jacewilliams1

[jacewilliams1]

Don’t stretch the glide—easier said than done

I have a theory I don’t want to have to test again. I took a passenger for a glider ride at Chardon, Ohio. He was a tech magazine editor based in Cleveland. The wind had seriously increased while we were aloft and on downwind I realized we were too far out when I turned base. This is the point where you know you must fight the urge to raise the nose a little to stretch the glide. Raising the nose could lower airspeed, cause a stall, and spin into the ground. I was getting a close-up view of the trees at the end of runway 11. I did two things, one of which was apparently necessary. One was fighting the urge to raise the nose. The other was to continue a conversation with the passenger so our landing would appear normal, not frightening. 

I don’t know if I processed what I decided to do. I think I reasoned it out later. I put the nose down to increase speed so as to be in the strong wind a shorter time and to get into ground effect for better glide ratio and penetration. I don’t know if that was the correct decision, but we brushed the last of the treetops and landed. The retrieving golf cart took a long time, using the entire runway to get to us. Although it was a really good short field landing, it wasn’t done on purpose. The increasing wind made this the last flight of the day. In a powered aircraft with a running engine, more throttle would have been the solution—but not in a glider. Okay aeronautical experts, I would like opinions.

I am telling this story because I have been helped by hangar tales to avoid catastrophe a few times. The most memorable was hearing one of Ted Pawski’s tales. In the early thirties, he had been an instructor in Germany in sport aviation glider clubs, pre-Nazi, pre-Luftwaffe. We always thought Ted knew some way to create his own lift. Maybe it could be attributed to his ever present pipe.

In a hangar flying talk session, someone had asked Ted what the most common accident was back then in training in Germany. I listened carefully, as you had to translate Ted’s very strong German accent. Since I occasionally heard German as a kid, when used as a parental secret code, it might have been a little easier for me.

It seems like it will work, but it never does.

Ted said the most common training accident in Germany was always when a student was a little low when making the turn to final approach. On base leg they would raise the nose to stretch the glide and be reluctant to lower the inside wing enough to make a coordinated turn and use too much rudder. The resulting low speed, skidded turn would end in a stall/spin accident.

I had just joined Cleveland Soaring Society, which was then flying at Freedom Field on Route 18 near Medina. I had previously been a member of Central Ohio Soaring Association in Marion. I was in the club’s Schweizer 1-26 glider returning to Freedom Field.

The wind had increased and as I made my turn to base, Ted’s voice came back to me, complete with German accent. I was in exactly the potential accident situation I had overheard him describe a couple of weeks before. The wind had increased since takeoff and I was unaware of this until downwind. We and our gliders had no radios then for AWOS. I turned onto base leg later than I should have. At this point the recording in my mind of Ted’s voice turned on and I resisted the urge to raise the nose; instead I started looking for alternate landing sites straight ahead. 

I could see there were none, except small ones in people’s backyards. I still had enough altitude to make a coordinated turn to final approach and then thought maybe I would have to land crossways on Route 18. I found I had put the nose down enough to pick up a little extra airspeed and could perhaps go under the wires on Route 18 to make the runway. A thermal from the highway pavement gave me enough altitude to skim over the wires. After landing and looking back at the wires I saw the wires had been lowered and there was no room under them. 

The final note of this story is, I had been designing modifications of Sunbeam appliances so they could be sold as brand name products by Sears, Montgomery Ward, Penney’s, Hoover, etc. Ken McGarr, an Akron, Ohio, model maker, was producing models of my designs for me. 

At a later visit to his shop, he told me he was driving west past Freedom Field on Route 18 and was telling his wife he knew a glider pilot who flew from there. It was at the point I was crossing the road in the 1-26 low enough for Ken to recognize me and point me out to his wife as I passed low over his car. That’s way too low but it was high enough to make it back.

Keep the nose down when in doubt. Airspeed, airspeed, airspeed. Keep em flying! That was a slogan from WW 2 Army Air Corps recruiting posters.

Later when editing this it occurred to me that when I recognized the increase in wind I should have turned base early but since I didn’t catch that in time, my next option was to continue my turn to base beyond 90 degrees to aim diagonally at the runway threshold; then a shallow turn to align near the runway. There was no absolute reason that I had to use a rectangular pattern. There were no obstructions. It would have avoided the possible use of airport neighbors’ backyards.

I could have used the hypotenuse and answered the question asked in high school geometry classes: what are we ever going to use this for?

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[jacewilliams1]

Flying a Cirrus VFR across Russia

In 2019 my wife Sherry and I flew our Cirrus SR22 from Florida to Nome, Alaska. In Nome, we joined the Alaska Airmen’s Association Goodwill Flight to Provedinya Bay, located in the Chukotka district of Eastern Russia. While acquiring the necessary permits, I learned that it was possible to fly entirely across Russia. I found this astounding. For decades, the requirements to fly a private plane beyond Moscow or St. Petersburg required having a Russian speaker/navigator on board. I understood that the necessary permits were difficult to obtain and that avgas was hard to come by.

With little notice or announcements, all of this has changed. A Russian speaker is no longer required. Avgas availability has tremendously improved and, oh, by the way, “hop in your small plane, come fly around Russia; we are open for business.” Thinking about all of this for just a few seconds, I knew that I had to make this trip. Then Covid put a delay on the plan. It was not until July of 2021 the trip became possible.

Planning the route is only step one: what about avgas and ATC?

The three significant obstacles to opening Russia to foreign general aviation were language, radio coverage, and avgas. Russia has always had English speakers at its international airports and high altitude airways to handle international commercial flights. The challenge was to bring the English language to its domestic airports and the lower altitudes. Considering the vast size of the country, this was an enormous undertaking. Russian and English could not be more different; therefore, introducing English to over 8,200 air traffic controllers took a while.

Ensuring low altitude VHF radio coverage across the largest country in the world was also an enormous logistical task. Russia produces 100LL avgas in three different refineries, so it is readily available. It was just a matter of having it available at suitable locations, making it possible to cross the country. The only stop that I insisted on making that did not have avgas was Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka. The solution was shipping two 200 liter drums there, which was no problem.

Several Russian agencies have participated in opening up the country to foreign General Aviation. However, one individual that has provided the heart-beat to make it all happen is Evgeny Kabanov. Currently the Chairman of the International Tourism Committee of AOPA Russia, Evgeny’s company (MAK Aviation Services) has driven the cooperation between the various agencies. In addition, he has organized avgas availability at many airports, making it possible to easily cross the country in a piston-powered aircraft. A trip across Russia can be quickly planned by just looking at MAKgas’s fuel page. The complexities of obtaining permits, having flight plans and routings approved by the CAA and ATC are a breeze using MAKgas. Their fees are surprisingly reasonable.

A flight across Russia is as large of an undertaking as Russia itself. Consider that Russia has a landmass of 17.13 million square kilometers, almost twice the size of the US. Russia is the largest country in the world. It encompasses more than one-eighth of Earth’s inhabited land area. If you flew a great circle route from the most western border of Russia to its most eastern seashore, it would be over 5,000 miles. Russia has 11 time zones, spans two continents, borders 16 sovereign nations, and reaches almost halfway around the northern hemisphere; it is enormous.

Russia is such a vast landmass that practically flying across Russia amounts to an “an around the world” flight. Since opening to general aviation, pilots wishing to complete an “around the world” flight have found the Russian route a convenient and weather-friendly option. This route is also a much less expensive option than crossing the Middle East and Asia.

Crossing the Greenland ice sheet—not the place for ignition trouble.

My departure was from my home base in Apalachicola, Florida. The route took me to Iqaluit, Canada (CYFB), conveniently located to cross the North Atlantic. As luck would have it, the weather shut me down there for four days. Then halfway across Greenland, the electronic ignition system shut down, so another five days in Reykjavik (BIRK) waiting for parts. Two weeks in, I had not gone farther than Iceland. If there is any place to break down, Reykjavik is one of the best—it is a scenic, hip town, not to mention that Iceland has between 20 to 30 local craft breweries.

From Reykjavik, my route went to Wick, Scotland (EGPC), and then onto the first Russian stop of Pskov (ULOO). Pskov, a favorite clearing spot for ferry pilots, is a scenic town with friendly but thorough customs agents. The river Velikaya runs through Pskov, one of Russia’s oldest cities dating back to 903 AD. What a great place to get your first taste of Russian beauty and hospitality!

The next stop was Konakovo (UUEL), about 100 miles north of Moscow. Primarily a civilian helicopter field, it has a 1,950 t. runway, beautiful facilities, a five-star restaurant, hotel rooms, cabins, a lake, and an expansive children’s playground. Konakovo hosts helicopter competition events, and the club located there boasts several international awards. My hosts here were fellow Earthrounders Maxim and Natalia Sotnikov, who flew their Bell 407 around the world in 2017. They have done an excellent job of developing Konakovo, and it was one of my favorite stops.

From Konakovo, three stops were made at general aviation airports around Moscow. First was Myachkovo (UUBM) home base for the busy flight school Aero Region Training. With an impressive fleet of G1000-equipped Cessna 172s and Tecnam aircraft, they have graduated over 500 Private Pilot students in the last two years, and that’s during the pandemic. They currently have an impressive 12 instructors and approximately 60 students. I presented Carrabelle Flying Club t-shirts to two of their flight instructors. They quickly produced a bottle of Beluga vodka in exchange!

Avoiding big airline airports offered the chance to find plenty of interesting GA airports.

Next was Novinki (UUDN), probably the most excellent airport in Russia and maybe just about anywhere. The general aviation-only terminal features a restaurant, bar, pilot’s lounge with a billiards table, and hotel rooms with beautiful facilities. Novinki even has hangar homes. The piston power Cessna/Beechcraft sales and service center is selling two new aircraft every month. Notice “sales and service.” Getting service done in Russia, even on a Cirrus, was no problem. I found the facilities and maintenance technicians to be excellent throughout Russia.

Then on to Torbeevo (UUCT). Here the second largest airline in Russia, S7, has built a general aviation training center. Beautiful hangars, modern classrooms, and G1000-equipped 172s. The flight school at Torbeevo is separate from their Boeing and Airbus airline training campus located just outside of Domodedovo (UUDD). S7 happens to own the Epic Aircraft Company located in Bend, Oregon. Everyone at S7 is very proud to be involved in a US manufacturer. There are several local airplanes based here, including a new Cirrus SR22 that was parked next to an Ilyushin 11-2 Shturmovuk, fully restored to flying condition, except for the bullet hole that shot it down in 1942

To practically fly east from any of the Moscow GA airports, you generally follow the Trans-Siberian Railway. This historic railway dates back to 1916 and connects Moscow with the Russian Far East. It is the longest railway in the world, with a length of over 5,772 miles.

To follow the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia is the flying adventure of a lifetime. Along the way, GA-friendly airports, beautiful scenic cities, five-star hotels, fantastic exotic restaurants, and friendly, helpful people are all in abundance. In addition, this is a weather-friendly route in the summer months that can be flown using VFR flight plans. Avgas is not available everywhere, but it is readily available and not an issue.

One of the stops along this route was Krasny Yar, Samara (UWWQ). Here fellow Earthrounders Sergey Alafinov and Dmitriy Sislakov greeted me and toured me through the Aero Volga faculties. Aero Volga produces amphibious seaplanes, and the current production includes the twin-engine LA-8 and the LSA Borey. Both models were flown around the world in 2018. I had the opportunity to fly a Borey with its designer Dmitriy on the Volga River. Dmitriy, an avid fly fisherman, has ensured ample space for fishing and camping gear in this beautiful flying boat. US certification is scheduled for 2021.

The hospitality from Russian GA pilots was almost overwhelming.

I tried to stay away from big airports, as one of the goals of this trip was to meet as many Russian GA pilots as possible. Most large cities along the railway have smaller airports located nearby. At almost every stop, I was greeted eagerly by Russian GA pilots. They were helpful, friendly, interested in the Cirrus, my route, and in showing me their planes. Photos, dinners, beers, and of course, vodka always followed. I cannot say enough about the generosity and hospitality that Russian pilots, mechanics, and airport workers showed me. General aviation in Russia is alive and well, welcoming pilots from anywhere in the world.

Following the railway, as I did to Vladivostok, is not the shortest route across Russia. It ends in the very southeastern part of Russia near the Chinese and North Korean borders. From Vladivostok, it’s another 2,000+ miles north with stops at Sakhalin Island, Petropavlovsk, and Anadyr, before crossing the Bering Sea to Alaska. One of the advantages of this route is that it over-flies the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Volcano National Park, one of the most spectacular flying opportunities in the world. In total, my odyssey across Russia was over 7,500 miles.

There are some differences between flying in Russia and the US. Russia has technically converted to the use of QNH from QFE. QFE provides for altitude above ground level versus sea level. I found that QFE was still in limited use, depending on the region flown in. When given QFE, I would ask for QNH, and it was provided. Altitude in meters is also sometimes used. G1000-equipped aircraft altimeters can easily be switched to meters; otherwise, having a conversion chart handy would be necessary. Transition levels for standard altimeter settings, 29.92/10.13 are generally around 7,000 ft. However, this is not the same everywhere. Usually, this is noted on the airport information page or contained in the ATIS.

