Aileron

A drizzly kind of day this Saturday.

Labels: Cloudscapes

Another one from last night at the airport, but this one viewing a receding storm.

Labels: Cloudscapes

At one point I thought it would be a great job to be a flight instructor – flying all the time, building hours, all while getting paid – but after tonight's lesson, I am reconsidering. The job description amounts to "wait until the student does something catastrophic, then try to fix it before you crash".

Okay, tonight's lesson was not that bad. It was one of the more difficult lessons, but difficult as in indicative of progress. First, let me get some excuses out of the way, and then maybe I'll say something constructive:

• It was damn-humid (I'm certain there's a METAR code for that). A lot of the lesson was either flying slow or taxiing on the ground and the air vents don't scoop much air into the cockpit those times.
• I hadn't really eaten anything today. Sometimes when I work from home, I forget.
• The plane we were assigned had a problem with its left seat positioning so my feet didn't reach the pedals as well as they usually do. I had to slouch a bit and my site picture was off and things were slightly in the wrong place.
• Crosswinds (more on that later).
• It was dark. I know most of my other lessons have had a portion in the dark and I consciously decided a while ago that this was a good thing since I'm required to have night-flying experience anyway, and flying in daylight will then seem easier (kind of a Batman thing going here), but tonight I wished it wasn't dark so that I could see the landmarks and read my instruments better because I wanted something that wasn't fighting against me.

Anyway, enough of that. Get on with it.

It's been really hot and humid here the past couple of days and today a cold front finally started making its way through, generating small, but strong thunderstorms here and there. We didn't get any direct hits at N51 and all that cloud action makes for really nice sunsets, but it also means there is wind, both horizontal and vertical. I've never really experienced crosswinds before, where the wind tends to push the plane sideways off the runway, and tonight we were doing more landing training, where keeping the plane smooth and straight is critical.

I did three landings. The first one I didn't quite have a feel for how much crosswind correction was needed and I was all over the place. The tricky bit is that the wind isn't constant; it gusts and also changes as you descend into where ground obstructions begin to factor in. A continual feel of the wind and flight control adjustment is required. The second landing, I was set up better and had the plane lined up until the last couple of feet where a gust blew me off to the right and I got kind of nervous correcting so low to the ground because correcting means banking the wings. My third landing was decent; I held the correction all the way down and put the plane down without my CFI having to save it. It feels so good to put the wheels on the ground and remain right-side up.

At that point I figured that I'd crossed a personal threshold of diminishing returns, where my nerves had gotten so high and my energy levels so low, that further practice wouldn't benefit me much, so I called it quits and we parked the plane. In retrospect, I kind of wish I'd tried another one to see if I would've continued improving. Also in retrospect, from the comfort of my home, I think crosswind days really are an opportunity to put my skills through their paces, and I should fly them as much as possible, but one thing at a time.

• Flight Hours: 8.3
• METAR N51 092330Z 16007KT 10SM CLR 27/22 A2983

Sunset at the airport: sweet. If you live in populated areas and want unobstructed views of the sky for cloud pictures (or meteor showers or whatever), you can't beat your local airport.

Labels: Flight Lessons

If you've ever been highly tempted to make a scene on an airliner when the person next to you asks you to close your window shade and ignore the magnificent, prolonged sunset that's occurring as you're traveling six miles above the snow-capped Rockies at three-fourths the speed of sound so that he can better enjoy the sitcom rerun that's playing on the five-inch screen in front of him, there are others who share your sentiment. One of them wrote a book!

Vanhoenacker is also a 747 pilot and so is able to pepper his romantic musings on sunsets, auroras, shooting stars, and flying (flying for the sake of flying) with fun aviation facts and the accounts of the trips he flew.

There is a quiet, implicit plea to look out the window more, but he doesn't press it. Not everyone is in love with aviation; or natural phenomena. And although he thinks long and hard about announcing to his passengers that a once in a lifetime viewing of the northern lights, from miles in the air, is occurring right outside their windows, he is in the end a commercial pilot who understands that people are trying to sleep and, even if they're not, may not care (this is why captains don't announce nice things, people).

The book does not have much structure, and it doesn't seem like any research was done beyond what you would expect an airline pilot to already know. It's more like if you met at a party a pilot who's also given to writing poems, this is what he would say for the next couple hours.

Labels: Book Reviews

Last September we were still living on our sailboat across from New York. It's sunrise, and this is what I saw when I stepped out into the cockpit, sleepy-eyed. I think a storm is skirting us to the north (left) with a stratus layer higher up.

