Our Dumb Blog

Well, I didn’t sleep very well last night because I’ve gotten used to going to bed at 2am and waking up at noon. So I’m pretty tired after getting up at 0630 this morning, then bicycling 35 minutes, sitting in class for 3 hours, flying for an hour, then bicycling back.

Ground school was fairly interesting; I didn’t find myself falling asleep despite how tired I was. The teacher, I believe his name is Dale, is between 40 and 50 years and looks like he weighs over 400 pounds, which can be somewhat distracting at first. Although generally well spoken, he has some amusing grammatical quirks. For instance, something he might say when talking about someone who crashed, “The only thing he coulda did to get out of that was…” And he never says feet, at least I’ve never heard him say feet. Usually foot, every now and then foots. e.g., “Traffic pattern altitude is about 1000 foot AGL…” He finished up talking about aerodynamics, and then moved onto airport signage and the like which was far less interesting.

After that, I found Mike and we went flying. After I took an eternity to get the preflight done since I’d never really done it before, Mike had me do a bit of taxiing. I wouldn’t have figured it’s all that hard, really. The 172 has only two methods of steering, and they both involve the rudder pedals. Push the right pedal, the plane goes right and vice versa. The nose wheel is connected to the rudder cables by a sort of bungee system, which is hardly very precise, and at best turns the noise wheel 30 degrees right or left, a few seconds after you ask it to, provided you’re already moving. So you’ve got to stay ahead of the game. Fortunately, for tighter turns, you can also use either brake to turn in the direction you want by pressing on the tops of the rudder pedals.

Well, it turns out that the first bad thing is that everything else I’ve driven I steer with a mechanism in front of me. Right in front of me is a control yoke which, of course, is utterly useless on the ground (aside from trying to keep the plane from doing bad things in really gusty conditions) and of course, I know this. That doesn’t stop me from grabbing it and turning it to no avail.

Since there’s a monster propeller sitting in front of me turning clockwise, the plane does its best to turn left, both on the ground and in the sky. This takes some getting used to, because what it means is that the plane doesn’t turn to the right or the left the same way. The end result to having two different methods of turning the plane, one which requires stomping the associated rudder pedal to the floor and the other which requires delicately touching the tops of the pedals is that I had a fair amount of difficulty getting it to do what I wanted remotely gracefully. Mike kept insisting that I was doing just fine. “It’s not THAT big a deal if you don’t keep it on the line, and you’re a long way away from the grass…” Still, I thought that part would be easy! And the nice thing about a plane was that if I got it too far off, Mike could just straighten it out for me, at the same time helping get a feel for the right inputs.