Both VFR or IFR flight plans are allowed, but you must be on a flight plan. Either way, plan on routings via airways with regular position reports required. Russian databases are part of the Jeppesen International coverage. They can be purchased from Jeppesen and include four downloads. Their database does not include all Russian airports, and the coverage is generally limited to airports with instrument approaches. The Russian pilots I met all use the app Air Navigation. This app has all of the Russian airports with their associated information pages. I ran one iPad with ForeFlight and the other displaying the Air Navigation VFR display.

Active volcanoes over the Kamchatka Peninsula made for spectacular views.

Weather briefings are technically available in some places but only in Russian. You are basically on your own for the weather in Russia. I found Windy Pro, Storm Radar Premium, and ForeFlight to be the most practical for determining the weather.

Both the CAA and ATC must approve flight plans for foreign-registered aircraft. MAK Aviation Services makes all of this look easy. Their service includes having the flight plans and the routing approved, validated, and filed. The approved flight plan is then transmitted via email the night before departure. IFR and VFR flight plans require validation.

Russian entry requirements for private aircraft allow for 30 days in the country. Extensions are permitted for weather and maintenance issues. I spent 25 days and flew over 7,500 miles just crossing Russia. The country, the people, the airports, the cities, the sites, the hotels, the restaurants, and the flying experience were all beyond my expectations. While visiting some of the smaller Siberian towns, I was stopped several times by people wanting a picture with me. They had never seen an American before. One waiter asked me if I could show him some American money. “One day,” he said, “one day I will go to America.” It was the trip of a lifetime.

Flying across Russia does not require any additional fuel tanks or special avionics. Communications across some areas of Russia are somewhat limited below 10,000 ft. Although not required, I found a satphone to be a convenient device and prefer the Iridium GO. This device, operated through an app and paired to a headset, makes it possible to make and receive calls over the headset. Survival equipment similar to that typically carried for flights to the remote areas of Alaska and Canada is also recommended.

Crossing from Anadyr, Chukotka to Nome, Alaska, the airway follows a route that allows for the shortest overwater time of the Bering Sea, 63 miles. This route passes over the Diomede Islands (Big Diomede in Russia, Little Diomede in the US). The distance between them: 2.6 miles. 2.6 miles separate these two great countries.

Following is a list of my airport stops in Russia:

Russia and the United States are separated by just 2.6 miles.

UULO: Pskov                                      

UUEL: Konakovo

UUBM: Myachkovo

UUDN: Novinki                       

UUTC: Torbeevo

UWTK: Karaishevo, Kazan

UWWQ: Krasny Yar, Samara

UNCC: Gorodskoy, Novosibirsk

UNKK: Krasnoyarsk Severny

UIII: Ulan Ude

UHBB: Blagoveshchensk

UHHS: Kalinka, Kharbarovsk

UHWW: Vladivostok    

UHSS: Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk

UHPP: Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka

UHMA: Anadyr

Any long-range international trip requires much planning and preparation. This is undoubtedly true in planning a flight across Russia and around the world. However, in the words of French author and Nobel winner Andre Gide, “The drawback to a journey that has been too well-planned is that it does not leave enough room for adventure.”

Russian Flying Resources:

www.makgas.com

www.AOPA.RU

The post Flying a Cirrus VFR across Russia appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2021/11/flying-a-cirrus-vfr-across-russia/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=flying-a-cirrus-vfr-across-russia

[jacewilliams1]

Friday Photo: the king is ready

The view: Waiting at Gstaad Airport (LSGK), Switzerland, after a heavy cell had passed by and the asphalt was still hot

The pilot: Daniel Schwerzmann

The airplane: Beechcraft Super King Air B200 Blackhawk

The mission: Landing at a tricky spot in Switzerland for a passenger pick up

The memory: Flying and landing in the Swiss Alps can be very tricky and challenging. The reward is exceptional pictures

Want to share your “Friday Photo?” Send your photo and description (using the format above) to: airfacts@sportys.com

The post Friday Photo: the king is ready appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

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[jacewilliams1]

Paratroopers of the 1950s: in the trees, at night

A night jump! It was 1958 and my Airborne Infantry Company at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, received notice that we would be making a non-tactical night jump. I was a 20-year old Specialist 4th Class (E-4) Fire Team Leader in the 1st Platoon of Easy Company, 1st Airborne Battle Group, 505th Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. (Today, as in WWII, the 505th is designated as a Parachute Infantry Regiment.)

A night jump! In the 1950s, unlike today, night jumps in the 82nd Airborne were not common. I had been on jump status since late 1956, and this would be, along with most of my fellow paratroopers, my first night jump.

A night jump! My fellow jumpers and I were excited. We were a bunch of young, gung-ho paratroopers looking forward to our first night jump. The morale and esprit de corps of the Airborne in the 1950s was very high. In the 82nd Airborne, many of our senior NCOs wore one or more small gold stars on their jump wings, each gold star indicating a combat jump in WWII. (The 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division made four combat jumps in WWII: Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Holland.)

Let me reconstruct from memory my first night jump of 54 years ago.

We loaded on the familiar deuce-and-a-half trucks in the company area for transportation to Pope Air Force Base, which adjoins Ft. Bragg, the home of the 82nd Airborne Division. There the division riggers issued each of us a T-10 main parachute, a reserve parachute, a Griswold weapons container, and an aviator’s kit bag which we would each use to stow the deployed main parachute after our jump.

When you’re 20-year old paratrooper, night jumps sound fun.

I humped the 35 lb. main parachute on my back, inserted the leg harness straps through the straps of my light pack, inserted the three harness fittings into the quick release, and inserted the safety snap in the quick release. I clipped my reserve chute to my main harness, and clipped the Griswold weapons container holding my M1 rifle to the main harness on my left side. The jumpmaster or a jumpmaster assistant inspected my gear, especially the all-important static line which, when hooked to the anchor cable in the aircraft, automatically deploys the main chute upon the jumper exiting the aircraft. I put on my steel pot and tightened the chin strap, and I was ready to go.

Easy Company loaded into three Fairchild C-123s. The aircraft commander of my C-123 gave us the usual pre-flight briefing, including emergencies: “Just before impact I will give you a continuous ring of the alarm bell.” We looked at each other, thinking, No, sir, we’ll unass this airplane and be outta here long before that happens. The aircrew went through the starting procedures of the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines, we taxied out and took off from Pope Air Force Base.

We flew for about an hour, and it was now totally dark. The Air Force crew chief gave our jumpmaster the 20-minute warning. Our jumpmaster, at the rear of the aircraft near the jump doors, held up 10 fingers twice and sounded off “TWENTY MINUTES.” We woke up any jumpers who were asleep, which proves that infantry grunts can sleep anywhere and under any conditions. I checked my steel pot to make sure that it was secure, as anything not secure would leave the jumper as he exited the aircraft into the prop blast. (We called it “hitting the blast.”)

The crew chief then gave the jumpmaster the 10-minute warning, and our jumpmaster held up 10 fingers and sounded off “TEN MINUTES.” Some crew chiefs, at that point, would move to the front of the aircraft, as somehow a rumor got started that the 82nd might drag a chuted-up crew chief out the door with them. Surely we wouldn’t do that. Would we?

The jumpmaster then began the standard jump commands, which were verbal along with hand signals due to the noise of the engines:

“GET READY.” Okay, time to rock ‘n roll! We felt the adrenaline kicking in.

“STAND UP.” We stood up facing the jumpmaster at the rear of the aircraft with our parachute static line snap hooks held at shoulder level in our inboard hands.

“HOOK UP.” We attached the all-important static line snap hooks to the anchor cables in the aircraft.

“CHECK STATIC LINES.” Each jumper checked the static line of the jumper in front of him, making sure that the static line was clear and not under the parachute harness. The “check static lines” jump command was added in 1957 after the 82nd had a jumper exit a C-123 with his static line under his harness. He didn’t make it.

“CHECK YOUR EQUIPMENT.” Jumpers checked that their equipment was secure and that there was no obvious and overlooked problem with their chutes or equipment.

“SOUND OFF FOR EQUIPMENT CHECK.” The last man in the stick near the front of the aircraft slapped the back of the jumper in front of him and sounded off “Okay,” and each succeeding jumper sounded off “Okay” with the number one jumper sounding off to the jumpmaster “All Okay.”

We got the one minute warning, and the jumpmaster sounded off with the next jump command: “STAND IN THE DOOR.” The number one jumper on each side of the aircraft stood in the door, with his fingers gripping the outside skin of the aircraft, ready for a vigorous exit. Adrenaline was flowing, and all of us young paratroopers were sounding off: “GO! GO! GO! GO!”

Jumping out of a C-123 is a carefully choreographed maneuver.

The red lights over the jump doors went out, the green jump lights came on, and the jumpmaster gave his last jump command: “GO!” The first jumper in each door exited at our jump altitude of 1250 feet, the number two jumper on each side pivoted 90 degrees, stepped up to the door and exited. (It was a matter of company pride how quickly we could exit the jump aircraft. Because of the placement of the jump doors in the C-119, we could exit that aircraft very fast: around 10 seconds from green light to the last jumper with 20 jumpers on each side. In the C-123 and the C-130, the landing gear wheel wells were just in front of the jump doors, and the pivot and the extra step slowed us down somewhat.)

When I arrived at the jump door, I vigorously exited the aircraft into the darkness and the Category 5 hurricane of those big Pratt & Whitney radials, and immediately assumed the exit body position: feet and knees together, elbows pressing into my side, fingers spread on either side of my reserve chute, head bent toward my reserve chute, and started counting out loud the four seconds required for main chute deployment: “Hup thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.” My hands were on my reserve chute with my right hand over the D ring in case it was necessary to use it in the event of a partial malfunction or a complete malfunction of the main. And I, along with all the other jumpers, was very aware of the possibility of having to use the reserve chute.

Before I reached the count of four, I felt the most beautiful feeling that a jumper can experience at that point in time: the opening shock of my main canopy deploying. After my chute stabilized, I reached up and grabbed my main canopy risers, tilted my head back and checked my canopy. As far as I could tell in the darkness, I had a good chute. I could sense other jumpers in the air around me, verified by the very loud yelling back and forth between the descending jumpers that goes on in a peacetime jump.

As I got oriented, I found that I was facing in the direction of the jump aircraft that we had just exited, and the aircraft engine noise was slowly diminishing as the three C-123s departed. I looked down, and it was black. In the pale moonlight I could see the drop zone (DZ) to my right. I realized that I was over the trees to the left of the DZ. I reached up to the risers on the right side of the main chute and pulled down in an attempt to slip to the DZ. I immediately realized that the wind was moving me away from the DZ, and slipping was not going to get me there. The US Air Force had missed the drop zone completely and had dropped three plane loads of 82nd Airborne paratroopers, including me, in the trees—at night!

All of the jumpers realized that the Air Force had missed the drop zone, and we were all going in the trees. We could still faintly hear the engine noises of the departing C-123s, with the Air Force going back to Pope, to hot showers, family, girlfriends or whatever. Wow! The strong language that was directed at the departing aircrews was very loud, very colorful and very uncomplimentary.

But we didn’t have time to gripe and whine, as we were about 30 seconds from descending at 24 feet per second into the trees. Jumpers descending into trees is a very serious event, especially at night, with the possibilities for injuries being very high. The face and eyes are the most vulnerable to injury from a tree landing. The preparation for the tree landing is for the jumper to extend the fingers of each hand, place the right hand in his left armpit, the left hand in his right armpit, and position his face to the left in the protection of his arm. Other parts of the male anatomy just had to take their chances, and do the best they could under the circumstances.

Airborne all the way!

I assumed the tree landing position and descended into blackness. Today I can still imagine the swishing noise of me descending past and brushing the outer branches of the tall pines at Ft. Bragg, and then WHUMP! I landed with absolutely no attempt at doing a PLF (Parachute Landing Fall). I stood up, and couldn’t believe it. I was uninjured and I was not hung up in a tree where trying to get down is possibly dangerous. And, I had now made my first night jump, one to be remembered.

I unloosened my steel pot chin strap, released my Griswold container that contained my M1, released my unused reserve chute and the main chute harness. I stowed the main canopy and harness in the kit bag, snapped the reserve chute to the kit bag, and slung this 45 lb. load over my head with the reserve chute on my chest and the kit bag on my back. I picked up my light pack and Griswold container and started humping it through the woods in the direction of the assembly area on the DZ. No other jumpers were in sight.

Within minutes I joined up with other jumpers on our way to the assembly area. As I was writing this article I realized that our peace-time jump in 1958 was similar to the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne on the Normandy combat jump in 1944, where most troopers were not dropped on their designated DZ . Small groups of paratroopers joined up, many from different outfits, and marched towards the sound of guns firing.

Normally following a jump we would be at the assembly area in minutes. Obviously, in combat or even on a tactical training exercise, jumpers want to join up with their fighting units as quickly as possible. This night, the assembly was completed not in minutes, but in about two hours. Some troopers came in without their main parachutes, having left the canopies in the trees. But, to my knowledge, no one was seriously hurt. (Scrapes and getting knocked about is normal for an Airborne jump). Once the company was assembled, we had some good laughs about the Air Force dropping us in the trees—at night!

When I completed my three year enlistment and separated from the Army on May 29, 1959, I had two and a half years of jump experience with the 82nd Airborne: 34 T-10 jumps from the C-119, C-123, C-124 and C-130 aircraft; I was a graduate of the division jumpmaster school as an E-4; in jumpmaster school I had jumpmastered a C-130 jump on my second and final night jump, and I was subsequently awarded the Senior Parachutist Badge; I had 42 free-falls from the L-20 Beaver, H-21 and H-34 helicopters with the 18th Airborne Corps Sport Parachuting Club. However, of my 76 parachute jumps, by far the most memorable was my 1st night jump in which we were all dropped in the trees–at night!

