Garmin Lovin’

Today was the first time I really stretched my legs and used my new Garmin 396 as more than just a pointer in the general direction of my destination. The Weather-out-the-Window&trade was not exactly what the Chamber of Commerce would be looking for when looking for examples to include in the brochure, but it wasn’t horrible either. The morning was forecast to be warm and muggy with a 9000′ overcast, and the after was forecast to be warmer and muggier with a 9000′ forecast. Or something like that. Not pretty, periods of light rain, but flyable.

I’ve noticed that I’ve become very selective about the weather that I will fly in. To a large degree that has had more to do with concern over the conditions later in the day that the ambient weather at departure time. Once away from my PC and internet connection, it gets exponentially harder to acquire weather data. Forecasts are nothing more than slightly informed rumors, but they’re all we have to use in our decision making. The fear has always been that a forecast for light winds and 9000′ overcast could end up being horribly wrong and I’d find myself faced with much worse conditions.

The Garmin 396 helps with that with the weather reports that it downloads from the XM radio satellites. More on that later. For now, the plan was to fly to Portsmouth Ohio for a flight in Wingman Ted’s RV-9A. I’ve ridden in it before, of course, but this time I was more interested in getting some stick time. As I pursue my futile pass time of trying to decide what I would like to have should I ever decide to upgrade to a more weather capable airplane, I have developed quite a bit of curiosity regarding the RV-9A. It has some notable benefits over the RV-6:

– Nosewheel and (much!) larger rudder allow for flying in higher wind conditions
– Longer wing provides more stability, which is desirable in an instrument platform
– Nosewheel and longer, more forgiving wing would allow the opportunity for real flying lessons for Co-pilot Egg, should she ever express an interest in that
– Good IFR equipment would already be bought and installed in any example that I would consider buying. It would cost $15,000 – $20,000 to bring Papa Golf up to that technical standard, and even then I don’t think I’d do it because of the stability issue

Possible detriments to the RV-9A:

– Longer, more forgiving wing would make it handle like a truck
– Nosewheel would cause the manly men who are capable of flying a tailwheel airplane to deride my abilities and openly question my studliness

It was the former of those points that I hoped to address by flying Ted’s plane.

As mentioned, the weather wasn’t that great, but it was only going to get worse as the heat index rose throughout the day. Papa and I were climbing out of Bolton by 0830. You can see that we weren’t flying through what you would call scintillating weather; it was really kind of ugly:

I made a fairly decent landing, although I wasn’t too impressed with my radio work in the way into Portsmouth. I got all muddle-mouthed on my initial call and tripped heavily over the words “straight in approach,” probably because I very rarely make such an approach. It’s one of those evangelical pilot issues – some people hate them, others don’t see the big fuss. I had been monitoring the CTAF frequency for miles and miles, though, and not heard a single other airplane at Portsmouth all morning. That does not guarantee that there’s no one there, of course, but it’s certainly a strong hint that I might have the place to myself. I decided that if anyone chirped up on the radio, it would be a simple matter to just transition into a right crosswind, downwind, and base to runway 18.

That plan was going swimmingly right up until I made my last radio call on short final. The radio came alive with “Papa Golf, I’m watching.”

Oooooookkkkayyyyyy.

Who’s watching? The FAA? Some guy in a Lear Jet getting ready to takeoff in the opposite direction?

I didn’t see anyone, though, so I kept going. It was a relatively good landing, but any time I down completely grease one in such light wind conditions I feel like Tiger Woods getting a bogey on a 480 yd Par 5. In other words, I feel like I missed an opportunity.

Ted met me at the airplane with his belt-holstered aviation transceiver. Ah, mystery solved. After a few morning pleasantries, we jumped into his plane. Me in the left seat. The position of honor! Sweet!

Ted explained his flying techniques for protecting the nosewheel on takeoff and landing. The Van’s nosewheels have either a well- or un-deserved reputation for having a weak, crumple-prone design. It’s another one of those religious issues to RV pilots and I know enough to stay out of discussions on it. Which is a good thing, actually, since I have absolutely no direct knowledge on the topic. You’d think that a lack of knowledge would keep me from expressing an opinion on any topic, but sadly such is not always the case. In any event, I figure it’s Ted’s plane and I’ll fly it the way he wants me to. Or try, anyway. It turns out to be one of those things you do by feel, and I wasn’t feeling it. I imagine that, as with many other things, comes with practice.

What I determined about the flying qualities was pretty much as I would have guessed. When compared to the nimble RV-6, the RV-9A feels ponderous in both pitch and roll. It’s not that it requires more stick movement exactly, it’s more that it requires more effort to move the stick and the resulting roll or pitch rate is much slower than in the -6. This is by design, of course, and is not to be considered a demerit. Quite the contrary, in fact. These are the qualities that make it a better touring and instrument airplane. Well, that and the wider, more comfortable cockpit.

Ted set all of the fancy computerized gadgetry up for me to fly the GPS approach back into Portsmouth. That seems like a bit of a trade-off. There was quite a flurry of button pushing and knob turning, but once all of that was done it was a simple matter indeed to fly the approach. Just follow the lines on the screen and you will find the airport. It takes awhile to decode exactly what you’re looking at, but this too is simply a matter of familiarity. I’m sure I’d get used to it quickly. It’s bound to be safer than the attitude indicator, directional gyro, and CDI that I’m used to. Perhaps it’s overkill, though. I think I could get by with a good HSI when it comes right down to it. No reason to do so, though, since the glass stuff is becoming more affordable that precision, complex mechanical instruments.

I hamfisted my way through a couple of landings where I attempted to prove those detractors of the ostensibly weak Van’s nosewheel wrong by repeatedly slapping Ted’s against the runway, but if I’m remembering correctly even my worst landing didn’t result in the bouncing that happens so commonly when I botch a landing in the -6. Hopefully Ted had his eyes open and can chime in with his observations on that topic.

After wolfing down a ham and cheese omelet at the airport diner, it was time to head home. The weather hadn’t improved, nor had it significantly deteriorated. There was some rain in the area though. Here’s an over-the-shoulder shot of Portsmouth as I was climbing out to the north:

Ick.

I pointed the Garmin at Bolton and zoomed out to take a look at the weather:

(You can click on these pictures to see them larger; that will probably help as I talk about them)

You can see a few interesting things in the picture above. First, that little airplane icon in the bottom center of the screen is me. The purple line running vertically from the little airplane icon up to the top of the map is the direct route to Bolton. It’s hard to see, but the ‘KTZR’ just under the purple arrow at the top is Bolton.

You can also see inverted pale blue pyramids at the airports labeled KILN (Wilmington), KLCK (Rickenbacker AFB), and a collection of others. Light blue means VFR, or in other words, good (enough) weather conditions. Oddly enough, Garmin chose the color Green for marginal conditions. Yellow and Red indicate increasingly crappy conditions that are unsuitable for a VFR pilot/airplane such as me/Papa. The collection of light blue pyramids indicated that the general conditions for a broad area around me were still adequate for my immediate needs.

Off to the east and northeast you can see radar returns. That means rain. Light green rain is reportedly often still flyable if the clouds are high enough, but as none of it was in my direct path there was no reason to test those assertions.

Finally, you can see some hatched purple lines forming irregular boxes. Those lines surround MOAs, or Military Operating Areas. Those are legal to fly through, but it’s not well advised to do so without first contacting air traffic control to see if they’re being used. The box that I would be flying through has a floor of 5,000′ and I would be down at 3,500′, so that was moot. I’m familiar with those altitudes from previous experience, but the 396 could have told me the altitude restrictions quite easily had I needed it to.

Even though the blue pyramid at Bolton indicated generally adequate conditions, a more detailed report is most assuredly desirable. For example, while the conditions for visibility and ceiling might be within limits, a 30 knot wind would preclude my landing there, but would not trigger a change to a green pyramid. Therefore, I really appreciate the ability to find a more specific report:

Wind from the south at 4 knots, clear skies, and at least 10 miles visibility.

Perfect!

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the conditions weren’t as good as this. Let’s pretend that instead of clear and 10, I found a report for a 3,000′ ceiling and 3 miles visibility. That’s right on the very edge of VFR requirements, but still suitable. The thing is, though, that three miles visibility is not very much, particularly when the clouds force you to stay down an 2,500′. In Ohio, that’s only 1,500′ above the ground, and the view from that low isn’t all that great, especially if flying into thick haze. The GPS could guide me to the airport, but I wouldn’t see it until the last second and would face a scramble to get into the proper position for landing.