Labels: Cloudscapes

When I went traveling for work last week, I was afraid of aviation withdrawal and so took some precautions to be safe (symptoms include attempting to pull back on your car steering wheel, and running around your office making propellor noises). In addition to taking along my study materials and a pretty good flying related book (Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring), I found myself a GA airport with a museum to visit. The museum was decent fun for maybe forty minutes. I wish I had had more time for the gift shop, but I had to be somewhere else. I also booked a hotel at that same airport so I could see the runway from my room. Watching the little planes putter around was comforting.

✈

The view of the aviation museum from my room. Atop the roof, they have a Rutan Long-EZ, a kit plane that you can build yourself at home. For trivia, this was the model of aircraft John Denver was flying when he fatally crashed (not a jet plane).

Stanley Hiller, at the age of seventeen, founded Hiller Industries in Berkeley, California in 1942 to develop his coaxial XH-44 "Hiller Copter" for the U.S. Army. He had to teach himself to fly while it was being built so he could test pilot it (some people get the aviation bug bad). Hiller Industries eventually became Hiller Aircraft Co., now in Firebaugh, CA, and is still owned by the Hiller family. The family also endowed the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA at the San Carlos Airport (KSQL).

The exhibits focus mainly on the less conventional helicopters by Hiller, like the Hiller Flying Platform, coaxial designs, and tilt-rotor designs; but also on aviation history in general in the bay area, which was quite active since the beginning of powered flight. There were some neat photos of the flying field that was to become San Francisco International.

The museum has some large fixed-wings like a Grumman Albatross flying boat and a huge Boeing Condor spanning the building. Outside, they have the entire front section of a Boeing 747 (with complete cockpit) and a Pratt and Whitney JT9D with the panels off to go along with it. I really wanted to play with the simulators they have scattered about, but so did all the kids running around and I'm not quite mean enough to kick them out of the way.

✈

The San Carlos Flying Field was established during World War I, but that more or less sank into the swamp so they built another one in another spot in the 1950s and that eventually became San Carlos Airport. It currently has one runway 12/30, at 2600 x 75 ft asphalt. It's about ten miles southeast of KSFO and is listed as a reliever airport for it. The traffic pattern for both runways flies over some swampy bits of South SF Bay. If you're staying nearby and go for a run towards the bay trail, you can run right by the threshold of runway 12, which is good fun when planes are landing.

Grumman Albatross, used primarily for search and rescue over water, but this one was tricked out as a luxury passenger plane.

A Pratt and Whitney JT9D, kind of looking from the back into the fan. Just inside the blue cowling, you can see the ring of thrust reverser petals partially closed. These close completely after landing to redirect the fan thrust out and forward. It was a bit scary standing directly behind the jet nozzle, because yeah, there's no fuel and no starter, but what if we misunderstood something, like in all those movies where they thought the monster was dead but it woke up anyway? It's a good rule in life to not stand behind jet engines.

After Tuesday's lesson, I jotted down some specific things to work on in addition to landings, so I might as well publish them here.

✈

I don't know the compass rose as well as I thought. Sure, I know that 90° is east and 180° is south, but for me to picture, for example, where 115° heads, I have to go through several steps in my head: (1) well, I know it's between east and south, (2) directly SE is 90° + 45° (3) so 135°, (4) ah, so 115° is 20° north of SE. Or, to turn from 280° to 95°, is it faster to turn left or right (again, arithmetic gears whirring in my head)? Sure, I can arrive at the correct answer eventually, but not quickly enough.

And things happen quickly in the traffic pattern. A common question is something like, "What heading should we fly to be perpendicular to runway 30 on our left?".

And so I step through, "Hm, well runway 30 means its heading is 300°, which is kind of northwest. To have it on my left I need to add 90° (subtract if I want it on my right); 300 + 90 is… 390, but crap, that's bigger than 360, so need to subtract 360… Fly 030°!" And by this time we are rather far from the runway or we've already passed 030 in the turn.

I think the answer is to eschew arithmetic altogether and burn into my head a really solid picture of the compass rose. It is a bit sad, though, because there are simple arithmetic problems, and then there are arithmetic word problems, and then there is doing arithmetic in order to fly an airplane (fly an airplane), and while I thought I finally have a very good reason for passing the third grade, I'm just too slow at it (apologies, younger self). But arithmetic will always be there to check my answers, so there's that.