The Air Force missing the drop zone and dropping us in the trees at night? No big problem, we were: AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY!

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[jacewilliams1]

Flying (improvised) IFR in Vietnam

Between early 1966 and early 1967, I flew in the 19th Air Commando Squadron in South Vietnam. The flying was absolutely the best experience I have ever had flying anywhere. Primarily the reason was that we had no restrictive rules to go by, we had few instrument procedures that we could follow, and the aircraft (Fairchild C-123 without jets) was ideal for the flying that we were doing. When I and everyone else who joined the squadron participated in the orientation flights to prepare us to be productive crewmembers “in country,” we were shocked and sometimes terrified at some of the maneuvering and procedures necessary to complete the missions. It wasn’t too long until we started relaxing and understood that this was the “normal” for accomplishing the missions that we had.

Flying IFR, we had few instrument procedures, so we had to improvise most of the approaches. This led to some quite interesting approaches as you can imagine. For instance, going into Saigon when the weather was bad, if you called Approach for an instrument approach, you would be given probably 45 minutes to an hour and a half for an approach time. If that happened, we would set the radar altimeter to 200 or 100 feet depending on how bad the weather was. We would fly down over the South China Sea and let down until we broke out. If we didn’t break out, then we would go back and ask for an approach time.

If we broke out, we would head back towards Saigon. We would find the inlet of the bay at Saigon and fly north. There was a river that emptied in on the north side of the bay. We would fly up that river.

Now, of course, we were high enough that we could see there were several turns and loops that the river had.

But we would fly north until we found a creek coming in on the left.

We turned to the runway heading (250) over that creek and kept listening to the radio to see if someone had reported the outer marker. If they had reported over the outer marker, we would do a 360 at that time and allow them to pass overhead. Of course, we couldn’t see them, but the 360 maneuver would give them enough time to pass overhead. After that we would go back to the runway heading and call the tower and give our call sign of Provide 54. The call I made was, “ Saigon Tower, Provide 54 VFR final for landing.”

Usually the response would come back “Provide 54, Saigon Tower, cleared to land.” We would proceed to visual contact of the runway and go ahead and land. Saigon Tower knew the Provide call sign and what we were doing.

For takeoffs in IFR weather, we would file an abbreviated flight plan. They would give us taxi instructions, and when ready, clearance for takeoff. After takeoff we were cleared to contact Paris Control for departure. We would stay with Paris control until we were then handed off to one of the other controllers, or if we were in VFR conditions at that time, we would cancel our flight following.

One morning, the visibility was extremely bad. Operations knew that the field was closed, but our frag was a tactical emergency (TAC-E) mission. We started engines and tuned the radios to the ground controller and listened for a minute. The tower was transmitting for the VFR aircraft not to start engines or contact the tower until they put out the message that they were ready for traffic. They said the field was closed at this time, and for IFR aircraft not to start engines until they received their clearance.

I keyed the mic and transmitted, “Saigon Tower, Provide 54, TAC-E, taxi.”

Ground controller prime replied, “Provide 54, taxi runway 25.”

Now we had a problem, because getting to runway 25 was going to be difficult. As I pulled out of the parking slot, I did see a taxiway light. As I passed that light, I looked ahead until I could see the next light. That’s the way I got to the end of the taxiway in the run-up area. After run-up, we requested and were given permission to take off. I taxied on to the runway and stayed close to the left side so I could see the lights. As I passed one light on takeoff roll, I would look for the next light and so on until liftoff.

We would stay with Paris Control until VFR on top or were passed off to the next sector controller.

The post Flying (improvised) IFR in Vietnam appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

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[jacewilliams1]

When hypoxia becomes real

As a late blooming, somewhat studious private pilot who earned his certificate at age 75, I certainly learned, knew, and could recite the Federal Aviation Regulations that relate to the use of oxygen while flying at altitude in an unpressurized aircraft—no doubt. I did not really understand, much less comprehend, however, just how dangerous a situation a pilot can find himself in when actually experiencing real hypoxia until a recent cross-country flight from Oregon to Wyoming to visit my grandson at his summer construction job.

While flight planning, I chose a route of flight that would take me across the states of Oregon and Idaho on Victor airways 500 and 4 that would lead to a fuel stop at Rock Springs, Wyoming (RKS), and leave a short leg up to Casper (CPR), our final destination. I determined an eastbound altitude of 11,500 ft. would provide sufficient vertical clearances from terrain and reasoned 12,500 ft. on the way home would provide some extra cushion along our sometimes-mountainous VFR route on the same airways.

Disposable oxygen bottles can help, but only if you have enough—and only if you use them.

The thought of 12,500 ft. prompted me to pick up a few cans of supplemental pure oxygen just in case it was needed on the way back, as the 12,500 ft. altitude kind of triggers the use of supplemental oxygen—so I thought. Little did I know what could happen to me in such a situation.

After getting airborne, heading eastbound and crossing the Cascade Mountain range on what started out to be a beautiful Saturday morning, I noticed what I felt was a little dizziness and a slightly uncomfortable feeling within the first few hours of a five-hour leg. Smoke from forest fires also shielded a good view of the ground, making what started out as a fun flight fade into uneasiness as we flew along. I decided to try breathing a little oxygen en route, even though in my mind I was thinking we weren’t anywhere near where we needed that stuff yet.

I was somewhat muted as a pilot and felt OK, but when crossing over Bear Lake near the Idaho-Utah border, my son, who was with me as a passenger, became extremely quiet. Upon rousing him a little, it became very clear that he was about to pass out. Although I thought his symptoms could be diet related, I got him going on gasps of oxygen as well to see if it helped. I noticed his fingertips were turning a little white in color. I offered to make a landing at Kemmerer (EMM), a place I had picked as an alternate fuel stop, but was relieved when he said no and would try to make it the 70 miles we had remaining into Rock Springs.

Thank God for his Army Ranger training. Honestly, I was a little relieved as by this time I did not feel all that sharp as an aviator and preferred to follow my original plan as I was familiar with it, rather than lose altitude quickly to get on the ground and see just how we felt.

After a little extended break at RKS, we headed northeast to Casper, again flying at 11,500 ft. Some fairly strong updrafts and downdrafts prompted me to turn off the autopilot and fly manually to maintain course and altitude and it was in doing this I noticed I could just not quite make corrections quick enough to be doing a good job with it—but I really didn’t know just why I was having so much trouble.

Once we got on the ground, all was forgotten so we could enjoy a quick visit, which did include some golf as well as a discussion of the fact that we may need a lot more oxygen on the way back as we would be flying 1,000 feet higher going west. When we stopped at the sporting goods store to buy a case of oxygen canisters after golf, the checkout person said we must have had a tough day on the golf course if we needed that much oxygen after it was over. Funny but true in our case.

On a grand departure westbound out of Casper, we climbed to 12,500 ft. and were enjoying finding mines and power plants when that dizzy, unbalanced feeling took over again within the first 100 miles. We started breathing with a lot more supplemental oxygen pretty much from reaching altitude but the feelings of being mentally distracted and somewhat out of it got worse. Over Bear Lake once again, but this time with a long way to go, I struggled with the decision and implementation but did descend down to 10,500 ft. to see if we could shake that sort of paralyzed, incapacitated feeling, but it didn’t get much better.

When we got near Boise, ATC diverted us for traffic and as I switched out of autopilot to be responsive, I found that I could not adequately control the aircraft to normal standards. When I lost some altitude, I would slowly correct, then realize I had lost course and tried to fix it while losing altitude again. Everything was in slow motion, sort of like falling asleep at the wheel after a long drive, or being a little drunk, and it was difficult to reason why this was happening. I didn’t understand it at the time.

We made it, but why do we feel so bad?

When ATC gave us back our own navigation, they actually called to confirm we had it as our track was not appearing to them like we did. We slowly got control and as we continued on to our scheduled fuel stop, more “normal” pilotage came back into focus with time and of course, oxygen, but I never quite got a completely good feeling through it all. We completed the adventure successfully but it took a few days on the ground to shake that unstable feeling and prompted a lot more study of what the real dangers of hypoxia are to any pilot.

That study, along with some internal discernment, led me to the following suggestions that might help fellow aviators:

Take hypoxia seriously. We all know 14 CFR 91.211 calls for supplemental oxygen on flights at or above 12,500 ft. for any stretch over 30 minutes, but I didn’t take that seriously enough in my flight planning. If I would have thought about the fact that, by regulation on my return trip that meant I would pretty much need oxygen full time, I would have been better prepared for that and might have chosen 10,500 ft. as it would have worked for most of the route. Not enough attention was paid to the real risks here.

10,000 ft. is a good baseline. Post-flight studies revealed that many sources verbalize the fact that although the regulations use 12,500 ft. as a cutoff for supplemental oxygen, going above about 10,000 ft. is really a better delineator to assess the risks of actually experiencing hypoxia at altitude. This is my new marker for altitude and oxygen on future flights and I recommend consideration for others as well.

Recognize the symptoms. As part of my post-flight evaluation on this trip, I looked back at past flights to see if I had felt like this before on previous trips. Although I had completed several earlier cross-country flights at the 11,500 ft. without incident, I did recall one occasion while going from Bakersfield to Thermal, in California, the sensation of feeling out of balance or some dizziness that was similar to the initial onset of the hypoxia experienced on this much longer flight at the same altitude—which I could not readily identify at the time. I now know what the onset of insufficient oxygen feels like.

Symptoms are progressive. The effects of hypoxia progress with time in the air and degrade the pilot’s ability to just fly correctly. The longer the flight, the worse it gets. In my case, it started with dizziness or an unbalanced feeling in the head I had felt on that one earlier flight but could not identify, then progressed to some form of loss of cognition, which manifested itself by way of slow reactions and loss of motor skills. Ultimately, a sort of grogginess and loss of comprehension as to what was happening came upon me that lead to a surreal feeling and some real struggles with basic flying skills that are normally present. Serious stuff.

Beware hypoxia! It is real. It can affect different people in different ways and at different altitudes. It can be dangerous if you’re not prepared for it, as I learned. Make it part of a risk assessment on flight planning when appropriate. And most of all, enjoy each flight. We can’t do this stuff forever.

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[jacewilliams1]

Mustang musings: what it’s like to fly the legendary P-51

Several years ago my close friend Lewis Shaw and I took a trip south from Dallas to Encinal, TX, in his North American P-51D Mustang. We were flying to the remote and little-known town to visit with an associate who was a serious collector of warbirds. He was looking to buy a second Mustang to add to his collection and Lewis was looking to sell his—a polished aluminum beauty that was an exquisite example of the legendary WWII fighter in every way.

Neither Lewis nor the interested buyer were new to the Mustang world. Lewis had owned two beautiful Mustangs prior to this one and the interested buyer had one already in his stable and a number of other perfectly restored and flightworthy warbirds to boot. I had arranged the meeting between the two and was invited along for the ride to handle introductions.

Acceleration in a North American P-51D is rapid and seriously forceful.

Acceleration in a North American P-51D is rapid and seriously forceful. If you’ve ever put the pedal to the metal in a high-dollar sports car, no further explanation is required. During the first few seconds following brake release, the pilot has no direct forward view. Because the tailwheel is still on the runway, all Mustang (and taildragger) pilots must momentarily compensate by developing a peripheral sense of where the airplane is heading. Once a little forward stick is applied (which, incidentally, also unlocks the tailwheel from the rudder) and the tail lifts, the view forward is excellent. At that point, the mission objective becomes simply keeping the airplane on the centerline while it accelerates to takeoff speed.

During acceleration, engine power is metered out in measured quantities. Too much torque can be a dangerous thing when airspeed and lift are marginal, so max power (approximately 40 inches of mercury at 3,000 rpm) isn’t applied at the very beginning of the takeoff roll. It is, in fact, eased into at a somewhat conservative pace using a good mix of experience, book learning, and common sense.

Staying centered is no overly simple task; the P-51D’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and Hamilton Standard four-blade propeller develop a lot of torque. Right rudder in serious quantities is required to offset the pull to the left (five degrees of right rudder are, in fact, pre-set by the pilot prior to takeoff to ease rudder pedal forces), but once the airplane’s airspeed gets to the point where the rudder and vertical tail have acquired some authority, the pilot can reduce the right rudder input and start concentrating on other things.

Once airborne at just over 100 miles per hour, the landing gear are retracted and, if flaps were used (20 degrees–optional), they are retracted also. The oil and coolant shutters are usually operating in automatic mode, so they are not an issue–particularly on a cool day.

Immediately after takeoff, the pilot has to be conscious not only of too much engine power being applied too quickly, but also P-factor. Sometimes referred to as asymmetric blade effect, it is a condition that occurs usually at low airspeeds and relatively high angles of attack. Without getting into the modestly complicated aerodynamics of it all, suffice it to say that P-factor forces a propeller driven airplane to yaw, usually to the left, in concert with the added force of torque. At low airspeeds and low altitudes, P-factor and torque can create a deadly duo that P-51 pilots do their best to avoid at all costs, particularly during takeoff and landing.

