Colorado Flying Follies

After more than a month that has been punctuated by weekly snowstorms, I finally made it out to the airport and got the trusty steed back into the air. The poor thing was frozen after sitting out on the ramp for 5 weeks on tires that looked about flat. Falcon Aircraft, my trusty A&Ps, were kind enough to roll the plane into their heated hanger for a couple of hours so that by the time I was ready to give it the ritual preflight look-over my hands did not stick to the aluminum skin when they touched it. Everything checked out fine, so we pulled it back into the sunlight (blessed with a nearly 50 degree day for a change) and I climbed aboard with my instructor (Robert Dorbund) from Peak Aviation Center. Our mission was not overly ambitious. I needed to complete two insturment approaches to slide my currency forward to April, and I wanted some hands on practice doing emergency, minimum radius turn course reversals.... the sort one might do to extract plane and passengers from a misinformed trip up a box canyon (or to avoid hitting an apartment building in Manhatten). We made the short flight down to Pueblo (KPUB) to do the approaches, a full ILS including the procedure turn (and the attendant reverse sensing), followed by vectors back around to the same approach. The main lesson in all of this was how shockingly quickly one's instrument skills deterioriate, and how absolutely necessary it is to have a routine one follows EVERY time for briefing an approach ... even one with which you are already very familiar. In the event, I misread the wind as it changed near the ground, requiring a lot more attention to the needle than should be the case, and my quick glance at the approach plate retreived the localizer approach minima instead of the ILS ones. No real harm done, but on a real approach that could easily have lead to a miss rather than a successful landing. Much better results on the second approach.

 

The course reversals were a lot more fun. The idea here is to execute a 180 degree turn with as short a turn radius and as little altitude loss as possible. The technique is to pull up smartly as you roll into a steep (60 degree) turn, trading airspeed for altitude and dropping 20 degrees of flaps as soon as the airspeed decays into the white arc. As the nose eventually begins to fall, slowly roll out of the turn to avoid losing too much altitude and, of course, prevent a stall. It took a few tries before I could get the timing right, but in the end I was able to accomplish an amazingly fast reversal with less than 100 feet loss of altitude. It is a maneouver that I hopefully will never need to use, but a good one to have in the tool kit. It brings the plane right to the very edge of the stall, and then uses the nose dropping to complete the turn quickly. Kind of fun, and something to practice.

 

For having sat out unsused for so long, the airplane did remarkably well. It started right up without any hesitation, and everything worked perfectly, even the trucculent number two nav-com. I did notice a thin film of oil bleeding out along the prop after shutdown, which the mechanics said was "probably a cracked seal". In any case the annual inspection is coming up so I went ahead and scheduled it for the week of March 5th. That is always an adventure, which is a subject for another day.

Generally winter is not so bad a time to fly here on Colorado's Front Range. Granted if there are clouds around you will likely have to stay on the ground. With field elevations of 5,000 - 6,000 MSL, it is unusual for any winter clouds not to produce ice. So anything remotely approaching marginal VFR conditions usually means scrubbing your flying plans. But the fact is that there are relatively few days that are overcast, and with the cold tempertures and clear skies winter can be a great time to get airborn. Our usual daily convection is a fading memory and the airplane perferforms like a major leaguer on steriods. But that is the typical winter. This one has been different. As I write this we are at the begining of our second major winter storm in the last week. The last one, a couple of days before Christmas, pretty well shut down the entire eastern half of the state, including all of the airports. (KDEN's fiasco was national news for three days.) The carnage from that storm has not melted off yet, and we are looking at another foot or two in the next 48 hours. So, like it or no, typical or odd, I am grounded for probably the next two weeks at least. What to do?

 

To begin with, I have made a huge dent in the intimidating pile of aviation magazines, newsletters and catalogs that huddles accusingly next to my bed. At this rate I may even approach aviation literature currency. Out of that exercise have come several excellent ideas for training exercises and IFR operating tricks that I plan to build into my 2007 training program. I've also acquired a hunger for datalink weather that is similar to "new car fever". It seems now more like a "which/when" question than a "whether-or-not" one. The Garmin GPSmap 396/496 is starting to sound like a real "must want" item. With all the convection we have here in the summer, it might even be justified.