There’s a better way. These days, instrument approach diagrams (‘plates’ in the vernacular) are available free on the internet. If you look at this approach plate for Bolton, you will see the data that will enable a more accurate approach:

The two red circles mark the same point. That point is a waypoint named BOUTN. BOUTN is simply a defined point in space; there is nothing on the ground that defines BOUTN. It is also way is called an Initial Approach Fix. What that means is that it is a great waypoint to use as the first target when approaching the airport.

The green circle surrounds Bolton. The black line running from BOUTN to the green circle is the approach path. If you stay on that path, you will eventually arrive at the runway. You may not see it, mind you, but you will reach it.

The blue line is the flight path that I would take to reach BOUTN.

How did I figure that out? Well, I told the 396 to load the ILS 4 approach into Bolton. What that caused it to do was display BOUTN on the screen and set it as my next waypoint to fly to:

I didn’t want to fly directly to BOUTN, though. What I really wanted to do was fly to a spot about two miles further away from the airport so I would have time to make the turn onto a course that would take me on a straight line through BOUTN to the end of runway four. I did that by telling the 396 that I would be receiving ATC vectors to that line. That was a fib, of course, but oddly enough I feel no compunction about lying to inanimate objects. It’s an ethical lapse to be sure, but I’ve learned to live with it. Anyway, once I could see the extended line from BOUTN and could compare it to my present course, it was a simple matter to eyeball an appropriate heading that would allow me to intercept the inbound course a few miles outside of BOUTN. I told the 396 that a 345&deg heading was what I wanted, and it courteously provided me with a purple pentagon at the top of the screen to follow.

Here you can see me following the 345&deg heading bug, and you can see the diagonal yellow line pointing to a northeast heading:

When I am about to intersect that course line, the dark yellow segment of the diagonal line will align with the rest of the indicator line. When that happens, all I have to do is turn to the right to rotate the line to the vertical. It looks like this:

That picture shows that I am just to the right of the intended course. The BOUTN – RW04 tells me that I am between BOUTN and the end of the runway, and that I am 3.7 miles away from the runway. Here’s what that looks like out the window:

If that’s the view from 3.7 miles away, you can see why only three miles of visibility would make this much harder. Even that close, I would not be able to see the runway. Using this method, though, once I did see the runway, I would be well positioned to land. This would work even if I was going to land in the opposite direction on runway 22. In fact, that’s what happened today. I called the tower when I was still outside of BOUTN to let him know that I was eight miles southwest and inbound for landing. He replied by asking if I was better positioned for a left or right pattern since he didn’t know that I was in a position that would allow for either. Note that I would have avoided this position entirely if I had heard any traffic departing on 22.

Here’s a hint: when the tower asks you if you want left or right, there is only one wrong choice. I hear this all the time and it really irritates the controller. That wrong answer is “whatever is best for you.” If the controller had a preference, he would already have assigned it to you.

Just make a decision and tell him.

I chose left.

It was a tad gusty in the flare, but still a reasonably good landing.

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FCF

‘FCF’ is an acronym (ok, you probably recognized that part on your own) for Functional Check Flight. It’s exactly what it sounds like: you perform some maintenance on the airplane, then you go flying to make sure all of the parts stay attached.

Yesterday’s FCF was intended to test two things. First, I replace the broken tach cable. If I was keeping a list of “Things That Are Easier to Remove Than They Are to Replace,” tach cables would now be added. It took a few minutes to wrestle it into place, a few more minutes to wrestle it out of place, and yet more minutes to wrestle it into the correct place. There’s some routing to be done to correctly wind the cable through some of the other stuff hanging around at the back of the engine. Once the cable is correctly positioned, there’s nothing left to do but screw the ferrule caps (Warning: non-technical, just-made-up part description) into place. That would be easy of not for the aforementioned other engine bits being in the way. Seriously, I don’t know why I don’t just yank out the vacuum pump and gyros – I don’t use them.

Once the tach cable was done, I removed the temporary cigarette lighter power cord that I had been using to deliver pure 12 VDC to the Garmin 396 and replaced it with a cord that I could wire directly to ship’s power. That was a very simple task. In fact, both of these jobs were very easy and very low risk, but I would not have been able to do either of them myself if I didn’t have an Experimental certificate for the plane. Total cost was $26.50 for the tach cable, and an unconscionable $28.95 for the Garmin power cord. Had I required an A&P to do the work, the price of the cables would have had a mark-up and labor costs would have added at least $150.

Just saying.

Airnav.com indicated that the lowest price fuel within a reasonable distance was at Urbana. I was able to convince the snooty, high-fallutin’ new GPS to point me in that general direction after a few minutes of fumbling around with the slightly different button/menu stuff on the 396. Once we had been in the air for a few minutes, the GPS started displaying METAR and TAF weather information. Without even being asked! And without prolonged messing around with recalcitrant equipment. I am VERY happy with the Garmin 396!

I was also very happy with both of my landings. They were both CAG (made up acronym alert!) landings: Calm Air Greasers. That was a bit of a relief after my last flight where everything just felt wrong. Confidence now restored in both aircraft and pilot, I’m looking forward to some good flying this weekend.

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A routine flight? There’s no such thing.

The Weather-out-the-Window™ this morning looked fantastic. That was a bit of a relief – I had been out at a party last night and unable to check the forecast. Just to make sure I didn’t leave it too late to make arrangements for flying, I texted Co-pilot Rick to see if he could check the forecast. He responded with a five page text containing the forecast, but it was raw data rather than the human readable form that I can get from the internet.

Since the internet briefing sites are more than happy to decode the FAA gibberish for me, I have gotten out of the habit of reading the original format. I was too embarrassed to ask for a plain text report, besides which it would have entailed receiving a ten page text. Given that each page rings the phone as it arrives, I thought it might be rude to be the guy whose phone won’t stop ringing. I was able to read enough of the salient points to see that at least the morning was predicted to be nice. If I was reading it correctly, that is, which is why it was a relief to see a sunny sky and calm air out the window at 0630 this morning.

Just so you can more easily understand the challenge, here is the raw format:

TAF KCMH 041132Z 0412/0512 27005KT P6SM SCT250
FM041800 24007KT P6SM BKN120
FM050000 14005KT P6SM VCSH BKN050
FM050800 VRB03KT P6SM VCSH SCT035 OVC050

This is the decoded format that I apparently have become overly dependent on:

Columbus OH (Port Columbus Intl) [KCMH] terminal forecast
issued on the 4th at 7:32am EDT (1132Z), valid from the 4th at 8am EDT (12Z) through the 5th at 8am EDT (12Z)

8am EDT (12Z) wind 270° at 5 knots, visibility greater than 6 miles, 25,000 feet scattered

2:00pm EDT (1800Z) wind 240° at 7 knots, visibility greater than 6 miles, 12,000 feet broken

8:00pm EDT (0000Z) wind 140° at 5 knots, visibility greater than 6 miles, showers in the vicinity, 5,000 feet broken

4:00am EDT (0800Z) wind variable at 3 knots, visibility greater than 6 miles, showers in the vicinity, 3,500 feet scattered, 5,000 feet overcast.

Quite a difference, don’t you think? Actually, I can usually still read the encoded version fairly well, but the tiny screen of my phone made it difficult. And I’m not completely absolving Samuel Adams and his diabolically smooth and light Summer Ale of a share of the blame either. Ok, I admit it: it was the Sam Adams.

As we all know, though, the Weather-out-the-Window™ forecast only provides an initial measure of the flyability of the day and further research is required. It didn’t take long to learn that the expectations for the afternoon weren’t nearly as rosy. In fact, those municipalities that stood on tradition and decided to have their fireworks displays on the 4th are likely to be disappointed. When faced with a nice morning but a questionable afternoon, the default decision is a routine breakfast flight to Urbana.

Not flying at all wasn’t a viable option since Papa needs fuel and the local airports charging less that $4 per gallon are becoming increasingly scarce. Urbana was, in fact, one of the few remaining with the lower priced fuel, and that is more than likely not going to be the case for much longer. Next time they buy fuel, they too will probably be north of $4.00. I figured I’d better get the cheap stuff while the getting was good. Since a routine food and fuel flight isn’t all that exciting anymore, Rick and I thought that we’d get it done early and then take the kayaks out for a little spin when we got back.

On the way out the door, I briefly considered grabbing my camera as required by the “Never Fly Without a Camera” rule. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one – you can probably already predict where I’m going with this.) I didn’t. After all, I’ve hauled that camera back and forth to Urbana a gazillion times without ever using it. Why lug it along just for breakfast and fuel??

