Lesson 24: Circuits (Cancelled – High Wind)

June 25th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

The day before the lesson, the wind was forecast to be 24 mph (20 knots) and gusting even higher.

So, I was well prepared when the phone rang for this lesson to be cancelled.

It wasn’t a total loss, I guess as my instructor was just going to be sitting around anyway she said to come in and we could get some other ground work bits and pieces signed off in my training record.

You don’t pay if the propeller ain’t spinning (money makes the propeller go round), so this was a bit of a freebie, we like free stuff 🙂

TAF’s & METARS

Metars are actual observations of the weather, they attempt to give you a picture of what it’s like right now.

TAF’s (Terminal Aerodrome Forecast) are, as the name suggests, forecasts of the weather and give you a ‘best guess’ at what it might be like in the near future and for how long it might be like that.

Both come in an encoded text format, standardised by the ICAO if you can read them in one location, you should be able to read them anywhere in the world.

Met Office : Aviation Services

If you want accurate and up to date METAR’s & TAF’s, one of/the best source at least in the UK is The Met Office and thankfully they offer an “Aviation” service, for free.  You just need to register (free) and then login and you can get at all the information.

In addition to METAR’s & TAF’s, The Met Office provides Form F214 & 215, which provide wind speeds and graphical displays of the weather updated regularly during the day.

Really good service, if you haven’t found it/aren’t fully using it to its full potential yet, check it out.   As with all big websites there’s a lot of information and it’s sometimes hard to find where the good stuff on there is, but just those handful of bits are useful.

Aerodrome Information

Having gone through that lot and decoded a few METAR’s & TAF’s (more stuff signed off in the training sheet), I was shown possibly the only book I’ve yet to buy, the UK VFR Guide.

Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped in with “Ahhh yes, I need one of those….”  Because the excitement was shot down pretty promptly by a reminder that actually, it can go out of date and the publisher is under no requirement to inform you.

The official source of information for aerodromes, should be the CAA’s AIP, specifically the Aerodrome section.   If something changes, they will re-issue the page(s) affected.   So another useful bookmark to have is where you can find all of this information.

In addition on there you can quickly search NOTAM’s (NOtice To Air Men) and find out things like why an area is currently marked as a danger area etc.

The Out of Date Chart

When you start to fly, there’s a lot of stuff you need and you’ll either buy it all in one big spending spree of ‘super preparation’ (there’s not masses of point to this), or you’ll add loads of it to wish-lists etc. and get friends & family to buy it you….. After years of “What do you want for….???”   I finally had a huuuge list I could point people at 🙂

So of course when asked “Do you have a chart?”

The answer was an excited “Yes”, finally the beginnings of using it in anger for something!

Nicely folded, we began to unfold it and discovered it was Issue 37……bought just around the new year marker (guess), we had sailed past April and well, now it was out of date!    Issue 38 is now out 🙁

If you ever wanted proof that buying stuff before you really need it  isn’t useful, this is it – but hey, I got to practice my map folding with it so it wasn’t a total loss.

Now for the bad news, I couldn’t get the box for “Current / Valid Chart” ticked off, I might have had a very recent chart, but it wasn’t the current one  🙁

A good hour on the ground

All in all, a very enjoyable hour on the ground learning some new things, getting better at others and being shown around a few sites I probably should have been playing with a long time ago but have been far to busy with flying 🙂

 

 

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Lesson 23: Circuits (Finally….)

June 25th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

G-UFCB Cessna 172SP

G-UFCB : Cessna 172SP

I had the 9am slot booked, but at 8:40am I got the dreaded phone call that normally means only one thing:  Lesson Canceled due to…….    Sure enough that’s how the call started, but with the upshot that someone else must have cancelled because they now had an 11am slot available and did I want it?   No need to ask twice!

Upon arrival to the aero club, I discovered there were even more Olympic Games security procedures coming into play – now you can’t even get outside to the locked gate without a badge to get you through the now locked door!!   (price you pay for being one of the few airports near London that will still be open during the games).

Briefing

I’d be flying with the instructor who I did my first landing with…..at this point, with so many forgettable attempts to duplicate that lesson behind me, I can’t tell you how good this felt.

I don’t know if he’d read my file, or just wanted to give me a typical “Haven’t flown with you in a while re-cap….”   However he went through flying the circuit again in the briefing room and it went roughly like this:

Fly down to the runway…..Then Fly Over it……Keep trying to Fly Over it.

In his words “Sure, you can talk about the ‘hold-off’ and ‘flaring’ and they’re all the right terms…….but if you fly down to the runway, then level off to try and fly over it and then just keep trying to fly over it, you’ll find the flare happens naturally.   You don’t have enough power on to stay in the air, so you’re coming down, it’s a fact.”

I don’t know why it clicked, but these words just seemed to click – if I was waiting for some coin to drop, this was the speech that made it drop.

Beyond this speech, it was as simple as:   “Right, lets get you the keys……”

I’ve been flying for nearly a year now and I still enjoy being passed the keys to a plane 🙂

Taxi and Take-Off

I’ve spent a year doing left hand circuits, but for the last couple of weeks it’s all change to right hand circuits…….still at least when Air Traffic ask me to “Taxi to Delta via the grass taxi way.”   I know where it is now, I need a map of this airport 🙂

Delta is at the far end, far, far away from where the Cessna’s are parked up and the grass taxi way to it becomes a descent down a hill which would make a pretty good sledge run in the winter.    Stop thinking it’s costing £3/min to be chugging along the grass at a speed you could literally get out and walk faster and just enjoy the views and the fact you’re playing with airplanes, what could be better!

As we finish up on the power checks and set-up on the holding position of Delta my instructor points out that somewhere in the 87+ point checklist, I’ve clearly missed the step to turn the nav/strobe lights on.  Oops!   (We could argue they’re not required during the day, but lets not…..)

First Circuit of the Day

The deal was the instructor would stay quiet, I’d do the circuit and he’d see where I was at from there – I did warn him that traditionally my first circuit of the day was my worst, but we’d see.

