Lesson Eighteen, back on schedule

I got to Riverside Airport Saturday afternoon just before my scheduled 1pm lesson.  The Directional Gyro had been replaced in the 152 a day or two earlier, so we would be flying it.

I completed the pre-flight checks and we looked at the lesson plan for the day, we would be flying to the west practice area to work on slow flight, stalls, turns and emergency procedures, working to get the maneuvers closer to check-ride tolerances.

The airport was very busy, as there was a Beechcraft fly-in, I got the weather report from ATIS and received clearance to taxi to runway 1 left.  As soon as we pulled out into the taxiway, we were stuck behind a couple of pilots in Beechcraft who had pulled up to the airport's controlled area marker before calling for any clearance, which is legal but a bit thoughtless.  They eventually got finished with whatever they were doing, but we had to cancel our taxi while we waited for them.  There were so many Beechcraft calling ground control that at one point the controller called out "Beechcraft one-zero.. uh, sorry, Piper one-zero-three..."

We got a new taxi clearance, completed the run-up checklist and were assigned number four in line to take off.  We got to witness what was technically a runway incursion, as someone had rolled to a stop with the nose gear just past the runway edge markings before getting clearance from the tower, but nothing was reported.

Finally we were number one to takeoff, and Bob called for a soft field take-off, so I dropped in ten degrees of flaps, and held the controls back as I pushed the throttle to full, to keep the weight off the nose wheel.  After rotating at 50 knots, I immediately leveled off while still in the ground effect area, increased speed to 67 knots, then raised the flaps and climbed out as normal.

We were quickly given instructions to make our turn to the west so as to get us out of the way of faster planes taking off behind us.

On Saturday I had spent some time looking out the windows at the trees that were turning yellow and red for autumn, this time out there was a lot more brown visible as the leaves were starting to fall.

We climbed to 2500 feet and headed to the practice area, where I performed some stalls and slow flight, then Bob pulled the throttle to idle and we went through the emergency procedures for a failed engine and forced landing.  After deciding that we could land in the field I had picked out, we did a go-around, engine to full power and climbed back to altitude.

After some steep turns we got the fresh weather report and headed back to Riverside.  The airport was still pretty busy, so we were given a hurry-up request and cleared straight in to land.

Next lesson is Wednesday, which will be night time flying again, so probably more maneuvers and pattern work to knock the remaining rust off of my flying. 
Soon I will have to start deciding where to fly for cross country navigation lessons!

Back in the Saddle

Soon after getting the official go-ahead from the TSA, I scheduled my normal Wednesday night 6pm to 8pm lesson in the flight school's Cessna 152.  About a day later I got the news that the Directional Gyro had been steadily getting worse since the last time I flew, and it was decided that it was time for a replacement.  The gyro is still under warranty, but we have no spare while it's being rebuilt.  As a result, the 152 is down for maintenance until some time next week. 

Fortunately Michael took pity on me, and offered me a discount rate on the larger Cessna 172.  I immediately agreed.  Bob and I had talked about getting me checked out on the 172 so we could use it for the cross country lessons, as it's faster, and has better range than the 152.  Wednesday afternoon Bob called and said he had a spot open for a 4pm to 6pm lesson if I could make it, I got permission from work, and at 3:30 headed for the airfield.

I have to admit I was nervous as I really wasn't sure how much I had forgotten in the two months of bureaucratic shenanigans since my last flight. 

Michael met me at the flight school, and had a new checklist for the 172 that he wanted me to try out, so we both went out to the plane, tail number 370JA, and started through the checks.  There were a couple of corrections we found to simplify the flow a little, such as "Fuel Shut-Off In" instead of "Fuel Shut-Off Off".

As we continued around the plane, I really got a feel for how much larger than the 152 a 172 really is.

Cessna 152

Bob and I got in the plane, and we got the weather report.  Winds were light out of the North, and the temperature was about 70f on the ground.  The airport was very busy due to the nice weather, lots of pilots enjoying the last of the warmth before winter really sets in.  I got clearance to taxi from ground control, and after the run-up checklist was complete, I was number 2 to take off on runway 1 left.

Cessna 172

Bob and I had gone over all the appropriate speeds, most of which were just 5 knots faster than in the 152, rotate at 55 knots, climb at 74 knots.