 

In addition to all the literature-inspired training ideas and expanding maintenance and tech toy wish lists, I think I will go ahead and take the "unusual attitude recovery" course being offered by a flight school in Denver. In addition to the maneouvers suggested by the course title, some basic aerobatics are also included (split-S, Hammerhead. loops, wingovers) as well as some actual spins and spin recoveries. And as icing on the cake, someof the lessons can be flown in a Pitts S2-B biplane. Anyone in the Cheyenne-Denver-Colorado Springs-Pueblo area ought to check out their website: www.flyaerobatics.com  How often do you get to have fun and get possibly life-saving training at the same time for under $500?

 

Anyway, I will try to put my weather enforced grounding to good use, and spend some time mapping out a plan for flying more and doing it better throughout 2007. Have a happy holiday season wherever you are, and fly safe.

You can read about pilots striking trees or wires on a pretty regular basis in accident reports. Usually at night. The following story

was in this morning's paper. Meadowlake airport is one I am fimailiar with, and have used a few times myself at night. Both trees

and powerlines can be a factor on the runway 15 approach, but you have to be going pretty low to strike either of them, certainly

well below the PAPI indication. It was about an hour after sunset, so it was dark even with a nearly full moon. The text of the article

appears below.

"A pilot escaped with minor injuries Thursday evening after the plane he was flying sliced a power line and hit a tree while

approaching the runway at Meadowlake Airport, authorities said. The downed power line and fuel leaking from the plane

I finally made myself get up off my ass and go do the night landings I needed to regain my long lost night currency. I was surprised at how hard it was to make myself go do. What it came down to was fear. Fear of messing up, of getting into something over my head. It had been so long since I had done any flying in the dark (I had to check my logbook to find out it was 11 months) that the very idea of it produced a nervous discomfort that was encrouaging me to find excuses NOT to go and do it. But Saturday was a near perfect night with calm winds everywhere and only a few clouds up much higher than I had either intent or hope of going. There was no moon, but plenty of ground lighting over the route that I had planned. So in the end there really was no good excuse to put it off, and I went.

 

In the event, everything went well, although my rust was pretty evident. The plan was to fly from Colorado Springs down to Pueblo (40nm more-or-less), back up to 00V (a small airport out east of Colorado Springs), and then return to home base. That would be about 90nm in all, an hour and a half of night time, three full stop landings and a visit to a Class C, Class D and non-towered airport. My first landing at KPUB went pretty well, but I let myself be rushed to depart and neglected to retract the flaps from landing until I noticed how slow my climbout was going. BAD! The landing at Meadowlake (00V) was not so pretty. The runway was much narrower than I am used to, giving a very different sight picture, and I ended up dumping the poor plane onto the concrete with the nose too low and not enough of a flare. I made a nice recovery from the resulting bounce, but it should not have happened in the first place. The short hop back to KCOS was uneventful and the landing was acceptable, if slightly fast.

 

So what were the lessons learned? First of all, NEVER rush yourself. Take your time. Follow the checklists. Be deliberate in everything you do. If things are rushing along too fast for you, slow down. Pull over and get out of the way (or let George fly for a few minutes while you sort it out). Rushing leads to mistakes. Many mistakes are fairly benign and just leave you feeling foolish. But some mistakes can kill you. There is nothing that has to be done so urgently that you should risk doing it wrong. Not in an airplane. And especially in an unfamiliar environment.

 

Second, pay attention to those feelings of fear and discomfort. Don't let them prevent you from flying, but be aware of them. Grab a CFI if they are serious. But sort out why you are uncomfortable and address it.

 

Next up on the list, more instrument approaches as my IFR currency expires on December 9th.

The tension between the person who does just one thing really well and the "Jack of All Trades" isn't a new phenomenon, and I doubt its going to resolve itself anytime soon, if ever. Have you noticed that the same thing exists on the internet? With some sites trying to be your "one stop shop" for everything from maps and directions to replacement filers for your humidifier to your preferred source for genuine Thai chilis; while other places are tightly focused on doing one single thing and doing it really well. I'm not sure one approach is really better than the other. It may just depend on what it is you need at the moment.

 

Anyway, here is a great web site that does one thing really, really well: display current sectional and terninal area charts. You can call up any chart in the set by entering an airport or navaid identifier, scroll around the chart with your mouse, zoom in and out, and even view current METAR at airports by placing your cursor over them. You can embed links to specific charts into your own web sites, e-mails or documents. It is not going to replace paper charts in your cockpit, but its a great flight planning tool. And best of all, its completely free! Check it out for yourself at Skyvector.