My friend, pilot, and Mustang owner, Lewis Shaw and I were, of course, communicating throughout the takeoff roll and departure from Addison Airport. I was having a seriously enjoyable time in the back seat documenting everything with my Nikons and trying to keep up with all the activity in the front seat. After some radio chatter with the tower, ATC got us heading in the right direction and out of the way of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport traffic. Basic route for us was due south/southwest to Waco, Austin, and San Antonio, and then a slight veer to the west after we passed over the Alamo.

Encinal—population 629—our destination, is just over 100 miles south of San Antonio, so air time from Addison (just north of Dallas) to Encinal was just about an hour and fifteen minutes cruising at around 300 mph. Cruising altitude was around 6,500 feet. All in all, a comfortable setup for the airplane and Lewis and me.

Cruising along in the P-51D is an unforgettable experience.

The Merlin, at cruise, is a relatively smooth and responsive engine. With a helmet and headset on, the cockpit noise level is easily bearable but far from quiet.

Finding that I had overdressed a bit and had put on a sweatshirt that proved redundant, I decided to remove it in the tight constraints of the back seat. This required some serious twisting and turning, a complicated unbuckling of belt and chute harness, and of course the removal of my helmet. The latter quickly gave me a much better sense of actual ambient cockpit noise without any ear protection. Suffice it to say it was a relief putting the helmet back on after I got the sweatshirt off!

Midway through the flight Lewis turned the stick over to me. This was not a simple matter of communication, but also involved my pulling the back seat stick from its storage clamps on the right side of the cockpit and installing the stick in the base stub on the floor just in front of my seat. No major effort involved, but it was easy to understand why the stick was removable. Getting in and out of the rear seat area would have been all but impossible without this feature.

Rudder pedals are permanently installed, so there was no issue there and nothing to do but place my feet on them. After that, it was grip the throttle and have a good time!

With Lewis’s blessing I did a few gentle maneuvers, input some partial rolls to the left and right, watched my horizon flip flop around without a lot of effort, and overall thoroughly enjoyed the rare treat of flying a real-deal Mustang. Though this was not my first Mustang ride, it was most certainly the first time I had been given full control of the airplane. It was a most memorable experience.

The Mustang’s stick and rudder coordination are excellent and very smooth. Response is near instantaneous to inputs from either, and the throttle response is equally fast. One has to be conscious of the engine/propeller torque (and airspeed) at all times, as too much power input too quickly, even at cruising airspeeds, can quickly affect the airplane’s direction and stability. Everything on the other end of the throttle handle needs to be handled with finesse and forethought until flying the Mustang becomes second nature. Even then, it’s nothing to be taken for granted. Mustangs do not bear fools lightly…

As noted previously, the Mustang’s back seat is not the most comfortable perch on the planet. After an hour of flying, keeping an eye on the GPS and compass, and cooking under the clear bubble canopy, I was ready to land and stretch my legs and rub my back. When Encinal finally appeared on the horizon, I was not unhappy about it. After locating our destination runway, we made the customary high-speed pass down the centerline, pitched up, rolled, and turned onto base leg and final.

The wheel landing, with Lewis back in control, was uneventful. Approach, with a modest amount of flap, was around 110 mph with touchdown taking place at about 95 mph. Once the tailwheel was on the ground, things slowed in a hurry. Five minutes after the main gear kissed the asphalt, we were pulling up in front the main hangar and shutting down.

Our visit lasted for about two hours. The airport proprietor was a kind and absolutely first-class host. After Lewis and our host finished their business, we were fed and the Mustang was fully fueled for the trek back north. The Mustang holds around 180 gallons of hi-octane avgas internally and has a range of about 1,100 miles in standard fighter configuration. Add two 75-gallon external wing tanks (which Lewis has on his Mustang), and the range jumps to just short of 2,400 miles. Either way, those are long non-stop hauls. If you’re in the back seat, you better take some pain pills with you and possess a very large bladder.

Made for performance, not comfort.

Departure from Encinal was uneventful except for the obligatory high-speed pass and roll. Aiming north and getting back up to cruising altitude and airspeed, Lewis again turned over the stick. For the next hour and several minutes, I cruised along fat, dumb, and very happy while my pilot dozed for a few minutes in the front seat.

All too soon it was over. After turning control back to Lewis, I pulled the stick from its stub connector, inserted it into its storage clasps to my right, took my feet off the rudder pedals, and relaxed back into passenger mode. Before I knew it, we were on final to Addison. A minute or two later, the mains kissed the runway and the Mustang began to decelerate. A few seconds after that, the tail wheel was back on the ground with a light bump and the snake dance back to Lewis’s well-known “Toy Barn” hangar got underway.

One thing that sticks with me is how many people came out of their hangars and buildings lining the Addison Airport runway and taxiway to watch our cackling and popping passage. Though Lewis flew his Mustang regularly from Addison, it’s obvious the locals never got tired of seeing or hearing it. Polished aluminum, a Rolls-Royce Merlin, and the name Mustang are eye candy that no red-blooded aviator can ignore.

Once the big Hamilton Standard prop came to a halt and Lewis extricated himself from the front seat, I was able to follow suit. I must say that that moment arrived none too soon, as by then my back and butt were absolutely killing me!

Would I do it again?

In a heartbeat…

The post Mustang musings: what it’s like to fly the legendary P-51 appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

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[jacewilliams1]

Friday Photo: pyramids of Giza from a 787

The view: The Great Pyramid of Giza, seen through a heads-up display

The pilot: Richard Pittet

The photographer: Luc Martineau

The airplane: Boeing 787

The mission: Airline flight across Egypt at FL360

The memory: Ancient technology and modern technology meet: what would the builders of those pyramids think about a Boeing?

Want to share your “Friday Photo?” Send your photo and description (using the format above) to: airfacts@sportys.com

The post Friday Photo: pyramids of Giza from a 787 appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

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[jacewilliams1]

Podcast: GA trends and urban air mobility hype, with Mac McClellan

Mac McClellan logged thousands of hours in his Beech Baron.

Mac McClellan is a frequent contributor to Air Facts, but as Editor-in-Chief at Flying magazine for 20 years he flew just about every new airplane delivered since 1976. In this podcast episode, Mac shares his favorite ones and some that he wished he’d never flown.

As a keen observer of general aviation trends, Mac also explains why pilots are flying fewer cross countries, why personal flying inevitably means tradeoffs between safety and efficiency, and what the future holds for urban air mobility/eVTOL proposals.

In the “ready to copy” segment, Mac shares why he thinks personal minimums are a bad idea, the best places to fly in Michigan, and what sailing and flying have in common.

Listen online:

Listen on your favorite apps:

Listen on Apple Podcasts >>

Listen on Spotify >>

The post Podcast: GA trends and urban air mobility hype, with Mac McClellan appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2021/10/podcast-ga-trends-and-urban-air-mobility-hype-with-mac-mcclellan/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=podcast-ga-trends-and-urban-air-mobility-hype-with-mac-mcclellan

[jacewilliams1]

Harmony and distractions

Music occupies space as poetry. The notes merge into a symphony, calibrating the brain with that ethereal sense of wonder. Bach’s music by some is considered the emotional calibrator. Each melodic note rides the wave on the preceding note; much like the start of an IO-550 engine, you can hear the guttural sound on ignition. After the fuel pump has loaded up the distributor block and the mixture of air and fuel is introduced into the cylinder, the magnetos induce the electrical spark from the spark plugs as a gentle cascading flame spreads across the piston head, combusting the air/fuel mixture and pressing the pistons in their cylinders into a perpetual linear motion of up and down.

You can hear this if you concentrate and slow your brain down—keep the door and window open when starting the engine. Keep the headset on your lap for a moment and listen. Just like the members of a symphony or at a Broadway play, the musicians calibrate their wind and string instruments before the maestro raises his arms. And suddenly there is harmony. All the cylinders fire in harmony if there is no early morning sickness of stuck valves. The CHTs on the display come alive like the musical score communicating the information visually. All is well with the machine, pilot, and the world.

Do you hear the symphony?

I put my headsets on when the symphony is well on its way and then listen through the noise cancelling waves for any errant cellist in the mix. Taxiing to the approach end of the runway is much the same: no distractions, just concentration on the task at hand, safely negotiating the taxiway to the runway and using the checklist.

Taking off is magic, every time. Ask any pilot and within a fraction of a percentage you will hear these words, “Its magic!” As the weight is lifted off the gear and borne entirely by the wings, we are airborne. The sound of the engine changes as it harmonizes with the ocean of air.

After an hour and a half of flying, I was returning to my home airport the other evening. It was a dusky evening with the haze clamped down firmly beneath by the overhead gray clouds. It was that time of the day where the forces of night are hammering at the door to let it in, and that little bit of twilight won’t give up.

Three miles from the airport, I was already at traffic pattern altitude, slowing down from my standard 20 inches of manifold pressure (MP) to 18 inches. The winds were calm on surface based on the AWOS but at 1000 feet they were 5 knots from the west. I was planning the 45-degree entry for a downwind pattern to runway 24, when I heard the call that a Cherokee was on a practice ILS approach to runway 06. He announced that he was three miles out. Midstream in my thought process, I changed my plans to accommodate the pilot and land on runway 06 as well, to avoid any conflict.

I was doing 110 knots, slowing to 105 knots as I flew crosswind-midfield overhead the runway. Turning onto left downwind, I reduced power to 15 inches of MP to slow down. Suddenly that blessed-neural-harmony of thought had an errant cellist in the midst. The Cherokee pilot announced he was one mile from the runway threshold; I looked for the aircraft below and to my left and could not see the aircraft. Nope, nothing there! I strained at 2-3 miles beyond the runway threshold and nothing still.

I heard the seven clicks, and the runway lights came on at full bright. I strained to look for the Cherokee to decide when to make the base turn. And lo and behold, his localizer must have been pegged to the right because he blew right past me, 500 feet below and closer to my flight path. The Garmin lady blurted “Traffic! Traffic!” as the yellow ball danced just below me on the MFD.

I turned base as the pilot announced a missed approach and the yellow ball disappeared on the MFD. I noted that my airspeed was still 95 knots and put the approach flaps in and simultaneously reduced the MP further. The dissonant cacophony of the gear-warning alarm disturbed the harmony! One and a half miles from the threshold. I looked for the three green—and there weren’t any! My hand grabbed the gear handle and pushed it down and four seconds later the three green lights lit up. The base leg gave me ample time to stabilize for the final approach at 700 feet.

The “500 feet” warning came on a few seconds later and I deployed full flaps. The aircraft slowed down to my desired approach speed of 80 knots, and I reconfirmed the GUMPS with the “three green” visually once again. I looked for the Cherokee pilot and saw him well left of the runway executing a missed approach, turning southbound right over the midfield at 200-300 feet above my altitude. Fortunately, there weren’t any others around to partake in this spaghetti-like confluence of distractions and maneuvers.

Not the result any pilot wants.

What went wrong with my symphonic harmony? It is obvious there was a minor distraction that prevented me from reviewing and executing my checklist. In retrospect, I realize that if the harmony of thought is broken at any point during a flight, one must force oneself into the basics. Perhaps, I should have extended downwind and pulled out the checklist and reconfigured for the approach (a wiser and more careful methodology), but not turned back to an upwind for another pattern since the Cherokee pilot was cutting his missed approach quicker and at a lower altitude (although I did not have a clue then). He would have been a conflict!

These are questions worth pondering in the aftermath exercise. An old saying, “there are those pilots who have had a gear up landing and those who will,” scares the daylights out of me!

What went wrong (Excuses n’ all):

Visibility

Deviation of planned maneuver

Sudden change of runway

Unable to visualize where the other aircraft was

Forgetting to lower the gear on turning downwind (checklist)

Verbalizing, “three green” while simultaneously looking for the indication on downwind

Verbalizing, “three green” on base leg before the gear warning horn sounded

Reducing power below 15 inches MP to reduce speed, which if properly configured in the aircraft I fly, should happen only at short final when the runway is made.

OK, I did not mention the chatty passenger “he, who shall not be named,” in the back seat, whom I had to electronically isolate while overhead the field… should have done that five miles out!

DECIDE:

D- Detect that the action is necessary: checklist review E- Estimate the significance of the action: gear up landing C- Choose a desirable outcome: landing safely I- Identify actions needed to achieve the chosen option: power/speed/gear/flaps D- Do the necessary action to achieve change: extend gear/flaps E- Evaluate the effects of the action: power and desired speed

What saved the day:

The below 15 inches MP gear warning horn

Alertness to the warning

Immediate execution of gear extension

Confirming the “three green” on base

Confirming the “three green” on final

Reconfirming with the “check landing gear” warning at 200 feet from the Landing Heights System (LIDAR) that I recently installed.

Stabilizing the approach at 700 feet, otherwise unstable at 500 feet equals a missed approach.

Landing without incident.

LESSON LEARNED!!!

The musical interlude exists to enjoy for another day, for breaking the surly bonds and witnessing the spectacle of flight—but now with renewed concepts and understanding.

The post Harmony and distractions appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

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[jacewilliams1]

Confessions of a seaplane charter pilot

Following my retirement from dentistry, I became very bored very quickly and realized the necessity of having something to occupy my spare time. I immediately turned to the field of flight.