Mike made all the appropriate radio calls, and then we taxied out the runway. He had me keeps my hands and feet on the controls while he took off so I could get a feel for what was going on. After we were barely established in a climb, and before I was really ready for it, Mike let go of the controls and had me climb out. It was quite windy, and rather gusty, up to 20 knots. He wouldn’t let me use the instruments, and just told me to keep the cowl level with the horizon. He had me make left traffic, then fly south and follow a river. I got the hang of turning, aileron input wasn’t much of a surprise, but getting the hang of the rudder was. The first few turns I made were shallow banked, and not very well coordinated since I didn’t really use much rudder input. After that I decided to go for a real turn, hauled off and banked rapidly to the right, and used a judicial amount of rudder, until I could feel it working. Curious about how I was doing, I glanced down at the turn coordinator even though Mike told me not to use the instruments. I was amazed that the ball was slammed against the left side of its little groove, and the bank was approximately appropriate for a standard turn. I’d thought I was a lot steeper than that, and certainly better coordinated. I stomped rather heartily on the right rudder pedal to try and coordinatet hings a bit. The ball didn’t move. It took what seemed like a lot of rudder to get it centered, and by then I was losing altitude rather rapidly. I discovered it took a lot more effort to keep the nose up in a turn than I expected. As I rolled out, Mike said, “My other private went for her first flight this morning… She rolled us right into a 60 degree turn, I was impressed.” That really surprised me, since it’s rather unnerving at first to be in a little box tilted over 60 degrees. Not wanting to be outdone, I turned into what I was sure was a fairly steep turn, glanced down and discovered that it needed a lot more rudder, which was fun, and then realized that I was losing altitude so pulled back and learned first hand what load factor and increased angle of attack in a turn is all about. That’s a really fun feeling, though I doubt it was more than a 1.5G turn. I was dismayed when I glanced at the attitude indicator and saw that I was in a 45 degree bank. It seemed like much more and I really would fall over. Part of it for me, too, is that I’ve spent a lot of time in airliners which seldom exceed 30 degrees of bank. After leveling out, I decided to regain lost altitude, and thought I’d try a climb at best rate of climb. Pulling back and firewalling the throttle was fun. I just kept pulling the nose up until the airspeed indicator hit 65 knots. It sunk a little below that, then Mike said I could try it a little steeper. Shortly after pulling back just a little more I got the stall warning and backed off a little. “Wanna try a stall?” Mike asked. Having never been in a stall,and seeing as how there was no time like the present, I said sure. Mike mumbled something about not usually doing stalls your first time up, then said he’d demonstrate one, then I could do it. We leveled off at 3500 feet, he reduced power to idle, and said we’d simulate a landing approach. He slowed to about 65 knots, and put out 30 degrees of flaps. After establishing a steady descent rather slowly, he pulled back on the yoke and stall warning started whining. It whined for about 5 seconds, the plane shuddered a little, then sank into a nose low attitude Mike left the nose low, applied power establishing a positive rate of climb, then gradually reduced flaps until the airplane was clean again. After reminding me not to try to use the ailerons to correct for the inevitable leftward falling (since this is a good way to find out what a spin is all about), he left it to me to do the same thing. I established a decent, slowed us down, extended the flaps, then pulled back. A whine, then the nose refused to climb higher and sunk a bit. I was a little disappointed at just how boring it was, so I kept pulling back until the plane was quite stalled, and mike said, “That’s about all the stall you’re going to get…” So I pushed the nose a little further down, went to full power and started climbing. “About like that, or should I have gained more airspeed before climbing out?” “No, that’s good, you want to climb as soon you’re able, and not lose anymore altitude than you need to.” I kept climbing, but it seemed rather sluggish. The airpseed indicator said about 45 knots, and the stall warning was starting to whine again. Confused, since I didn’t seem to be climbing that steeply, I let the nose down a bit until it stopped and looked inquisitively at Mike. “Put the flaps up,” he said. “Oh, right.” With 30 degrees of flaps, I wasn’t going to climb anywhere very fast.

Mike had me fly a crosswind heading for awhile, and let me experiment with the difference between crabbing and slipping, and I experienced the joys of trying to force a 172 to fly uncoordinated yet straight. It really doesn’t want to. Well, getting it in a slip is easy enough, it’s just that minor correction is tricky.

After it seemed like we’d only been up there for a short while, Mike called for a landing clearance, and we were cleared straight in. The runway was ahead of us, just off to the right. He had me establish the approach, which I did although I ended up a little low and fast, mostly because Mike told me to keep the numbers in the middle of the windscreen which seemed a bit low to me. In getting lower, I got a little faster, which is when Mike decided he’d better land. This is good, because I was getting a little worried that he was going to have me land it, and I didn’t really think that was such a great idea. I had a bit more frustration trying to keep the plane taxiing straight back to the tie-down area, where the lesson was over. After the lesson, he signed my logbook and said I was on the schedule tomorrow for noon was well, and that we’d do some steep turns, some more stalls, and he’d let me take off and possibly land. It hardly seemed like a 1.2 hour flight. I’ve been on 15 minute flights that seemed longer, although I did spend a very long time taxiing in circles, or trying to anyway.

