Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

Well, my grandmother passed away Tuesday night.

I’m now completely out of grandparents.

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 called this afternoon to wish my mother a happy birthday. Ben answered the phone, and I asked if Mom were asleep. “Oh, you haven’t heard,” he said. “Mamama seems to have had another stroke.” She was sitting at the table eating Chinese after church when she slumped over. She’s at the hospital now, not really responding to anything but seems to be sleeping.

I’m glad I got to see her last weekend when I was back in Mobile for Ben’s graduation and Ian’s dedication.

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:)