Into the wild grey yonder...
Aug. 27th, 2010 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarThe job interview at the airport only lasted half an hour ('til 10h30 or so), so it was back to drawing lines and angles on maps, filling in charts, calculating wind drift corrections, and pouring over aircraft performance charts and "winds aloft" supercomputer model predictions to determine estimated ground speeds and fuel consumption and estimated times to reach my chosen waypoints for my noon flight. Since I was doing a "cross country" trip (which is any flight more than about 25 nautical miles), I was booked into GQQV, an Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) rated aircraft with an integrated Garmin 430 GPS, dual VORs, DME, dual radios, and ADF... everything but an autopilot. When my friend arrived to come with me (GG for those who know her), it was about 10 minutes before the flight had been booked to start at noon, so I got ready to file my flight plan and... found out as I was asking for the keys that the other IFR certified aircraft that the club has was in for maintenance and because I was doing a Visual Flight Rules (VFR) flight, GQQV had been given to a pilot who was doing an actual IFR flight. Fair enough, right? I didn't need all that fancy stuff to get to where I was going. We were going to go in GMME, which I'd never flown. So... it had at least a VOR, right? Nope. No VORs. Oh. Well at least it had a ADF said the instructor who was standing nearby in an effort to mitigate my disappointment... and that was fine because I had planned some navigation by NDB... but another instructor called over their shoulder on their way to the can "Oh, the ADF on GMME went on the fritz, so, no, it doesn't have ADF". Oh, so no radio navigation at all. So what did it have? Well, it had a single VHF radio and a Mode C transponder (okay, so it was at least latter quarter of the 20th century ready) and what is affectionately known as "a six pack of steam gauges": vacuum driven gyros for the heading indicator and artificial horizon, an electrical gyro for the turn indicator, and air pressure driven indicators for altitude, airspeed, and the vertical speed indicator. Well, I said, could I have one of the portable GPS units then? The instructor, still trying be helpful said that since I was bumped from GQQV that they'd even lend it to me for free... until the dispatcher rolled her eyes and said that the lighter socket on GMME doesn't work and the battery was dead on the GPS. Lose x 3. Sigh.
So it was going to be steam gauges, maps, my trusty E6B rotary slide rule, and a wristwatch that were going to get us there. I went over my planning again (it was now 10 minutes after I had the plane booked) and informed my passenger of the change in plans, joking that we were going in a plane with nothing but a propeller and wings held together with bailing wire and duct tape in the finest traditions of historical flight. I called in my flight plan and headed out to GMME. Oh gods... I thought I was joking! If you look close at the picture, you can actually see the tape on the lower fairing on the wing strut (the diagonal thing between the middle of the wing and aircraft body). The interior looked like it hadn't been touched up since it rolled out of the factory in1603 1974. Needless to say I did a thorough pre-flight inspection on poor ol' GMME. The ailerons were a little stiff, but other than that, the airframe and controls all seemed fit (the tape was covering a broken plastic piece to reduce drag as it moved through the air... nothing structural was being held with tape), so I just had to check the oil (it was okay) and the fuel and... dammitall, it was down to half in the tanks! The flying school keeps a bunch of their aircraft at half tanks because then they can operate them in "utility" mode where they can go out and do stuff like stalls and spins as part of training. So when I got bumped, it was in a training configuration, not a cross country configuration. So... wheel it over to the pumps (fyi, that is done my hooking a bar to the front gear and pulling it across the apron manually). Then fill, then push back from the pumps, then 45 minutes after I was supposed to be in the air... (note: I only have to pay when the engine is running... not for the whole time the plane is booked) I finally got it started (it ran like a charm), tested the radios and instruments, did my run-up checks, waited for landing aircraft (one runway, and the wind was such we needed to "backtrack" on the runway before taking off... so that's drive onto it from a taxiway nearly a thousand feet from the end, then drive up that thousand feet and turn around before taking off). When we were finally airborne, it was almost an hour later than I had hoped to be up. So, climbed out, did the 20° turn over the Ottawa river (less noisy for those below), did the crosswind leg (90° left turn) as we continued to climb, joined the downwind leg (another left turn) at circuit altitude (1000 feet above ground level, which is 1200 feet above sea level there) and headed west towards the Gatineau River before following it north at 1500 feet (to stay well below Ottawa International's Class D airspace that starts at 2500 feet at that point and goes up). As soon as I was out of the Rockcliffe airspace, I called the Québec Flight Service Station and revised my "time off the ground" for my flight plan so when I arrived late in Mont Laurier, Québec they wouldn't be sending out search and rescue for me (not appreciated, to say the least, if you haven't actually crashed somewhere and need the help).