I guess it’s quite a bit harder, and very much different than I thought it would be. It seems like it will take an eternity of instruction before I’ll feel comfortable enough to fly it on my own.

The bicycle riding thing is a lot of work, but I suppose it’s good for me.

Well, tomorrow’s another day, but I get to fly! Joanna left me a message saying she’d be getting off work at 530pm tonight. Overtime on her first day. I’m not sure if that’s good or not.

Bedtime is rapidly approaching, so this may be rather abbreviated…

Much to my disappointment, I didn’t fly on Friday, and still haven’t flown. The weather on Friday wasn’t very conducive to flying. I did end up preflighting a plane…. in the rain. Eventually the rain stopped, and it looked like we were going to go. But after getting a weather briefing, my instructor decided against it. It was fine directly above the field, but we were surrounded by convective activity and towing cumulus clouds, with lightning reported to the north. The wind was gusty and fluctuating wildly in direction. Several other instructors were trying to encourage Mike to take me up anyway, and just stay close to the field. Mike, conservatively, stuck to his decision, which I considered to be good rather than bad. I didn’t get to fly, but there’s no point in unnecessary risk, particularly considering this would be my first flight.

It turns out I’m Mike’s first private student; the rest of his couple of months experience as an instructor has been primarily commercial students with one instrument student. He was somewhat relieved to find out that I’ve got a solid background of aviation knowledge. After spending about an hour with me, he said he felt like he was talking to one of his commercial students. This is good, in that we can progress more rapidly to what I don’t know, but there’s always the risk that he might skip over something assuming that I know it. I pointed out that I don’t know what I don’t know, and he agreed that was definitely true.

I found out, for instance, that my experience in the aviation industry has provided me with a much more knowledge of what actually goes on at the airlines than most of the people aspiring to be an airline pilot seem to know.

Before we went of the basics of a preflight experience, Mike took me over to the pilot shop. It’s a little room in the flight school, which seems to be operated by a woman unassociated with the flight school. I assume she pays them rent, but the flight school is not itself interested in the sale of supplies, which is good as it keeps costs down. I’d already purchased the most expensive thing I needed, a headset. I took pride in observing that I managed to purchase mine for nearly $100 less than the pilot shop price. I asked her about it, and it turns out I bought mine at a price substantially lower than HER cost. Naturally, she was rather interested in where I’d purchased it.

Mike walked me around the little room, handing me things in a way that made the scene resemble Harry Potter’s acquiring of school supplies. At least I knew what most of the things I bought were, but most people probably wouldn’t. I bought a plotter, a fuel strainer, a copy of the FAR’s, a Dallas-Fort Worth sectional, a pilot’s information manual for the Cessna 172 (Essentially a generic POH for student use), a private pilot text book, and some other assorted things. I elected not to purchase a copy of the Airport Facilities Directory, since the current edition expires on April 15. I can make do without and just get the current version when it comes out, which should be shortly.

After hanging around for a couple of hours, discussing the weather and so on, Mike suggest I talk to Dale, the person teaching the private ground school class. It turns out that he was in such a place that it would be quite easy for me to take the last half of the class starting on Monday (tomorrow) and then go back and do the first half the next week. That will save me some time. The unfortunate thing is that private ground school is Mon-Fri 8:30am-Noon. That’s early.

Furthermore, Joanna is going to start working in a warehouse on Monday so that she can make some money while she hopes to get another job. It’s not a great job, and doesn’t pay very well, but some income will keep us from getting further in the hole. The bad thing is that we’ve only got one car, and we both need to be in two places at once. Arthur is pretty much out of the picture until I can spend some serious money on him.