I had already owned and leased out aircraft, including a new Piper PA-16 that I traveled to Florida to purchase new for $10,750 (in 1963) to replace my worn out, leased Piper Tri-Pacer. (The salesman suggested that I sell the valuable radios and “throw in” the airplane). I then flew the new airplane back to Boeing Field without a radio; yes, they still painted the name of the airport on the roof of the hangar to aid navigation. Later, I bought and leased to my glider club a Piper Super Cub for towing gliders. But the maintenance, fuel, and insurance ($4,500/year on a $20,000 aircraft) made the business model impractical; I returned to my first love, seaplanes.

Lake Union is one of the busiest seaplane bases in the world.

My mentor, Lana Kurtzer, had already died and his estate had sold the land and the company to his former competitor. But one of his long-time employees had established a small company across Lake Union; I decided to introduce myself.

The timing was perfect; the seaplane charter business is seasonal and (most of) the small companies fly seven days a week for three months in the hope of earning enough to carry them over the winter months. This was the beginning of the season and the boss needed a pilot. I checked out in one of his two Cessna 206s on floats (N8397Q) and immediately began flying, at first occasionally and then nearly every day. The Cessna 206 with a Continental IO-520 engine had right-side double doors aft but lacked a front seat right-side door (no exit from the right front during docking) and was mounted on Deep V 3400 floats that were valuable when landing in rough weather.

Aircraft maintenance was the responsibility of the boss (an A&P) and always a consideration. One of my first charters was ferrying a passenger to Lake Chaunigan on Vancouver Island to attend a rowing crew race. Before departing, the boss muttered something about the alternator on N8397Q that I did not clearly hear and we headed out of Lake Union, crossed the straits, and soon found lake Chaunigan near Victoria. It was surrounded by crowds of people; I landed and taxied up and down the shoreline searching in vain for a docking area to unload my passenger and finally shut down the engine in the hope someone would run out to us and take my passenger. Nobody volunteered; I decided to restart and taxi clear of the lake for the coming race. The battery was dead!

The crew race began, and I was stranded in the middle of the course. People were shouting and waving at me from the shore to clear the course and finally one kind boater recognized my problem and towed me off the course to shore. The emergency paddle fit into a sleeve on the inside of the left float; I used it to paddle into a float where my passenger quickly jumped ashore and disappeared. The race finished and I sat there deciding where I could find another battery and thinking unkind thoughts about my boss and what he had muttered about the alternator. I suddenly remembered that sometimes if you leave a dead battery sit a few minutes it sometimes generates a small revival charge. I tied a slipknot to the cleat on the float and ran the end into the cockpit, hit the starter and it kicked over once and started! But my problems were not over…

I took off, climbed out to 2,000 ft., leveled off for cruise and noticed that it was cruising 10 mph slow. I checked the power settings, flaps, and water rudders but suddenly remembered… the paddle! Looking out the window I could see that it was firmly plastered vertically to the leading edge of the float struts by the airflow, blade down and with the handle just out of reach. I knew that I could not fly across the city with this situation—it would surely depart at a most inopportune time—and tried everything to dislodge it: slow flight, stalls, skids, slips. All were unsuccessful, and finally I let down and touched down on the step and dislodged it.

I returned to Lake Union with a more realistic understanding of maintenance problems in small (and large?) aircraft companies that I found valuable in future years on several occasions.

A seaplane can get the pilot into unique forms of trouble.

My seaplane charters continued nearly every day in the summers and there were always challenging problems that kept it interesting.

For instance, Tuesday was sailboat race day on Lake Union, and it was sometimes challenging to find an area large enough to land without violating safety rules. I returned one late Tuesday to find dozens of race competitors covering almost the entire lake. I noted one potential area on the east side of the lake that would could qualify by stretching the rules slightly, and entered a downwind left-hand pattern over Westlake Avenue with final approach to touchdown into the strong breeze just offshore from the houseboats lining the lake. I touched down easily and settled down off the step to begin my 180-degree turn around on the water to taxi back to the dock at the southeast corner of the lake.

Floatplanes weathercock into the wind and are difficult to turn away from the wind in a strong breeze. The torque from the propeller rotation will turn them naturally to the left and the greater the RPM, the greater the left turn force. The water rudders help when properly rigged to allow them to deploy full length into the water; 8379Q had received a recent 100-hour inspection and the rudders were not properly rigged.

After touchdown, I applied (a lot of) power, stood on the left rudder with the yoke back, began the 180-degree left turn, and slowly came around 90 degrees to find myself with my madly thrashing propeller looking dead ahead at the Seattle police harbor patrol boat. This was not a good way to make friends! I completed my turn and taxied back to the dock with the police boat following. I climbed out, tied up and, expecting the worst, met the officer coming down the dock.

He had a quizzical look on his face as I calmly greeted him, and unapologetically explained the difficulty turning the seaplane away from the strong wind. I offered to taxi him out on the lake to demonstrate the problem.

He just smiled and said, “I thought you were just being obnoxious.”

We departed good friends.

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[jacewilliams1]

Get-home-itis: be on the lookout

If you watch any of the TV crime shows (my wife’s favorite is NCIS, in case you were wondering), they talk about BOLOs. It took me a while, but I finally got that this means “Be on the lookout.” This is a government agency’s terminology to alert their community to be alert to a person or situation that is important to monitor or address.

For us pilots, we can use this same intentional alertness to observe and influence our flying and specifically our choices. During a recent long day of flying I had a chance to experience aviation’s version of completion bias—the drive to complete a flight—also known as get-home-itis. I learned a great deal from it and want to share the experience. First the set up and then we’ll unpack what I did right and wrong.

Even with ADS-B weather and on an IFR flight plan, staying visual is often the best idea.

That day’s mission was to retrieve an airplane three states away. It was a four hour flight just to get to the pick-up point. We made an early start to the day because the weather was forecast to steadily degrade in the area we were flying toward as a front approached. Traditional summer convection was possible in the afternoon for the return trip but no fronts or lines of storms between us and home. The flight out was smooth with great ceilings and visibilities until we were within about 20 miles of the destination. By the time we got to the end of our first leg, steady rain had started and convective activity was about 100 miles further west. Needless to say, it was in our best interest not waste time on the ground getting turned around.

I was out of the airplane as the prop stopped turning. I realized quickly that Murphy was firmly in charge when I couldn’t find the airplane keys and that the airplane needed gas as the rain got steadily heavier. The line crew was fueling the plane by the time I found the keys and began the pre-flight. My rain coat saved me from a real soaking. Thank you North Face!

I picked up my clearance and departed into solid IMC for the first 30 miles and then spent the rest of the trip deviating around build-ups. It was getting pretty hot out there and the cumulus clouds were steadily building. By the time I was an hour from my landing in the DC area, I was hot and tired after seven hours in the cockpit.

As I got closer to my destination, Martin State Airport in Baltimore (MTN), I started seeing areas of precipitation from the ADS-B Nexrad display. Two primary areas, one very close to Joint Base Andrews (formerly known as Andrews Air Force Base) and one near Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall airport (BWI). The cell over BWI was headed northeast toward my destination but MTN was solid VFR and I thought I could get in before the weather, based on judging the updates of the Nexrad images and the general look at build-ups through the windshield.

The MTN ATIS was telling arrivals to expect a visual approach to runway 15. Potomac Approach cleared me to arrive from the northwest, as I would have expected. Then Potomac told me to plan the LOC 15 at MTN and began to vector me toward the final approach course.

I could see build-ups off to the southeast of my position and started to watch the conditions, carefully comparing the ADS-B with the conditions out the window. Everything still looked good, though the BWI cell was now closer to MTN and another had now developed northeast of the airport. There was lots of VFR in between these.

Just as I was about to intercept the localizer, it started to get pretty bumpy and I was seeing more cloud—although I was still in visual conditions. I did not have a visual on the airport and I was starting to get rain on the windshield. As quickly as the rain started it intensified a great deal, started to darken and I immediately broke off the approach and told Potomac I wanted to divert back in the direction I came (toward good VFR) and land at Carrol County Airport (DMW) about 32 NM northwest, to allow the weather to clear. See the flight track below:

In retrospect I made good choices and bad choices. Let’s look at a few of each.

Good choices:

I topped off my fuel before my takeoff so I had plenty of gas and had monitored/managed my fuel burn effectively.

I asked ATC for altitudes to largely remain in visual conditions as I got closer to weather at the end of the trip to allow continuous visual assessment and reduce my single pilot IFR workload.

I was well equipped to be able to monitor weather with ADS-B tools and used the gear to maintain my situational awareness throughout the flight.

I broke off the approach and diverted when the weather started to get worse while still in visual conditions and didn’t resume until the weather was well clear.

Bad choices:

I allowed myself to get too close to a cell. Recommendations are at least 20 miles. I was much closer as the cell little grew across the final approach course.

Weather is dynamic and was changing right in front of me and I was not reacting fast enough. I should have been reminding myself that what I’m seeing is changing in ways I might not necessarily totally observe.

I was fatigued. I should have eaten on the ground between the flights as opposed to just snacking on the way home. I was likely dehydrated as well. Your brain and body need nutrients to serve you well—especially making good decisions.

I allowed completion bias to cloud my judgement. When I finally diverted I was less than 9 miles from the runway threshold. I allowed the “I am almost home” to really distract me and I procrastinated.

As I have learned from mentors and tell my students, we want to be “lifelong learners” when it comes to flying and everything we want to be good at! So what did I learn for my next long trip?

During the trip I should ask myself, “how am I feeling and how is my flying?”

Watch the weather carefully and more holistically. Imagine what I while do if it’s worse than forecast so I’m already planning my next move. It’s less about reacting and more about planning if completion is doubtful.

Be “spring loaded” to divert quickly.

Remember the impact of bad choices in the cockpit on the ones who care about me (and you). Think carefully about the risks I am taking on in every phase and condition of flight. Most of us have friends and family who also are hurt if something happens to us.

I am thankful to learn from this experience and share it with the Air Facts family. Be on the lookout in your own flying for areas where you could have made better decisions and think through how you would choose in the future should something similar occur.

Editor’s Note: This article is from our series called “I Can’t Believe I Did That,” where pilots ‘fess up about mistakes they’ve made but lived to tell about. If you have a story to tell, email us at: airfacts@sportys.com.

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[jacewilliams1]

Friday Photo: fog rolls in

The view: Sea fog at Panama City, Florida (ECP)

The pilot: Bruddy Cravens

The mission: Local flight

The memory: Here in Florida we experience the beauty of some of the best weather views quite often, especially as winter turns to fall (which is rather quick as our winter lasts about an hour… sure seems that way!). The phenomenon of sea fog can turn a bright, sunny, warmer day into a blanket of fog in minutes. The airport is roughly 16 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. I followed the fog as it moved inland and as I was on short final I saw it start to roll back into the sky as it met the warmer air. This is one of the results.

Want to share your “Friday Photo?” Send your photo and description (using the format above) to: airfacts@sportys.com

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[jacewilliams1]

What’s in a (fighter pilot’s) name?

Fighter aircraft have names such as Mustang, Lightning, Thunderbolt, Spitfire, Warthog (the unofficial name of the A-10 Thunderbolt II), Viper (the unofficial name of the F-16 Fighting Falcon), Tomcat, Phantom, Wildcat, Eagle, Cougar, Hellcat, and Typhoon.

Fighter pilots have names, or “callsigns,” as well. You are probably familiar with some of the callsigns of characters in Top Gun. There was Maverick, Goose, Iceman, Hollywood, Viper, Jester, Cougar, etc.

Where do those catchy names come from?

You may wonder where a callsign comes from, or what one does to earn a callsign that sticks forever. Callsigns can be associated with your name, your profession (some people around fighter pilots get a callsign, as seen below), a noteworthy accomplishment, or something you would rather forget—and wish that everyone else would as well. What follows are some callsigns I knew during my career and how they came to be.

To begin, I’ll own up to my own callsign—Boots—to which I still answer. It starts with my last name, Hill, and then think about the gunfighters in the Wild West who were buried at Boot Hill after dying with their boots on. Fighter pilots believe they are immortal but, if they are killed, they want to die with their boots on while “in the fight” and not doing the dishes. Finally, I always wore Corcoran combat boots, the same ones worn by Army paratroopers, which hold a shine like nobody’s business, and meant the lieutenants hated seeing my boots next to theirs. The moniker stuck and I proudly wear it.

There are easily explained callsigns.

If your last name was Rhodes or something similar, you inevitably were Dusty.

My brother was a Marine F-4 pilot and he was called Mustang for much the same reason Tom Cruise was Maverick in Top Gun.

One of the pilots in my squadron had the last name of Porter, so he became Bagman.

A fellow A-10 driver had the last name of Davidson; naturally he was called Harley.

A good friend with the last name of Bruner picked up Burners, which is very fitting for one who flew an aircraft with afterburners.

When computers were becoming widespread, our squadron had a guy called Spam, not because he had a computer, but because he actually liked to eat Spam.

A fellow A-10 pilot at Myrtle Beach once made a gear-up landing in an O-2 (a militarized Cessna Skymaster); he subsequently, and permanently, got stuck with the callsign of Skids.

Another A-10 pilot with the last name of Dill became Pickle. Note, when you drop a bomb or fire ordnance in fighters, you press the pickle button, so this name was fitting for a fighter pilot.

A fellow classmate in my F-16 training course took off one day and was trying to catch up with his instructor pilot (IP) in the lead aircraft. But he was having trouble getting sufficient airspeed, even with the throttle pushed well forward. He finally did join up with the flight leader and that’s when the IP saw the problem: my classmate had never raised his gear after takeoff. He forever became Wheels.

