Lesson 61 - One of THOSE Days

Today's task, a flight out to Limon, CO using GPS and VOR navigation in addition to visual landmarks. This was going to be an easy day. My last flight was my "long cross country," which I had flown with my second instructor, so I was pretty confident in that part of things. Today was going to work more on electronic navigation, using GPS and VOR navigational aids. The weather was cold, and we had just had a fresh snowfall, but other than that, a regular walk in the park.

Yeah, right. I wouldn't have written that if it were true.

This was my first flight with my original CFI after a long time flying with my second CFI. This was mostly just due to scheduling, as I tried to alternate between the two so to balance both styles. I found I'd learn things with one, but be able to better practice them with the other. Weird dynamic, but it got me through my landing difficulties and onto my solo flight, so--hey--whatever works.

Anyway, the first hint today was going to be strange was when I got to the airport and there was a note attached to the book for the plane. "Engine break-in period." The plane had just received a new engine. This meant that we were to fly the plane with the throttle at 100% for every stage of the flight except landings. That also meant no touch-and-goes, which wasn't really in our plans anyway. Second, we had to de-ice the plane, which is somewhat a pain. Plastic bags of warm water to melt and loosen the ice, then wipe it off with a towel. Fortunately being in Colorado, the sun does a pretty good job of melting frost and ice by mid-morning, but that only works where the sun hits. I pulled the plane out and turned it around so the sun could shine on the shady side of things, but it still took a bit to get things clean. And for whatever reason, I simply wasn't clicking on all cylinders today. Nothing major, just forgetting stupid things like my run-up checklist and just being a bit behind in thought. 

We took off and headed east. When you're climbing in a small plane like a Grumman, you have the throttle full as you need all the power you can get. Once you're at altitude, you back the throttle off a bit, set your pitch and fly straight and level. This plane today did not want to fly level for love or money. It just wanted to climb. Maybe the cold air had something to do with it, but it seemed every time I looked at the altimeter, I had climbed 100'. Trim? Didn't matter. No amount of nose-down trim kept this bird from climbing. 

Once en route, the plan was to pick up flight following from Denver control on our way out to Limon. Flight following is just an extra set of eyes on you as you fly to your destination. They'll alert you to traffic nearby and things like that. They don't necessarily tell you where to fly, though they will if you're in a congested area to keep you out of the way of other traffic. You call them up on the radio, they give you a unique code to punch into your transponder so they can identify you specifically on their screens, and you go about your flight. They were rather busy today, so they first took forever to get back to us when we called them. When they did, they gave us a code to enter. Simple. Nope. The transponder in the Grumman is a touch screen. I don't know whose brilliant idea it was that touch screens in a bumpy airplane cockpit were a good idea, but I'm pretty sure they were also responsible for screen doors on submarines. But, noooo.... that wasn't enough. In addition to having trouble hitting the right buttons on the touch screen, said touch screen decided it was going to malfunction. When you did finally land your finger on the "5" button, "3" showed up on the screen. It was a mess. All the while ATC is getting increasingly frustrated with us because we're not yet showing the requested code. After about two minutes of trying, we gave up and cancelled our request for flight following. So much for that.

Back to the task at hand, flying to Limon via GPS. It's simple, right? You have GPS. You enter your destination. You press "go to." A magenta line shows up on the screen. You follow the magenta line. Apparently not. You follow the magenta needle that shows up on your heading indicator. I did not know that, and my instructor was a bit annoyed at that. "What has your other instructor been teaching you?" he asked rather incredulously. Apparently it's not enough to fly the same heading as the magenta line though you're maybe a mile or two one side or the other of it. "Fly the needle" means you keep the plane directly on that magenta line. Yes, that's definitely how you want to do things when flying on instruments, and maybe this was a difference in expectations where my CFI was looking for instrument precision on this flight and I was using them as general references in conjunction with VFR rules. 

Be that as it may, we made it out to Limon. This was my first time flying to an un-towered airport. That means there's no air traffic controller telling you where to go. You have to make your own decisions on which runway to use, identify other traffic that's also flying around the airport, and most importantly, don't hit anyone in the process. I have the opposite problem from a lot of students. Many who fly out of un-towered airports cannot grasp radio calls to air traffic control. I'm the opposite. Communications at un-towered airports to me seem a bit wild west. There's structure, but there's no readback. It's all on you. And while it's not quite a foreign language, it's certainly a very distinct dialect. There were a few planes in the pattern at Limon today, so it was definitely an experience.

Landing at Limon was okay. We opted for a full stop/taxi back landing due to the wet runway conditions thanks to melting snow. No big deal. The runway was plowed. The taxiway, on the other hand. I got the nosewheel stuck in a pile of slushy snow that took some doing to get out of. Just one more thing to knock me off my game. 

We decided we were both frustrated enough for one day, pointed the nose west, and headed home. Not my best outing. Lots of little things. Some out of my control, some that I simply didn't execute. But in the list of unproductive lessons I've had, this one sits high on the list. 

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.