Recently in Learning to Fly Category

Today I'm officially a private pilot.

The test started out with an oral exam. The DPE (Designated Pilot Examiner) did explain that he wasn't looking for 100% knowledge on what he was to ask, but that he didn't want guesses (otherwise known as BS) either. I did fairly well here; tho a few things did come up that I didn't know. He made notes on those, and discussed them post-test, but .. overall, I passed the oral just fine, no worries. Topics included airspace, regulations, aerodynamics, medical factors, and my intended flight plan.

The flying test was actually fairly short. We took off from Sacramento, requesting flight following (and then cancelling it shortly thereafter; he was testing my radio skills). This was a bit amusing, as the radar guy thought I was going to Pine Mountain Lake direct, instead of my indirect route. As such, he vectored me to avoid traffic that I would have never hit on my own.

Actual skills put to test: take offs and landings (normal; short field; soft field); turns around a point and S turns; steep turns (45 degree bank); flying instrument only, including going to bad attitudes and then recovering; radio work; navigation (including diversions). One of my steep turns was pretty marginal. However, the examiner was in a good mood, and let me try again, and I nailed it.

My big fear, the soft field landing, I managed to squeek a great landing in. Several tries yesterday all sucked; but the one with the examiner worked out. Turns out that I could use more flaps, and land slower, when doing soft field landings, which the DPE suggested.

Anyhow, I now have a license to learn.. and to fly about freely in the sky. Horray!

I'm currently taking time off from work, and spending a couple of weeks boning up on anything and everthing. My checkride is set for the 19th, and I really hope to not have to do that twice.

My current emphasis on practice is softfield landings. I'm required to know how to do them, and to do them well; I'm also required to not actually use a soft field, when using the planes at the flight club I'm at. Go figure! Soft field landings require a soft and slow touchdown of the main wheels, while keeping the front nosewheel off the ground, until you've lost as much speed as possible. This is because the nosewheel structurally is not nearly as strong as the mains.

The first week is done; one week left to continue practice and study!

I've got my check ride scheduled. I'm taking a few weeks off from work in September; 2 of those weeks will be spent with my intructor working on getting me up to snuff, working on the pet peeves of my particular designated pilot examiner. Hopefully a month from now, I should have my license!

When flying, you're not supposed to follow another plane too closely. Not just due to the laws of man, but also the laws of physics. They leave behind wake turbulance, which is a disturbance in the air generated by the wings of the plane pretty much any time the plane is off the ground. The slower, heavier, and cleaner the plane is flying, the more disturbance it is leaving behind.

This weekend we did 360 turns, at a tight 45 degree angle. Those can be fun - you basically feel the effects of a couple G's. As it turns out, if you do a 360 turn, at 45 degrees, and you do it correctly - you run into your own turbulance, and get a nice bump confirmation.

.. and leap with your hands out in front of you.

Today was my "cross country" solo. 260 miles round trip, no instructor. Just me, the plane, and every other plane out there. Even the birds stayed out of the way!

Soft fields present an interesting challenge for an airplane, especially a tricycle gear airplane. You have to adjust your takeoffs and landings such as to keep all the pressure you can off the front nose.. so that it doesn't sink into the muck.

Landings, you come down on two wheels, and intentionally keep the front end of the plane from touching down, and stay off the brakes. The field you're landing on will slow you down plenty.

Takeoffs, you try and keep the pressure off the nose gear - and actually raise the nose gear as early as you can. Looks funny as hell. Trying to fly that way? annoying as hell. Once you get enough speed, you get off the ground, but stay in ground effect - getting off all 3 wheels as soon as you can. You can do this at low speeds, but if you try and actually move away from the earth, you'll loose the the ground effect, and come crashing down. So, you have to build up spee d while floating _over_ the ground until you have enough for a proper departure.

I also practiced "short field" landings today, per the book. According to the book, I can land that plane in 550 feet. Currently, I'm landing it in about 750 feet. We'll see how close I can get to what the book says. In any case, I'll learn my personal minimums, on what I can safely land with.

Tomorrow: cross country, Sacrmamento to Chico to Redding to Sacramento, solo... assuming the weather is kind.

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.

So, one of the things I have to do, as a step of getting my private pilot's license, is a 100 mile night flight. That's a minimum, not a maximum. This is with my instructor, not solo (apparently, there are no solo night requirements for the license; any solo night work I do will be after I get my licenes).

Destination: Chico. Bonus destination: Red Bluff. (It happened to be fairly close..). Pilotage was not going to get us far, as you can not see the terrain at night. You can see the twinkles of cities; and depending on the highway, you might see that.

For the night flight, I had permission to depend on radio aids; that is, tuning to VOR radio stations to determine my position relative to those stations, and using them as my way points. My route followed I5, which is a fairly busy freeway, even up north. This would help me keep track of where I am should my radios fail. (The route direct to chico would have had me travelling a big giant void).

Weather Saturday night was great. Cool on the ground; hot as heck above ground for the first 1500 or so feet. Then cool again at altitude. Clear skies and great visibility. (Cool is relative. It had been 108F that day..).

