The Sounds of Silence - Part 2

This last weekend, Thing 1 was unusually free, there not being a football game scheduled (she is in the band).  We had promised Thing 2 a trip to Sea World if she scored all A's and B's throughout 6th grade, and since she delivered, we had to as well.  The stars were aligned for a trip to San Antonio.

At 3:30 Friday afternoon I arrived at the airport, and having pre-flighted the Bonanza, taxied over to the fuel pumps for a fill up.  At 4pm, Sally arrived with Thing 1 and Thing 2, and we blasted off through the muggy afternoon, IFR with a clearance via Waco and Austin VORs.  Once south of Love Field, I was cleared up to 8,000, which put us in a layer of clouds, so I requested, and was cleared to continue the climb to 10,000ft.  With a GPS ground speed of 150 kts (17 knot headwind), we landed and shut down the engine just before 6pm. The FBO (Millionaire) had the rental car on the ramp, and helped us load it up, while I made arrangements at the desk.

After spending the whole day at Sea World, we arrived back at the FBO at 6:30pm. While San Antonio had high overcast, a check with Flight Service and looking at the radar, showed a line of strong thunderstorms near Waco, and heading north east towards Dallas.  I didn't fancy single pilot IFR at night under those conditions, so we made a reservation at a local hotel, and spent the night.

Early the next morning, San Antonio was wet.  Over half an inch of rain had fallen at the airport, and the ceiling was 300 feet.  Dallas was clear, and the cloud overcast thinned out around 50 miles north.  With my clearance in hand, I taxied to the active runway and ran my checks.  I switched the tower frequency, and then I noticed that my transmit light was flickering, and the #1 radio (a Garmin 430W) was also showing "Tx", which meant I was transmitting non-stop.  I switched radios, and found that the same thing happened with radio 2 - I had a stuck microphone transmitter switch.

Of course when transmitting, you can't receive.  In a recently well publicized case, two Southwest Airline pilots had a stuck mic, and transmitted their innermost and not very flattering thoughts to the whole world.  I don't think I said anything bad, except to insist that Thing 1 should wear her headset for take off.  I may have blocked the frequency for a few minutes.

I transmitted in the blind that I had a stuck mic, and was returning to the FBO, but I actually just went to the nearest, Landmark.  There they tried to find a mechanic, but being Sunday, no-one was working and no-one answered the on-call phone number.  So I decided to rent a car and drive home that day, so that the girls would not miss school, and come back the next day.  In the meantime, I asked them to put the Bonanza inside so that it could dry out, if the rain and damp was the cause.

The next morning, I got up at 5am and drove the 5 hours to San Antonio airport.  After returning the car and paying the hangar fee, I got into the Bonanza and turning on the radios.  I found I still had the same problem, but that if I put the audio panel intercom switch into "isolate", effectively turning off everything except my own headset and mic switch, the problem went away.  So I departed VFR, and arrived at my home airport 1 hour and 45 minutes later.

Once on the ground, I set the audio panel selector to first "crew" and then "all", and had no problems with a stuck mic.  I suspect that I was correct - the heavy rain and/or 100% humidity caused either the audio panel, or the co-pilot's push-to-talk switch to short out.  Getting into the dry air and running the radio stack and cooling fans dried it out.  So it was in the end fortunate that no mechanic was available early on Sunday, I saved a lot of money.  I did have to rent a car for a day and spend money on about 10 gallons of fuel each way, but now everything and everybody is where they are supposed to be.

Any lessons here?  Not really, I had a stuck mic and I found it on the ground before it became a big problem.  I made the right call in not attempting the night IFR flight on a stormy evening.  I spent $140 on a hotel room, $30 for a car and $60 for gas, plus $50 for a hangar rental.  But the first hotel was free, thanks to frequent traveler points, and it's only money.  Better to be safe, and alive to pay the bills, than to be sorry.

The Same. But Different.

This past week has been a blur.  I started on the American Flyers CFI Academy, a 4 week long boot camp for future Certified Flight Instructors.  The first 2 weeks are spent on instruments and the "Fundamentals of Instructing", or FOI.  The second 2 weeks are spent on Airplane flying and regulations.  By the time the torture test is done, you have both the CFI-Instruments, and CFI-Airplane ratings, and if you want them, the Ground Instructor Airplane and Instrument certificates as well.

You also have to fly the schools Cessna 172's from the right seat, while instructing (also known as talking about everything you are doing), and flying IFR to the FAA Practical Test Standards (PTS).  Phew - that's a lot.  My first flight was in real IMC, with a 25 knot wind, in an airplane I hadn't flown in 15 years, on a real flight plan in the busy DFW airspace.  At the end, I looked like I'd been beaten up by a pack of very wet assailants.

Still, I did it.  I even coped with ATC changing my clearance in the air, the turbulence, and a GPS unit I'd never seen before.  If I can do that, I can do anything.

I hope.