Other then a slight moment of doubting myself on when to turn on to base having only flown a right hand circuit a couple of times, the circuit itself was pretty nice and the approach was equally ok.   I turned a bit to soon on to final, largely because of a crosswind that made it feel like there’d never be a good time to turn.

It was all going so nicely, but around 100ft I convinced myself I was too low and was going to touch down before the runway threshold.   Rather then force the landing I decided to just bail on it and go-around.

My instructor said there was actually nothing really wrong with it and was looking good, but it showed I could make safe decisions.    Yeah, feed me the  positive stuff, I’m not paying £179/hour to be depressed 🙂

Second Circuit

An all round better circuit, we’re only talking by factors of 50ft but just that bit better.

A nice final approach with a 7kt crosswind.  As the runway disappeared under us, I began the attempt to “fly over/along it”.    Taking off the remaining power as it went and bringing the nose up in the futile attempt to keep the plane flying over the runway before kicking it straight with the ruder, the main wheels touched down.

…….and that is how I did it the first time!!!!!

It’s a sensation I’d been chasing for ~6 lessons, that nice touch down where you know you’ve landed but it didn’t require medical attention to your back afterwards.   Oh at times its felt like the whole show was a joke and I’d never crack it, but eureka, it can be done!

Admittedly I could have got it a bit straighter just before touch down, but we were on the center line or thereabouts, it was decent enough.

Third Circuit

All in all as nice as the second, slight improvement on the amount of rudder used to kick it straight just before touch down and a landing that felt like a landing – rather than a crash you walked away from.

Flaps up, full power on and back up we go…..

Fourth Circuit

My instructor decided to give my emergency procedures a run and announced we’d had an engine failure on take-off (oh ok there might have been a radio call to ATC to just let them know what we were about to do, but still, not much notice….).    Set the attitude to get airspeed (70kts) and then start picking a field.

The instructor pointed out that if there’s time you can go through the motions of curing the problem.   If not, the rest of the checklist for an engine failure on take off is effectively to shut the engine down and land straight ahead if possible (the checklist says land “Straight ahead” – but maybe don’t do this if straight ahead is a house and 30 degrees to the right is a big grass field….).   The objective though is that you don’t want to be turning without an engine unless you have to and/or have sufficient height.

Fifth Circuit

I flew the circuit and my instructor decided to demonstrate that the engine doesn’t have to fail on take off.   It can decide it’s going to fail wherever it likes, so this time he ‘failed’ it three quarters of the way downwind.

Constantly asking the question “Can I make the runway” he commenced a glide in approach – in all honesty making it look far to easy.

Sixth Circuit

We must have been flying in the most unreliable plane on the planet, because it had another ‘engine failure’ on take off!   (Honestly I’m sure the book says to land it when the first one happens 🙂  ).

Another fairly nice circuit, though I did need a reminder to make a radio call for downwind – I may have become ‘inflight obsessed’ with flying it straight.

The landing was another good one…..

Seven Circuit & Final Landing

Original plan was that I was going to do a glide in approach, but unfortunately another plane beat us into the circuit by getting clearance to fly straight into final approach.

Got to partially glide in and it was another happy landing……… Go back to the start, I don’t know why this lesson clicked, whether it was just a mental confidence boost to be flying with someone I knew I’d done good landings with, the speech at the beginning or something else.   The trick will be doing it again on the next lesson.

Debriefing

The words I remember hearing were “you’re landings are good enough to go solo.”

After what feels like stacks of lessons, this becomes all you look forward to hearing 🙂

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Lesson 20 & 21 : Circuits

June 18th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

As it was my birthday I decided what better way to spend it then to go flying all day long, so I’d booked in for two lessons on the same day (each lesson is a two hour slot, so other than a spot of lunch in the middle for 4 hours of the day you’re either checking a plane, talking about planes or flying the plane 🙂  ).   There really are worse ways to spend a weekend….

Briefing

We went through the calculation for working out the crosswind component.

There are many ways to do this, the technically most accurate is:

XWind = WindSpeed * sin(WindDiffAngle)

Where “WindDiffAngle” is the difference between the runway angle and the wind angle, assuming you want the crosswind component of flying into that runway.  Good luck trying to remember your sine tables while somewhere in the circuit or on approach to an airfield.

Lets say the runway is 23  (230 degrees), and there’s a crosswind from 270 at 14 kts.

Flight Computer computing Crosswind Component

Calculating Crosswind Component

Because a Flight Computer (the UK  mandates use of a mechanical version, which for me is stretching the bounds of what you should be allowed to call a “computer”), is essentially a circular slide rule, it can do this equation for you.   Well sort of, because it’s mechanical its solution is that you set the circular part to the wind direction, then mark with a pencil the wind speed.   Then as you rotate the circular part to the runway direction, your pencil mark will move, giving you the final crosswind component for that runway (I can’t wait to try and do all that faffing in the air!)

Mechanical flight computers lack precision and are exposed to the mercy of human error, most of the time you just want a ball park figure anyway – especially when you’re busy doing the top priority of ‘aviating’ in the circuit.

There are many schemes for getting in the ball park, arguably the simplest is the “Clock” rule of thumb.

Quite simply, draw a clock with 60 at the top, 30 at the bottom etc.   Now take difference between the runway and the wind direction (in the above example: 270-230 = 40).   40 is two thirds of 60, so the crosswind component is roughly two thirds of the wind speed – so in our example, 14kts * 0.666 = ~9.32 kts.

If we used the equation to compute this we’d get:   (14 * (sin(40)) = 8.99 kts

So the rule of thumb method has an error of 0.33 kts (for this scenario, the rule has a huge 13% error at 60 degrees), but it gets you in the ball park.   You don’t need to worry too much about that big error at 60 degrees difference between runway & wind direction, because the clock rule of thumb is pessimistic.   It will result in you multiplying the reported wind by 1, instead of 0.87, this will give you an answer with a higher crosswind component then there actually is.