As I was opening the hangar door, I was surprised to see that I have a new hangar frog! I guess he never heard the tragic news about what happened to the last hangar frog that tried to live in hangar H5. Too bad I didn’t have my camera to commemorate his arrival. Well, actually, I guess it would be more accurate to say that I needed a picture of him before I accidentally run over him like I did his predecessor.

I did the preflight and we were off the ground at about 0845 and enjoying a smooth ride over to Urbana, unopposed by any kind of wind. I throttled back a little bit to make a good 140 knots, there being no real reason to spend the fuel to get there any quicker than that. When we were 15 or so miles out, we heard a pilot call arrival at Urbana:

“North American, overhead pattern to left traffic runway 2.”

That was helpful – when the winds are calm and either direction on the runway is equally valid, it’s nice to have someone already there to establish the runway to use. We were curious about what type of ‘North American’ airplane it was, though. The options run from a Navion to T-6 Texan to P-51 Mustang and all the way up to a B-25 Mitchell or an F-86 Sabre. The specific type doesn’t really matter in one aspect, though: having any one of those types at the airport would be just the reason that I made the “Never Fly Without a Camera” rule in the first place. Still, I’ve seen all of them before. While I was a little frustrated to be sans camera, it wasn’t all that horrible. Well, truth be told I’d be furious if it was an F-86, but that odds of that were very, very small.

Traffic was light at Urbana and we didn’t hear another arrival until a Skyhawk checked in:

“Skyhawk [insert random numbers here – I don’t remember them] is five miles south for a straight-in to runway 2.”

As we were a little more than six miles south east ourselves at that moment, I thought I ought to go ahead and let him know that we were about the same distance away as he was and that we would be crossing over the runway to make left traffic to the same runway. He replied that he would forego the straight-in approach and also cross over to a left downwind. In theory that made the whole thing easier, but it didn’t turn out that way.

The first thing I do when I find myself to be equidistant to the airport with a plane like a Skyhawk is speed up. It does neither of us any good to arrive at the same time, so I just throw a little more coal on the fire and get there before him. I figured there was no way he was going to keep up with 150 knots, and actually told Rick that I’d eat my hat if we didn’t easily get there first, but with one caveat: he didn’t sound all that confident on the radio and I figured there was some chance that he didn’t really know how far he was from the airport. Most people have GPS now and are therefore very aware of their position relative to the airport, but there are still some guys out there that either don’t have a GPS or never learned how to use the one in the plane they fly.

We crossed over the runway and made the left turn to downwind and reported such on the radio:

“Four Six Six Papa Golf is midfield left downwind runway 2.”

The next transmission from the Skyhawk was a stunner:

“But I’m midfield downwind too!”

As you can imagine, this revelation caused no small degree of consternation in the Papa Golf command center!

“Do you see him?”

“How could he have gotten here before us?”

“I don’t see him and he doesn’t see us – we’d better get out of here.”

I started a turn to the north and transmitted that we’d be making a big 360 for spacing and would re-enter the downwind after the Skyhawk had gotten to base leg. This wasn’t the most comfortable thing to do because the Skyhawk pilots often fly very, very wide patterns and if this guy was way, way out on a downwind, we’d be turning right into him. He had said he was at pattern altitude, though, so I climbed us up a few hundred feet so we’d hopefully go over him if he was as far out as we were. By the time we were through the circle, we still couldn’t see him and he had not yet called a base turn. He did have one important thing to report, though:

“Skyhawk [whatever] is midfield crosswind to the left downwind, runway 2.”

Ah, so he wasn’t on the downwind at all! And sure enough, now that we knew where to look, there he was still a mile or so south of us.

Sigh. Both of us had heard him report that was was midfield downwind. He can only have meant that he was midfield downwind on the other side of the airport (if you were going to land in the opposite direction), but that doesn’t make any sense. Either way, I would have been better off continuing on my downwind but there had been no way to know that. Although, when you consider how often high wing versus low wing mid-air incidents occur, I’d probably make the same decision again.

Dealing with that distraction led to me turning base to final with more altitude and air speed to get rid of than usual. There was no headwind to help reduce our ground speed as we were coming down final, either. The whole mess ended up with a big embarrassing bounce on landing. The recovery from that bounce was, if I do say so myself, pretty good, but that absolves nothing. To make it worse, there was no shot at all of making the face-saving first turn-off.

We taxied in the long way and parked in my favorite spot right in front of the diner.

It was closed.

Drat. Should have seen that coming. July 4th and all that.

On the plus side, we were able to see the what kind of North American we had heard on the radio was. It was a T-6.

Having failed to get food, there was nothing left to do but taxi over to the pumps and get the fuel Papa needed. As I was getting ready to pump the gas, a couple of guys came flying over in a golf cart.

“Oh great, they aren’t selling gas today either,” I thought to myself.

Rick was over at the plane removing the fuel caps so appeared to the head golf cart dude to be the PIC:

“Hey, is this your plane?”

Rick pointed him in my direction.

“Now what? He wants to rag on me about that debacle of a landing?”

Nope, that’s not what he wanted. Phew!

It turns out that he knows Papa’s builder and has quite a few hours in the plane himself. He just wanted to see the plane again. Cool! He also mentioned that food was available at a car show that just happened to be going on adjacent to the airport, and he’d be happy to give us a ride over there. I moved Papa back down the ramp to an appropriate parking spot, and as I was buttoning up the canopy and dropping a chock down by the wheel, I heard him on his cell phone:

“Hey, guess where I am. I’m sitting in front of your old airplane!”

He had called the builder to tell him that Papa was at Urbana. Then he handed me the phone. It turns out that the builder is at Urbana quite often doing volunteer work on a B-17 that’s being restored there. He seemed interested in seeing Papa again, so I promised I’d give him a call next time I’m going to be there. And not just because he told me that he found the original plans for the airplane and has been saving them for me, either. Nope, it’s just that I’m a nice guy. That’s my story, anyway.

Rick and I made our way over to the car show by way of the B-17 hangar. They’re working on the fuselage right now and I think I saw a huge completed rudder sitting off in a corner. Things were pretty cramped and it left me wondering where they’re going to find the room to rebuild those huge wings.

The car show looked like it was going to be very well attended. Even as early as we were there, cars were pouring in. Many of them were spectacular. I swear, if I wasn’t a plane guy I’d be a car guy. I was particularly impressed with the very, very old 1900’s models. It amazes me that they can keep them running at all, and it’s even more impressive that they look just like they had come from the show room yesterday.

Gee, wouldn’t some pictures be nice right around now?

So, we’re standing at the food trailer when I see a car pull in with a dog in the back seat. That in itself wouldn’t be blog-worthy, of course. What’s amazing is that the dog in question was very nearly an identical twin to Brave Sir Hogarth! This I had to see! I’m not normally the walk-up-to-a-stranger kind of guy, but in this case I willingly made an exception. The closer I got to the dog, the more astonished I was by his similarity to Hogarth. After chatting with the owner for awhile and ascertaining that her dog (Sully) had gobs of similar traits to Hogarth, I asked how old he was. Four years old. Hogarth is nine. No direct relationship then, but you wouldn’t think it to look at them. No one at home would believe me. And I had no camera to prove it. Argh!

But… did I mention that Rick had brought his camera? Well, he did, and I rushed back to find him because I simply had to have photographic evidence to take home. Here are a couple of pictures of Sully:

Compare to Brave Sir:

Very handsome lads, the both of them. In my opinion, anyway.

And yeah, I’ve been holding out on you with the whole Rick brought his camera thing. Why? Well, because it was funnier this way. I reserve that right.

Here’s a picture of the hangar frog:

And here’s the T-6:

And even a picture of the car show:

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Flying across generations

I caught the flying bug early in life, but I’m not sure where exactly it came from. To the best of my knowledge, there wasn’t anyone in my family tree that was an aviator. My dad was horse guy and I have memories of him departing for a weekend now and then with my grandfather to attend events with intriguing names like The Little Brown Jug.

Others inherited their interest in airplanes from their parents or other members of their family. This is something that I hope happens with Co-pilot Egg, but it’s not something that can be forced. It’s also often something that won’t be known until much later in her life. Their lives are so very full of new and different things and at least in the case of Egg, flying is mundane. She’s never known a time in her life when I wasn’t a pilot.

She is by no means unique in this. A Twitter buddy posted a link to a very moving story about a father/son flying relationship. You really should read the whole thing (here), but here’s a sample to get you started:

My earliest memories are of pointing to the sky, having detected the far-off drone of a piston engine. Dad had been a pilot since before I was born. He flew a pea-green Cessna 172 from Rialto Municipal in Southern California. I can remember with crystal clarity those lazy Saturday afternoons at the airport, helping him push back the big hangar doors and leaning my small weight against the airplane’s struts as he pulled it into the sun.

