Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

Landing is hard. At least, landing both safely and comfortably. It’s relatively easy to muscle a Cessna 172 on the ground in most any attitude and get it stopped, particularly on a 5000 foot runway, which is about 3500 more than I would need if I were any good.

D. rang up this afternoon and said, “We’ve got ceilings around 3,000 feet, let’s go do some pattern work.” It was pretty marginal VFR, but just fine for flying the pattern. If it deteriorates while you’re flying circles around the airport, it’s hard for much to go bad. I had to file a VFR flight plan by school rules since there was no dispatcher. It was pretty easy, I just hadn’t done it before. After taking off, we did somewhere between 8-10 touch and go’s, although we realized we’d both lost count when it came time to fill out my log book.

It was good. My imperfect patten flying resulted in all kinds of different approaches: slow, fast, low, high, and D. didn’t touch the controls after the first one, which means I wasn’t doing too badly. I think it was the second or third landing that was the worst. I came in fast and flared high, and D. just sat back and watched me drop the plane like a brick from at least 5 feet over the runway, about midfield. I made all the radio calls, and I’m sure the controller got some good amusement watching me land poorly. At one point there was another airman student with a really, really thick Middle eastern accent. The controller answered one of the guy’s calls, slightly mocking his accent. I gained 200 feet on the downwind because I was laughing so hard. I think his instructor decided to take him out of the pattern after the controller said, “Nine One Echo, you really need to make your turns closer to the airport, you’re way off the pattern.” I looked, and he seemed to be at LEAST 3 miles downwind past where he ought to have turned base. He didn’t re-enter the pattern.

One landing, although far from perfect, was at least acceptable. D. started being rather loud, which is out of character for him, “Yeah, that was it, just like that!!!” I did another three landings today, and none of them were quite that good. But I’ve got a pretty solid feel for what they ought to be like now. Another 100-200 of them, and I might have it down.

I keep forgetting to hold the nose off the ground. I’m so excited to have gotten the mains on the ground, I just keep letting the nose drop. And I’m having a hard time maintaining runway heading after takeoff with a crosswind. But I’ll get better, I just need lots more practice.

Which seems impossible to get. The weather’s been crap. It’s either too windy, too cloudy, too foggy or too thunderstormy.

Ground school is about to wrap past the point where I started, so hopefully I’ll get to stop going soon. This is good, because the interesting half seemed to be the half I already sat through.

My speed for pulling this week was 92%, and that’s not adjusted for taking our breaks at weird times one day (which cut my percentages in half for a few of my runs). My very last run on Friday I pulled 254 pieces in an hour in a department where the minimum standard is 220!

I think we’re getting used to having to wake up at 6:45 each morning, for me to drive to work and for Berck to bicycle to class. The bike shop is tuning his bike this week, so on Monday and Tuesday, I guess he’ll have to drop me off and pick me up from work. It’s half an hour’s drive to the warehouse, so he’ll have to drive for two hours each day doing that. Yesterday it was raining, so I dropped him off at ground school early and then picked him up (I get off at 1 pm on Fridays). He can’t fly in the rain yet.

We got a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator for Berck to practice on, and he’s been flying it pretty continually. It’s so detailed that it has nearly the exact plane he flies AND it has Norman’s airport. And you can even set it up for realtime daylight/night conditions and let it check the weather online and give you realtime weather conditions. And when he gets bored with that, he can switch to a biplane or a Boeing 777. Earlier today he was landing a pontoon plane on an Alaskan lake. His instructors say that Flight Simulator is one of the best ways to practice when he can’t actually be in a plane. Some flight schools even hook up some buttons and use it as their official simulator.

Today I went to the Norman farmer’s market (it’s Saturday mornings from 8 to 12) and got some fresh spinach and asparagus. I also got some potted herbs: English thyme, rosemary, parsley, hot oregano, and spicy and sweet basil. We’ll plant them in a planter on the patio…hopefully before a kid walks off with one.

I was craving some chocolate yesterday afternoon, so I made a recipe called something like “Chocolate Fragments.” You bake a layer of cookie in a pan and then cover it with melted chocolate. I started on the chocolate part while the cookie was baking, but by then I realized I was supposed to melt sweetened chocolate squares, and I didn’t have any. So I melted butter and cocoa and sugar instead. I didn’t know how much sugar to add, so I put in as much as the cocoa. This made the chocolate bittersweet (more bitter than sweet), but that’s exactly how I like it. I poured the concoction over the cookie and put in the freezer as directed. It didn’t harden, of course, because I didn’t have any paraffin. So instead of chocolate fragments, it’s more of a chocolate goop. Berck refuses to eat it, saying it’s far too bitter. So I get the whole thing to myself. Yum! The only thing is that it’s nearly impossible to eat without a spoon.

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.