We were cleared to take off, and given instructions to maintain a heading of 300 degrees, north west.

The largest flying difference between the planes is that the 172 model we were in is really sensitive to Pitch inputs, so I had some difficulty maintaining my proper altitude until I got used to it.  The other difference is the power, we were buzzing around at 120 knots, and hit 140 at one point, the 152 has to work hard to reach 100 knots straight and level.

The plan for the day was just to see how much I had retained, so we did slow flight, stalls, turns, and steep turns, then headed back to Riverside for a couple of Touch-and-Go landings before calling it a day. 

By the time we got back to Riverside it was getting dark, but the airport was still pretty busy, we completed two touch-and-go's on runway 1 right, then asked for a full stop landing on runway 1 left, so we would be closer to the flight school's parking area.

We got the plane tied down and went back inside to discuss the lesson, Bob told me I had done really well, and we could start the syllabus lesson plan on our next lesson. The whole flight had been a great confidence booster, but I can really understand the importance of staying current in your airplane, one of the requirements to carry passengers is that you have had at least 3 take off and landings within the previous 90 days.

I have another lesson scheduled in 370JA on Saturday, and 69212 should be flight-worthy again by next Wednesday.  I really enjoyed flying the 172, but I am a lot more comfortable in the 152 that I have been flying since the beginning.

More to Come!
-Gareth

Reach for the Sky!

I got an email from the TSA this morning, they have acknowledged receipt of  my fingerprints, and I am allowed to fly again!  The email from the TSA arrived in my email in-box at 6:34 AM, and at just after 7am, I got another from Bob, he had received the good news as well.  I have already scheduled a lesson for tonight from 7:00 to 9:00pm.  It's been getting dark earlier lately, so it will probably be night hours for me!

The trip to Will Rogers airport in Oklahoma City to get fingerprinted took about 2 hours by car, we had joked during ground school about just making it an unofficial cross country flight, but decided to err on the side of caution.  My wife Melodie and I both took the friday afternoon off of work to make the trip, and we arrived shortly before my appointed time of 3:00pm.

The fingerprinting location was at a jet charter company, where we met the guy that would be taking my fingerprints.  The fingerprinting machine used a pink ink and thick paper fingerprinting cards.  After all the pink prints were taken, the card was heated in the machine to cure the ink, which turned black when it was done cooking.  While we chatted, I learned that I was actually his first Alien Flight Student Program customer, and that he had purchased the fingerprinting equipment to help his charter company air crews pass their security checks.

Twenty minutes after we arrived, and with two separate sets of fingerprints completed, we were done, and so went to visit my sister, Rachel, who lives in Oklahoma City.  While we were at her house, I got a phone call letting me know that the fingerprints had been successfully uploaded.

All I had to do then, was wait for today's email.

Stay Tuned! More to come, hopefully more often that over the last couple of months!

Still Alive

I finally heard back from the TSA's Alien Flight Student Program last week, they have finished my background checks and approved my training request!  The next step is to submit my fingerprints for their records, so I checked online for the closest approved fingerprinting office, which is two hours away.  I called them and set an appointment for this Friday the 22nd, I was told that they use an ink-pad fingerprinting system, but they then scan them and digitally upload the images to the Transportation Security Clearinghouse, which forwards them on to the TSA.  After that, I have to wait another (up to) seven business days for the TSA to acknowledge receipt of the fingerprints.

I finished Ground School on Monday of last week, and ended up getting a 93% on the final exam, so I am pretty pleased with that.  When I am ready to go and take the FAA Written Test I can go back to the Flight School and take another refresher quiz, then they will get me registered so I can take the test at a testing center on the other side of the airport.

I am really impatient to get up in the air again, I had a rather disturbing dream last night that I was trying to fly, and the plane just wouldn't stay in the air no matter what I did, so I ended up bouncing along the ground in short hops until we got back to the airport.  The plane itself looked fine, so I guess my subconscious just doesn't have a very good grasp of the physics involved...

I have been playing with Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I hope will keep me from regressing too much until I can fly again.

More to come! (Hopefully soon!)