As a commander, one of my guys had the callsign of Pid. His first name was Stuart, and his nametag was embroidered with “Stu” followed by a dash and then “Pid.” Of course, he was anything bit stupid!

We had two pilots who arrived at the 80th Fighter Squadron (the Juvats) in Korea at about the same time. One was a large, affable character, the other was a smaller version of the first. They instantly became Yogi and Boo-Boo–remember that cartoon? As you can see, timing plays a part in assigning callsigns.

Callsigns can also be based on a physical attributes. As a commander, I once took five of my F-16s and eight of my IPs to Miramar Naval Air Station outside of San Diego, California. We spent a week role-playing Soviet fighters for their students learning to fly the F-14. When I spoke with our host officer on the phone prior to our arrival, he told me his callsign was Tiny. Upon landing at Miramar, I climbed down the ladder of my F-16 and Tiny was there to greet me. He was anything but tiny! I wondered how he ever fit into the cockpit of an F-14.

Not all callsigns are compliments.

One of my IPs who made that trip to Miramar was a guy we called Little Joe (like Michael Landon on “Bonanza”). His name was Lloyd Joseph, but, like our host at Miramar, his callsign was based on his size. I wondered how Little Joe, or L-J as we sometimes called him, fit into an F-16 cockpit. I knew when he was the last one who flew an F-16 that I climbed into because I couldn’t see over the glare shield until the generator came on line and I could raise the seat. To give you an idea of his size, L-J was a lineman on the Brigham Young football team.

I have a longtime friend who graduated college with me and we flew A-10s together at Myrtle Beach. Like me he is now retired and is also a member of the same Daedalian Flight in Atlanta. He is known as Senator, but it’s not because he’s a politician; he has a southern accent and can press the flesh with the best of them.

When I was commanding the 61st Fighter Squadron one student pilot we trained, named Roger, got a unique callsign. Roger was an F-4 pilot when the Air Force started looking for flight surgeons who would also be fully qualified fighter pilots, not just occupy the back seat on the occasional mission. As a qualified fighter pilot, he would normally go through a three-month transition course to get checked out in the F-16. However, Roger was accepted for this new program as he had the grades, passed the MCat, and had been accepted to medical school. So, he stopped flying the F-4 for four years of medical school followed by his residency to become a flight surgeon.

When he returned to flying, he had been out of the cockpit for over five years. On top of that, he was upgrading to fly the F-16. The higher-ups decided that, because Roger had been out of flying for so long and he was also upgrading to a new fighter, he would go through a six-month basic course. The other students in Roger’s class were primarily those who had just been awarded their wings. Roger was a Major and, because of his rank, he was the class commander while his classmates were a bunch of fresh-faced, young (very young!), 2nd lieutenants.

We thought long and hard about what Roger’s callsign should be. We thought of Bones (what Captain Kirk often called Doctor McCoy on Star Trek) as well as Doc (like one of the seven dwarfs in Sleeping Beauty), but those were both too easy. After much deliberation and because of the age difference between Roger and his fellow classmates, we settled on what you call an old bone: Fossil!

As for non-fighter pilots who were given a callsign, the first to come to mind were two 2nd lieutenants in Korea who were in the 8th Fighter Wing (the Wolfpack) weather shop. We liked these guys, had fun with them, and they became known as the Phoon brothers, Ty and Buff.

The Juvats also had a flight surgeon who was in the first class of women to graduate from the Air Force Academy. Her last name was O’Hare, so she was tagged with Scarlet (think Gone With the Wind). When she returned to the States, Scarlet was the flight surgeon for the 61st Fighter Squadron at MacDill AFB in Tampa, Florida, while I was the commander. She later married one of my pilots whose last name was Fox. As a result, we changed her callsign to Fox II, which is the radio call made when firing the heat-seeking, AIM-9 air-to-air missile. See how easy this is?

In my past I knew a Mallard, a Latka (from TV’s “Taxi”), a Juice, an Enos (from TV’s “Dukes of Hazzard”), a Bulb (like a lightbulb), and a Torch (who nearly burned down the squadron).

I’ll close with two of my favorite callsigns and why they were assigned.

One should never try to badger those who are assigning callsigns; but you can try and bribe them! I knew a 2nd lieutenant who wanted to be a Rock, or Flame, or Spidey, or some other super-hero, and he let everyone know it. But, because of his baby face and for making such a nuisance of himself, he got tagged with Fluffy!

Finally, remember the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter that was shot down by Yugoslavian forces in 1999? The mission callsign of that F-117 was “Vega 31.” When a B-2 pilot I know proposed to and subsequently married a Canadian-American lady of Yugoslavian descent, he picked up the callsign of Vega because he too was a stealth pilot “shot down” by a Yugoslavian.

There are many callsigns out there like Conan, Rocket, Fazer, Hose, Ajax, Slam, Two-G, Dizzy, and others. When you encounter someone sporting a callsign on their jacket or flight gear, ask them how they got that name. You might be in for a good laugh along with a good story!

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[jacewilliams1]

Go or No Go: cut-off low conundrum

After a beautiful early fall in Ohio, a cut-off low has installed itself over the southeastern United States and brought with it rain, storms, and IFR conditions. Flying conditions have been marginal all week, but you need to get to Nashville from your home outside Cincinnati, so you’ve been trying to pick the right time. It’s a two hour trip in your Cessna 182—is this the right time? Read the weather briefing below, then add a comment and tell us if it’s a go or a no-go for you. You are instrument rated and your proposed departure time is 1330Z.

Overview

The Map page in ForeFlight shows scattered rain and IFR conditions across your route of flight, but at least there’s not a solid wall of thunderstorms like there was yesterday.

The driving force behind all this weather is that cut-off low aloft. It’s been spinning over Missouri for days now.

The result is an ugly surface analysis, with a warm front and a stationary front draped across the Midwest and Southeast.

The prog charts suggest the weather might finally start to move east today, but only very slowly.

Even tonight, there is plenty of rain forecast along that front.

Radar and satellite

Step one today is to get a handle on that rain: is there any convection to watch out for? The Convective SIGMET map certainly thinks it’s possible, although there is only an outlook box along your route.

The regional radar shows fairly scattered rain around Cincinnati.

Closer to Nashville, it looks like the rain breaks up.

The infrared satellite image shows fairly thick clouds in Ohio, but nothing major in the western half of Kentucky or Tennessee.

Icing

It is early October, so it’s definitely icing season. There are some AIRMETs for in-flight icing, but they are at higher altitudes.

A look at the freezing levels shows a flight at your typical 8-10,000 ft. altitude should be above freezing.

The forecast icing product shows no threat at 11,000 feet (although it does start at 13,000).

Finally, the cloud forecast map offers some good news. Tops seem to be fairly low along your route, so it looks like you might get on top—especially closer to your destination.

Text weather

Your departure airport is showing pretty solid IFR conditions, but is forecast to improve.

En route, conditions appear to be pretty good VFR, with broken layers and no rain.

In Nashville, it’s marginal VFR and forecast to stay pretty much the same, although it should clear up later in the day.

Some pilot reports are also worth noting. They suggest the tops are right around your cruising altitude near Cincinnati.

Decision time

It’s time to make the call. Your goal was to get airborne during the morning, before any of the day’s heat can make those rain showers thunderstorms. Right now that looks to be the case, with mostly rain and layered clouds along your route. But will it stay that way? Does that front have any other surprises?

Add your comment below.

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[jacewilliams1]

Proficiency test—a father-daughter cross-country to remember

“Is the transponder supposed to say that?”

My eyes shot across the cockpit. Whap whap whap whap whap whap. The propeller bit the air. My dad was crunched into the right seat of the Cessna 172, knees bent into his chest, head cocked toward me. Stashed in the right corner of the instrument panel was our transponder—the 8” x 10” x 2” black box that transmitted our position to Air Traffic Control. It ran on the plane’s electrical system, the same power source as the radios and the flaps. We needed the transponder to fly into Class Charlie airspace, the wedding-cake-shaped extension of FAA-regulated atmosphere around our destination: El Paso International Airport (ELP). We needed the radios to make sure no Black Hawk helicopters or Boeing 737s turned our 1972 Skyhawk into an electric blue smudge in the sky. We needed the flaps to land the plane.

We were 40 miles west, 8,500 feet above the airfield. 21 minutes away if the winds held.

I saw my reflection whip across my dad’s aviators. Split-second crosscheck. His face was ice-cold. No expression. Whap whap whap whap whap whap. A message blinked on the black box:

Transponder failed.

There’s nothing like a cross-country in a Cessna 172 to connect with someone.

72 hours earlier, my dad and I departed Coulter Field in Bryan, Texas, for a 1,348-mile round-trip trek to El Paso. I had been an FAA-approved Private Pilot for 41 hours. We took off at 8am in a plane that had spent most of its useful life tied down at an un-towered airstrip baking in the Texas sun-ray oven. We were 50 pounds shy of the maximum gross weight—stuffed full of fuel, hiking boots, granola bars, and golf clubs. Wheels up, course set, elevator trimmed for straight and level flight. Whap whap whap whap whap whap. Checklist complete.

It’s still something of a miracle that I ended up in the left seat. In mid-March 2020, as the world spiraled into coronavirus chaos, I was banished from Harvard College to finish my senior spring Zooming into poetry seminars from my childhood bedroom. The view from the ground was bleak. I did yard work between YouTube graduation speeches. I walked my dog around the same block at 9am every morning. On the really wild nights, I’d eat breakfast tacos for dinner and wax philosophical about the Lost iGeneration at the kitchen table while my dad checked email. Then I’d go to bed at 9.

Quarantine stretched out in front of me like the West Texas desert: endless, changeless, and empty except for the occasional Tex-Mex stop. It felt like a bad breakup with the best years of my life.

Then, out of the wild blue yonder, I caught the flying bug. I was moping around the house one day, recently returned from walking the dog, when my dad suggested I take a drive to the small airfield up the road.

“The airport?”

“Yeah, go take a discovery flight.”

“Discovery flight?”

“Yeah, go fly with a flight instructor.”

“Like, in a plane?”

“Yeah, here, take the keys.”

When I was a kid, I was all about aviation. My dad graduated from the US Air Force Academy and wore a flight suit to work for 20 years. I spent the better part of my childhood base-jumping across the United States—Tennessee, Colorado, Mississippi, Texas. T-38s streaked across the kitchen window every morning, and F-15s roared above the soccer fields every afternoon. I dreamt of trading places with those pilots. I built planes out of cardboard moving boxes and wrote poems about flying to the moon. I knew I would see the world above the clouds one day. I couldn’t imagine life any other way.

Then my dad switched careers from flight surgeon to civilian ER doctor. Nothing roared overhead anymore except the loudspeaker in my public high school. The sky faded into a mute blue backdrop for schoolwork and soccer practice. I gave up my last shot to be a pilot age 18, when I accepted early admission to Harvard and forgot about the Air Force Academy. The only glimpse I’d get of the left seat of a cockpit was on my way back to the coach cabin on the commercial flight to Boston. I let the door shut on any other possibility.

It hurt—letting my dad’s USAF contrails dissipate into thin air. But I wanted a liberal arts education. I studied English literature and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford my senior fall of college. Four months after graduation, I was set to hop across the pond and start a master’s degree in history, basic training for a life digging through the archives instead of flying to the moon. No one in my family was an academic. My last year at college, my mom, dad, and I had gradually run out of things to talk about on the calls back home. I turned in my thesis mid-March and looked ahead to a pre-grad-school summer of reading for fun. Then, the day after the thesis deadline, COVID-19 hit Harvard.

And suddenly, I was back in Texas, stuck in coronavirus-limbo, pushed out the door by the USAF veteran who wore his flight suit to fight weeds in the backyard. Conscripted, I took the seven-minute drive to the airfield and the twenty-minute flight above the clouds. And I fell headset over heels.

“I never wanted to come back down again.”

I was in the left seat, the instructor in the right, both squeezed into a Cessna 162. We slipped above the sticky morning at a thousand feet per minute. The airfield, the Brazos River, my house, my high school, the highway traffic—all of it slid beneath us, riding on the planetary conveyor belt buckled to the ground below. We rose above that toy factory, pistons pushing and pulling, a formula floating on composite wings. We leveled off at 6,500 feet, seven football fields above the scattered layer of clouds. The instructor trimmed the elevator and let me take the yoke. Left 30 degrees, right 30 degrees. Pitch up, push forward, one hand, light touch. It felt like engineered poetry. Fluent in three dimensions, held aloft by the fluid freedom of nitrogen molecules, tethered to human life by naught except the invisible radio-strands of other aeronauts sailing the unbound ocean of blue!

On the drive home I saw highways in the clouds. That night I stared at the moon for twenty minutes. It felt like seeing an old friend. After that, my poetry seminar, virtual commencement, daily dog walks, weekly Netflix parties, monthly book clubs—anything that kept two feet on the ground—felt boring. Real life was somewhere 6,000 feet above my head. I had touched it. I never wanted to come back down again.

My dad and I found a cheap airplane for rent and a retired-Marine-friend-of-a-friend to teach me how to fly it. Every day I’d wake up, down a cup of coffee, fly with my instructor, down another cup of coffee, read Federal Aviation Administration textbooks, and effuse about aviation with the mechanics at the airfield, my digital friends, my Australian shepherd, the grocery store clerks, the mailman, the cows grazing under the telephone wires across the street—anyone who would listen. My stack of fun-reading collected dust. When I wasn’t flying, or reading about flying, or talking about flying, I was listening to audiobooks about flying. David McCullough’s biography of the Wright Brothers. Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars. Jocko naval aviator podcasts, the Airline Pilot Guy Show, the Weather Channel. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.