I read him checklists, learning words like “aileron,” “magnetos,” and “pitot” that no one else in my first-grade class knew.

Egg could also describe the function of the flaps, rudder, and elevator should it ever come up in casual conversation. She knows nothing of these “struts,” though. Those are for sissies.

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Having it both ways

There are three ways of looking at Fathers Day. First, you can view it as Mothers Day, but without the flowers. A day of breakfast in bed, relaxation instead of the normal day-to-day chores, and a nice brunch or dinner out. Or, you can view it as a day to spend with your children doing things together. Finally, you can take the opposite approach and spend some time doing something with your own dad. I figured if I played it just right, I could have at least two out of three of those.

The weather for today was forecast to be flyable, albeit fairly hot and humid at a presumptive 86 degrees and 50+% humidity in the afternoon. Rather than that being a problem, that actually played into my plan. Co-pilot Egg would not want to get up early and make breakfast for me (and for good reason: she had her wisdom teeth out yesterday) or pursue any type of activity, but might be up for a late afternoon movie. My dad, on the other hand, is an early riser like I am. With the pieces lined up like that, the germ of a plan started to develop in my head. I could fly out to the farm in the early-ish morning while it was still cool and calm to pick him up and fly out somewhere for brunch, then return home for the afternoon with Egg.

The challenge then was to find someplace to fly to. Given that I’m physically incapable of planning or deliberately flying a route that involves a lot of backtracking and that the farm is located on the western edge of Ohio, none of the Ohio restaurant airports that I know of really fit the bill. By being limited to flying only southwest, west, or northwest, it looked like I’d have to find someplace in Indiana. After spending quite a bit of time hunting around the internet for just the right place, I relaxed my search constraints and decided to allow southerly and northerly destinations as well.

Oxford, OH (KOXD) fit the bill. While there is no restaurant on the airport, I had been there once before and knew that the FBO guy will provide a ride into town and a later pick-up for the ride back to the airport. Oxford is only 40nm from Darke Co. airport (KVES) where I would be picking up my passenger, so if the return flight was uncomfortably hot & bumpy it would at least have the benefit of being brief. And without Co-pilot Rick along, I’d have to fly the hot & bumpy leg myself. Best to minimize it then, right?

The only outstanding issue was where to eat in Oxford. The last time I was there, I ate at a nice Mexican place. I didn’t figure that would be a good choice for today, though. Google told me that there is a Bob Evans in Oxford, so I decided that I’d use that as a fall back plan if we couldn’t find something more interesting. There was a severe down side to Bob Evans, though, and that was its location. It was out on the fringes of town. If the FBO guy dropped us there, it would be a very long walk into the town. I wanted to walk around the campus too – it’s very scenic. Since Bob’s was only the secondary target, though, I thought it was OK to take the chance.

As I was flying out to the farm, I listened to the Unicom on 122.8 and counted the number of occurrences of the poor radio practices I wrote about here. I had to give up when I ran out of fingers and thumbs to count on. The radio was really hopping with traffic from all of the normal 122.8 players but there was one in particular that I’ve never heard before that seemed to be attracting quite a bit of traffic: Connersville. I’ve found that an unusually large number of arrivals at a place I don’t normally hear used at all means there’s some kind of fly-in or event going on. As it turns out, Connersville Mettel Field (KCEV) has an annual Fathers Day fly-in. Mystery solved.

It takes about half an hour to get from Bolton to KVES, ample time for me to revel in the smooth flying conditions. I rarely fly alone anymore, but it’s a nice change of pace now and then. When I fly alone, the plane is lighter and feels more energetic. There’s also a little more room to spread out and adopt a La-Z-Boy kind of relaxed posture. Once I got all settled in and trimmed Papa to fly with a light fingertip touch, I kicked back and let the miles, well, fly by.

The pattern at KVES was empty when I arrived, so the decision as to what runway to use was left entirely up to me. There was no wind to speak of; as I flew over the field I could see that the flaccid windsock wasn’t going to provide much of a hint either. It appeared that I would be able to have my druthers, so based on the fact that a landing towards the east would require squinting into the morning sun, I decided I’d druther land to the west. It was an OK landing, but not the squeaker I’d druther have when the wind is calm. I misjudged my flare, forgetting that it’s a narrower runway and that my sight picture would be off a bit. I plopped Papa down from about a foot high. Not enough to rattle my teeth or nerves, but enough to feel that I had left a good landing on the table. A wasted opportunity, in other words. Thankfully, there were no witnesses.

I got my dad loaded up (maybe I should give him a name – how about Pat Treeark? Patriarch. Get it?) and we took off for the short ride down to Oxford. Because there is no dead horse in existence that I won’t flog, I made sure to point out instances of poor radio work on the Unicom on the way down. It was a target rich environment. There was also great sightseeing to be done since this was a strip of geography that he has heavily traveled in the past. “There’s Eaton over there, and that big lake must be Acton Lake and Hueston Woods.”

The wind was still light and variable when we reached the decision-making point at Oxford. Since we were approaching from the north, a left downwind to runway 5 would work best. I announced our position and intentions when we were six miles out. Soon thereafter, a Cherokee announced “ten miles out, landing runway 5.” There! That’s the way you do it. He had been monitoring the frequency and was going to follow my lead. Knowing he was out there and going to be following us, I spurred Papa up a few knots to get us out of the way a little quicker. The ensuing landing was about average. As we were taxiing in, I saw an RV-8 already parked there. You can’t go anywhere….

It’s a neat airport. I like the old-school (heh!) FBO building:

The artist alongside his work.

As we parked next to the RV-8, the FBO guy came out to see if we needed fuel or anything. I responded that we have plenty of gas, but a ride to town would be appreciated. “Unnecessary,” he replied. “Just take the courtesy car.”

Score!

By that time the Cherokee was taxiing in so I waited until he was parked and out of the plane before heading in to get the car. I thought there was some possibility that he’d be wanting to go into town too and I thought it would be courteous to share the courtesy car if he was. Nope, he wasn’t. Emergency rest room break. “Ha,” I thought. “What a rookie. He doesn’t know about Espresso!”

He sure missed out! In the unofficial Best Courtesy Car in the Country competition, KOXD is a clear front runner, at least in the Regional competition:

Brand new! I think it had about 23,000 miles on it. Miami University owns the airport, and by extension it was the university that provided the courtesy car. It’s enough to make the father of a soon-to-be-college-age daughter wonder how he’s going to afford tuition. It’s a beautiful campus and town, though. If she wants to go there, Daddy will have to find a way. It’s a college town through and through and would provide for a tremendous collegiate experience. Plus, and this is only a minor consideration [cough cough], I could fly out there to visit!

We found the town easily enough. I think I only made three wrong turns in as many miles. I don’t know why I don’t grab the Garmin Nuvi out of the Subaru on my way out of the house. Just can’t seem to remember to do it. After a little walk through town, we found a place to eat and absorb some air conditioning. I had a generous portion of Gyro meat (both beef and chicken), most of which I had them box up for transport back to Columbus. I try to eat light when I have the prospect of a hot flight home ahead of me, and all indications were that it would indeed by a scorcher. It’ll make a good lunch tomorrow.

The Miami University campus is huge, so we were only able to see a small portion of it. It was surely a representative sample, though. The architecture is remarkably consistent considering that the place is 200 years old and has expanded by at least an order of magnitude in that time. Miami has a bit of a “preppy” reputation in Ohio, and the equestrian center must sure exacerbate that:

Snazzy, eh? They had enough stables to provide lodging for dozens of horses. Very impressive. Yet… I don’t think I’ll tell Egg. Tuition is one thing, food and lodging for a horse? I don’t think so!

The trip back to KVES was warm but the air hadn’t yet gotten too bumpy. There was a light chop and only one big pocket that we dropped into. It was nothing like those hot August afternoons when Co-pilot Rick gets stuck with the flying duties. After I had dropped Pat off and was heading back to Bolton, I debated climbing higher thanthe 3,500′ cruising altitude that I’d been using all day to try to find some cooler, smoother air, but it’s only a 65 mile trip. It’s usually more efficient just to stay down in the rough stuff for the 25 minute flight.

As I was monitoring Bolton tower, I couldn’t help noticing that there wasn’t much flying going on. Too hot? Probably not. I think it probably had more to do with it being Fathers Day. In any event, I decided to break one of my Comm Rules. When the tower is really, really slow, I’ve found that I often have to repeat my initial call because I caught them by surprise and they just weren’t ready for a call.