But even with all the tribulation, this was my first solo flight in over a year (i.e. without an instructor... I had to get a "check out" a few weeks back with an instructor before I was allowed to rent an airplane and fly by myself... which is just basic sense, right?). I was very excited and happy as I could possibly be! Quite honestly, if I don't fly often enough, I get mopey and lose interest in a lot of other stuff as well. If I can fly, it motivates me to do all kinds of other stuff that's not flying related (and I've already started in on that today... I've done a whole bunch of stuff that had needed doing for a very long time). Now that I'm an impoverished (in a very real sense) student, every minute of time in the air is going to be precious to me as it's going to be very hard won. If I can get about 20 more hours of cross country flying (and probably at least 6 to 10 more hours of dual instruction with blinders on, flying only by instruments again), I will be able to write my IFR exam and do my practical IFR test. Then, it'll only be about another 10 or 15 hours of flying before I can apply for my commercial license and perhaps get a job as a flight instructor and get paid to fly rather than burning through money like a crackhead on a bender in Las Vegas to get those hours (it runs about $135/hr ... that's a lot of Kraft Dinner!).
The big issues for the flight were going to be twofold: I had counted on instrument assistance to fly a precise track over land that wasn't going to have a lot of features I could use for about 20 nautical miles (until I started flying over lakes... those are quite distinctive and somewhat easier to match between what I see and what's on the map), and the weather was predicted to be okay, but a little less optimal than what had been predicted when I set out in the morning. In specific, the ceiling (the base of the clouds) was supposed to be around 6000 feet or more, but the observations when I took off were more like broken at 4000 and scattered at 3000, and they were reporting clouds as low as 1500 feet in Montreal (that would be ungood since I was flying through hills with peaks as high as 2700 feet). When heading north on a VFR flight, you need to fly at odd thousand plus 500 feet and I climbed up to 3500 feet as I turned north north east from the river (and knew that Ottawa Class D airspace was at 6000 feet and above) and was immediately running just a few hundred feet below the clouds, and could tell there were scattered clouds even lower (that I had to dodge, since I am not legally allowed to actually fly into a cloud and even have to keep certain distances above, below, and to the sides of them as I go... when I have my IFR rating I'll be allowed to fly into clouds). It was still gorgeous to be up in the air and the view was perfectly clear (no haze at all). It was beautiful to watch the fluffy clouds go by off our wings and the farms and forests stretch out in all directions (then all forest... with the occasional town or farm or cottage country on the many, many lakes).
It was smooth flying and cool and wonderful and invigorating as we went. I flew the heading I calculated and when I reached the first discernible waypoint (the tip of a large lake), I was only off about half a mile and easily corrected my course, which I was able to stay on for the rest of the flight, and I found the destination airport with no problem. I called for an airport advisory, but... there was no answer. I called a few times, but nothing... so I overflew the field looking for the wind direction and couldn't see a wind sock. Hmmm... so I flew over it again and still couldn't see it. I looked at the nearby lake and the surface was perfectly still, so I decided it wouldn't really matter if I landed the wrong way because the tailwind wouldn't be too bad even if I picked wrong (a 50/50 chance). I announced my intentions headed over the airport again to join the downwind leg of the circuit... only to finally spot the wind sock and ... yup, given a 50/50 chance, there's a 100% certainty of picking the wrong direction ;). So, I announced my change of plans, tooted out the other way, and then headed in for landing. Not one of my better ones (I was high and fast coming in... need to work on that) and bounced once (not hard, but embarrassingly) before settling down and managing to stop in time for the first taxiway. We pulled up to the airport and nobody came out to tell us where to park, so I picked an empty spot between two other aircraft, and pulled a 180° to position the plane so I could easily push it back out of the way. Did my pre-shutdown check and stopped the engine (which is done by starving it of fuel, fyi, and then turning off the electrical system). We pushed it back and headed into the airport building. There was only a little old French lady in a rocking chair knitting. I asked her (in French) where the phone was and she pointed, so I called up and closed my flight plan (I was almost perfectly on time... or at least my revised time) and asked her if anyone was on the radios, to which she replied "non". I verified the radio frequency (which she knew), so there was just no staff there. Works for me if it works for them (it's an "uncontrolled" airport, so it is perfectly fine). We walked up the hill and right into the little Québeçois greasy spoon that's just outside the airport fence along the road there. When in Rome, right? So poutine and a soda it was! :) Good to stretch my legs (it's actually really hard on the legs to fly because they're used to control the rudder), and do my flight planning for the return trip. We were going to have a leisurely lunch and then dessert (tarte au sucre! ... again when in Rome), but my spidey senses started tingling and I made the decision that we weren't staying for dessert (but could take it with us or grab some back in Ottawa), and I settled the bill, we both used the loo, and then headed back to plane.