Fortunately, the flight school is approximately 4 miles away. Too far to walk, but not terribly far to bicycle. In a rather un-Berckish endeavor, I went out to the bike shop on Friday, and after talking briefly to the salesperson decided on a bike. They only a had a smallish one available, but said they ordered a larger one for me and said I could pick it up after 1pm on Saturday. At 2pm on Saturday, they told me to come back at 5pm. At 5pm, they had a bike for me, though it wasn’t the color they said it would be. I didn’t really care, and bought it anyway. So, for $350, I now have a bike, a helmet, and a bike lock. My bike isn’t a true road bike, as those start at around $700, and I’m not about to spend that much on a bicycle. It’s classified as a hybrid, or “comfort” bike. Somewhere between a road bike and a mountain bike. It’s got skinnier tires, and geared much higher than mountain bikes tend to be. The seat hurts my butt, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should have gotten a 23″ instead of the 21″ I’ve got, but it’s a nice bike. It’s even got such goodies as a front suspension fork (a scaled down version of what you find on a motorcycle) and springs as well as a pneumatic shock under the seat. It rides quite smoothly.

It turns out that the highest gear is a little much for me on level ground, but it’s nice when going downhill. The lower gears are far lower than I seem to need.

I bicycled to the flight school and back today to see how long it would take me. It’s about a 35 minute ride there, and a 25 minute ride back. There’s about half a mile that’s pretty high traffic density, but the rest is relatively empty. It’s a lot of work for me, but wasn’t too bad. It was also about 50 degrees out, I’m sure it will be absolutely miserable when it heats up to 100. It’ll be good for me though.

So, I’ve got to leave here around 7:30 tomorrow morning, so I’m going to to try to fall asleep now…

We bought a bike for Berck yesterday, and today he practiced his trip to the flight school. He’ll have to bike because I’ll have the car at work in OK City. It took him an hour to get there and back, which isn’t bad at all (of course, there was hardly any traffic on an Easter afternoon). It took him 35 minutes to get there and 25 to get back (there’s a big hill he has to climb on the way there). He’s busy reading his pilot text books this evening.

I’ve been busy making shelves. I sanded and stained plywood pieces to go between the door and the couch. There’s no other wall space left… it’s all taken up with shelves or furniture!

A cold front came through Oklahoma yesterday, and temperatures plunged into the 50’s. Berck was worried about the pets (we keep all the windows open all the time still), especially when the Betta wouldn’t respond to food being put in his water. So Berck put the two of them in the bathroom and turned on the heat lamp and shut the door so they could keep warm.

The gerbil is so funny. He hates being caught (gerbils just do that) but then doesn’t mind being held, just poops a lot. But if you stick your hand down in his tub without trying to catch him, he has to come investigate. He’ll sniff your fingers and even put his little front paws on your hand. We think he’s bored because today he started climbing on top of his box-house and jumping. He can just barely reach the little ledge near the rim of the tub, so it may be just a matter of time before he escapes.

Tomorrow I start work and Berck begins ground school halfway through the course. The instructor seemed to think it didn’t matter if he began at the beginning or in the middle. And it’s forecast to be cloudy tomorrow, so he probably won’t get to fly yet.

Berck and I are now the proud “parents” of a new gerbil. It happened like this…

I was heading out the door to a job interview when I noticed a black and white cat crouched by the tire of the car parked next to the Miata. I recognized the cat; I often see him roaming the parking lots of our apartment complex. In fact, one evening when we had our door wide open to let the evening breeze in, I looked up to the see the cat all the way through the doorway, poking his nose around to see who was inside…though he dashed off when I stood up and greeted him with, “Hi, cat!”

But now as approached our car, the cat completely ignored me. He was intently staring at something emerging from behind the other side of the tire. A gerbil! I froze and thought to myself, I am about to witness a death. The thought of rescuing the gerbil occurred to me, but only briefly. Rodents are cheap and don’t live long, and this one’s owner had most likely already given it up for lost or dead. Still, I felt obligated to watch its death, not that I wanted to; it just seemed the proper respect to pay an animal I was declining to rescue.