“Annnnnd, Bolton Tower…..”

It worked. Got it on the first try. He responded with “Winds calm, report left base runway 4.” That set me up for a nice over-the-neighborhood approach and a landing halfway down the runway to reduce taxi time. As I exited an taxiway Alpha 3 and crossed in front of the tower, he said, “Hey, I really like that Yosemite Sam!”

Pat would be proud.

I got home in time for my Fathers Day with Co-pilot Egg, but it didn’t work out. Her teeth were still quite painful and she had a low fever. She gave me a rain check, though, and I think I’m going to use it by flying out to Oxford with her so she can see it.

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When Worlds Collide

With aviation being as diverse as it is, there are many “worlds” that divide the flying community and these worlds don’t always share a common viewpoint or, for that matter, a common language. As pilots, we typically find it easy to form a bond with others that may live in a different world than we do and it is often the case that any given pilot may exist in more than one world, but there are times when, to borrow a Seinfeldism, our worlds may collide.

There was an interesting collision between my world, where I predominantly fly into rural uncontrolled airports, and Lynda’s world of structured IFR flight into and out of major metropolitan airports. Our worlds (but hopefully not our respective aircraft) collided when we had a Twitter conversation on the topic of radio communication. As a breed, pilots tend to be evangelical on any number of topics and one of the most contentious can be the proper way to communicate amongst ourselves or with Air Traffic Control. Controllers also have a stake in this game as they spend nearly 100% of their working day talking to pilots. Any time you have that much of a specific activity in your work life, there are bound to be sore points. Lynda had a few blog posts on the subject that you should read if you want to keep up with the discussion, but I will try to excerpt as necessary to help the more time-constrained amongst you keep up.

http://thegirlswithwingsblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/midairs.html

http://thegirlswithwingsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/jargon-chatter-and-mayonnaise-er-i-mean.html

http://thegirlswithwingsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/now-to-mayonnaise.html

Because Lynda inhabits a vastly different flying world than I do, the applicability of some of the communications sore points she mentions to my world are somewhat rare. For example, the always controversial “with you” as used in the context “Big City Center, four six six papa golf with you at eight thousand” isn’t that big of a deal to me since I rarely work with Big City Center. That said, I can see the point of those that object to it: frequencies can be crowded and even two unnecessary words uttered by a lot of airplanes can propagate into an untenable over-usage of a fixed capacity spectrum.

In my world, frequency congestion is also a problem. The uncontrolled airports I fly into often share a radio frequency with many other surrounding airports. This is known as a UNICOM frequency. It is also commonly referred to as a CTAF frequency. They’re not precisely synonyms, but the semantic differences aren’t critical to this discussion. This definition will suit our purposes:

UNICOM is employed at airports with a low volume of general aviation traffic and where no control tower is presently active. UNICOM stations typically use a single communications frequency. Some fields always offer UNICOM service while others revert to UNICOM procedures only during hours when the control tower is closed.
In this system or protocol, aircraft may call a non-government ground station to make announcements of their intentions. In some cases, the ground station is not staffed. If no one is staffing the ground station, pilots broadcast their location and intentions over the UNICOM channel. When the ground station is closed this is done without an acknowledgement.

This UNICOM frequency is used by pilots to coordinate their activity within the vicinity of an uncontrolled airport with other pilots. As an example, consider an arrival at MadCo (KUYF) where I typically buy gas for Papa. The runway is oriented east to west. I usually approach from the east. If the winds are westerly, I will want to land on runway 27 which points into the wind. Coming from the east, you might think that I could just fly straight in to runway 27, but that is frowned upon. In fact, it’s another of those evangelical issues pilots love to argue about. Rather than fly a straight in approach, I navigate to a position six or seven miles due south of the airport, turn north to approach the airport, and enter the traffic pattern at midfield for a left downwind.

Before I get to that position, though, I have been monitoring the UNICOM frequency assigned to MadCo. As soon as I’m far enough away from Bolton Tower, I change the radio to the MadCo UNICOM frequency and start listening. In the case of MadCo, that frequency is 123.00. Amongst others, this is also the frequency at Blue Ash (KISZ), down south in Cincinnati. Even as far away as that is, I can hear pilots there and they can hear me. Therefore, I identify the airport that I am going to in order to avoid confusion. My initial radio transmission will go something like this:

“Madison County traffic, experimental four six six papa golf, six miles south, inbound left traffic two seven, Madison County”

Because I have been monitoring the frequency, I have a fairly good idea as to what’s going on in the pattern. There may be a student doing touch & goes, or there may be other airplanes arriving or departing. Because we all announce our intentions (with some notable exceptions, such as airplanes that do not have a radio), I can develop a relatively good picture of who’s there, where they are, and where they will be when I get there. I say it’s a “relatively” good picture because it can never be completely accurate. At a minimum, though, it should give me a pretty good idea as to the amount of traffic there and which runway is in use.

It may seem obvious which runway is in use, but that is not always the case. If the winds are light and variable, or if they are almost exactly 90 degrees to the runway orientation, it’s up to the pilot’s discretion which runway to use. Those are tricky situations in which the only prudent course of action is to listen, look, listen, look, listen, and look, look, look. Since those are the two things most important to do anyway, that really shouldn’t be a problem. It is a fact of life, though, that there are many pilots that rely entirely on the existence of radio traffic to determine what’s going on at the airport. Not surprising, that was recently the topic of another Twitter conversation.

Where the issue of frequency congestion arrives is when the UNICOM frequencies are used for chit chat. It is far too typical to find that you can’t get a word in edgewise because a couple of buddies are yapping about this, that, and the other thing. There are also a number of other poor (in my opinion) techniques that can cause unneeded congestion or unsafe situations:

– Every now and then, you will hear “Podunk Unicom, what’s your active?” Translated, that means what runway would you recommend that I use. Keep in mind, by definition there is no controlling authority at an uncontrolled airport, so any response to this can at best be only advisory in nature. There are three ways to determine this for yourself rather than tying up the frequency by asking: 1) know the wind direction. This is often available via an automatic reporting system. There may not be one at the specific airport you are using, but check your charts. There are often airports nearby that have one. Well, at least in Ohio where there are many, many airports. 2) look at the wind sock. This requires you to fly overhead at an altitude above pattern altitude, though, so many are reluctant to do it. 3) monitor the frequency. What are other pilots in the area doing? I’m not ruling out the use of “What’s your active” or its kissing cousin “Requesting airport advisory,” but it is used far more commonly than is necessary.

– Not listening for other pilots talking to you. Simply broadcasting your position and intentions is all well and good, but for true coordination to occur you have to respond to any other pilots that may be trying to talk to you. They may want to know your intentions (full stop, touch & go) or they may be trying to alert you to a potential conflict. Either way, communication is (or should be) a two-way street.

– Not clearly stating what airport you are at. You may have noticed in my example above that I said “Madison County” twice. This is another contentious subject, but I do it for two reasons. First is that the first word may be cut off by the radio if it is said too quickly after keying the mike. This is also the reason many pilots start a transmission with “Uh” or “And” and it should be no surprise to you by now to learn that this too is a pet peeve of many a pilot. The second reason that I do it is because of how many times I will be flying along and not quite hear the first airport identification but clearly hear “left downwind two seven.” Darn, did he say “Morain” or “Madison?” I then listen for the closing identification, but not everyone does it.

– I mentioned this above, but far too often we hear “Hey, did you see the game last night?” “Man, I’m glad I’m flying this morning, I have to mow the lawn later.” Hint, people: no one else cares, and we may be trying to, you know, land this airplane at a crowded field. Write a letter for crying out loud.

Those are pretty common beefs, but there are some that are more situationally dependent. This brings us to the intersection of Lynda’s world with mine. During our Twitter conversation, I stated that there are a couple more communications that I find to be either unnecessary, overused and wasteful of the limited space available on a shared frequency, or even somewhat dangerous.

The first was:

“Podunk County, Cessna one two three echo echo five miles east, inbound, any traffic in the area please advise.”

In the most common case, this is a completely useless transmission and has the additional effect of incurring even more congestion when every airplane in the vicinity of Podunk chimes in with their location. I always wonder what the guy flying that plane has been doing for the last 20 miles that prevented him from monitoring the frequency. In fact, Co-pilot Rick and I just had this discussion last Sunday as we were approaching Urbana. We decided that there are exceptions that need to be made to any hard and fast rejection of the “please advise” call, but they are relatively rare.

