Entries tagged with “risks” from Garbage In, Garbage Out

So, we recently rediscovered the gas fireplace in our house.  Once it warms up the fake log and starts radiating heat, it works nicely to keep downstairs warm (versus central heating, which keeps downstairs cold and upstairs hot).  The fireplace is convenient - just flip the light switch on the wall, and the gas starts flowing and gets ignited.

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

Helps put a bit of perspective on the risks of flying, motorcyle riding, etc..

During preflight, one of the things you do is drain fuel from all the sump points, and make sure it smells flamable and looks blue. (100 low-lead aviation fuel is dyed blue). Why?

Condensation. Water vapor is in the air around us. The amount of water that can be held depends on the temperature. Once the air chills below that point, the water will condense, turn to fog/cloud, or in some other fashion re-appear into a for we know it as.

Unfortunately, fuel tanks, if not kept topped off, can have a fair amount of air in them. The plane I had today, had 13 out of 40 gallons filled, the rest of the space was air.

I did not find water in the wing drain points (where fuel is stored), but I did get water at the engine fuel drain. Not a huge amount, but some. It looked like a bubble that sinked to the bottom of the fuel sample. I drained and sampled repeatedly until all the water was out, and then I drained a bit more, to be certain.

The plane did run rough for the first moments, but cleared up quickly. More importantly, I didn't feed the water into the system on takeoff.
Otherwise, I might have emulated
this accident in Rancho Murietta. There was a writeup in one of the flight magazines recently, by the instructor who was involved in that accident.

So, for today, I got to see a real life example of what you preflight so dillegently, and, I had ten touch-n-gos that didn't suck. All in all, an interesting but good day.

This one took a few days to get posted, because it took a few days to digest my feelings on it.

Last Sunday was my first solo. After a few good landings, my instructor got out of the plane, and had me run a few take offs and landings on my own. The first two were good. The third, was not.

On the third pass, I hit the flaps too soon, lost too much altitude. So, I ramped up the power, and got back up to the proper angle on final. My air speed went up as well, so I started compensating. Power out, full flaps. My approach was a bit high, but still managable.

At flare out, something went not quite right, which I still don't quite know what happened. Perhaps I flared too soon. In any case, I landed fairly hard, bounced back upwards much more than I liked, and decided it was not worth saving. Cram the power! Cram the carb heat! Hmm. Flaps. I'm at full flaps, which means, I'm not going to get off the ground like this. The right thing, would have been to level out, then reduce to half flaps, and wait until I was far off the ground. The wrong thing, is fit the flaps fully, while close to the ground. This had me still descending, as I still hadn't had enough forward speed. I tipped the nose down for a moment, just to get speed back, and leveled out again - then climbed out normal, and did a go around.

The fourth approach, was spot on; but that third approach definately left a shadow for the day.

I know not to slam the flaps all the way on a go around, but .. I still did. I mixed things up a bit with a touch-and-go (which, you fully retract the flaps, once you're on the ground), which we had done prior; and, I overreacted, knowing that full power plus full flaps wasn't going to get me off the ground.

The cool thing, I didn't panic during the event. The uncool thing, was that the rest of the day (and all freaking night), I kept replaying things in my head, trying to figure out what why I went wrong. It took a few days to fully digest; but now that I recognize what happened, I'm feeling much better about it.

So, a bit ago, I posted about safety with regards to flying. What happened today, I believe only encourages me to fly more, to get away from the dangers of the ground.

I was taking the motorcycle to the shop. Naturally, the shop is on the other side of town - a good 20 minute drive on a good day. During commute hours, twice that. I'm following my wife, so that I stay on her good side by not leaving her in the dust. As we were changing freeways, traffic slowed down.

All of a sudden behind me I can hear screeching. I was still moving - I let off the break, and came up right to the left of the wife's car, in the emergency lane. By the time I got stopped, and looked in the mirror, I could see a car right where I was - with a huge cloud of burned tire. Had I not moved off to the side and forward, I wouldn't be writing this now.

There seem to be two common reactions when I tell people I'm learning to fly... "Are you crazy?" and "Is that safe?". I can assure you, that as to the former, there is probably little I can do to change people's opinion. But, on the topic of safety...

Flying is dangerous. So is my motorcycle. So is an average car. What you need to do, is learn to manage those risks. Many (but definately not all) of you have mastered this in a car, for example. All things are relative, and the only way you'll escape danger, is to hole yourself up and treat yourself like a mushroom.