Lessons learned on this particular trip:

• USE the checklist for landing. Don't run it from memory. In my final landing of the night, this bit me - I have the DAYTIME landing list in my head perfect. ... However, at night, it helps to turn your landing light on. It helps you judge where the ground is, and when to flare. I flared late and we hit a bit hard :(. On the bright side, I'm supposed to practice landing with my landing lights off.. this counts!
• My favorite light is no longer in stock at Frys. Grr. I need a few of them. Super bright white, and a pretty darn bright single led red, single unit. I remembered to tape the one I have on the white side, so I don't accidentally use it. That would kill my night vision.
• My instructor was playing with the white light portion of my LED flashlight. He could see the ground from several hundred feet in the air. It could make a useful backup light should my landing lights fail. Not enough to see usefully, but to help gauge the ground level.
• The chart is freaking impossible to read. In particular, you can't make out the magenta or yellow on the chart under red light. I think next night flight around, I'm going to photocopy the chart so I have a black and white copy with me, and see if that helps with contrast.
• My VOR work (using radios for reference points) needs improvement.
• I need to more carefully look at the terrain around airports before flying there. Parts around Red Bluff were pretty black and unlit, and we had no moon, so I had no depth perception of the surrounding area. I had to modify my pattern approach accordingly to stick to the area that was definately not hilly. Instead of entering on a 45 to the downwind, I entered almost directly on the downwind direction itself.
• Wow, that heat saps the heck out of climb ability. I think I need to add some padding to what my book says about times and distances to climb on a hot day.

All in all the trip was fairly uneventful. Things were peaceful. With no moon out, there wasn't much to look at other than the pattern of lights from I5 and the occasional city. I don't think I'd do this again for pleasure - nothing to look at.

On the flip side, I didn't have any orientation issues that can be associated from night flight. Due to lack of things to look at, night flight can be close to instrument flight. You have to trust your instruments a lot more and your visual reference a lot less.

Finally, first solo flight! It was slated originally for Sunday (all my cross country stuff is currently slated for Sundays); however, the weather was forecast to be too windy for my endorsement. A plane was available to do it Saturday; I went ahead and took advantage of it. Even still, wind was borderline - by the time I had the plane preflighted, and started listening to the weather, the wind was gusting more than allowed. An hour wait later, and I was off.

My first solo "cross country" was fairly short distance wise, and to an airport I've been to before - Modesto. (Nice folks there!). Drawing on my previous trip there, I rerouted things such that all the distinguishable landmarks would be on my left, where I have much better visibility. Checkpoints would include my usual Franklin Field (it just happens to be on both sides of the map; and the map stops a mere 12 miles south of my home airport before needing to be flipped over); Flagg City and Lodi (in particular, interstate 5 and highway 12 area); then outskirts of Stockton and the i-5/205 (to SF) junction; final leg would be aiming directly at the Modesto airport. Everything went to plan, and my arrival time was off by a minute.

Returning was much more direct; Modesto to the right edge of Stockton; a few degrees to the right to go just barely over Lodi (to avoid any skydivers at Lodi Skypark); and direct to Franklin and Sacramento. I must have rushed through the plan on this one as my angles were dead on even with wind correction but my times were way off. I also had difficulty opening my flight plan on the ground over the radio - Rancho Radio doesn't pick up pilots on the ground at that location. The tower staff were kind enough to phone it in for me. My instructor told me later that for Modesto you have to open your flight plan once you're in the air.

A minor bit of amusement was just before I reached Franklin on the way back home .. Norcal Approach advised me to descend immediately from 4,500 to 4,000.. "because the plane behind you is a lot faster." That's the sort of instruction you act on immediately, then read back the instructions they gave you for confirmation. Since I was close to my descent point anyways, I requested permission to descend all the way down to 1000 feet, which would get me out of the way of any other heavy aircraft who were heading to Sacramento International.

Still on the todo list: one long cross country solo (probably to Chico and Redding); and one night long cross country with my instructor. Apparently I don't do night time solo until after I have my license.

Thursday was my first night flight. It was spectacular. All around me, the cities were lit up like they had Christmas lights all over. Visibility was great - from Sacramento, I could see the lights at Lincoln and Auburn while flying at 2000 feet. Airports were very distinguishable with their beacons running, occasionally pulsing a bright white or green.

Airport lighting is kinda interesting. Look for the gap where you think the airport should be, and where the beacon claims there is an airport. Switch to the right communications frequency, then tap the transmit button a number of times. Depending on how many times you tap it, the lights will light up at various intensities and stay lit for 15 minute. All the lights - runway, approach, taxi, etc. Runways that used to belong to the airforce are particularly impressive with their size and quantity of lighting.

My instructor says landing at night is identical to landing at the day. Technically, he's right. Same air speeds, engine speeds, attitudes. That said, when you can't see the ground, there's a bit of a panic that runs through one's head. You have to put a fair bit of faith into the hands of the people who designed that airport, and the charts around that airport.

One item that helps is that some airports have lighting systems that will let you know if you're on the right glide angle coming into the airport. The lights are all red if you're coming in too low; and all white if you're too high. Half red half white means you're on the right path. The number of lights and positioning of such vary with which system is used, but the basics are the same. They are actually very low tech - they just have blinders on them such that you can only see the light if you're on the correct glide angle. For more information, see the VASI entry at Wikipedia.

At the end of training, we received clearance to circle around downtown Sacramento once. Sacramento's skyline is much more findable during the day than at night, as it turns out. At least from 2000 feet, it is not super impressive :-). It was still a neat experience and on the list of things I wanted to do once I got my license. So, we snuck this in a bit early :)