One that I fully understand after having experienced it myself is in the case of the airplane that is arriving after a hand off from air traffic control. In my case, the Tampico had only a single radio so I could not monitor the UNICOM frequency while still being in the positive control of ATC. It is often the case that ATC does not allow the frequency change to the UNICOM frequency until the arriving plane is already in the close vicinity of the airport and at that point, the most prudent thing to do is ask.

That is the first of two quandaries faced by the folks that live in Lynda’s world. The second is closely associated with it. It is case where an IFR pilot (or student) will announce their position on UNICOM using a language that is completely foreign to most VFR pilots. For example, you might hear this:

“Podunk County traffic, Beechcraft one two three is procedure turn inbound to runway two seven.”

Upon hearing that, the low-time VFR pilot or student doing tough & goes is usually thinking “Huh?? Where the heck is Procedure Turn? I wonder if they have a restaurant there…”

This disparity in language puts a burden on the pilot flying a high performance airplane making an IFR approach on a VFR day. ATC will often require that the pilot “call procedure turn inbound” before releasing him from the frequency. The IFR pilot has to make a quick transition from an IFR mentality to a VFR mentality, and there isn’t always a lot of time to do it in. In a perfect world, that pilot would have ample time to report “procedure turn inbound” to his IFR controller and get his release from the frequency before de-IFRing himself and announcing his position to Podunk traffic as “eight miles west, inbound.” I’ve been there, and even in an airplane as slow as the Tampico it was a difficult adjustment to make. It has to be far more difficult for a pilot in a high performance airplane, especially if that pilot didn’t spend a lot of time in the VFR world before moving up to the IFR world.

Even within my world, I find times when I wonder what’s going on in the head of another pilot. It is often too easy for me to forget that I didn’t always have 700+ hours under my belt. Lynda made an extremely good point on this topic: “A pilot may believe someone is being an idiot, but be professional. And no one gets hurt!” That’s exactly right.

It is important for a pilot to retain a couple of abilities, no matter how experienced he or she may be. First, a pilot must be able to empathize with those pilots from other worlds. In my world, we were all students once, many of us were low-time weekend renters, but few of us have flown at the speeds and in the complex environment that Lynda does. In the first two cases, we need to remember our past. In the latter case, we must try to be as cognizant of the challenges others may be facing as possible. We share the sky, so we need to be able to see the other guy’s point-of-view. Second, and I believe this to be critically important, we need to retain a desire and ability to learn from others. As a corollary to that, I also believe that it is important for us to be able to engage in critical introspection in order to learn from our own mistakes.

Failing that, the chances that your world will collide with someone else’s in a literal, rather than Seinfeldian, sense will be needlessly increased.

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Early starts

My personal list of things that are improved by getting an early start continues to grow. Consider:

– Flying. The air is cooler and smoother, there are fewer airplanes to deal with in the battle for limited-capacity shared resources (runways, parking spots, pie), and the greenhouse cockpit of an RV has not yet gotten hot enough to cook a pizza.
– Driving to work. Every five minutes late out the door is another 10,000 cars on the road being driven by women doing their makeup and men pretending they’re racing the last lap at Talladega.
– Running/jogging/biking: see ‘Flying’ re: temperatures.

To that list I have now added kayaking. But we’ll get to that.

I’m just back from an early breakfast at Urbana for the second week in a row. Co-pilot Rick, who is now a necessary component of the airplane to the degree that I rarely fly alone anymore, has had afternoon commitments for the last couple of weekends and the weather forecasts for the late afternoon have also been somewhat cruddy.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of flying out to breakfast per se, but it does come with the slight additional baggage of feeling like some of the utility of the airplane is going to waste. It is a pretty expensive and ostentatious (bordering on debauchery, to be perfectly candid) way to go out for a meal after all. To salve my conscience, I’ve been practicing the throttle-to-idle-on-downwind landings that I first attempted during my BFR last month. It’s better to do that when the landing pattern is more or less empty and the only way to ensure that when flying to Urbana on a Sunday morning is to get there early. See ‘Flying’ re: limited-capacity shared resources.

The first attempt was the arrival at Urbana last week. Remembering that I had landed long both times I had tried it during the BFR, I extended my downwind a little bit before turning onto the base leg. Once turned onto the final approach and with enough altitude in the potential energy column of the how-goes-it spreadsheet (as evidenced by a solid row of white lights on the PAPI lights), I would start easing the flaps down. On the first try I put Papa right on the numbers with an almost-a-greaser-but-not-quite landing. Later, when returning to Bolton, I did even better: I scored one of those landings where the only indication of having converted Papa from a flying machine to a rolling machine is the scuff of the tires as they are forced into rotation by the friction of the runway surface.

On the way out to Urbana, I also got a chance to take a better picture of the round barn:

Today was a bit windier at 7-ish knots and thus afforded me with the additional benefit of a crosswind to practice against, but the results were similar. Well, the second and third results were similar; the arrival at Urbana was something more akin to what you’d see in a circus act. I carried a bit too much speed into the flare and got into a cycle of bouncing down the runway on the left wheel. Or as I said at the time, “That was atrocious, and it’s still not over.” Fortunately Papa needed gas and at an unsustainable price of $3.45 per over at MadCo, it was pecuniarily efficacious to make a stop there on the way back to Bolton. That would give me a chance for a redemption landing, albeit landing to the east which is something I routinely do poorly when landing at MadCo. It worked out well enough today, as did the final landing back at Bolton. It wasn’t a strong crosswind, but it was sufficient for getting some good practice.

So, back to why kayaking is improved with an early start. Getting out to the river before it starts to get hot and/or sunny is a big benefit, but beating the crowd of drunken canoers is also beneficial. That’s primarily a problem further down river where Trapper Johns Drunken Canoer Livery feeds sloshed boaters into the river like the detritus from a pork rendering plant splashing out of a sluice pipe, but you still get your fair share up river too. As we all know, it’s never too early in the day to be drunk in a boat but most of the heavy drinkers get smashed on Saturday night and sleep in on Sundays. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part you can get there ahead of them.

You may remember that the last time I had been kayaking, I had gone sans seat cushion when we took the boats up to Alum Creek. As you might expect, that caused a notable discomfort in the posterior regions. To address that pain point, I ordered a seat cushion to provide some buffer between my bones and the hard bottom of the boat. It turns out that seating cushions for kayaks are unconscionably expensive. The cheapest I could find was a product called the Happy Bottom Kayak Seat. It was surprisingly costly for something that’s really nothing more than a piece of injection molded foam, but what are ya gonna do? If the bottom isn’t happy, the kayaker isn’t happy. I used the seat for the first time yesterday when Rick and I took a short ride down the Big Darby.

We got the aforementioned early start so had the river to ourselves for the most part, although we did come upon a group of three fishing from a canoe. Either the fish were biting like mad or these folks were going to go unfed for the week if they didn’t bring something home, but for whatever reason they apparently couldn’t spare the 30 seconds it would have taken for us to pass by them. Now I don’t know if there is conventional wisdom or a river custom of courtesy to back this statement up, but it seems rude to me to cast your fishing line right across the path of a passing kayak. Which is exactly what two of the three did. Perhaps they think there are brake pedals on kayaks. Hint: there are not.

Once past them, though, it was just the two of us and the chirping of the birds. The water was a touch low and there were some spots where the banging of river water against the bottom of my boat made me wonder when I could expect to spring a leak, and there were a couple of places where I actually got stuck on the rocks, but other than that it was a very nice ride. Except for one thing. I hurt like hell.

While my bottom was perfectly happy, it so transpires that with regards to kayaking, happiness is a zero-sum game. In other words, it seems that something has to hurt. By removing the pain from my bottom, it was mathematically required to find a new place to reside. What it found was my backbone. The new seat shifted my seating position such that I found myself leaning back against the cockpit sill. After about a half hour of rubbing my spine against that hard, sharp edge, I was to the point where something had to be done to put some padding between the two surfaces. I folded up the little towel that I carry with me and that provided a modicum of relief, but it was one of those situations of too little, too late. I was burdened with that ache until we finally got out of the boats. It was the first time since I’ve been kayaking that I couldn’t wait to get out of the boat. So the search begins today for a piece of foam that I can glue to the sill to provide a softer place to lean back against.

Even with the personal discomfort, though, it was a beautiful ride. I took along the video camera and put together a short, six minute movie. Be sure to watch it all the way through since there’s some neat wildlife to see at the end. And it you have the bandwidth to view it in HD, it’s well worth doing so:

Warning: don’t turn your speakers up too loud – it gets very noisy when the boat starts hitting and scraping across rocks!