But the cat didn’t pounce. And the gerbil didn’t try to run away. It simply walked to the other side of the tire, while the cat passed to the opposite side. I amused myself with the cartoonish idea that these two natural enemies were actually friends, out playing in the parking lot. I had to leave, and the two animals were continuing their protracted chase further under the car. So I came inside and informed Berck about my surreal encounter. He was standing, blinking, in the bathroom in his boxers, having just awoken.

When I returned from the job interview (for which I was hired on the spot, although it’s just a warehouse job that pays $8 an hour), I found Berck again in the bathroom, this time fully clothed. “Well, did you see your friend?” he asked. In a plastic storage tub by the front door was a little box and a towel with tell-tale rodent droppings on it. Out of the box poked a quivering, whisker covered, orange and white nose. “I glanced out the window and saw the cat playing with him,” Berck admitted. “The cat was poking, trying to make him run. I couldn’t let him toy with him until he killed him!”

I made somewhat of an effort to find the gerbil’s owner (he can’t have gone far…he certainly didn’t walk all the way from Mongolia, where gerbils originated). I went next door to the kleptomaniac kid’s house to ask first. Dad bought us some pepper plants at Wal-Mart when he was here helping us get settled the day after we arrived. We hadn’t gotten around to planting them yet, and they were still sitting in their little containers on the front porch. One afternoon there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to see a little kid with thick black hair and very crooked teeth standing there holding one of the peppers. Behind him, standing back on the sidewalk, a woman my age stood with her arms crossed and a very stern expression on her face.

The little boy took a deep breath, held out the pepper, stared at the ground, and said in a continuous stream, “I’m very sorry I saw this plant and I took it I don’t know why just for the heck of it I didn’t know it was just sitting out in the sun and I’m very sorry…” Here he offered the plant to me. I took it, trying not to laugh out loud, and thanked him. His mother’s expression melted into a smile, and they walked back to their apartment together.

The next day there was another knock, this time the boy’s mother asking to borrow a Phillip’s screwdriver to take her vacuum apart. I figured she meant it when she promised to bring it right back.

So she seemed the logical person to ask first about a missing gerbil. It’s a rather odd thing to knock on someone’s door and ask, “Have you lost a gerbil?” She hadn’t. I asked if she’d like a gerbil if I couldn’t find the owner. “Yes!” she said. I’m not sure which would be worse for the gerbil’s health: the black and white cat or her two boys. But gerbils are cheap and don’t live long anyway.

Next I asked a lady playing with her miniature daschunds in the grass across the street, but she didn’t have a gerbil either. I spotted a couple of Oriental kids playing in the parking lot, so I called to them, “Did you guys lose a gerbil!” They screeched to a halt and nodded. So I went inside and collected the gerbil’s box/nest. It’s a convenient way to pick him up, instead of chasing him around the tub with one’s hand. But when I went back outside, the kids were nowhere to be seen. I heard them, however, giggling and crouched behind an apartment’s porch fence. “Is this your gerbil?” I asked them. They giggled at me and peered into the box, jumping back in surprise to see a living creature inside. They giggled some more and moved closer to get a better look. I was getting the feeling they didn’t speak much English. “Is this your apartment?” Giggles. “What’s his name?” I asked, pointing to the gerbil.

“Minda!” said the little girl, poking herself in the chest. Oh, dear. About that time an Oriental man strolled around the corner. I asked him if the gerbil was his. He looked inside the box with much the same reaction as his kids had, except without the giggling.

“No,” he said. He ordered the kids to come with him in a guttural language. I wondered what he thought about the strange woman in the parking lot, pushing rodents to susceptible children. (“Wanna see my gerbil?”)

I asked a couple of other people in the parking lot, but by the time everyone began arriving home from work, I gave up. I didn’t expect many nine-to-fivers to keep gerbils as pets.