-Gareth

Hooray for the TSA

I haven't posted on here in a little while, because I haven't been flying in a little while.  I am taking the ground school portion of my training at the minute, which while very important, isn't actually very interesting.  Well, It's interesting to me, because I want to learn this stuff so I can pass my written test and actually become a pilot some day.  We have been learning about regulations and the theories behind why an airplane actually flies, Newtons laws of motion, Bernoulli's principle and things of that sort.  The last lesson was about Weather and how it is formed and how it relates to how we fly.  Which basically boils down to stay away from the clouds.

In other news though, apparently the Transport Safety Authority has an Alien Flight Student Program, and neither I or anybody at the Flight School had heard of it, so Michael was very surprised when he got a call from the TSA after submitting my paperwork saying I had soloed.  Fortunately they waived the $2500 fine, as this was the first time it had come up, and I had given them copies of all the paperwork the TSA would have requested anyway.

Bob had to sign up with this AFSP program as a training provider, which he did this week, and I had to submit a "Training Request" through their website.  Currently I am waiting for an email with further instructions of how to pay the $130 processing fee, and where I need to go to get my fingerprints taken.  The downside is that I am effectively grounded until this is all sorted out.

Fortunately with Ground School from 6 to 9 three nights a week, I was going to be cutting down my actual flight time anyway, so this all happened at the best time possible really.

Stay Tuned for more (probably sporadic) information!
-Gareth

Lesson Seventeen, Short Field and Soft Field Landings, and Clouds

Saturday morning was nice and cool, I arrived at Riverside airport just before my scheduled lesson time of 8am.  The Cessna 152 was a little low on fuel, and someone had tightened the oil dipstick until we needed a wrench to get it out, but everything else checked out, so after getting about five gallons from the fuel truck, Bob and I went inside to discuss the days lesson plan.

I had a choice, the syllabus we are using called for more stall and ground reference maneuver practice, followed by short field and soft field takeoff and landings.  Bob told me that we would probably only have time to do one or the other this time, and finish up later, so I chose to do the takeoff and landing work.

We got in the plane to fly to Tulsa International, they have a longer runway so we can do full-stop landings without having to taxi off and back to the end of the runway.  

Bob explained the theory behind the short and soft field operations, and said we would be doing a short field takeoff first.  A short field takeoff assumes that you have to get off the ground quickly, and get above an object past the end of the runway.  Once we got the clearance to taxi onto the runway, we headed right for the edge of the tarmac, so as to have the most possible runway ahead of us, got the plane lined up on the runway center line and dropped down one notch of flaps.

Holding the plane in place with the wheel brakes, I pushed in the throttle and waited for the revs to climb to maximum, while checking the oil pressure at the same time.  Once the engine had stabilized at about 2300 rpm, I released the wheel brakes, and started the takeoff roll.  As soon as we hit 50 knots, our rotate speed, I pulled back on the controls, but brought the nose up to maintain 54 knots, instead of the usual 67.  54 knots is this planes "Vx" or best angle of climb speed, whereas 67 knots is "Vy" our best rate of climb speed.  The "V" section of my Pilots Handbook of Aviation Knowledge glossary is very crowded with all these V-whatever speed definitions.

Once we had cleared our imaginary fifty foot obstacle, I lowered the nose for 67 knots, raised the flaps, and we climbed up to 2000 feet, headed north east.

We were given clearance to land straight in on runway 36L at Tulsa International, and Bob told me we would do a short field landing.  It's the same as a normal landing, but assumes a short runway, so you have to get stopped fast once you are down.  I got lined up on the runway and brought the plane down for a passable landing.  As soon as the wheels had fully settled onto the tarmac, we raised the flaps completely, stood on the brakes and pulled back hard on the controls.  This brought the plane to a not-quite screeching halt, as locking up the brakes on a wheel is to be avoided.  Pulling the control yoke back raises the elevator, which takes a bit of pressure off of the nose gear, but also acts as an air brake at the lower speed after landing.

We got everything reset, dropped down 10 degrees of flaps, and did a Soft Field takeoff.  Soft field takeoffs are just what they sound like, if you are operating off a grass or dirt runway, you have to do things a little differently to avoid digging the nose gear into the turf.