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Flying: it’s not like riding a bike

You do forget how. It’s a well recognized fact that pilots need to undergo periodic refresher training to remain as safe as possible in the air. This is true for airline and military pilots that fly complex equipment in a ever-changing and always-challenging environment nearly every day, and it is true for people like me that fly a much simpler airplane in conditions of my choosing. For the professionals, both the government and their employers (which are, of course, the same thing for the military folks) decree what the recurrent training cycles are and what will be taught. Far more often than not, that type of training is performed in very sophisticated simulators. Two obvious reasons for training in a simulator rather than an actual airplane are cost (fuel and lost revenue from taking a jet off the line) and safety. You can read about a recent example of this type of training in this post by Lynda, a Cessna Citation X pilot:

Today was my first day of STEP training. STEP stands for Scenario Based Training and Education Program. Instead of doing the same old instrument approach proficiency practice and single engine and other emergency procedures, the company has determined that a lot of risk involved in our everyday operations involves threat and error management. In other words, recognizing the first link in a chain of events that may lead to an incident or accident. Instead of taking a checkride, the instructor evaluates our SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) knowledge and decision making skills.

As you might expect, things are a bit easier for those of us flying smaller planes, although maybe not for the reasons you might guess. It would be tempting to say that we fly in a less challenging environment, but that isn’t necessarily true. We fly at lower levels and have to deal with weather that jets fly over, we typically fly as the only pilot, we normally don’t have the systems redundancy and anti-icing protection of a “big” plane, and we don’t have the support of an entire room full of dispatchers and meteorologists watching out for us. And, as noted, we don’t always have the depth of training. So, if it’s not the comparative difficulty that allows us to fly without the ever-watchful eye of check pilots and FAA inspectors looking over our shoulders, what is it?

Well, I can only guess that it’s the fact that we aren’t hauling around dozens or hundreds of paying customers. It’s not that we’re lower risk (and statistics will glaringly show that we most emphatically are not lower risk), it’s that the cost of an accident isn’t as high. It’s high enough, of course, but not as high as that of an airline disaster.

The FAA has mandated that a private pilot must have an hour of air instruction and an hour of ground instruction with a certified flight instructor no less than once every two years. This is known as a Biennial Flight Review, or BFR. Mine was due by the end of May. BFRs are very low stress if you’re an active and current pilot, but those that are not fortunate enough to fly as regularly as I do often view them as being another check ride and the first one was tough enough, thank you. I view them as a chance to learn a few new things about my airplane. This is similar to Lynda’s employer’s view that there is benefit in practicing things that you don’t do every day.

I would be flying with Greg, a guy I’ve known from way back when I was just out of renting and into my first flying club. He’s been building an RV-6 for as long as I’ve known him and I thought he’d be a good choice for working with me on my BFR. I’d get a good lesson and he’d get some seat time in the same type of airplane that he will someday be flying.

It’s always fun to have RV builders ride with me – every single one of them goes over the plane with a fine tooth comb looking at how the parts that they’ve assembled in their shops all go together to make a functioning airplane. Every single one has a specific part that they may have had trouble building and they want to see how it looks on my plane. And the biggest thing? I believe that every single one of them goes back to their shop newly inspired to get their RV done so that they too can enjoy the experience of flying such a well balanced airplane. So, as long as I didn’t totally screw up the flying, it was a win-win.

I like having my BFR due in May because by the time it rolls around, the weather has been good enough for at least enough flying for me to be demonstrably proficient. I wouldn’t like my chances as much in February, for instance. Flying is flying to Papa, so for him it was just another romp around the local area. He did me proud in front of Greg, starting up with a nice rumble after only half a blade. You’d almost believe he was showing off!

The BFR requirements stipulate an hour of air work but do not define what must be covered in that hour. That makes sense when you consider the huge variety of different flying situations you will find with private pilots. While NetJets can reasonably assume that Lynda will be flying in conditions and equipment nearly identical to her peers and tailor her training accordingly, private pilots are like snowflakes and finger prints: no two are alike. Some pilots will be rusty at the basic skills and need to concentrate on landings and takeoffs. Others may fly every day, but need practice in seldom visited flight regimes such as slow flight or even stalls. The CFI and the pilot work together to decide what they should concentrate their efforts on.

I expressed to Greg that my number one area of concern with regards to the type of flying that I do and the type of airplane that I do it in is landing after an engine failure. The RV-6 has a relatively short, stubby wing and my perception has always been that it would come down like the price of Chrysler stock if the fan ever stopped turning. I usually use my BFRs to practice simulated engine out landings. We flew over to MadCo where I made a normal landing (well, not entirely normal: it was a greaser), then took off again and stayed in the landing pattern.

At pattern altitude and just past midfield, I had 120 mph in the bank. I pulled the throttle back to idle and glided it in. I usually keep the flaps up until I’m established on final and it appears that I won’t be landing ignominiously short of the runway. This usually keeps me too high on the approach, but that’s considered by most pilots to be a superior situation to be in over the alternative. It’s easy to lose altitude sans engine, harder to find it. If the flaps still don’t get us down fast enough, a forward slip will finish the job.

On the first landing, I didn’t get low and slow soon enough. Had it been an actual emergency, we would still have been able to get onto the runway and stopped before the end, but since it was just practice and I still had the option of using the engine available to me, I went around to see if I could do better with another try. I did, and scored my second greaser of the day.

With the landing practice done, we climbed back up to do some air work. I mentioned to Greg that stalls are not only somewhat abrupt in an RV, they are also very sensitive to the rudder. There’s a phrase that describes an uncoordinated stall in an RV: spin entry. Stall it with the rudder hanging out in the breeze and you will soon find yourself heading in the opposite direction and staring at the ground through eyes as big as tennis balls. And by ‘soon’ I mean ‘RIGHT NOW!’ Because of this, I normally recover from my practice stalls at the first sign of buffet which, as it turns out, in an RV is concurrent with the signature precipitous drop of the nose that defines a stall. Greg, God bless him, wanted to know what happens if you actually hold it in the stall. Me? I couldn’t care less. Well, that’s my excuse for not knowing, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. I can understand why you might think that my reluctance to find out what happens has a little more to do with a case of huevos pequeños on my part than an actual disinterest in the topic, but I couldn’t possibly comment on that.

In any event, now I know: hold the stick back after putting Papa in a stall and he will buck like a enojado caballo. He shakes his nose up and down and kicks back through the control stick. But he’s honest about it: as long as you keep the nose centered, he won’t drop off on a wing. Which is good because it takes a long time to cram those tennis ball sized eyes back into your head.

Our hour was up so we headed back to Bolton. I had hoped to go three for three on the perfect landings, but didn’t. It wasn’t a bad landing, mind you. It was the routine tiny little bounce that’s so common for me. But still, a perfect trifecta would have been nice.

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My Google Map FAIL!

Look, I’ll just say it right up front: it was more than likely the fault of the Margaritas. Yes, true, it was my own choice to drink them, but did they have to be so very delicious? Well, in any event I found myself at the computer this morning planning a flight to Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland. Not so much planning the flight, although that was part of it, but planning the ground-based activities as well. I had a dim recollection of visiting a really neat galleria in downtown Cleveland some 25 years ago, and I thought that maybe I could find it again.

As we all know, the first place one would look for such a thing is Google, and as is nearly always the case, Google found the place as easily as I can find the item on a restaurant menu that they’re out of. Whoops, not so fast there, Bub. The first place in the Google results was much newer and more modern than I remembered. I was all set to go there anyway, but my friend Lynda chimed in on Twitter with a link to the place that I was actually looking for. The problem, as is also often the case with Google, was in the search string that I was using. What I was actually looking for was the Cleveland Arcade.

So, now that I knew what I was looking for, I needed only to find out where it was. Google, again. Maps this time. So here’s what I found:

For some reason, (cough Margaritas cough) I saw the item at E as the place I wanted to go. FAIL! It turns out to have been item B that I wanted. You would think the fact that E was surrounded by exactly nothing resembling a building of any sort would have served as a clue, but you would be wrong, wrong, wrong. I diligently memorized the walking route from the Burke Lakefront aiport to… nowhere. That all came later, though; first we had to get to Cleveland.

Recognizing at the very time of their ingestion that those margaritas had the potential to make an early departure unpalatable to both myself and Co-pilot Rick, I suggested an 0930 meeting at the aerodrome. That would give me time to assuage my morning headache with coffee, and to get over to the hangar early enough to put the wheel pants back on. They’re worth 10 knots extra speed when they’re on the plane, and the trip to Cleveland and back is long enough to make that difference noticeable.