The clouds were starting to look like weather from the east and the ceilings looked like they were dropping. I called to open my new flight plan back and get a detailed weather briefing. It was just as I suspected but even a little worse in that they were seeing "embedded towering cumulus" in their radar and precipitation to the west of where we were. I am very pleased that I seem to have developed at a least some weather sense after all these years of flying and studying. It was then or not, so I did another pre-flight (found that the rear baggage door had come unlocked and was open... not an aerodynamics issue, but if we turned left suddenly, the bag of survival gear could have dropped out of the plane onto someone's head below... well, on a tree, but...), did my run up, checked for traffic, made my radio calls, backtracked (about half a mile this time) on the runway, positioned and then took off. Again, not a minute too soon... there was a little rain on takeoff, but once we got airborne, we could see it was raining quite noticeably to the west and northwest of where we were and it was bearing down on where we were. The good news is that it also became obvious that we were moving away from it much faster than it was moving and would likely miss the worst of it. Now, a little rain isn't going to do any harm, but given that I haven't had a lot of time in weather I decided that it wasn't time to put myself to the test ;). Going south, it's even thousands plus five hundred feet, so I stayed at 2500 feet. Off to the east, you could see sun... off to the west, medium strength rain showers. There were the occasional small showers that I was actually able to fly around, but we did go through a couple of light showers on our way back. I was very pleased with my performance and never was out of VFR flight (the view down was always perfectly clear), and other than a few very small bumps (which disappointed my passenger who is more of a "if I still have all my fillings, the flight was too smooth" gal, heh) it was a beautiful and uneventful flight back over beautiful lakes and forests and eventually farm fields and rivers and city. Because we were flying lower, she was able to spot the cottages that she's visited on Lac du Poisson Blanc over her lifetime and we were able to chat about various features we saw as we went. But we had survived the worsening weather and the path into the Rockcliffe airport was clear and free of rain or low clouds. Since I was coming in from the north of the city (over the city of Gatineau), and runway 09 was active because of the wind direction (it's usually 27), we overflew the field at 1700 feet and did a descending 180° turn over the city and had great views of it as well as we were coming over, around, and then back. Radio calls all the way, of course, and another aircraft was coming in from the Ottawa airport, acknowledged that they saw us and tucked in at a respectable distance behind (we were first in line to land... Rockcliffe is another uncontrolled airport, so it's up to the pilots using it to sort out who's doing what, where, and when). Down to 1200 feet, fly over the field, make our radio call, join the mid left downwind leg, do the pre-landing checks, turn onto the base leg and announce our position, slow the aircraft further, put some flaps down, start losing altitude, make our call and turn onto the final leg, align with the runway, put more flaps in, pull the power all the way back to idle, forward slip to lose a little more altitude and things are looking perfect for touchdown... over the parkway, over the fence, set down on the main gear (bounce again... sigh, gotta work on that), settle all the way down (heh), and gently lower the nose gear down as we lose speed. Brake and exit on taxiway Bravo. Clear the field by 200 feet and call clear of the active runway. The plane behind us lands after we're clear. Taxi back to the pumps. Fill it up with fuel and then go inside to call and close the flight plan. I was one minute early on returning the plane before my booking was due to end. Win x 3.