Look closely at the image of the flight computer, the pencil mark is now showing maybe 8kts or maybe 9kts of crosswind.   As I said above, being mechanical, they lack precision and this lack of precision comes from:  How thick was the pencil?  and the tolerance spacing between markings of 2kts per box.   Still, it’ll do the computation.

Taxi to Delta…..to where?

G-SHWK

G-SHWK

Flying G-SHWK, if the weather hadn’t been so bad the month before I’d hoped to have made this set of lessons the one where I went solo.   However, it was unlikely now, especially as the last lesson had ended with a need to see a couple of lessons of good landings before sending me solo.   At times I’d take 1 good landing, forget a lesson full of them, that is where my head is at this point in the training.

An amazingly hot sunny day, we got clearance to taxi down to holding point ‘Delta’ (where the heck is that!).   I’ve flown here for like a year, we’ve never gone there, I didn’t even know it existed.   Shocking.

Starting to be grateful about not being let loose on my own, I clearly don’t even know my home airport.   Still, it’s easier when there’s someone in the right seat to give directions 🙂

Emergency Stops on the Runway

Once down at Delta, which is the worlds longest taxi.  We waited for a plane to come in, then my instructor asks permission to do an emergency stop on the runway – now rather then getting our clearance, we get told to hold…….forever, for the longest time we were sat there, feet on the toe brakes just waiting for this jet coming in on the ILS (Instrument Landing System).   Waiting and waiting, there was even time to discuss having an ice cream out on the wing!

Finally cleared to go we line up and stop, the instructor runs me through how to do the emergency stop.

Full power on, then a voice “STOP!”    It’s all go from that moment, I pull the throttle out, then probably in a moment of wrongness start applying the brakes, I stop doing that and the plane attempts to get airborne!

The nose wheel is off the ground, we do maybe 50 meters on the back wheels alone before getting the nose back down.   This must have looked properly bonkers to onlookers.   Still, it stops and we have well over half the runway remaining.

Note:  We were not cleared for a take-off, we had been cleared to do an emergency stop.   So we have to ask for clearance again to take off.

Circuits

The rest of the day was spent flying (right hand) circuits:  Up, round, down, land – almost always not applying enough back pressure.   Up, round and down.

Because I’m not applying enough back pressure my instructor tells me to trim the plane on approach so its nose wants to come up on the approach and basically fly it down with a little forward pressure.   Now on hold off it will be naturally trimmed closer to want to lift the nose…….this makes it a bit easier, but in my head I know I’m now cutting a corner and I want to avoid this trick.

It was a really enjoyable day of flying in some great weather, but I didn’t leave either lesson feeling much closer to going solo.

The positives are that I’m not flying with a map over my instruments, my instructor isn’t having to constantly tell me to “Look up!”   and other than a bit of convergence in the downwind, my circuits are now pretty good.    I just need that last 50ft to be as if I’ve done it a million times before……..and at this rate, I will have done it a million times 🙂

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Lesson 19: Circuits

June 12th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

Briefing

G-SHWK

G-SHWK

Take off, turn, descend, land…….flaps up, full throttle and repeat.

After a shocking last lesson in cross wind my notes clearly  said we’d had some fun in crosswind.

Back flying with my ‘regular’ flight instructor (more hours with her than anyone else, but I’ve had seven instructors to date!).   We’d take G-SHWK up and see how the gods of aviation felt like playing it today.

Circuits

One general improvement to report, I no longer seem to have a map or a smiley face covering up all the instruments.

I’m not going to even attempt to remember every circuit from this lesson, it’s a blur in a mad run of lessons in May (the weather turned for the better and so I was flying faster than I could stop to write it all down).

A theme of nice circuits, really nice approaches and hard landings is occurring.

There’s no way I could ever put it into words for someone else to truly appreciate unless they’ve seen it first hand, but the last 50-60ft just felt too fast.   There’s a sort of ‘elbow stop rest’ and I keep finding myself pulling the control column back to this point and no further, which ultimately seems to result in landing “flat” rather than with a decent flare.   I’m not sure if it’s just this, a subconscious fear of ballooning (results in having to go-around) or something else going wrong.

The quest to try and figure out what I did on the first circuit lesson that was so much better just continues – oh that isn’t to say what is going wrong isn’t being explained to me.   Unfortunately if you could just read the book and then put the words into actions, learning how to fly would be a lot easier 🙂

Circuits were mixed up with a few practice emergencies and go-arounds.

Another Chance to Land on the Grass

The lesson ended with Air Traffic radioing in that runway 23 had been closed for inspection and could we land on 23 Grass?

……….we could give it a go 🙂

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Lesson 18: Circuits (with Crosswind)

June 10th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

I’m still catching up on a back-log of flying, so this is a few weeks after the event, but in the grand scheme of the blog, it’s generally in sequence.

Briefing

G-SHWK

G-SHWK

We’d be flying G-SHWK.  Of the clubs planes, this one is my favorite.   Cessna, the FAA or even EASA might tell you that as the plane is certified and holds a Certificate of Airworthiness (“C of A”), that it is born equal.   In terms of at what speed it gets airborne/stalls at etc. I don’t dispute it.   However, it doesn’t squeak/creak like Charlie Bravo does.   I’ve flown it at night, I like it.

I’ve flown enough circuits now to not really need briefing on it, but with an instructor I’ve only flown with once before, we had a quick catch-up and a look at the weather:

The wind was really starting to pick up and starting to reach the limits (20kts) of a student pilot, but we’d go up and give it a go.

Taxi and Take-Off

Due to a hose pipe ban, I hadn’t flown in ~3 weeks.   Top tip to anyone taking up learning how to fly:  This is the absolute max gap you want to have between flying lessons, it’s the point where you can’t quite remember the sensation of starting the engine and it all starts to feel non-instinctive.

Circuits and Crosswind

As this was with an instructor I hadn’t flown with for a while, but had been chatting to the previous night through aero club social events, I had hoped the gods of aviation would be kind.   It was not going to happen though, the first circuit was as shocking as any I’ve ever done, the approach was just a fight and at somewhere around 200ft:

Full Power On………”Golf Whiskey Kilo, Going Around….”