The morning forecast promised a calm-ish, clear morning with afternoon conditions trending towards 12G20 winds and 5,000′ ceilings. Winds at 12G20 are within the limits of my capabilities, but foretell possible issues with personal comfort enroute. In fact, the forecast was a virtual guarantee of a bumpy ride home. That’s flying, though. We deal with it.

As promised, it was a glorious morning and I was able to get myself fully caffeinated and the airplane fully dressed before the Co-pilot made another on-time arrival at the gate. As I walked around doing the preflight inspection, I couldn’t help but notice that the wind was starting to pick up. By the time we got to the end of the runway for takeoff, we had a pretty steady crosswind from the left. That’s the bad side on takeoff, of course, since the wind beating against the side of the rudder exacerbates the left-turning tendency caused by the torque of the engine and propeller.

As we were accelerating down the runway, I was finding that it was taking a pretty hefty pressure on the right rudder pedal to keep us tracking more or less straight. I knew that once the wheels came off of the pavement I was going to have to be ready for the transition from ground vehicle to airborne vehicle, but failed to carry the left aileron that would have eased the rapid entry into the left crab that we would carry to keep us moving down the centerline of the runway. Well, good practice and better luck next time.

We climbed to 7,500′ to get over the tops of the puffy white clouds that we could see stretching in front of us in the clear morning air and found smooth sky for our ride to Cleveland. Unfortunately, Cleveland is surrounded by Class B airspace, and with the clouds being right at the altitudes we would need to fly at in that airspace, we wouldn’t be able to go that way. Besides which, I’ve tried working with the controllers that manage the Class B airspace surrounding Cleveland before and found it to be a frustrating experience. I decided it would be easier (and in some ways, safer) to just stay under it at 3,000′.

The problem with that strategy is that we would have to descend from our comfortable perch up in the smooth air down into the far bumpier air underneath the clouds. The GPS was still indicating 35 miles or so to go when I saw a big hole in the clouds below us to drop down through. If there’s one thing Papa likes to do, it’s go down fast. With the throttle pulled back to a high idle, we were able to drop through the opening at 3,000 feet per minute. All too soon, we were bumping along beneath the clouds and navigating around the controlled airspace. When we were 15 or 20 miles out, we had to drop even lower to stay under some rather mean looking clouds:

It looked like it would be clear ahead once we got under the darkest cloud, and it was:

I dialed up the KBKL ATIS frequency to get the weather conditions at the airport, but rather than the ATIS I expected I found an automated report. That’s fine by me – the weather is the weather – but I was a little surprised at it. I was ready to quickly make note of the current ATIS advisory (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.) so I’d be able to tell the tower on my initial contact that I had heard the report (“Lakefront Tower, experimental 466PG with information Bravo, 10 miles south…”) so it took me a couple of moments to figure out why the identifier wasn’t provided.

I went ahead and contacted the tower and was directed to fly over the top of the airport and enter a left downwind for runway 6 Right. Oh, and to watch out for a banner tow a couple of miles from the airport. Apparently the Indians were playing. The nice thing about banner towing planes as traffic is just how easy they are to see. That is the entire point of a banner ad, right? To be seen? Sure it is! With the banner tow in sight and the only other plane in the pattern already on short final, it was an easy arrival. There was some wind, but nothing really noticeable. With the airport being right on the banks of Lake Erie, low winds are somewhat abnormal, but certainly welcome. It was a pretty good landing.

My studiously laid out route to nowhere took us right past the USS Cod, and as Rick hadn’t visited it in decades, we decided to take the tour. It’s one of those things that’s best done when it’s not crowded, and since it appeared that we’d be the only ones there, in we went.

Probably the most defining trait of a machine of war as utilitarian and designed for functionality as a submarine is the predominance of machinery. You are literally surrounded by knobs, valves, levers, handles, gauges, lights, and switches. There are no soft edges to anything; the entire boat is made out of steel, brass, iron, or some combination thereof. And it is cramped. Narrow, steep ladders and small hatchways are the means of moving from one part of the boat to another. In other words, it’s an intriguing place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there!

Plus, there are big guns!

Then it was time to continue our hike to nowhere. Naturally I took the opportunity to brag about how clever I was in researching our route to know that I couldn’t use the landmark that I had seen in the Google street view: a guy rolling by in a wheel chair. Nope, too clever to fall into that trap, but not clever enough to recognize the complete lack of well, anything located at the spot I took us to. After ambling around looking for the Galleria/Cleveland Arcade, I posted a note on Twitter advertising to the world that I had failed to write down the actual address of the destination, what with my being convinced that I had no need for such esoteric information.

As we were heading back to the airport in shame (well, I was ashamed. Rick was just hungry. Downtown Cleveland is a ghost town on Sundays and everything was closed), two things happened nearly simultaneously. First, we stumbled across the entrance to The Arcade:

Second, just as we were going in, I received a text message from Eric forwarding the address that Lynda has posted on Twitter in reply to my failure Tweet. What an amazing world we live in! So, was it worth the trip? Sure! Isn’t this beautiful?

I’d like to spend a night there sometime when Cleveland is, well, open. There are a lot of nice restaurants around there, and plenty of really good touristy things to do. The wind was starting to pick up, though, so it was time to head home.

Back at Burke, we untied the airplane and loaded up for our trip back. With Papa’s engine started and warming up, I called Lakefront Ground and told them we were ready to taxi for departure, VFR south, He cleared us to taxi out to runway 24L. Once we were out there, I changed over to the tower frequency and told him that we were ready to go. Now in my defense, back at Bolton the ground controller and the tower controller are the same guy, and in that world he would have already known that we were planning a VFR departure to the south. Not so at Burke: “Say direction of flight.” D’oh! How embarrassing! But then he said, “Information Alpha is current.” Which could mean only one thing: the ATIS was active, and I hadn’t checked it. What a Rube! Well, I didn’t need to check it, really, because it was already evident what it would say: it’s windy. And it was. It was mostly down the runway, though, so the takeoff went well enough.

A left turn from runway 24L to point us to the south would have put us right over downtown Cleveland, so we were instructed to make a right turn out and proceed back to the east until further notice. As we were tooling along the coast, I got to wondering just how far east we were going to have to go. Eventually the tower instructed some other tail number to resume on course heading, but I didn’t remember there being another airplane out in front of us.

“Was that for 466PG?”

“Why, yes. Yes it was.”

Glad I asked! We’d be in Buffalo by now!

So, how was the trip back? Bumpy. Guess who flew that leg.

I let the Co-pilot take over once we were clear of the Class B (he can’t see the GPS from where he sits, so he couldn’t see the green rings) and let him endure the rough, choppy ride back to Bolton. We climbed to 4,500′, but that wasn’t high enough to get over the disturbed air. Any higher would have brought the clouds into play, so… we just dealt with it. It was the kind of ride where you reach for a knob on the GPS or radio and the best that you can hope for is that you actually grab the particular piece of equipment you were aiming for, then try to work your way over to the correct knob. More common is the case where a bump moves your hand to a completely different box and you have to try again.

I’ve been letting Rick fly deeper and deeper into the pattern at the destination airport, but I took over a little earlier this time. While the tower was reporting the winds as 3 gusting 16 (which is a very odd report indeed!), we were feeling a steady 15 knots or more from the west. That was having the effect of pushing us from right to left and really messing up the nice squareness of the approach. We were also having trouble getting down to the pattern altitude – I finally realized that Papa wasn’t slowing down like I expected him to because I had put the wheel pants back on. He’s a little less draggy that way, and I hadn’t factored that into my plans.

Other than one sharp bump from a gust of wind on short final that lifted the right wing into a 20 degree bank, the winds were fairly steady. It was a direct crosswind from the right, so I had to carry quite a bit of rudder to offset the drift. Even with all of that, I managed a fairly decent landing. Sure, there was a fairly good bounce, but I’ll take it.

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My next airplane might be…. a car!

As many of you are aware, a lot of the places that I fly to are selected based on the availability of local transportation or attractions within walking distance of the airport. Sure, now and then I can score the usage of a “courtesy car” or crew van, but it isn’t a good idea to count on that.

Of course, I’m old enough to have spent decades fruitlessly waiting on the boffins to deliver on their promises of jet packs and flying cars, so I had pretty much given up on ever seeing either of those futuristic conveyances. But this one, well, it looks ever so plausible that I find myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, I will live long enough to see the idea of a flyable/drivable vehicle come to fruition:

There are far more details available here.

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