There's no real way to convey the pure joy of being in the air in a small aircraft (versus tearing across the upper reaches of the troposphere in a commercial jet). I always think of that line from "Contact" where she says "Some celestial event. No — no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea." When my friend Blackbird was here visiting from Germany, I told her we were going to go flying. She wasn't feeling well the first day we had planned to go and I canceled, but I convinced her to come with me to the airport the Sunday morning she was leaving. She came along because I was insistent and she knew it was important to me, not because she was particularly interested in and of itself. Well, I had another underhanded trick up my sleeve too: at that point, I was not allowed to fly because I hadn't had my checkride, so I had booked an "Introductory Flying Lesson" for her with an instructor, and she was going to be flying the plane (it actually counts as formal flight training and can be logged as flying hours under dual instruction time). Well, as you can imagine, she was ready to punch my clock but good after pulling that sort of stunt, but she's an adventurous type and decided to roll with it and kill me once she was back ;). Well, when she landed about 40 minutes later, she was a changed person and she was saying "I finally understand" (because she's been reading my posts for years). The promised threat of bodily harm to me upon her return was forgotten, and she went on to say that it had never occurred to her that she could be a pilot if she chose to do so... and that there were so many more things she could do that she had never previously thought herself capable of (heck, the sky's the limit, right? lol). Well, that's the way I feel every time I fly. And each time, my heart breaks at the wonder and overwhelming beauty of it all, and it gives me whatever impetus I need to do what I need to do in everything else I do, just because I know that I live in such a glorious world. That Gillespie poem captures it so well, "I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings"...
FYI, I can take someone with me each time I fly, so if you're in Ottawa, or will be in Ottawa, let me know if you want to come some time (donations towards rental costs are welcome, but not necessary... it will all go, to the penny, to the "more minutes in the air for Da Friar fund").
P.S. We never did get dessert because by the time we were back and the plane was fueled and tied down, my friend had to head off for her job at the circus sideshow that evening at 6PM. :(
So it was going to be steam gauges, maps, my trusty E6B rotary slide rule, and a wristwatch that were going to get us there. I went over my planning again (it was now 10 minutes after I had the plane booked) and informed my passenger of the change in plans, joking that we were going in a plane with nothing but a propeller and wings held together with bailing wire and duct tape in the finest traditions of historical flight. I called in my flight plan and headed out to GMME. Oh gods... I thought I was joking! If you look close at the picture, you can actually see the tape on the lower fairing on the wing strut (the diagonal thing between the middle of the wing and aircraft body). The interior looked like it hadn't been touched up since it rolled out of the factory in
But even with all the tribulation, this was my first solo flight in over a year (i.e. without an instructor... I had to get a "check out" a few weeks back with an instructor before I was allowed to rent an airplane and fly by myself... which is just basic sense, right?). I was very excited and happy as I could possibly be! Quite honestly, if I don't fly often enough, I get mopey and lose interest in a lot of other stuff as well. If I can fly, it motivates me to do all kinds of other stuff that's not flying related (and I've already started in on that today... I've done a whole bunch of stuff that had needed doing for a very long time). Now that I'm an impoverished (in a very real sense) student, every minute of time in the air is going to be precious to me as it's going to be very hard won. If I can get about 20 more hours of cross country flying (and probably at least 6 to 10 more hours of dual instruction with blinders on, flying only by instruments again), I will be able to write my IFR exam and do my practical IFR test. Then, it'll only be about another 10 or 15 hours of flying before I can apply for my commercial license and perhaps get a job as a flight instructor and get paid to fly rather than burning through money like a crackhead on a bender in Las Vegas to get those hours (it runs about $135/hr ... that's a lot of Kraft Dinner!).