That wasn’t the original game plan, but as we started to climb away, I thought “Not to worry, shows you can make safe decisions….”

Circuit #2 was nice enough, the approach was still a good old session with the wind, but better than before.   100ft to the runway still looking reasonable, with 50-100ft to go it all started to unravel and we touched down with a solid full-on WHAM!  🙁

It was so hard that the next words from my instructor was “When we get back up I’ll take control and explain what went wrong there…..”

No joking.

I can look back with weeks of hindsight and I’m convinced my arm was finding a natural ‘back rest’ and would not pull back the controls further than just about nose level.   So we were hitting the deck at 55kts or somewhere around there – it felt like it!

Circuit #3, lets just cut to the chase – the magnitude of disappointment in myself with the landing on this circuit was exhausted audibly in the cockpit with what my instructor described as a “Big Sigh.”

What you have to remember is that my first two landings were things of near perfection.   Since then, I’ve just searched to replicate them and failed, lesson after lesson……three circuits into another lesson, my subconscious was clearly starting to to ponder what the hell I was doing.

I think my instructor got the general impression that this wasn’t going to happen today and called it quits.   The next circuit was to land……..it was better, but still completely rubbish in my book.

Debriefing

My instructor said a lot of positive things about my approaches and general flying.

For my money though, this was quite simply my worst lesson to date.   Maybe because this was the 6th circuit lesson I’d had and it was a million miles worse then my first.

Blame it on the cross winds, book some more lessons and see what happens next time – not all lessons are great ones to remember.

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Air Law Exam : Passed

June 6th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

This is a bit of a belated post, but in the grand scheme of things is largely in sequence.

For those thinking about learning to fly, passing the air law exam is 1 of 3 tick boxes for being allowed to fly solo (the others:  Hold a Class 2 Medical, Have an instructor say you’re good to go……it’s as simple as that :-\  ).

The air law book is one of the thicker books in the set of material to learn and more than once it certainly went through my head “How on earth do you memorise all of this…?”   Countered of course with the fact that people do, all the time, so it must be possible.

40 questions, multiple choice (4 answers per question), with an hour to reach the finish, a pass mark of 75% is required.

In my experience, most of the questions had 1 answer you should be able to immediately dismiss, one you should be able to reasonably dismiss and then two that are both reasonable.

Looking back I found that if you try and pick it up and read sections, what actually happens is you start reading the same sections over and over and get quite good at them.   However, the sections you’re not so interested in don’t get much coverage or the sections that the book doesn’t naturally open to gets sparse coverage.   The best solution I found for this is not actually to read it cover to cover and then repeat, but actually to follow a recommendation from someone else at the aero club, get the Simplifier book.   This has 3 example papers in it, now when you think you’ve read up and know your stuff, run through a paper.   Any questions you don’t immediately know the answer to, make a note of/mark, then take your best guess and keep going.  Three important facts will come out of this:

  1. What areas of questioning needs more attention.
  2. Can you get through a paper within the time allowed.
  3. Did you pass – and did you pass by fluke (how many marked up questions did you have), or did you pass by knowing your stuff without hesitation.

Be careful though, with only 3 example papers it’s very easy to become an expert at the questions on those papers (effectively you’ve memorised the answer sheet, not learnt the subject material).

You can read and read and read…..and if you have no purpose for the reading, you can put the book down for a bit, then pick it up, read some more, put it down, pick it up and put it down again.   I had the air law book months before I started learning to fly and I’d been reading it off/on like this for months into my training.   Nothing quite focuses the mind like having a fixed in stone date.   So as a top tip to others, I’d say once you’re approaching your first circuit lesson (e.g. somewhere just after the time you do stalls), start reading up as if you mean it – then set a date to do the exam.  Once you have a date in the diary, you should find it focuses the mind and gives a purpose to the revision.

How did I do on the day?

My preparation results suggested I could finish in time and that I should pass it, but with such a wide topic area there’s always a chance each one will pick the one thing you missed.

The strategy was to make a first pass blitz through the paper and only answer the questions I knew, with absoluteness, the right answer.

On a separate piece of paper I marked up those I thought I knew but could be wrong and from there I would know just how far away from passing I was.

It’s easy to write only about the positives and how well it’s all going for you in blogs like this, I don’t think that adds much value to other readers though and it doesn’t really capture the memories of the experience for myself…..

Suffice to say, by the end of the first run through the paper, I’d counted 11 questions I was doubting myself on – any other day of the week I probably would have been absolute on 7 of those, but when you’re doing it for score it’s amazing how doubt creeps in.

11 questions!    If I got them all wrong, I’d have just failed my first attempt at air law and would have two attempts remaining – this is not the position I expected to be in from the hours of revision and test prep that had gone in the weeks before.   However, statistics were on my side, if I guessed 11 questions I should statistically get 1 in 4 right by pure fluke (2.75).   If I rounded that down to 2 by pure fluke, so long as nothing was wrong in my “absolute right” answers, we’d have 77% and a pass.   That’s with a 1 in 4 guess, I said earlier you can get it down to about 1 in 3 or 1 in 2 with a bit of thought, it’s not like I hadn’t revised this stuff so I should be able to get it in the ball park.   That would put the worst case score closer to 5 out of 11 and give a little margin on the others.

In the end I made my best and final answers, went back through the paper a couple of times just to make sure nothing really silly had happened (like start on line 2 of the answer sheet with the answer for question 1 etc.) and went back to the office to hand the paperwork in for marking.   I’d reached the point of “this is as good as it gets on the day.” inside of 30 minutes, upon returning I got the impression I was quicker then expected.

I walked away with 11 questions engraved in my brain, how I’d answered these I was sure would be the decider on whether I passed or not.   Thankfully it’s not far to drive from the aero club back to my house……..and there I had an answer book 🙂

Armed with the answer book, I worked out that unless something else had gone wrong, I’d scored about 85%.    Some of the stuff I got wrong, I still kick myself about but there are two things to remember here:   1.)  Exam environments change things, you doubt yourself a bit more, you second guess your instincts etc.   2.)  The objective is to pass, setting a record here is both impossible and pointless.