I'm guessing that other pilots are not too fast at it either, because almost every aircraft has a heading indicator (HI) or, if you like older terms, a directional gyroscope (DG). This is an awesome little instrument because it tells magnetic heading without using a magnet, and so is immune to the lead/lag/dip/acceleration errors that a magnetic compass is prone to in an aircraft. Instead, you sync the DG with the compass when you're confident of the compass, and the DG then uses a gyroscope to fix its orientation in space as the aircraft turns around it, telling accurate heading without outside information. The top of the DG will read the current heading of the aircraft, but it can simplify other problems too. With the above example of runway 30, it doesn't matter what 300 + 90 is, just turn the plane until 300 is under the left tick mark on the DG. I need to become more proficient at using the DG.

✈

I can't adjust the flaps by feel. I think the flap lever is supposed to have little notches so you can feel when it's exactly at 10° and 20°, but they may be too worn in these old planes. Without looking at the lever, I can reliably select zero flaps, full flaps, and somewhere-in-between flaps, but that's as precise as I go.

✈

Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range (VOR). VOR is a nifty radio navigation system that lets planes home into navigation stations. I kind of glossed over this topic in my readings because I figured it would be a while before I would be flying far enough away from my home airport to need homing signals, but hey look at that, it was hazy and dark and I was suddenly interested in getting home from an airport I've never been to. This is easy enough to correct; just read the material.

I got back to flying last night after two weeks away. I was worried that I had forgotten all of the procedures and the feel of the plane but all the memories were still there. I think I did my best takeoff yet, a nice, straight roll down the runway; and it was my first short-field takeoff, where a bit of flaps are used and we go for best angle of climb (altitude gain with respect to horizontal distance) instead of best climb (altitude gain with respect to time).

And it was a good thing I didn't forget much because we were going to work on something big! We were going to start training for landings!

The first thing to do in training for landings is to find a nice, big runway so that when I screw up, there's still plenty of runway left to fix it and no one dies. We headed southwest to Trenton-Mercer Airport (KTTN) for this purpose, which has two asphalt runways: 06/24 at 6006 × 150 ft (over a mile of runway!) and 16/34 at 4800 × 150 ft. Compared to my home airport's 3735 × 50 ft, this was quite nice.

Landings are usually practiced by doing touch-and-go's, where once a plane touches down, it immediately comes back on the power and takes off again without losing much speed on the ground. This allows for getting in a lot of landings in one session.

Last night's aircraft.

So first time practicing landings, first time to another airport, and also first time at a controlled airport where there is a tower that tells planes what to do. I asked my instructor to handle the comms this first time since I figured I'd have my hands full with the landings, but it was good to at least listen to how the conversations go and imagine how that will factor into my workload.

A small plane lands by descending towards the end of the runway and then flaring to ideally bring its vertical speed to zero just as it touches the ground. From the cockpit, the approach descent looks very much like flying directly into the ground, but my instructor assures me this is how it's done. There are definitely some primal instincts (David, ground, plane, bad) that need to be overruled during approach. The landing flare amounts to slowly pitching the nose up near the ground to bleed off speed, arrest the descent, and ultimately stop the wings from lifting. Sounds easy. Actually, not really; it's much easier to watch than it is to describe, but hopefully I made some sense.

My first landing (ever!) was pretty smooth. Not quite a continuous motion in the flare, but a reasonably gentle touchdown. Though at that point I had forgotten we were doing touch-and-go's and instead of celebrating, my instructor was frantically calling out how to get back in the air. Flaps, throttle, carb heat, etc. (quickly now).

We got back in the pattern and did three more landings before heading back to N51. Some were better than others, but none were horrific. Again, I stress that no one died. Sometimes I flared too much too soon and the plane dropped when I was done with my flare and the ground had not met the wheels yet. Once I didn't flare enough and we met the ground before I was ready. But overall, I know I can improve and I know how to improve (simply a lot of practice).

I always feel less nervous about flying after a lesson than before it because it's never as difficult as I imagine it might be, but I felt this relief especially after last night's lesson because in a way, all the cards are on the table now. Flying is some combination of climbing, turning, and descending, with a takeoff and a landing at each end. Roughly speaking, if I can do these things, then I can fly. There isn't anything major left to be introduced to, it's just a matter of honing what I've already done.

• Flight Hours: 7.7
• METAR KTTN 012353Z 17006KT 9SM CLR 27/19 A3002
• METAR N51 020030Z 16003KT 10SM CLR 26/19 A3005

A blimp at the airport today. At night it's lit from the inside like a giant lantern, but surprisingly, I didn't notice it until after we landed and were taxiing. My CFI said they're smaller than you think when you're flying. Also, I think it's so cool that the things they attach to on the ground are called moorings. And that rocket ships also have moorings. Boats can't fly through outer-space but we can damn-well pretend.

Labels: Flight Lessons