My dad and I had something to talk about again. On the best nights, I’d walk through the door, throw off my flight gear, and knock back a few drinks with him at the kitchen table, talking about his Air Force days. The idiot in survival training who outed their group to the upperclassmen Soviet officers. The SR-71 Blackbird in the induction parade that punched a hole in the sky with its Pratt and Whitney engine. The F-16 dogfight that sent earth and sky tumbling like clothes in a washing machine. The night after I flew my first steep turn, I asked him what a made a good fighter pilot. He shook his head over the lip of his beer, “The right stuff, man. The right stuff.”

The Right Stuff is a 1979 non-fiction novel about the rise of NASA’s Mercury Space Program in the 1960s. It’s the best book by America’s best 20th century satirist, Tom Wolfe. In his signature psychedelic style, Wolfe nails the fighter jock specimen: those righteous single-combat warriors who clawed their way to the top of the Maverick ziggurat to do battle with the Soviet Integral. Yeager, Shepard, Armstrong. These heroes orbited high above the bipedal billions snagged by the surly bonds of earth, shot beyond the thermosphere by that unnamable combination of edge, ego, guts, grit, and gumption—that righteous stuff.

I soaked it all in through my headphones, burning up the asphalt between my house and Coulter Field. The altimeter keeps winding down… He’s only 21,000 feet above the high desert… Bango!—the chute catches with a jolt… He pitches down… He jettisons the chute… and the beast heaves up again! Wolfe wrote like he was in the cockpit with Chuck Yeager. He had the style of an English major and the swagger of a fighter jock, those knights-in-shining-metal who spent their days flying and drinking, drinking and driving, whipping and wheeling their convertibles across the California desert floor. They called every exploit—racing cars, taking shots, breaking the sound barrier—by the same name: proficiency test.

I flew head-first into the frenzy. Every training day was another step up the ziggurat of airborne elites. I called anything difficult or dumb or reckless—everything from a 100-degree cross-country flight to a 100-degree day in the yard—another proficiency test. My dad started calling his 24-hour shifts by the same name.

For those with the right stuff, everything was a proficiency test.

SpaceX launched the Crew Dragon the day I soloed at an airfield built to train Cold War pilots. It was the first American orbital spaceflight in nine years, the first ever launched by a private company. I had graduated three days before. My dad asked me if I had ever thought about the Air National Guard. I talked to his old C-17 pilot buddy on the phone and started running the numbers in my head. How old would I be after I graduated from Oxford? How many years of training until I’d get a shot at the F-35? What are the terms of the Rhodes Scholarship, again?

A second Space Age had arrived—and with it, a second shot at the aviation family business.

***

By mid-summer I was flying solo every day. I flew at sunrise when I couldn’t sleep, flew at night when I didn’t want to sleep, flew in the afternoon when the ceiling finally burned above FAA minimums. Stalls, steep turns, S-turns across the road, turns-around-a-point. Each item off the training checklist was a step closer to the FAA check ride—and a step closer to getting my license, my official christening as a jock-of-the-skies private pilot.

But my days drinking and driving, driving and flying, flying and drinking, were numbered. Oxford would start mid-September. By mid-July logistical weeds were choking my time above the clouds. College accommodations forms, Confirmation of Acceptance Studies forms, National Health Service forms—the leagues of red tape between Houston and Heathrow was the stuff ATC dreams are made of. Throw in a pandemic and a 12th century bureaucracy, and you have a fail-proof recipe for a world-class headache. It didn’t help that I was having second thoughts.

Then there was the visa. Thanks to the logic of British bureaucrats, I had to have my fingerprints scanned and shipped to New York for processing before I could get my visa delivered through the mail. And the only UK office open more than two weeks before my departure date, across all 167 million acres of Texas, was El Paso, a city so far west it ran on Mountain Time. I could drive the 681 miles… But the thought of trekking ten hours there and back, on the ground, while the time I had left in American aviation ticked to zero, was unbearable. I had to fly.

The plan fell into place. The El Paso trek would be my first real test as a pilot. My dad would be my right-seat passenger. We’d make the trip a proper West Texas send-off: visit Carlsbad Caverns, hike Guadalupe Peak, play a few rounds of golf, knock out the visa appointment, get one last swig of Americana before jetting abroad. My dad would fly in a non-commercial aircraft for the first time since his Air Force days. We’d be two righteous single-combat warriors racing into the wild blue yonder to do battle with the British bureaucrats. All I needed was the license.

That was the first proficiency test.

The FAA examiner showed up an hour late. By the time we finished the two-hour oral test, angry thunderstorms had chewed up the afternoon. I called a discontinuance. We met at the airfield at 11:30 the next morning. The temperature throttled toward three digits, and gusty crosswinds whipped the windsock at speeds only a few knots below my personal maximums. I knocked out the stalls, ground reference maneuvers, and simulated emergencies, but by the time we turned back to Coulter Field for the landing, the crosswinds had picked up. I had never flown in winds this gusty before.

I turned left base to final, came in over the runway too high, and slipped to land the first touch-and-go. As I climbed out for the second circuit, the examiner lit up the radio waves. Wrong crab angle! Nose down! Right rudder! I had landed the plane within the FAA specifications, hadn’t I?

The examiner cut through my pre-landing checklist while we were on downwind:

“Land this one without flaps. You might have an electrical failure and lose power to the flap control. Happens all the time!”

No flaps? Nowhere did the Airman Certification Standards specify that a private pilot had to land a plane without flaps. It never came up in training. It never came up in The Right Stuff. Ten minutes from the finish, I became a test pilot. Turning left base to final, I didn’t trim the elevator up enough and came in too high, too fast. I had to go around. The examiner lit up the radios again. No way was I going to meet FAA standards in these conditions. I put the flaps in, put the plane on the ground, and called another discontinuance.

The smile of someone who has passed their check ride.

We agreed to reconvene the next day to finish the last two touch-and-goes. Twenty days later, I still didn’t have my license. First the examiner was stuck in Denver, then he was stuck in Dallas, then he had his license suspended for a “routine complaint.” The clock ticked. If I didn’t finish the exam in the next ten days, I would bust the FAA’s 30-day deadline and have to restart the test from scratch.

My hands were tied with red tape. The license, the El Paso cross-country flight, the fighter jock dreams—all up in smoke. I’d have to drive to the visa appointment. The only plane I’d ever take my dad flying in would be the ones I made of cardboard in third grade. I blamed it all on the flaps.

Then I got a text from my instructor. A friend of a friend of a friend knew an FAA examiner from out-of-state who had a thirty-minute opening Wednesday, August 19, two days before my dad and I were scheduled to leave for Carlsbad. “Dear Lord,” I prayed, “don’t let me f*** up.”

The full-flap touch-and-goes took ten minutes. I drove home a private pilot. Forty-one hours after that, my dad and I were cruising toward Carlsbad.

***

The going was slow. Between the wind, the heat, and the ancient airplane, we chugged above the farm-quilted terrain at a blistering 110 miles per hour. This was the longest I had ever flown. The caffeine buzz wore off at mile 262. My back ached from slouching against the Styrofoam blocks I had set against the back of the seat, so I could reach the rudder pedals. My dad monitored our progress on an iPad. He passed the time telling military stories. The time a fighter jock inverted on final approach. The time he and two buddies outran a thunderstorm between Columbus and Birmingham. He shook his head with a smile. The right stuff, man, the right stuff.

My dad had never been a pilot. A refractive error in his left eye disqualified him from flight training in his third year at the Academy. Finance officer in the First Gulf War, logistics man at unspecified air bases in the Middle East, then medical student and flight surgeon. As a doc, he did all he could to keep the fighter jocks flying. They loved him for it. Took him on practice dogfights in F-16s, 400-mile burrito runs in Learjets. And here he was, 12 years later, clunking toward El Paso at a quarter of a respectable cruising speed, squished in a Cessna one missed inspection away from the scrapheap, daughter in the left seat, dad in the right. He shook his head the one time I asked if he wanted to manipulate the controls. “You’re the pilot in command,” he said. Yes sir.

By the time we crossed over from hot, dry, oil-rigged West Texas into hot, dry, oil-rigged South New Mexico, we were landing in air seven times thinner than what we had departed in. The eight runways at the Carlsbad Cavern City Airport dissected each other like two off-set Zs. A crusty FBO manager with a white handlebar mustache wrangled the golf bags out of the back seat. Ten minutes later, we drove a tin-can SUV due north up the Carlsbad main drag, dad in the left seat, daughter in the right.

We woke up at 5:45 the next morning and drove an hour south to Carlsbad Caverns. It was 12:30 by the time we emerged, blinking, from the sleeping city of stalactites, stalagmites, and bat guano. Next up: Guadalupe Peak: 8,750 feet in the sky. We pulled into Guadalupe Mountain State Park and took stock of the situation. 1:30, winds below five knots, temperature 98 degrees and climbing. 3,000 feet of elevation gain across 8.4 miles—an estimated eight hours of strenuous hiking. We had two granola bars and two water bottles between the two of us. The closest gas station was thirty minutes out of the way. I looked across the dashboard at my dad. He flicked on his aviators and grinned, “Proficiency test.”

We averaged twenty-five minutes per mile for the first mile and a half. I zig-zagged around the roots, rocks, and switchbacks like a jackrabbit. Every few minutes I’d wait for my dad under the shade of some arthritic desert foliage. He followed behind at a steady pace, chugging up the elevation like our Skyhawk’s Lycoming engine. We passed other hikers and made bets on who’d make it to the summit. The temperature jumped above 100 degrees. Our water fell below half capacity.

Another proficiency test passed.

I passed the time asking my dad questions about his Academy days. I had to strain to catch his few-word answers across the stretching space between us. Was the Academy stressful? Yeah. Where did you go after graduation? The Middle East. Do you miss the Air Force? Not really. What was it like when you found out you weren’t pilot qualified? His steady pace rocked a bit. The flight surgeon gave him the eye exam junior year, he said. Walked into the room and broke the news, matter-of-fact. My dad, maybe ten months younger than I was at the time, felt his eyes well up in front of the refractive error. The flight surgeon glanced up from his clipboard. “You’re not going to cry about it, are you?” My dad didn’t. He spent the rest of his Air Force career slashing red-tape medical technicalities, so fighter jocks could stay airborne. We kept climbing.

“How are you holding up?” I called over my shoulder. No answer. Fifteen minutes later I called again, “How are you holding up?” A gruff reply came somewhere several feet behind me, “Don’t ask again. It makes me feel weak.” Water at a quarter capacity. 101 degrees.

I got to the top just before the five-hour mark, twenty minutes before my dad. When he surfaced over the edge of the summit, his shoes were splitting apart near the soles. Waterless, snackless, and burned to an offensive shade of pink, we sat down next to the vaguely phallic marble stone that marked Guadalupe Peak—the triumph of our righteous stuff. 2,667 feet above the surface. The desert stretched out in front of us, a sun-stained sectional chart of dried salt lakes, dust farms, and oil rigs. I patted my dad on the back. “You know,” I said, “this looks exactly like the view we have in the Cessna.” He blinked heavily behind his aviators, “Time to go down.”

Twelve hours later, we saw the same desert landscape from 6,000 feet higher in the atmosphere, fuzzed over by the plexiglass windshield of our battle-worn Skyhawk. 7:48. 89 miles into the 129-mile stretch between Carlsbad and El Paso International Airport, four hours and twelve minutes from the visa appointment that had sent us packing West. Time passed. My dad snapped pictures of the rippling terrain below while he monitored the iPad. I sipped hotel coffee and thought about how long it was going to be before I saw a world as barren, dusty, and free as this one again. The UK was getting closer every mile west we tracked—more real, it seemed, than that small marble plaque we humped 8.1 miles to see yesterday afternoon and now sailed a mile above this morning—

“Is your transponder supposed to say that?”

The black box screamed its death-threat in silence: Transponder failed.

Transponder failed. Right. Checklist, checklist. I fumbled around the left door pouch for my emergency procedures. The propeller bit the air. My dad watched in silence. Whap whap whap whap whap whap. I slapped the checklist onto my lap and keyed in a radio call to Air Traffic Control. “Carlsbad Center, Skyhawk seven-two-nine-nine-papa has a failed pfffffffft.” The radio frayed. “Uh, Skyhawk can you please repfffffft.” Keyed the radio, nothing, nothing. My dad held up the iPad. We were two minutes away from crossing into the Class Charlie airspace. We’d break the law to fly in NORDO, without radios or a transponder.

Checklist, checklist. I scoured the moving map for airfields outside El Paso. Nothing, nothing—there! Un-towered airstrip thirty miles south of the city. No avgas available. Maybe a mechanic. Almost certainly no rental car. I looked at my watch. 7:51. If we diverted, it was anyone’s guess if we could make the visa appointment in time. We want to make the visa appointment, right? Right. Sure. Thirty seconds until we crossed over into the Class Charlie. I prayed the Boeing 737s flying into ELP were watching their windows for traffic. We wouldn’t show up on their instrument panels sans-transponder. I handed my dad the iPad. “We’re going to divert,” I said, “but one last thing.” I ran my finger over the circuit breakers—bump. The alternator field breaker. I punched.