It would take 24 hours to mark the paper, so we’d have to just wait and see.

End Result

There was clearly nothing wrong with my ‘absolutely sure I’m correct’ answers, because when I called the aero club, the shout I heard from across the room of their office was “He passed, 85%”

Tick in the box………One step closer to flying solo.

As a foot note as this post is written up some weeks after the event, nobody has ever asked me what score I got.   The act of passing is a demonstration of knowledge competence in the area of air law – you could debate what questions you were asked verses the next person all day, but there’s no point.   Either you passed or you didn’t, if you did, it’s a tick in a box that opens a door to attempt the next tick box.

 

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Flying in California

June 1st, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

Before I started learning to fly, I’d go on holiday and do typical holiday excursion things.   Since starting to learn to fly – I’ve found myself looking almost permanently upwards (or at least once outside of LA).

This trip was to tour LA, Palm Springs, San Francisco and then drive back down the coast road via Santa Barbra back to LA.

Palm Springs – Blue Skies

Palm Springs and Blue Skies

Blue Sky over Palm Springs

I didn’t really think through the idea of going flying in the states before leaving, but once we hit Palm Springs, with its seemingly infinite blue skies – time to start emailing local flight instructors who could get me up there!

Having left it late to start asking around and with limited time, it was never going to be easy – Palm Springs was a no go, instructors were busy or I was busy.   Shame, I have to go back there to do some flying, you can’t imagine the vastness of the blue cloudless skies until you really experience it.   I’ve developed a new appreciation of deserts 🙂

San Francisco

It rains in the UK and they say we like nothing more then to talk about the weather, or at least I thought it rained in the UK.  Not like it does in San Francisco!!

At about 5am it must have started raining, not drizzle, the real deal full on soaking rain.  We were out doing tourist stuff all day and it didn’t let up until maybe gone 10pm – normally you get gaps, clearly when it wants to rain in San Francisco, it just rains!

The next day with the last of my emails to local flight instructors drawing blank and the weather not looking to improve.   I decided we should be spontaneous, hire a car for the day and just drive up to Napa and see what we find.

Over breakfast my wife found an advert for a vintage aircraft company.  Great we’ll aim for that and if it doesn’t pan out, we’ll be in Napa the weather was set to be good and we’d go try some wine – life could be worse 🙂

We found it easy enough, but pulling into the small airfield car park things didn’t look very promising.   There were no cars in the car park for a start and the place that looked to be the premises of ‘Vintage Aircraft Co.’ looked pretty silent.   After a stroll over to confirm nobody was home, it was back in the SUV to see if a last, slightly desperate attempt to give them a call yielded any success.

As the phone just rang out continuously and I began to accept fate, a camper van came out of the main hanger area of the airfield and pulled up alongside us.

“Hey, how’s it going……if you’re looking for…..I think they’ve packed up for the day”

“Oh really, I was hoping to go flying – I’m learning in the UK.”

“Wanna to see some cool stuff?? ………follow me.”

I had no idea who this guy was, but the offer of seeing some “cool stuff” sounded to tempting to pass up – especially as the hope of getting up in the air had just been shot down.

He spun his camper round and headed back into the airfield, we did similar and followed him up to the hangers.

At this point, when he was about to pull back the doors to the hanger I had expectations of seeing his plane, maybe it was a C172 he was proud of, or maybe something a bit more expensive like an SR22, or perhaps older like a Tiger Moth.

What I didn’t expect to see, was a replica, 1909 Bleriot!   But that’s what he had….

1909 Bleriot XI

1909 Bleriot XI

Ticks the box for something cool, especially as he built it in 29 days!   It turned out that I was talking to Eric Presten.   He’s got all the right stamps of approval for building and flying such stuff and probably best known for publishing Vintage Flyers photo book of almost every old and cool plane that has ever taken to the air.   It cost me the price of the book, but I did get my copy signed 🙂

Next to the Bleriot (see it run up its engine here) was his Cessna 182, sorry no pictures of that, Google has enough already if you want to see one.

The tour didn’t stop there though, following a motion of did I want to see some more cool stuff, we closed the hanger doors and headed off on foot round the corner.

As the hanger door opened a very shiny plane stood before me (1928, Stearman).

Stearman Fury

Stearman Fury, 1928

Ok, I hadn’t managed to get into the air, but this was turning out to be a pretty successful day none the less and Eric was a really nice guy to chat to about all things planes.

As he was closing up, I figured it was worth a punt and asked if he knew anyone in the area that might be able to get me up in the air today…..

“Oh yeah sure, follow me….”

We jumped in the SUV, drove out of the small (by UK standards, pretty random) airfield and up the road for about 3-6 miles – to yet another small, slightly random airfield.

Eric was telling me that there was a flight school here so there should be no problem getting up in a C172.   Great, I fly those here, so things were looking very much up.

The next thing I remember hearing was:   “Hey, Bob’s in town….”

I’m sure this was meant to mean something, of course Bob, everyone knows Bob.   Don’t they?

When the next sentence was “…..and he has a bi-plane.”   Bob quickly became someone I needed to know 🙂

It turned out that Bob didn’t just have any old bi-plane, he had a 1926 Travel Air 4000.   Believed to basically be the last one of its kind flying.

Travel Air 4000 (1926)

Travel Air 4000 (1926)

I was now presented with options and a bit of a dilemma.

Either go flying in a C172, which you can do pretty much anywhere and I do basically every other weekend or so – but get to fly the plane.

Or go up in a 1926 Travel Air 4000, last of its kind, very cool plane, probably once in a life time – but only get into the sky as a passenger.

Not that tough a decision, once in a life time Vs every other weekend…… It had to be a spin up in the Travel Air!

We did a deal with Bob, in his words “I like flying, not business….”   so I think we covered his costs of flying the plane and made him a bit of cash for the day – but we got a deal way better than what you’d get if you did an air tour in San Francisco (usually also sharing the experience with 6 others etc.)

