Paul's Down-Home Page

Bonus double Flying Friday post today. Why? Because this article is too good not to share.

…these NASA pilots were always at 350 when needed. It wasn’t 349 or 351. They always flew on-speed. For me, sitting in the backseat for my first couple of missions in ACTIVE, a whole new skill level was revealed. They flew this way all the time. They were always on parameters. They were always on-altitude. No 34,900 ft or 35,100 ft for them. It was 35,000 ft and not a foot higher or lower.

The author goes on to talk about how this precision inspired him to fly more precisely– “Why not,” he asks, “endeavor to fly as perfectly as possible? In fact, why not endeavor to fly as well as you possibly can all the time, versus ‘just good enough’?”

Exactly. That’s what I want, and what I try to do.

Andy, my primary flight instructor, has always described a pilot’s license as “a license to learn”. This may sound trite, but it’s true… if you’re doing things the right way.

This week’s FLYING LESSONS newsletter contained an interesting factoid: the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says that partial loss of power is three times more likely than complete engine failure. After reading the report, I am forced to agree with Thomas Turner that partial-power operation is under-taught; I know that in my relatively limited experience none of the instructors I’ve flown with mentioned how to deal with it or even how to recognize it.

Recognition, of course, sounds like it should be pretty easy: is the engine making as much power as it should? In a car, you can tell by your forward speed and/or acceleration: does the car accelerate normally when you push on the accelerator? There are also audible cues that may tell you whether the engine is working normally. In an airplane, the same audible cues may exist, but airspeed and climb performance are just as useful as the sounds you hear. If you have fancy engine instrumentation, then it may give you information such as cylinder head temperatures that tell you what’s going on.

The ATSB report calls out a fairly straightforward procedure for dealing with partial power loss: lower the nose to maintain best glide speed, find a place to land, and do so as soon as practical. No turns under 200′, and no troubleshooting the engine unless you have sufficient altitude to do so. It also goes into some detail about potential causes of partial power loss, including spark-plug fouling, fuel contamination, and problems with carburetor heat. All of these are things I will be more mindful of as part of my preflight and in-flight operations.

Always something new to learn…

Thomas P. Turner is a flight instructor and businessman who publishes an exceptionally useful weekly aviation newsletter called Flying Lessons. Recently he’s been focusing on trying to help pilots understand what’s truly risky about flying, and to provide some standards to help improve proficiency in those situations. As part of that process, in this week’s newsletter he linked to a matrix of go/no-go rules that I really like: the Categorical Outlook Flying™ matrix. The basic point of this matrix is to provide a simple, clear set of guidelines to help pilots of all experience and skill levels make good decisions.I don’t want to reproduce the entire matrix, but here’s a snippet:

This doesn’t seem that instructive– after all, all but one of the suggestions are “go”. However, the real beauty of this approach is that it breaks down the go/no-go decision into multiple factors, including weather, time of day, terrain, and flight rules. These factors correspond pretty well with some of the major risk factors associated with flight. Night VFR over mountains is more risky than day VFR over mountains– not because of the airplane, which doesn’t know it’s dark, but because of the difficulty of finding a safe place to land if there’s a problem.

The full set of matrices is well worth looking at. I like this approach and plan to incorporate it into my own personal minimums; the matrix above is already pretty much how I plan, but the “marginal VFR” matrix, which I haven’t shown here, is where things start to get a bit more interesting…

Tuesday afternoon I was working and decided to check out LiveATC.net, a web site that plays air traffic control audio for a huge range of airports worldwide. Soon enough I had fired up the Palo Alto tower, which led to looking out the window, which led to me reserving an airplane for a quick flight to Petaluma. Why there? It was just over 50nm away from Palo Alto, meaning that I could log the flight as cross-country time towards my instrument rating.

I got to the airport, preflighted the airplane, and enjoyed a smooth takeoff; departure had me do a right 45° departure and head towards the Oakland airport. I got on the radio with NORCAL Approach, who routed me over the runway 29 numbers at Oakland International and then cleared me further to the north. The sun was lowering in the western sky, which gave me a few pretty nice photo opportunities:

Approaching KOAK rwy 29 from the south; the numbers are just out of frame on the lower right

the city of San Francisco; that’s the Bay Bridge in the foreground

the Golden Gate Bridge, with bonus freighter

Both bridges, plus shafts of light through the city fog (you might need to see the full-size version to see them)

The Petaluma airport was easy to see, and I had a good landing on runway 29. Sadly, the diner there closes at 3pm, and I got there about 7:30pm. So, my key learning for this flight: verify the status of your proposed dinner destination before takeoff. I got out, stretched my legs, and fired the plane back up to return to Palo Alto; the night view was absolutely stunning, but I didn’t take any pictures.. maybe next time. Since it was dark, I went ahead and shot 3 landings to update my night currency; my last landing was a power-off, short-field squeaker that would have pleased even my  picky CFI.

An evening well spent…

I grew up reading Flying magazine. There always seemed to be copies around the house, along with books written by stalwart columnists such as Gordon Baxter (“File IFR even if you’re just going to the men’s room.”) and Dick Collins. I learned a great deal (mostly about what not to do) from reading the “I Learned About Flying From That” series, and I’ve happily enjoyed the magazine as it’s evolved to its present form, with a few minor nits that I’ll talk about another time.

Dick Collins is still writing. A couple of years ago, Sporty’s relaunched “Air Facts,” a magazine once run by Dick’s father, Leighton Collins. It’s now a web site and not a print magazine, but I still read and enjoy it. Earlier this week, Dick wrote a beautiful piece on a lifelong romance. No, not him and his airplane… him, his airplane, and his wife Ann, who sounds like a marvelous woman.

Read it.

(Yes, I know it’s not Friday. That’s because on Friday I was busy… flying. Not flying myself, you understand; rather, I was being flown by the fine folks at Delta from SFO to ATL and then on to HSV.)

I had already planned my weekend around the trip to Alabama to see the boys, but early Thursday morning received some bad news: my Uncle Edgar had passed away in Houma, Louisiana, and his funeral service would be first thing Monday morning. That seemed like a great opportunity to get some cross-country time; I could rent a 172 from the Redstone flying club, fly KHUA-KHUM in about 3.5 hours, and easily make both the Sunday night wake and the Monday service. I jumped online, reserved an aircraft, and went about my business… at least until I saw the weather.

AviationWeather.gov showed a strong chance of rain and scattered thunderstorms Sunday in Huntsville. So did the Weather Channel, but the WAAY-TV forecast called for scattered light rain. The local forecast for Houma for my arrival time looked good. What to do? I had a few options:

• Adjust my flight time to get out of town before the bad weather. Of course, if I ran into any delays, that could be a problem.
• Wait and see how the weather developed, planning on flying if there was no convective weather developing or forecasting.
• Call Delta and book a flight to New Orleans.

As much as I wanted to fly down there myself, I chose option #3. That turned out to be exactly the right move, because the weather across southern Louisiana deteriorated Sunday morning. Here’s what the weather looks like right now, as I sit comfortably aboard my Delta flight. All that green crap in the lower right corner of the map has been forming and blowing up from the Gulf into north Alabama over the last 36 hours or so—but the forecast I saw on Thursday didn’t predict that.

It might have been possible for me to adjust my departure time either earlier or later and still make the flight safely. However, the old adage that “it’s better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here” certainly applies. At this time of year, convective weather can be unpredictable, and tackling it at night as a non-instrument-rated pilot in an aircraft without onboard weather display or radar would be foolish.

As WOPR said, sometimes the only winning move is not to play. So I sat this flight out, and I’ll build my cross-country time another day.