I did some turns, climbs and descents without the auto pilot to get a feel for it, then we went right into the stall series. They were to standards on my first attempt, which is much better than I managed on the jet. After that, a couple of ILS approaches to landings in Memphis. There were a few malfunctions, but being the first day they were all pretty easy things like deice malfunctions, or fuel filter bypass indications. The last approach terminated in a miss, which went okay.

I was surprised at the number of little bitty things from the CRJ that I missed. Things like the autopilot controls in the jet all have clicking detents. So if you want to turn a heading bug 1 degree left, you turn the knob one click left. The Dash doesn’t have any clicks, so I wasted a lot of time trying to get things pointed in the correct direction.

The big thing it’s missing, though, is the moving map. In the CRJ, there’s a map that shows the aircraft’s position relative to the currently-important navigational aids. This is nice in a missed approach, where it’s hard to keep your head around a complicated series of things that you’re only going to do if you don’t get to land.

Other quirks: The airspeed indicator is not at all intuitive and reminds me of the one in T-37. The control wheel is enormous compared to the one in the CRJ, and it feels like it’s in the wrong place. The landings are straight forward enough, and the approaches are nice and slow so I’ve got time to watch it all happen. In a lot of ways, that’s been my saving grace: I’m used to how fast things happen in a jet, and the slowness of the turboprop helps out.

I was still very overwhelmed, but it was nowhere near as bad as my first lesson on the jet. Now that I’ve been through it once, I have confidence that I’ll be able to handle it as I get there. I’m still pretty nervous about single engine procedures, but we don’t actually get to those until Lesson 5.

Tonight is basically the same stuff we did last night, only it’s a “sign off” lesson, which means I need to be able to do everything I learned last night to standards. I’m not anticipating too much of a problem.

I went to sleep around 6am, and unfortunately woke up to a fire alarm at about 1:20pm. I felt well rested when I woke up–not sure how I’ll be doing tonight.

So, Jonah and I stayed up until 2am last night. My plan was that I would be tired this afternoon, so I could sleep when I got to Vancouver, and then be awake for me 12:45am-4:45am sim session.

I woke up around 7am this morning, far earlier than I needed or wanted to. Jonah drove me to Denver and I got to my flight as they were boarding. My boarding pass made the machine beep loudly, which turned out to be a good thing. It meant that I’d been upgraded to 1st class. This was a vast improvement over the middle seat I did have in the back of the plane.

There was a loud, large, friendly man next to me, but fortunately he decided to watch The Day the Earth Stood still when they started playing it. I had no intention of watching it, but started second-guessing that decision when I noticed Jennifer Connelly. Still, she hasn’t been in anything good ever since Beautiful Mind, I don’t think.

I spent most of the flight going over callouts, flows and memory items in preparation for the sim. I ate some totally unidentifiable saladish goop and a turkey sandwich for lunch. They were unimpressive — thus far I’m inclined to think that Delta has better first class food than United.

After exiting the plane in Vancouver, we were funneled through some sort of strange walkway with beaches. I’m not sure if there were live sea creatures, or just placards talking about them. Eventually, we got to the arrivals lobby, and was astounded at the thousands of people waiting in line to clear customs. It looked like a 3-4 hour wait. After waiting about 10 minutes, I realized that I’m in uniform and that ought to count for something.

Sure enough, one of the people marshaling us pointed me to a crew line. “Uniformed Flight Crew or Diplomatic Passport Holders only,” said the line. I keep my pilot certificate in my passport so I don’t lose it, but forgot to take it out when I handed it to the immigration agent. She wanted to know who was pictured on the back. “Orville and Wilbur Wright,” I told her. She seemed content, then asked me why I was staying 16 days. Flight crew stays for 1 day at a time. That took some explaining, but she eventually let me through. This is good, otherwise I might still be there.

After checking into the hotel, I tried to take a nap, but gave up after an hour. So much for that plan. Instead, I asked at the front desk where the nearest grocery store was, and set out on a walk. The weather is typical northwest Pacific winter: temps just above freezing, overcast, a bit foggy, and drizzling precip.

I’m in Richmond, BC. Everything feels somewhat cramped. The streets are big and busy, and there’s not enough room on the sidewalks. I walked under a monorail track, which made me think of the Simpsons. I never saw an actual train on it, though. This area appears to be a sort of Chinatown. The predominant ethnicity is Asian—presumably Japanese, but I’m not good at figuring this out. There’s many Japanese restaurants, but some Dim Sum as well. There’s zillion Asian grocery stores, even a large Asian supermarket. Not as big as the one in the Phoenix cultural center, but still big. There’s lots of promising looking restaurants of all kinds.

I stopped at an ATM to get some funny looking money, even though I probably could just use my credit card. I withdrew 40 Canuckian dollars, which, on my bank statement is $32.39 US including the $1.50 CDN ATM fee. Not bad.

I found the normal (well, if a Canuck grocery could be called normal) grocery store. I have a microwave and a fridge in my room, so I considered what sorts of food I might could buy. I settled on some orange juice (My usual Tropicana, but the label’s a little different and it’s avec pulpe), and some cranberry juice.

The total was $20 which seems outrageously expensive, but I didn’t have a store discount card, and it’s not real money.

My change consisted of a bills with old guys on the front and hockey players on the back. Seriously. And some two-loonie coins, which are nifty. They’re a bit bulky, but not thick or heavy.

I came back to my room, and heard some of my classmates behind a door across the hall, so I stopped by to say hi. We hung out for a bit, then walked downstairs to the Irish Pub attached at to the hotel. Yup, that’s right, I’ve got an Irish Pub attached to my hotel. What more could a guy want? It’s called the Foggy Dew.

I had a pretty good lamb burger with some decent fries and.. water. Drinking water at an Irish Pub should be criminal, but I’ve got a sim session tonight, thus on duty, so I can’t drink.

It’s quarter to 10pm now, so I’m going to change clothes and head downstairs to meet my sim partner so we can practice callouts before we go into the actual sim. Instead of proofreading this post:)