I gave the engine full power, and immediately pulled back on the controls, the idea is to keep as much weight off of the nose gear as possible.  We took off at 50 knots, then leveled off ten or twenty feet above the ground, still in the Ground Effect area of increased lift.  Once we reached 67 knots, we started a normal climb, raised the flaps, and turned for a left traffic pattern.

Next up was a Soft Field landing.  Again, it's a normal landing approach, but once the main gear tires touch down, as gently as possible, you keep the pressure back on the controls to keep weight off of the nose gear for as long as possible, and just let the plane roll to a stop without using the brakes.

The next few laps around the pattern were alternating soft and short field operations. 

However, the fun for the day was just starting!  The temperature and dew point on the ground were within a degree of each other, so as the air rose and cooled, small wispy clouds were starting to form at about 1500 feet.  Our pattern altitude is 1700 feet.

As the 152 is not certified for "Instrument Flight Rules" or IFR flight, and I am certainly not rated for IFR, we are not allowed to fly through any "visible moisture", but Bob explained that flying around the clouds is fine, as long as we give them some leeway.  There was a light breeze from the west, which was blowing more clouds over Tulsa from Keystone lake.  This meant that on each lap of the pattern, we had to move in closer and closer to the airport to stay out of the clouds, until on the downwind leg, we had to fly around one, at which point we decided to call it a day and head back to Riverside.

We climbed up through a gap between a few clouds, until we were above them at 2500 feet.  This was my first time seeing clouds from above in a small plane, and they are a beautiful sight.  As a VFR (Visual Flight Rules) student pilot, I am allowed to fly above clouds, as long as there are gaps between so I can still see the ground.

We flew back to Riverside at 2400RPM, as we were just ahead of another student and instructor in a faster Cessna 172, and wanted to beat them home for bragging rights, although it later turned out that they had had to reduce power to keep from running us over.

With the wind behind us on the base leg of the pattern, we were still fairly high on the turn to the final approach.  Bob said we could probably land somewhere in the middle of the runway, and suggested a forward slip.  I pushed in full right rudder, counteracted with left ailerons, and held the slip almost all the way to the ground.  We touched down just past the runway number markings.

I will be starting on Ground School this week, it's 6-9PM Monday, Wednesday and Friday until October 8th, so I will probably only being flying on Saturdays.

Talk to you soon!

Gareth

Lesson Sixteen, More Maneuvers

Bob called me Wednesday afternoon to let me know that his 6PM lesson had been cancelled, and would I like to fly then instead of at 8PM?  Sure!

Melodie and I ate a quick dinner, and I hit the road, arriving at the airport just as Bob finished up with his 4-6 lesson.  I pre-flighted the plane, which had just had its Annual Inspection, and we decided to head to the west practice area.

After getting taxi clearance, we headed to the end of 19 Left, performed the run-up checklist, then took off to the south, turning west once we climbed 500 feet above the ground.  Bob told me to climb straight out west to 3,500 feet, and handed me the IFR Practice glasses, which are just black plastic glasses that block your view out of the windows, but still allow you to see the instrument panel.  I continued the climb, when we got up to 3,500 Bob told me to make a right turn to the north, then left back to west, so I did.

With the IFR Training complete for the day, we did some slow flight practice, making right and left turns with the plane at 40 knots, just above a stall, then lowered the flaps, and did it again at 35 knots.  We got back to normal flying setup, then did some practice stalls.

When we finished the stall practice, we headed back to Riverside airport for a little pattern work before calling it a day.  The wind was straight out of the east at around 10 knots, so it made for good crosswind practice.

After getting the plane tied down we went back inside to talk about Cross Country trips, I need to start thinking about where I want to go, but Bob suggested Stillwater, as we can take the airport's courtesy car to Eskimo Joes, a popular local restaurant, or some other airports that had Italian or Mexican restaurants close by.  The other option is to head up north to Independence Kansas, where we might be able to get a look at the Cessna Manufacturing plant, which would be really neat.

We did decide that we would take the larger Cessna 172 on the cross country trips, as it has better range, better top speed, and Melodie can come along for the trip in the back seat!

Bob also let me know, that as I am taking to flying so well, I might be finished with my training as soon as Thanksgiving!

That would be really cool, Can I have an airplane for Christmas? :D

-Gareth