The big issues for the flight were going to be twofold: I had counted on instrument assistance to fly a precise track over land that wasn't going to have a lot of features I could use for about 20 nautical miles (until I started flying over lakes... those are quite distinctive and somewhat easier to match between what I see and what's on the map), and the weather was predicted to be okay, but a little less optimal than what had been predicted when I set out in the morning. In specific, the ceiling (the base of the clouds) was supposed to be around 6000 feet or more, but the observations when I took off were more like broken at 4000 and scattered at 3000, and they were reporting clouds as low as 1500 feet in Montreal (that would be ungood since I was flying through hills with peaks as high as 2700 feet). When heading north on a VFR flight, you need to fly at odd thousand plus 500 feet and I climbed up to 3500 feet as I turned north north east from the river (and knew that Ottawa Class D airspace was at 6000 feet and above) and was immediately running just a few hundred feet below the clouds, and could tell there were scattered clouds even lower (that I had to dodge, since I am not legally allowed to actually fly into a cloud and even have to keep certain distances above, below, and to the sides of them as I go... when I have my IFR rating I'll be allowed to fly into clouds). It was still gorgeous to be up in the air and the view was perfectly clear (no haze at all). It was beautiful to watch the fluffy clouds go by off our wings and the farms and forests stretch out in all directions (then all forest... with the occasional town or farm or cottage country on the many, many lakes).
It was smooth flying and cool and wonderful and invigorating as we went. I flew the heading I calculated and when I reached the first discernible waypoint (the tip of a large lake), I was only off about half a mile and easily corrected my course, which I was able to stay on for the rest of the flight, and I found the destination airport with no problem. I called for an airport advisory, but... there was no answer. I called a few times, but nothing... so I overflew the field looking for the wind direction and couldn't see a wind sock. Hmmm... so I flew over it again and still couldn't see it. I looked at the nearby lake and the surface was perfectly still, so I decided it wouldn't really matter if I landed the wrong way because the tailwind wouldn't be too bad even if I picked wrong (a 50/50 chance). I announced my intentions headed over the airport again to join the downwind leg of the circuit... only to finally spot the wind sock and ... yup, given a 50/50 chance, there's a 100% certainty of picking the wrong direction ;). So, I announced my change of plans, tooted out the other way, and then headed in for landing. Not one of my better ones (I was high and fast coming in... need to work on that) and bounced once (not hard, but embarrassingly) before settling down and managing to stop in time for the first taxiway. We pulled up to the airport and nobody came out to tell us where to park, so I picked an empty spot between two other aircraft, and pulled a 180° to position the plane so I could easily push it back out of the way. Did my pre-shutdown check and stopped the engine (which is done by starving it of fuel, fyi, and then turning off the electrical system). We pushed it back and headed into the airport building. There was only a little old French lady in a rocking chair knitting. I asked her (in French) where the phone was and she pointed, so I called up and closed my flight plan (I was almost perfectly on time... or at least my revised time) and asked her if anyone was on the radios, to which she replied "non". I verified the radio frequency (which she knew), so there was just no staff there. Works for me if it works for them (it's an "uncontrolled" airport, so it is perfectly fine). We walked up the hill and right into the little Québeçois greasy spoon that's just outside the airport fence along the road there. When in Rome, right? So poutine and a soda it was! :) Good to stretch my legs (it's actually really hard on the legs to fly because they're used to control the rudder), and do my flight planning for the return trip. We were going to have a leisurely lunch and then dessert (tarte au sucre! ... again when in Rome), but my spidey senses started tingling and I made the decision that we weren't staying for dessert (but could take it with us or grab some back in Ottawa), and I settled the bill, we both used the loo, and then headed back to plane.