We fed the gerbil a crust of bread, which he held in his hands and chewed furiously for a few minutes. Berck held him and played with him for quite a while. “Do you want to keep him?” he asked. I don’t care. “Do you wanna keep him?” a few minutes later. No. “But you said you didn’t care!” I was getting the idea Berck wanted to keep him. He had found the gerbil FAQ and read it while I was away. “He needs gerbil food and wood shavings,” Berck informed me. “But I think he’s a she. Males are supposed to have two little bumps by their tails.”

So we took an evening trip to Petsmart. While we were there, we bought another betta. (It’s Berck’s gamma betta, my alpha betta.) So now we have two pets, though neither of them have names yet. I’m reluctant to name the gerbil; his…er, her owner could still turn up. But mom is mailing my late mouse Stalin’s cage to us. In the meantime, the gerbil seems quite happy to live in a plastic tub filled with wood shavings, though she tries from time to time to dig through the plastic, making a noise like a CD skipping.

I wonder if the black and white cat is out there searching for his friend…

Joanna says she hasn’t journaled much lately because I’ve been keeping her too busy. She’s been looking for a job, and when she’s not doing that, she’s shelving books, something that’s a bit more time consuming this time…

We decided to organize all our books according to the Library of Congress system for several reasons. While we can do okay without a “real” classification system right now, it will eventually become impossible to find anything and it’s much easier to start now than later. The library of congress catalog is fully searchable online, although the classification schedules are only available if you pay for them. (If anyone stumbles across an LC classification schedule that some library is throwing away because they’ve updated it we’d really like it…) Joanna had been arranging books according to her own little schedule, which is okay for one person but it means that I have to ask her if I can’t find something. (Not to mention that we had several disagreements about her system, one of them being that she separates “fiction” from “literature”. This makes sense if you’re talking about Tom Clancy and Melville, but isn’t always so clear cut. After all, when it came out, Catch-22 was considered pop fiction, and Mark Twain probably was as well. In her defence, the LoC did the same thing up until about 1960.)

I’ve nominated her to shelve books for a couple of reasons, the biggest one being that I used to work in a library and shelving books was one of my least favorite activities. I liked doing it at first, because it’s quiet, I’m all by myself and I’m doing the sort of mindless thing I rather enjoy. After awhile, though, the bottom shelves will really start to kill you. I got to where I just avoided shelving books altogether and moved from circulation to serials/cataloging.

And so I do the cataloging. About half of our books have the LoC call numbers in them already, and the rest I look up at the LoC website, and pencil the numbers on the books. Joanna says she’s gotten familiar enough with the system that she can shelve most things without looking at the call numbers.

In other, possibly more exciting news, I went by the flight school today to sign the contract, get oriented, that sort of thing. My instructor’s name is Michael D.. I didn’t see it spelled at first, and it’s pronounced Dorn. Michael Dorn played Worf on Star Trek, a fact that Michael D., surprisingly enough, didn’t know. He doesn’t look much like Worf, much shorter than me, heavy-set, and red hair. He’s from Wisconsin, and like many flight instructors, hasn’t been flying very long at all. Airman Flight school hires almost exclusively their own students as instructors, and Mike just finished and got hired a few months ago. He seems pretty quiet, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I’ll find out soon enough. I’m tentatively scheduled for my first flight on Friday at 2pm, depending on scheduling.

Mike wasn’t sure about the scheduling since he’s mostly instructed in C-152’s so far, but both of us are big enough guys that fitting in a 152 on a hot day would be uncomfortable enough, and with that amount of weight on a hot day, getting off the ground might be unnecessarily difficult. For those of you unfamiliar with light aircraft, that might give you a better idea of just how small the planes I’ll be flying are.

So he tentatively scheduled me for 2pm on Friday, subject to aircraft availability.

While I start flying on Friday, ground school doesn’t start until next Monday, 19 April. So while I’ll be flying a couple hours a day, I shouldn’t be terribly busy. And Mike said he prefers to sleep mornings as well, so I shouldn’t have to get up early until ground school:)