Lesson 72 - Short Cross Country (redux)

Today was a repeat, a cross country flight out to Limon, CO. I flew this flight earlier this year with my old CFI before he left for the airlines. However, school policy says I must have flown any potential solo cross country route with my current CFI, so here we were planning another short hop out to Limon. I "just" need my solo cross country to wrap this process up, so whatever I can do to make that happen, I'm going to do it. 

On one hand, having to re-do this flight is bit of a bummer because in some ways it was just burning money to satisfy the legal or other policy requirements of the powers that be. No one likes wasting money, even if the views are great! On the other hand, my this was only my fourth flight with my new CFI, and he hadn't had a chance to fly with me long distances yet. He's still getting used to me, getting a feel for my strengths and weaknesses. Its his name on the endorsement, and I'd want the same of any student if I were teaching. Besides, my last flight to Limon was, well, let's just forget that one, shall we? 

I was a bit unsure of the winds forecast for the day, so I planned a flight to Limon and also to Fort Morgan, where earlier in the week the winds looked a bit more favorable. I figured we'd see what the winds were doing when we took off and fly to one or the other. The winds today favored Limon, so that's where we went. Today's flight was VFR (visual flight rules) which means you're navigating by what you can see out of the window. Yes, I have GPS in the plane, and I had the flight pulled up on my iPad to keep track of where I was, but I was not flying it by "magenta line." My job was to pick easily-identifiable landmarks along the route to get me to where I am supposed to be going. Old-school pilotage. Early on in my training, my original CFI had me draw up a flight plan to Limon using landmarks on the ground. When I looked at the map for identifiable landmarks between here and there, I got the joke. It's all farmland, and from 3,000' above the ground, all the farms look alike. I drew up a plan that followed the roads, since they were easily seen, if not necessarily the most direct route. My old CFI and I never got around to putting that plan into action, so I revived it for this trip. (My previous flight to Limon relied more on electronic navigation to get me out and back.)

With the flight plan loaded into the tablet and sun shining, we set off. My soft-field take-off technique still needs work. I need to get better at staying in ground effect to build up speed before climbing out. (Part of that is that I also still need to get used to climbing with 25 degrees of flaps. All of my climb-outs today were slower than I'd like them to be.) Once airborne, I flew to Parker, then down to Franktown where I picked up highway 86 which runs out to Limon, and followed that all the way out. 

Approaching Limon, my instructor dialed in Limon's airport on one of our GPS units to figure out what our descent rate should be. I haven't had the chance to play much with this aspect of the technology in the cockpit yet, so this was a bit of an electronics education for me. From where we were, it told us we needed a 500 foot-per-minute descent rate to get to pattern altitude over the airfield. I pulled out just a bit of power, set trim, and enjoyed probably one of the smoothest descents from altitude I've flown. (I'm really liking the Archers.) It was almost like having autopilot, which I'll get to momentarily. In any respect, it was almost like I knew where I was going and what I was doing! 

I did mess one thing up. I descended to 6,400' to overfly the airport, since that's the elevation my instructor dialed into the GPS. Normal procedure when overflying an airport is to do so 500' above pattern altitude, which is 1,000' above the field elevation. My brain, then, decided that 6,400' was 500' above traffic pattern altitude, so once over the field, I started descending an additional 500'. Alas, my brain was wrong. Field elevation at Limon is 5,400. Traffic pattern altitude is 6,400'. I'm pretty sure my instructor said that, and I'm pretty sure when I looked up the airport I saw the field elevation, but at that point in time, my brain was having none of it. It made up its mind, and it was wrong. Fortunately, it just meant that as I started descending down to around 6,100', my CFI reminded me that I was quite low enough for what we were doing, and perhaps I should level off a bit. 

The landings were pretty good. I was working on my short-field technique without necessarily making a point to do it, just that we only had 4,600' of runway and we were doing touch-and-goes, so I needed to land as short as possible so to have enough runway to get back up again. There aren't thousand-foot markers on this runway, so I really didn't have a specific aiming point. Having said that, I didn't really think I floated unnecessarily far down the runway, and had I been concentrating on making a specific point, probably would have made it easily enough. 

My climb-out performance still wasn't what I was hoping it would be. It was warm, but not hot, but I seem to have been given a choice--speed or rate-of-climb. If I wanted to climb at 300' per minute or more, my speed was 60 - 70 knots at the most, which is just too close to stall speed for comfort. I'm still not sure where that's stemming from besides me not being used to flying with 25 degrees of flaps. That's something I'm going to work on next time. It's probably just one little thing, but I need to figure out what it is. Outside of that, I only had one approach that got too low and slow for my tastes (and my instructors). I was getting ready to go around right when he said "go around." He said he wanted to give me a go-around anyway to see how I handled it, so there's that. I think on that landing, I put in full flaps just a touch too early, and did not put in enough power in return. 

We left Limon to head back to Centennial. I didn't have a specific flight plan for that beyond "go back the way I came." Nothing was in the iPad, so I just followed the road. I had thought earlier in the week that I could do some instrument flying and foggle work this trip, and was contemplating pulling my foggles out of my bag when my instructor asked if I had ever flown with autopilot. I hadn't, since neither the Grummans nor Cessnas that I had flown actually had working autopilots. He suggested I dial it up to see how it works. That sounded just as reasonable to me because my check ride examiner is going to expect me to know how to use the autopilot if it's in the plane I do my check ride in. 

It's actually pretty simple. You dial in the heading you want to fly and hit the "heading" button. Then you get to the altitude you want to maintain and hit the "altitude" button. The computer takes it from there. Need to change course? Just enter your new heading. Need to climb? You can turn a knob to increase your rate of climb to get you to a new elevation. Easy. "Sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight." Well, not quite. This flavor of autopilot will maintain your heading and altitude. It does not control your power or speed. If you reduce power, which tends to reduce altitude, it compensates by adjusting the pitch, which impacts speed. If you it a downdraft and lose altitude quickly, it doesn't see that as turbulence, but just a need to get you back up to the requested altitude, which it does by increasing pitch which reduces speed. While flying with the autopilot engaged and talking with my instructor about other things, my airspeed was quietly creeping down--almost to stall speed. Fortunately, the pilot can (a) overpower the autopilot, and (b) disengage it entirely in those situations. My instructor showed me where the "disengage" button was, and I flew manually the rest of the flight. Lesson: Autopilot allows you to take your hands off the controls. It does not mean you take your eyes off your instruments.

With that lesson learned, we called Centennial, got clearance to land and returned home. I was a bit lower than I should have been on my approach, which kinda bugged me that I let that happen, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. On my landing at Centennial, I flared too high because I was used to the narrower 60' runway at Limon and thought I was lower than I was. As a result, I floated further down the runway than I wanted to. (Definitely not a short field landing this time.) It wasn't a bad landing, but I wasn't as in control of it as I would like. But if that's the worst that happened, it's a good day in the air.