Random Stuff

49C is back on the ramp.I flew up to Sherman (KSWI) to fill up the fuel tanks, which were very low since one was drained to fix a leaking drain point.  I pumped 45 gallons, which at $2/gallon less than at my home base in McKinney, saves enough that it is worth the 26nm each way trip.  I only get fuel from my home FBO if the level is too low to get there safely (and I define that as under 15 gallons on take off, or 90 minutes flying time), or if I don't have time to make the side trip.

On the way back, I flipped on the NAV instruments to see if they were all working - I could receive the McKinney NDB/LOC on the ground in Sherman, and both VOR/ILS receivers grabbed the localizer signal at over 20 miles.  But the DME came on for about 15 seconds, then went blank.  I pulled the circuit breaker and reset it, but nothing.  I suspect the power connection is loose.

I'd like to fly today, but we are having an untypical Texas fall day, 55 degrees and non-stop drizzly rain.  The last time this happened, I took up 49C for some IFR practice, flying to Mesquite (KHQZ) for fuel, then several approaches at KTKI.  I experienced my one and only real world missed approach - on the GPS/WAAS approach to runway 35, I flew through a solid column of rain and at the DH at 300' AGL, could not see the runway.  Of course the moment I added power and started to climb, I flew out of the rain and saw the field underneath.  It was too late, and besides, I wanted to finish with the ILS 17 approach, which I did after receiving vectors from approach.  That was when I discovered the weak ILS receivers, now fixed.

Should I get the DME fixed now?  Really with GPS onboard it's not essential, as long as I keep my GPS NAV database current, which I do.  Any waypoint that can be identified with a VOR and DME can be identified more easily with GPS, as long as I have solid RAIM signal lock.


mmmmmmm............

Going Fast, ................Slowly

Earlier this month I flew my Sundowner from Texas to Pennsylvania and back, approx 2,000 miles. It was Mother's Day, and I was hankering for a flying challenge, so off I went.

Spring in the Central Plains and Ozarks can be rough. We have tremendous thunderstorms and even tornadoes on a regular basis. In the summer, typically Texas broils under a semi-permanent tropical "high" that keeps weather fronts off the the North, in Oklahoma or Kansas, but in May the high has not yet formed, and we get fronts coming and going, and highly variable, sometimes entertaining, sometimes dangerous, weather.

On my flight up, a cold front was sweeping down the plains, from Oklahoma to Detroit. Winds in front of a cold front tend to be strong and from the Southwest. After the front passes, they swing around to the north, then northwest. Ahead of the front, the air is warm, but usually clear. And that is what I had all the way to PA - a 40 to 50 kts tailwind, and apart from a thin layer over my departure airport, no clouds, and visibility about 10 to 15 miles. My Sundowner has NEVER covered the ground so fast - I saw ground speeds as high as 165 kts (190 mph).

I made it to PA a full hour ahead of schedule. The front caught up over the weekend, causing rain and thunderstorms.

I was planning to depart on Tuesday, but a look at the weather map convinced me to start a day earlier. A warm front was coming up the Ohio River valley, pushed by a strong cold front behind it, bringing the usual turbulent and dangerous weather. So I launched at 11:30, and by 3:20 I was on the ground in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

I can fly in warm fronts without much problem. Warm fronts tend to generate hazy, calm, muggy and rainy conditions, but without much vertical development - i.e. storms. I landed in Bowling Green in light rains and lowering ceilings. My plan was to let the thunderstorms ahead of the cold front pass by overnight, and take off in the crisp cool air behind.

Well, the front passed - to the north. Louisville, Cincinnati - they all got storms. But in Oklahoma, Missouri and Kentucky, the front just kind of stopped, spawned tornadoes that killed several people, and shuffled to the East. That meant layered clouds and the potential for thunderstorms all along my route.

It also meant I would be flying against headwinds, almost as strong as those that helped me going the other way.

I left Bowling Green at 9am. I entered the cloud at 2700 ft, and climbed to my planned cruising altitude of 6,000, still in the clouds, with moderate turbulence. I asked for, and received clearance to climb to 8,000. After almost an hour, I started to be able to see the cloud tops above me, and to break out occasionally into small patches of clear sky. I heard another aircraft say that the tops were between 10,000 and 11,000 feet. So I climbed to 10,000, where I was in the clear about 50% of the time. Somewhere over West Tennessee, battling headwinds near 40kts (so my ground speed was about 75 kts), the clouds lowered below my altitude. Passing North of Memphis I could see the FedEx planes on approach in a long string.

With the slow ground speed, I decided to change my planned fuel stop from Hot Springs, to Conway, Arkansas. The field was covered by a thick overcast clound layer from 2,500 to 6,000 feet, so I made an VOR/DME instrument approach, and landed visually once I was out of the clouds.

After refueling, I took off and climbed to 6,000 feet - just above the cloud tops. At 6,000 the head winds were a little less, and I had a ground speed of 85 kts, which slowly climbed above 90 as I passed over Oklahoma and into Texas. Just past Paris, Texas, I saw the ground for the first time, and descended into the Dallas area through patchy, hazy cloud, landing at 4:20pm.

