Our Dumb Blog

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.

In ground school today, we learned how to read a sectional (a pilot map), and spent the majority of class time on Airspace. I can’t think of anything we’re likely to cover that’s going to be both simultaneously as boring yet as important as the federal regulations about airspace. And we’re not finished yet, we’ve got more to cover tomorrow.

Airspace used to be a whole lot simpler. Back in the ’20s, it was all uncontrolled and the FAA has slowly been turning more and more airspace into controlled areas to deal with increased air traffic and make it safer for the airlines. The biggest problem these days, asside from sheer density of planes surrounding busy airports, is that there are planes that routinely fly at over 400 knots, and planes like the ones I fly, which cruise at about 100 knots. As recently as the 80’s, airspace was a lot simpler. These days, with the sole exception of a few areas out west, all airspace between 1,200 and 60,000 feet is controlled airspace. Granted, much of it is only Class E airspace, which is controlled, but not THAT controlled. You don’t have to ask permission to fly inside it, but it is controlled. For everything over 18,000 feet, pretty much the entire continental US is Class A airspace, which means you have to have filed an IFR flight plan to fly inside it. (Chances are that I may never fly a plane capable of 18,000 feet, so that one doesn’t really apply to me yet…) The area surrounding OUN (the field I’m learning to fly at), is surrounded by an area of Class D controlled airspace from the surface to 3,700 feet, and that’s surrounded by Class E airspace from 700 feet up to 18,000… That’s without mentioning that the northern borders of OUN’s airspace are actually in the Class C airspace belonging to OKC and Tinker AFB. It can all be rather confusing, because many different there’s different rules for all 5 classes of controlled airspace, and I have to know them all… Crossing the wrong boundary can cost a fine or an FAA suspension, or if I’m really careless, possibly my life. Some poor prospective student stumbled in to see what ground school was like, and didn’t take him too long to wander back out.

Flying was less of a surprise today than it was yesterday. Now that I’ve had my frustrations with taxiing, I’ve got that down and didn’t have any trouble… Mike made the radio calls again today, though I’m going to start doing it tomorrow. It’s frustrating because the way this particular plane is wired you can’t really hear the other pilot talking over the radio on the intercom, so I don’t have another pilot to listen to so I can get used to the radio calls. While I’m not so much worried about what I’ve got to say, I’m a lot more worried about being able to understand what the controller is saying.

I performed the take off and, well, it’s a whole lot harder to keep the plane going straight down the runway than it looks like. It wasn’t terribly pretty, but I got us off the ground in relative safety. I discovered what the beginnings of an accelerated stall are like while making a climbing turn in the traffic pattern. I didn’t stall, but I did get the beginnings of the warning horn, and when you’re 500 feet off the ground, that’s not a good thing. I knew the plane stalled at higher speeds in a bank, but at 75-80 knots I thought I was quite safe. Accelerated stalls are quite bad because they lead rapidly to spins. After flying out of the vicinity of the airport and climbing a bit, Mike had me work on steep turns. Mike did a rather poor job trying to demonstrate them, losing 250 feet and banking closer to 50 degrees, and then said, “Uh, just do what I tell you instead of what I do.” My first try, I made a circle in a 60 degree bank instead of 45, because I misread the attitude indicator. Whoops. I thought it looked rather steep, but it sure was fun. I also discovered what the beginnings of a spiral dive are like… I let the nose drop too much on roll in, but kept banking while trying to correct. Since I ended up banking to 60 degrees and kept pulling back, that actually kept tightening the turn and increasing my descent rather than helping things out at all. After a couple of tries, I seemed to do okay with steep turns. To the left, they don’t seem to require much rudder at all, but all sorts of rudder is needed to the right. Left turns are also easier since I’m on that side of the plane and have a better view of what’s going on.

After turns, it was time to fly back to the field. While heading toward David Perry, a little airport close to Norman, we were about to call OUN tower and ask for landing clearance when we heard someone, “…over David perry, requesting landing clearance.” We couldn’t see them at all. It was hazy, and spotting traffic was difficult. We requested clearance, and were told to follow the other Cessna in, but we couldn’t see it. So we asked where she was, and she was supposedly right out over the river, which was a bit in front of us. Then tower asked the other Cessna to make S turns to slow down for a Cherokee. The Cherokee had been complaining that he couldn’t find any of the traffic he was supposed to follow in, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Finally, we saw the Cessna on final, asked the tower if the Cessna that jsut landed was the one we were supposed to follow. She affirmed, and repeated that we were clear to land. I had us stabilized in the approach, though a little fast. No problem since I was only at 20 degrees of flaps. Added the last 10, which slowed us down a bit much, so I added some power to compensate. I was in a noticeable crab, since the wind a 6 knot crosswind. I tried to sideslip instead as we got closer, but that then got a little off course. It’s a little plane and a big runway, and Mike wasn’t complaining (He had his hands on the controls since it was my first landing, but I was flying) so I kept at it. I pulled the power and started to level out, but the left wing was coming up. About then Mike could tell I was pretty much in over my head, so he applied judicious amounts of right rudder and flared. The downwind wheel hit the pavement first and bounced off, which actually helped straighten us out and then the plane landed the rest of the way, and I taxied back to the ramp. Considering it was my first landing, it wasn’t half bad. I get to fly the landings from here on out as best I can…

While we were landing, the controller was busy yelling at someone for cutting off another plane, who he couldn’t see either. The weather service kept insisting 10 miles visibility, but it was really hazy. Being a controller at this airport has got to be a rough job. It’s pretty busy during the day, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that something like 90% of the traffic is students. Today, I heard someone request a touch and go, to which she responded, “Denied, the pattern is too full, state your intentions.” A rather hesitant, “uhh… I’ll just hang out here for awhile…” in response.

My butt is really sore from all this bicycling. I’m flying tomorrow at 3pm, which probably means I’ll hang out at the flight school studying for 3 hours rather than bicycle an extra 8 miles…