View of Napa from a Travel Air 4000

View of Napa from a Travel Air 4000

Bob flew us out almost to the coast, over the wine valley’s and along the hills – we flew pretty low, if we were higher than 1200ft I’d be amazed. It was a really, really good trip up and the views were well, the only way to see Napa to be honest.   On the return leg he decided to have a bit of fun with it, pulled back on the stick and we were aiming for the gods…….before cutting the throttle yawing the plane 180 degrees to point back at the ground and then into a dive.   Brilliant!!   Bi-planes, fly slow and this maneuver in them always looks like (from the ground) they’re turning almost on the spot, mid-air.   To make sure we got our moneys worth, he did it again 🙂

Aviation People are Great People

Since I started learning to fly, I’ve met a lot of people who fly or are learning to fly.   It never ceases to amaze me how much they all seem to be willing to help you out, show you something cool they’ve got, take you 6 miles up the road to find someone who can take you flying or just buy you a beer.

I can’t thank Eric and Bob enough for helping sorting this trip out, it was just fantastic.

…….and the last thing to put a smile on my face.   When we landed, I was chatting to the guy who ran the flight school there, asking how much it cost.   $139/hour with an instructor!    Just to put that in perspective, it costs me £179/hour.    It makes the idea of going out there for 1-2 weeks and just building a stack of flight hours very tempting.

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Class 2 Medical: Another Milestone

May 1st, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

Class 2 Medical Certificate

Class 2 Medical Certificate

Getting a Class 2 Medical Certificate is one of those many requirements that there’s no escape from – if you want a PPL or even to fly solo, you’re going to need one.   Your local GP can’t just issue it either, for this you will need an appointment with an approved Air Medical Examiner (AME), oh and some cash – nothing in flying is free 🙂

You can however fly with an instructor right up until the word ‘solo’ enters the vocabulary in your flight training without one.   This isn’t recommended practice for the obvious reason that by the time you need it, you’ll have spent a couple of  thousand pounds on flight training and it might have all been for nothing if you then find some medical problem that prevents you from being a pilot.

It might well be recommended to get it early, for very sound reasons, but as you can tell from this blog – I didn’t rush down to my local Air Medical Examiner the day after starting flight training.

Some people hate spiders, others hate flying…….and from reading around online I’m apparently not alone in having a dislike for doctors examination rooms.   So I did put this off and off and off some more.  Yes it could have meant throwing away lots of cash, but I had no reason to believe I couldn’t pass it and could at least enjoy flying in the mean time – knowing you could never get a license I’m sure would just put the breaks on bothering taking lessons for the fun of lessons.

Booking the Appointment

The aeroclub had given a couple of names of AME’s in the area that they recommended, the CAA maintains a full listing here.   As one of the clubs recommended AME’s I gave Dr. Wallace (AME: 10103) in Royston a call.

Sounded friendly enough with a touch of wise from experience, he runs the practice from his house and has all the right stamps.  He asked how urgent I needed the certificate and when I told him where I was in the training he did a good job of fitting me in before he left for his three week vacation.

Really straight forward though, a quick call, a few questions on whether there’s anything he really should know up front (e.g. are you typically ill, do you have any known serious medical issues etc.), a time/place and of course the cost:  At the time of writing £170 (inc. VAT)


The Appointment

It’s a little bit random to pull into someones driveway for a medical exam, but other than that it was a well run operation.   Upon arrival I was shown to the waiting room, a copy of Flyer Magazine and other aviation material available to pass the time (better than the typical glossy rubbish in a GP practice!).

Ten minutes later and we were on.

A bit of banter and then into the form filling, it started with a bit of an explanation on the certificate itself and that the number the computer generated for my medical would stick with me for life.

There’s a form to fill out of approx. 3 pages with a fairly vast array of medical illnesses to assert you don’t to your knowledge have (they all seemed to be fairly serious stuff, so if you’ve not been to your GP complaining of anything then they probably don’t apply).

This was followed by a measurement of my height and weight.

Next was a question on my eyesight, I’m short sighted and if you need glasses remember that the AME needs to see your opticians prescription to verify the correction required is within limits (+5.00/-8.00), full CAA details of the eyesight requirements can be found here.   Rather than going straight in to the eyesight test, we started with a short sight test (reading from a book with smallish print from approx. 30-60cm away).   This was followed by a colour blindness test (a book with several pages of large numbers ‘camouflaged’ in a sea of different colours).   All good and so it was on to the distance test, this was your typical back-lit chart of letters in descending size from top to bottom, which as expected with glasses I passed.

During this whole process Dr. Wallace was talking to me from various positions of the room and from this I assume he concluded he was happy with my hearing – but there was no explicit test on my hearing.   The CAA seems to document this as normal practice and is left to the AME’s judgement for class 2.

I can’t remember having a lung function test (peak flow), but again from what I’ve read this is typical unless you have respiratory problems such as Asthma.

A separate bathroom connecting to the office conveniently allowed for the urine sample, this is testing for diabetes, protein or blood in the urine.

With all of that out of the way, I was asked to remove my socks (shoes came off when being measured for height) and top and lie-flat on a typical GP office ‘bed’.  A fairly quick check from my throat & shoulders to my stomach and then I was wired up to the the ECG machine.

If you’ve never had one before, an ECG measures the electrical impulses passing through your heart.   You have ~6 electrodes fitted to various positions from your chest to your feet/ankles (thus the removal of socks) and then basically it’s a matter of “press go……and see what the computer says next.”

Dr. Wallace was really good at explaining the output of the ECG machine, firstly that it was normal (my eyes were drawn to the fact my ‘resting’ heart rate was 85bpm, which is high for me – but slightly elevated heart rate is expected at times like this).  Then he went into the detail of what all the “P’s”, “QRS’s” and “T’s” were all about and why it was alright on the night.   He even printed me a copy for myself, you don’t need it, but for £170 you might as well get something for the books!

With that out of the way it was pretty much a done deal, all that was left to do was attempt to use the CAA software to issue the certificate (which apparently is very slow and clunky – I told him Citrix is just like that I’m afraid, or at least whenever I’ve used anything running on it, it has been).