The clouds were starting to look like weather from the east and the ceilings looked like they were dropping. I called to open my new flight plan back and get a detailed weather briefing. It was just as I suspected but even a little worse in that they were seeing "embedded towering cumulus" in their radar and precipitation to the west of where we were. I am very pleased that I seem to have developed at a least some weather sense after all these years of flying and studying. It was then or not, so I did another pre-flight (found that the rear baggage door had come unlocked and was open... not an aerodynamics issue, but if we turned left suddenly, the bag of survival gear could have dropped out of the plane onto someone's head below... well, on a tree, but...), did my run up, checked for traffic, made my radio calls, backtracked (about half a mile this time) on the runway, positioned and then took off. Again, not a minute too soon... there was a little rain on takeoff, but once we got airborne, we could see it was raining quite noticeably to the west and northwest of where we were and it was bearing down on where we were. The good news is that it also became obvious that we were moving away from it much faster than it was moving and would likely miss the worst of it. Now, a little rain isn't going to do any harm, but given that I haven't had a lot of time in weather I decided that it wasn't time to put myself to the test ;). Going south, it's even thousands plus five hundred feet, so I stayed at 2500 feet. Off to the east, you could see sun... off to the west, medium strength rain showers. There were the occasional small showers that I was actually able to fly around, but we did go through a couple of light showers on our way back. I was very pleased with my performance and never was out of VFR flight (the view down was always perfectly clear), and other than a few very small bumps (which disappointed my passenger who is more of a "if I still have all my fillings, the flight was too smooth" gal, heh) it was a beautiful and uneventful flight back over beautiful lakes and forests and eventually farm fields and rivers and city. Because we were flying lower, she was able to spot the cottages that she's visited on Lac du Poisson Blanc over her lifetime and we were able to chat about various features we saw as we went. But we had survived the worsening weather and the path into the Rockcliffe airport was clear and free of rain or low clouds. Since I was coming in from the north of the city (over the city of Gatineau), and runway 09 was active because of the wind direction (it's usually 27), we overflew the field at 1700 feet and did a descending 180° turn over the city and had great views of it as well as we were coming over, around, and then back. Radio calls all the way, of course, and another aircraft was coming in from the Ottawa airport, acknowledged that they saw us and tucked in at a respectable distance behind (we were first in line to land... Rockcliffe is another uncontrolled airport, so it's up to the pilots using it to sort out who's doing what, where, and when). Down to 1200 feet, fly over the field, make our radio call, join the mid left downwind leg, do the pre-landing checks, turn onto the base leg and announce our position, slow the aircraft further, put some flaps down, start losing altitude, make our call and turn onto the final leg, align with the runway, put more flaps in, pull the power all the way back to idle, forward slip to lose a little more altitude and things are looking perfect for touchdown... over the parkway, over the fence, set down on the main gear (bounce again... sigh, gotta work on that), settle all the way down (heh), and gently lower the nose gear down as we lose speed. Brake and exit on taxiway Bravo. Clear the field by 200 feet and call clear of the active runway. The plane behind us lands after we're clear. Taxi back to the pumps. Fill it up with fuel and then go inside to call and close the flight plan. I was one minute early on returning the plane before my booking was due to end. Win x 3.
There's no real way to convey the pure joy of being in the air in a small aircraft (versus tearing across the upper reaches of the troposphere in a commercial jet). I always think of that line from "Contact" where she says "Some celestial event. No — no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea." When my friend Blackbird was here visiting from Germany, I told her we were going to go flying. She wasn't feeling well the first day we had planned to go and I canceled, but I convinced her to come with me to the airport the Sunday morning she was leaving. She came along because I was insistent and she knew it was important to me, not because she was particularly interested in and of itself. Well, I had another underhanded trick up my sleeve too: at that point, I was not allowed to fly because I hadn't had my checkride, so I had booked an "Introductory Flying Lesson" for her with an instructor, and she was going to be flying the plane (it actually counts as formal flight training and can be logged as flying hours under dual instruction time). Well, as you can imagine, she was ready to punch my clock but good after pulling that sort of stunt, but she's an adventurous type and decided to roll with it and kill me once she was back ;). Well, when she landed about 40 minutes later, she was a changed person and she was saying "I finally understand" (because she's been reading my posts for years). The promised threat of bodily harm to me upon her return was forgotten, and she went on to say that it had never occurred to her that she could be a pilot if she chose to do so... and that there were so many more things she could do that she had never previously thought herself capable of (heck, the sky's the limit, right? lol). Well, that's the way I feel every time I fly. And each time, my heart breaks at the wonder and overwhelming beauty of it all, and it gives me whatever impetus I need to do what I need to do in everything else I do, just because I know that I live in such a glorious world. That Gillespie poem captures it so well, "I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings"...
FYI, I can take someone with me each time I fly, so if you're in Ottawa, or will be in Ottawa, let me know if you want to come some time (donations towards rental costs are welcome, but not necessary... it will all go, to the penny, to the "more minutes in the air for Da Friar fund").
P.S. We never did get dessert because by the time we were back and the plane was fueled and tied down, my friend had to head off for her job at the circus sideshow that evening at 6PM. :(