In flying, there is usually a head wind. It's straight mathematics - imagine you are flying 1,000 miles at 100 mph. With no wind, it would take you 10 hours. Now, imagine that you have a 20 mph tailwind going one way, and the same wind going back. Now, your ground speed is 120 mph up, and 80 mph back. So the 10 hrs on the way up now drops to 8.3 hrs, but your return trip now takes 12.5, for a total of 20.83 hours, of which 40% of the time you had a headwind, and 60% of the time a headwind.

The winds are (nearly) always against you.

Totally Blind - but instrumented

Recently we had one of those rare weekend days in Dallas with low hanging cloud cover, but little vertical development (which is pilot talk for "not stormy"). The clouds just hung low over the runway at McKinney, occasionally spitting out a little rain. Perfect!

Since becoming an instrument pilot my view of weather perfection has changed. I used to like those clear blue days after a cold front had come and gone, when the air is crisp and you can see forever. I would get in a 'plane and climb as high as I could while fitting in a cross country (I was trying to build cross-country time in preparation for the instrument rating). The view was tremendous, and once I'd climbed past around 4,000 feet the air would become glassy calm.

Later I got my own aircraft, and the next year, an instrument rating. Now my idea of weather perfection is one where I can fly in actual cloud, shoot some approaches, but avoid too much turbulence, especially inside a cloud. When it rains in Texas, it tends to also storm, especially in the Springtime. Rain here tends to be an event of some violence, not something to mess around with in a lightplane.

So I launched into overcast skies, with 700 feet to the cloud base, on an IFR clearance direct KARLA, a GPS waypoint about 10 miles East of McKinney. Climbing to 2000 on a heading of 90 degrees, per ATC instructions, I swam up into clear air over a sea of white as far as the eye could see in every direction. These clouds where only 500 feet thick, and flat as a pancake.

Cleared to 3000ft, ATC gave me vectors to intercept the 212 radial from the Bonham VOR (BYP), and cleared me for the VOR-DME approach. I identified the radial using my #2 NAV and CDI, plus the DME, and also, just for grins, on my GPS. Fortunately they all agreed I was in the right place and heading in the right direction.

This pleased me. Turning in the clouds had given me what pilots call "the leans", which is vertigo. Pilots cannot trust their bodies senses in clouds, they must only trust the instruments. You turn right, and the body says you are climbing and turning left. When you can see on the panel that you are level and turning right, if you trust your sense of balance which says you climbing and turning left, you will move the controls in exactly the wrong way. That's one reason it takes so long to become instrument rated, and a reason why few private pilots complete it (almost all commercial pilots are instrument rated).

Once on the radial and 12 miles from BYP, I throttled back and descended into the murk at 2200 feet, then 7 minutes later at 22 miles on the DME down to 1400 feet, and clear of the clouds. I could see the airport dead ahead, and approach handed my over the tower. I told them I would end the approach and requested the ILS to runway 17. Cleared direct to the initial approach fix at FLUET, I recontacted DFW approach, and was cleared for the ILS. This time, I stayed at 2500 feet for the outbound leg and procedure turn, which meant I stayed mostly in the clouds, only occasionally popping out of the top at a particularly low area, or between cloud cells.

Once on the inbound leg, I intercepted the ILS glideslope, and setting up for 90 kts and 450 ft/min descent rate, came out of the soup at 1700 ft. The clouds were continuing to rise - now they were 1100 feet above the runway, making the field technically VFR. I canceled the approach and requested the GPS RNAV approach to runway 35 (the other end of the same single 7000 ft long runway at McKinney). ATC cleared me for the approach, and asked me to climb to 2500 feet, but them changed their mind and asked me to make the approach at 2000. I said "OK", because that would put me back inside the clouds, and because I could hear them working a Beechcraft King Air on the same approach. I suspected they want me to stay well below him.

At 2000 ft I kept occasionally catching sight of the ground, but by now I had got completely over my vertigo, and was flying entirely on instruments, which in the case of GPS on a real IFR flight simply meant following instructions until established on the purple line, and then descending along the GPS WAAS glideslope as indicated on the #1 CDI (just like an ILS). The main difference is that an ILS becomes more and more sensitive as you get closer to the transmitter, a GPS WAAS does not, making it very slightly easier to fly.

A GPS receiver uses satellites to fix its position in space, a constellation of 24 satellites controlled by the US military. For precision approaches, GPS uses a ground-based enhancement called "Wide Area Augmentation System", or "WAAS". WAAS approaches require an airport to have no ground facilities at all - so they are rapidly replacing NDB approaches at small airports, and even VOR/DME approaches will be a thing of the past soon.

It only took a few seconds to clear the clouds once on the WAAS glideslope - I could see the runway straight ahead about 5 miles away. I flew through a short, sharp rain shower, and landed. I didn't need the 3 approaches to legal currency, but the experience was useful, and knowing that I could do this for real was invaluable. It was also fun!