A few checks, double checks and triple checks of the details on the screen before finally submitting everything to the CAA and hey presto, a Class 2 Medical Certificate.

Next Milestone

………Now all that’s left to do is pass the Air Law exam and convince an instructor I’m capable of flying solo.

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Lessons 15,16,17 – Circuits, Circuits and More Circuits

April 11th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

Quite a bit to catch up on, as time has been limited and the only constant where everything else has had to give – has been actual flying lessons.

It’s funny how time flies when you’re having fun.    I remember waiting to do my first take off, then my first landing – each time feeling like it’s just out of reach, then it happens and before you know it you’re looking back and can’t remember how many times you’ve done them.   I’d struggle now (without referring to my log book) to tell you now how many landings I’ve done.

Now I’m just waiting to fly solo for the first time……and the knowledge that you’re maybe a few good circuits away from doing it, is a double edged sword.

Briefings

G-SHWK

G-SHWK

All three lessons were flown in G-SHWK. For no real reason, now my favourite of the clubs planes.

Lesson 15 was to focus on general circuits, touching on aborting/go-arounds.

Lesson 16 & 17 were flown on the same day (due to a bit of a club mix-up on bookings – and my eagerness to go flying, I just decided I’d have both slots with a few hours gap between them).   Again the focus was on circuits, but these lessons introduced the first emergency scenarios and beginning to get a feel for “if the engined failed, which field do you think you could reach Vs which field you could reach.”

All three lessons, rather amazingly were with an instructor who historically brings the rain (or I bring the rain to her – depends which side of the story you want to listen to).

Circuits, Circuits and More Circuits

Unlike almost all the previous lessons, when flying circuits I find I have a hard time remembering the good/bad/ugly from each circuit and it all just merges into a collective event.    Probably due to the increased workload going on.

First circuit of every lesson to-date has tended to be not brilliant, but from there on in generally the circuits of lesson 15 went smooth enough – a running theme of perhaps a bit more power still on during touch down then would be ideal and a constant bombardment from my instructor to keep my hand on the throttle for the entire circuit (more on that later).

Lesson 16: can be best remembered with my instructors arm & map covering all of the cockpit instruments – for most of the flight.   Apparently I’m flying on instruments to much……my defence of you can trust them didn’t go down well :-\   Countered quickly with the fact that the instruments won’t tell you you’re about to fly into someone else and an emphasis on the fact we fly at a very busy airport, while many pilots learn at much smaller airports and thus tend to make mistakes when flying into bigger airports with heavier traffic and stricter necessity to follow procedures (She has a point I guess 🙂 ).

With the map covering the instruments I apparently fly well, without the map I start flying on instruments and the desire for absolute accuracy (1000ft +/-0.1ft altitude etc.) causes the control surface workload to skyrocket – ask an autopilot to achieve 1000ft +/-0.1ft and see how many inputs it makes to achieve it……this probably illustrates what I must look like attempting to achieve it.

We practised a bit of engine failure and a couple of aborts/go-arounds and it was time to land – lesson 17 just a few hours away.

Lesson 17 – The Latest in Aviation Equipment

After lesson 16, my instructor had a very tired arm and so came up with a cost effective instrument to improve my flying:    A piece of paper & some sticky tape with the words:

LOOK UP!!

Written on it, with a smiley face of course……… 🙂

From about 100ft, my instruments were covered by the paper and I was told in no uncertain terms that I know what an 80knot climb looks like, so fly it and stop staring at the instruments (not that I could now).

A scary thing happened next:    With no instruments and only my instructor to tell me when to turn on to crosswind, I climbed at 80 knots, turned using 20 degrees of bank – and by some ‘miricle’ leveled out on crosswind at 1000ft!   My instructor thought I was cheating I suspect because she said “How did you know when to do that….”    and my honest response was “I have no idea – it just sort of looked right.”

Hmmm….they say something similar in the book about the landing perspective.    Could it be I’m getting the hang of this VFR flying lark, but am just holding on to the instruments like a safety blanket?     Maybe my instructor knows what she’s talking about!

My only problem now was trying to break the habit of staring down at where the instruments would be resulting in a very strange effect that you find yourself attempting to look through paper.

With the paper my flying was (instructors opinion) calm and smooth with plenty of time left to do other things like pre-landing checks.    When she took the paper away……..back to worrying about every single foot of altitude, every RPM over 2000.   Must look up, Must look up, must look up!

Grass Runway Landing

As we came in to land air traffic control announced that runway 23 main was closing for an inspection – and could we accept 23 grass?

As I’m heading closer and closer to going solo I’m doing most of the radio work now, but for this I had to look at my instructor and give a “I have no idea, can we?”  

Apparently we could – but that left the remaining issue that I’ve never landed on 23 grass before (or any other grass runway for that matter).

Issues to remember about grass runways:   Narrower (esp. compared to 23 main which can take 747’s), shorter and well errrrm they’re made of grass!

Took a few seconds to get it lined up properly as without all the nice PAPI toys and other lighting unless you’ve flown it before it takes a bit longer to actually work out what you’re trying to line up with.

After that the approach was good,  the landing ok – but I continue to be at 50ft with too much power…….and a grass landing?    Well it’s like a tarmac landing except it’s as bumpy as anything!

We backtracked on the runway to get to the taxiway and then had to hold position because one of the other clubs Cessna’s was coming in and hadn’t got stitched up to land on the grass 😉

I can’t seem to repeat the super smooth landing of my first two landings ever done, it’s beginning to get a little annoying that they were almost perfect and now I can find issue in almost every landing I’ve done since.

I left this string of lessons with one recurring phrase:   Look up!

 

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Lesson 14: Circuit Flying – (#2)

March 4th, 2012 by PHC | Permalink

G-SHWK

G-SHWK

After quite a few cancelled lessons due to bad weather, we finally got there.   Winter is beginning to fall away and with that the 4pm slot is available again as it’s now just about still officially daylight at 5pm.