“Skyhawk seven-two-nine-nine-papa confirm landing on runway two-six left. Repeat two-six-left.” There! The voice of the controller rang over the radio waves like the trumpet call of God. I keyed in the response, “Skyhawk nine-nine-papa two-six ppfffffft.” The radios died. We were on our own. But we had our orders.

Is that the right airport?

“We’re going to land at ELP,” I told my dad. Four minutes later we started the descent. We had our runway. Bleeding altitude, picking up airspeed, all we needed was to find it.

My dad looked on in silence as I scoured the windshield, trying to make visual contact with two-six left. We had a two-in-three chance of screwing the pooch on this landing. El Paso International was sandwiched between Fort Biggs Army airbase to the north and Juarez International to the west. Misread the runway, and we’d either land in the wrong airspace or the wrong country. All I could see was dust. Where the hell was ELP?

I grabbed the iPad from my dad and drew a straight line from the end of two-six left across the map. I lined up with the painted white numerals. We were forty seconds from touchdown, 1,000 feet above the ground. We’d have one shot to nail the landing. If we tried a go-around without radios at an international airport, we’d be asking for a collision with a commercial jet forty times our maximum gross weight. I reached down the instrument panel to put in the first ten degrees of flaps.

Click.

Nothing happened. The switch moved, but the flaps didn’t budge. A cold shiver snaked through my gut and curled around my spine. The flaps were dead. They ran on power from the electrical system, and the electrical system had failed. The voice of my first FAA examiner rang through the headsets like a ghost over the non-transmitting radio waves, “You might have an electrical failure and lose power to the flap control. Happens all the time!”

I handed the iPad back to my dad and keyed in two words over the dead radios: “Proficiency test.”

***

Thirty minutes later, my dad and I were sitting at a corner table at Cuauhtémoc Café, two miles from the airport, eating breakfast tacos. Customers in cloth masks shuffled in and out the door. My dad pulled out his laptop and checked his email. I finished eating and stared blankly at the orange wall. I had never tasted better Tex-Mex in my life.

I had put the plane on the ground. By a stroke of favor from the aviation gods, the FBO was immediately south of runway two-six left. No need to navigate across a mile of spaghetti-noodle taxiways without ATC instructions. We called the mechanic. He’d check the alternator first thing in the morning. The FBO manager, a short woman in a sharp business suit, sorted out the rental car, and we drove two miles straight west to Cuauhtémoc. We had time to kill before the visa appointment.

There was a strange silence hovering over the tortillas and the plastic straws. My blood shot through my cardiovascular system faster than the Skyhawk on initial descent. I had never felt this buzzed, this invincible, this much like a hyperbole ripped from a piece of literary non-fiction. Was this the world outside the envelope? How could I ever go back to “real life” again? Was the person sitting across from my dad the same person who sat to his left 8,500 feet above mean sea level this morning? The same person who struck out West to go back East, who four months before this took a discovery flight above the clouds, who four years before that boarded a commercial flight to Boston? Was this the next step up the mighty ziggurat of that righteous stuff—or was it the highest I’d ever reach?

My dad closed his laptop and looked at me from across the table. He shook his head and smiled. “The right stuff, man,” he said, “the right stuff.”

We drove to the visa office, dad in the left seat, daughter in the right. He stayed in the car while I went in alone. I paused in front of the entrance, blood still rippling through the arteries. It would be too literary to say two worlds opened in front of me at that moment—an old world in the East and a young world in the West. Whose dream was it to go to Oxford, and whose dream was it to fly to the moon? Mine, mine twelve years ago, my dad’s, my dad’s when he was my age? Was this aviation thing destiny, or just some freak side-effect from a freak pandemic?

Two roads diverged from the highway above the clouds. One paved with undergraduate ambitions, the other with childhood dreams. Would the real Lauren please take the first step?

Those thoughts belong to the world of Tom Wolfe novels. There was never a doubt that I’d go to the appointment. The only question was who I’d be when I walked out the door.

***

Not a bad way to kill time while the airplane gets fixed.

We spent an extra day in El Paso, finally putting the golf clubs to use while the mechanic trouble-shot the Skyhawk’s electrical system. Bad alternator, dead battery, loose safety wire. The money we saved renting a crappy airplane from a friend of a friend we promptly spent making the airplane significantly less crappy.

I called my instructor and recounted the triumph of the no-flaps landing. There was an awkward pause after I finished the story. He was waiting for the punchline. “Oh, you had plenty of runway to land that thing without flaps!” he said, “But glad you’re both okay.” I nodded, sobered. The adrenaline-shot shimmer life had acquired post-electrical-failure had already started to fade. “You may want to file a report with the FAA,” my instructor added, “just in case.”

After six hours battling headwinds in a worn-out plane with a brand-new battery, my dad and I touched down at Coulter Field. We crabbed into gusty crosswinds to make the full-flap landing. We were one day behind schedule. We yanked the golf clubs from the back seat and headed home in our black Tundra. My dad’s ER shift started in two hours. After he took off, I carried the one souvenir from the trip back to my bedroom: a poster of the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird. We had picked it up at the return fuel stop in San Angelo. It was a memento for the Oxford dorm room.

Thirteen days later, my dad drove me to the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. 5:30. Winds below five knots. It was the first time all summer that I was traveling to Houston on the ground, and I wasn’t the one in the left seat. We rode mostly in silence. The radio was dead quiet.

“You know,” my dad said, breaking the silence, “when we were up there, over the mountains, and the transponder failed,” he paused. I waited. “I felt a peace.” The engine hummed. “All the flights I’ve been on—the F-16s, the T-38s—and I would go down in a Cessna 172 somewhere in the middle of the West Texas desert.” He paused, smiled, and shook his head. “But I was okay with that. Because I was with you…” He trailed off and looked out the window for a moment. “And I was in a plane being flown by my daughter.”

My dad dropped me off at the gate. I grabbed my black suitcase and my backpack, with the luggage tags my instructor had given me. Lauren Spohn: Pilot in Command. The automatic doors slid open. I took the first step through when I heard my dad yell something behind me. “Hey!” I whipped around. He grinned, winked, and shouted two words through the open right window: “Proficiency test!”

I gave him a salute, walked through the sliding doors, and boarded the commercial flight to London.

The post Proficiency test—a father-daughter cross-country to remember appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

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[jacewilliams1]

A landing and a one-wheel takeoff on Interstate 25

On a hot August morning in 1976, at 7:20 (rush hour), I landed a Cessna 172 on Interstate 25 south of Denver, Colorado, near mile marker 172. Within a few minutes of my touching down, a TV reporter and cameraman showed up. Five minutes later—and quite predictably—the Colorado Highway Patrol arrived.

In addition to my day job as Manager Flight Services at Jeppesen, I was a working CFI. That morning, I was giving dual instruction to a private pilot student with a passenger (the husband of wife’s sister) in the back seat. My student had recently completed her first solo cross-country. That morning, I had asked her what she enjoyed about her trip and also to tell me what questions she had. After explaining the great feeling of going someplace else on her own (without me), she said she had a couple of questions: the first was she needed some help to figure out how to determine the best way to enter a new airport pattern for landing. Then she explained she was having some difficulty when tracking outbound from a VOR. She said everything went well when flying to a VOR but flying from just was confusing.

Not a great airport for a low performance airplane when it’s hot.

At 7:00 in the morning, we took off from Arapahoe County airport (now Centennial – APA). I asked her to fly to the Larkspur airport (now the private field Perry Park), still under construction at the time. Larkspur was on the 180 radial of the old Denver VOR as well as an airport that she had not been to before, perfect for accomplishing both goals—tracking “from” a VOR and entering the pattern to a new airport. The Larkspur airport elevation is about 6,700 feet and, importantly, the density altitude that morning was over 8,000 feet.

We successfully tracked the 180 radial to Larkspur and I helped her to determine the method to find the 45-degree entry leg to the downwind leg. She proceeded to fly the pattern legs followed by the final approach to landing. About 100 feet above the runway, I told her to go around since the runway, still under construction, was closed. She dutifully applied full throttle, pushed the carburetor heat knob to full cold, and raised the flaps from 40 degrees to 20 degrees. She also pitched up to maintain 65 knots and initiate a climb, since there was a significant hill about 200 feet above us on the other end of the runway.

As we flew over the runway surface, I immediately noted we were neither climbing nor gaining any speed. The hill at the departure end of the runway, on the other hand, was coming up fast. I told my student “I got it” and gently banked the airplane to the left, where we saw a busy Interstate 25. Despite full throttle, the airplane was still not gaining any airspeed, so I made the decision to fly low over the highway to pick up speed in ground effect. As we lumbered over to the highway (only a quarter mile from the airport), my brother-in-law pointed out that our flaps were still down. Surprised, I looked outside and saw that, indeed, our “barn doors” were still hanging. Looking back in the cockpit, I could see the flap handle was right where it was supposed to be (up), but the flaps themselves looked fully extended (later, inspection determined them to be at 40 degrees). Getting a little desperate for airspeed, I then jiggled the flap handle a number of times. Contacts finally closed, and I was able to get the flaps up.

By this time, however, we were over the highway, a mere 50 feet above the traffic and not flying much faster. I assessed our options as few and bad: the highway ahead was rising faster than we could climb. Additionally, a large tractor-trailer rig directly in front of us made our effective AGL altitude even lower. To the left was oncoming freeway traffic. The terrain to our right was dense with trees. I decided our only realistic option was to “merge” into the traffic from above and land on the highway.

In a stroke of amazing luck, a rest stop turnoff presented itself as soon as we touched down, giving us a “high-speed taxiway” I gratefully used to get out of the stream of auto traffic. As an interesting aside, the driver of the big rig in front of us saw our rotating red beacon in his rearview mirrors. Thinking we were a “bear in the air,” he also pulled into the turnoff and got out of his truck to see why he was being pulled over by an airborne Highway Patrol!

Sometimes only one option presents itself.

When the Highway Patrol arrived, the trooper invited me to join him in his car and informed me the FAA desired the pleasure of a phone call. “I’m sure they do,” I thought to myself. Since this was back before everyone on the planet had a mobile phone, I was grateful to find a pay phone (remember those?) at the rest stop. Fortunately (and completely by chance), the FAA Ops Inspector answering my call was my former private and commercial pilot instructor from Bozeman, MT, where he had also been a crop duster pilot.

Not only was I a former student, I had also flagged fields for him while he sprayed chemicals from his crop duster (this was before GPS made that chore unnecessary!). On one trip, I drove the chemical truck to a remote location to refill the chemical tanks on his plane. He landed on a deserted stretch of US 10 and taxied to my truck. As we talked on the phone, I said to him, “Hey, remember in Montana you showed me how to land on a highway? Well, I finally got it right!”

The FAA inspector gave me a choice: he would tell the CHP officer I was free to go, so I could either leave immediately or wait for a ferry permit so my insurance would still be valid. I decided to wait (giving me time to think about the details of getting airborne again), and a series of troopers carried the ferry permit to me by “passing the baton” between adjacent patrol areas.

While I waited, with passing drivers gawking at the sight of a Cessna parked in a highway rest area, the trooper drove my student and brother-in-law back to Centennial. My brother-in-law returned with my car and a camera. A couple of hours later the ferry permit finally arrived in another highway patrol unit. Since I knew the problem with the airplane was the now-retracted flaps, I knew it would be safe to take off in the airplane by myself.

I asked the highway patrolman to pull onto the highway and stop all traffic. I then asked the TV reporter to drive 1.5 miles down the road to make sure the highway was clear. That gave me about 7,500 feet of “runway”–an adequate distance, even with the high density altitude.

While waiting for my ferry permit, I took stock of the stretch of highway where I would be taking off. I noted the highway curved to the left almost immediately, so I closely watched the tractor-trailer rigs going around the corner to see how much they leaned to the outside of the curve. It appeared they didn’t lean at all at about 60 mph so I figured that when I took off, I could make the curve at takeoff power.

Well—not so. At full throttle in the curve, my 172 started to skid to the outside. I instinctively turned the ailerons to the left and went around the corner on only the left main gear, going airborne while flying on one wheel. Success! I was especially lucky (in our “pictures or it didn’t happen” world) that my brother-in-law, who had driven down beyond the curve with his camera, captured the one-wheel takeoff for posterity.

One of the perks of working at Jeppesen!

After a normal landing back at Centennial, inspection determined that the Cessna 172 had a defective flap actuator handle. When the flap handle was set to 20 degrees, the flaps would only retract to 33 degrees. Further, when the flaps were selected full up, they would not move at all unless the handle was pressed hard to the left to close the actuator switch.

While I like a tidy cockpit, my Jeppesen desk was typically cluttered. When I arrived at work the next day, my desk had been cleared of everything – except the brand-new Jeppesen “approach plate,” describing the I-25 VOR 2-Lane approach procedure!

Now retired from Jeppesen, instructing is still my passion. If it ever starts to feel like work, I’ll quit. What I learned from this experience was that things can go wrong even if you–or your student–don’t make any mistakes. Also, don’t panic: remain calm so that you can think of all possible options that might be available. Finally, remember it’s always best to be very polite when discussing your choice of landing runway with a Colorado state trooper!

The post A landing and a one-wheel takeoff on Interstate 25 appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2021/10/a-landing-and-a-one-wheel-takeoff-on-interstate-25/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-landing-and-a-one-wheel-takeoff-on-interstate-25