This lesson would be flying G-SHWK with an instructor I’ve not flown with for a while, but we’ve done a couples of lessons (inc. a night flight) so it’s all good.

Briefing

As I’d had a three week gap in my training, the instructor just wanted to go back over the approach perspectives to landing.    Other than that it was as simple as “Can you remember your speeds, altitudes etc…..” – answer yes and get on with it.

The wind was approaching no go speeds, currently at a reported 14-16mph from 240 degrees.    But my instructor said we’d give it a go and worst case the lesson would have to be cut short if the wind got really bad on final.

The plane (Whiskey Kilo) had a broken taxi light, but other than that, brimming with AVGAS and in basically tip-top shape.

Taxi

After one or two lessons some time back where the plane wouldn’t start first time, I still find myself breathing a sigh of relief when the engine kicks in and starts to run.    I should be over this, but I think it might be stuck with me now as one of those little ritual things you pick up.

Air Traffic Control seemed fairly relaxed and tolerant of my taxi clearance radio call “…..G-SHWK <stop> for Runway 23.”     Which is syntactically wrong (call sign ends the message), but they got the idea.

Bailed from doing the take-off briefing, at the end of the day I’m not envisioning the instructor letting me do an emergency landing in a real emergency, so I think we can both be confident he’ll take control should that occur.

Take Off

In my previous lesson (different instructor), I was told to level the nose during the take off to see how good/or bad it was with respect to being straight without using instruments…   So this time I did level the nose, and got promptly told we shouldn’t be able to see the horizon, point the nose up.    Now one thing to note about the sanity of the first instructors idea, is that the runway I take off from is massive (1,965m) with respect to the amount required for a Cessna 172SP to take off on (~500m) – so you’re airborne while you’ve still got 2/3 of the runway left to go.    However, it’s another one of those small examples of the problems you get from constantly swapping instructors.

Other than that, the take off was fine – it’s one of those things.   A few months back I’d be sitting in the plane hoping to do the take of, when I started doing them you’d be hoping it’ll come off looking pretty good.   Now I find I’m just expecting to do it and expecting it will be good.

 Circuits

So much was going on during this lesson with air traffic control (as we’d find out while doing laps of the airport they were not having their finest day).  It’s hard to actually remember on which circuit each event happened – but here’s my best recollection of events.

On the first circuit my instructor did the radio, everything went largely ok, the approach was fairly nice but the wind was “immense” (relative to my first lesson where it was practically zero).    The problem with this was not so much an issue for keeping it lined up – but the increased volume of corrective actions required to keep it lined up, every other second there was a gust of wind making the plane want to go somewhere else.

The approach down to 80-100ft was nice enough, from here on I wasn’t happy with it.   I’d come in on the glide slope (~3 degrees), this is a fairly shallow approach, meaning you’re fairly ‘flat’ to the runway, the net result is its harder to shed the remaining speed and rather then a gentle touch down, it was a hard thump.    Not main wheel destroying, but not good enough in my own mind and compared to my first two landings, this was like taking a step backwards.

Flaps up, power back on and we were off to try doing that again!

On the second circuit air traffic told us to extend down wind, we did, they then gave instructions to another plane that my instructor suggested they’d regret.  And moments later, they retracted their call to the other plane.

Again the approach was fine other than the wind trying hard to stop the landing from happening at all, but we stayed on course.    I don’t think I had the airspeed trimmed in very well (if at all) and the flare was more of a fight then an action.

Try again…..

Orbit, don’t Orbit……whatever you want ATC

As we were going down wind air traffic asked us to orbit right, so after looking under both wings, I started the turn – my instructor again suggested “he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s going to regret asking us to do that”.   Sure enough, no more than 40 degrees into the 360 degree turn, ATC came back with “Cancel orbit, continue downwind.”

Great, except we’re now pointing away from the circuit!    Still nothing a sharpish left turn can’t fix, and it’s all good practice and the result of learning at a busy airport.

The landing was better, but still hard and I figured in my head “one more and these will be starting to look decent.”

Abort Landing, Go Around – Repeat Abort.

On the next circuit I was set to try and do it decently, it was beginning to get dark and the runway looks like landing at heathrow when its dark (which can be off-putting all on its own).   Very conscious we were starting to run out of time.

Air Traffic threw in some more fun and games on the down wind leg.

Final was going fine, 400ft, 300ft, 200ft…..somewhere around 150ft and at this point you’re just about to cross a busy road at a fairly low altitude.  Air Traffic Control radio “G-SHWK,  Go Around.”      Knowing our altitude my instructor radioed back “We’re below 200ft, confirm the go around….”      ATC came back repeating the instruction to go around.

Concurrently with a lot of mumbling my instructor took control, full power went on, the last stage of flaps was removed and we began our abort shift slightly to the dead side (right) of the runway.

Damn it, that was going to be a nice landing too – and I never did hear the reason for the request.

Final Touch and Go, Landing.

Both were pretty much repeats or slight variants of what had come before:  Not shocking, not so awful that my instructor wanted to grab the controls for fear of his life……..but they just could have been better.

My instructor said what I kept doing was approaching nicely, but coming in to shallow (this goes back to the debate of whether you should fly the glide slope or not in a light aircraft, I’m beginning to agree with the “not” argument).   To achieve it I was finding myself over the runway in a configuration that couldn’t be flared, so the only option was to reduce power and thus thump the runway.

Personally, with hindsight, I also think I was focusing on landing on the numbers more than making the landing smooth.   I was ‘flying it down to the landing’ rather than trimming it up to fly itself down to the runway, which would probably be fine on a calm day, but the wind was really high and it was a fight to keep the airspeed attitude correct (which probably didn’t need to have been).

Debriefing

Nothing overly critical, the general comment was that I “didn’t have enough penetration on the approach, so you had nothing left to flare with”.    Other than that, generally good comments on the setup and overall approach perspective and reactions to being high/low etc.

It was enjoyable, but it just needed one sweet landing to have made me happy and I got robbed of that by ATC  (as good an excuse as any).

Another 50 minutes in the log book, another instructor who’s survived several of my landings 🙂

 

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