Walking on the Moon

Not too much to say about Sunday’s exploits. I taxied miserably at ELP, getting redirected twice, but flew OK out to Midland and then on to McKinney. The controller at McKinney basically tried to tuck me in ahead of a seminole with a night short approach. I made the short approach, but didn’t quite get off fast enough to get the seminole in behind me. I think it was overaggressive sequencing, but I was still hoping to make it work. :-(

Anyway, we’re in Frisco and hanging out with Brenda’s family.

As Brenda mentioned, she and I are off on a cross country to see our families in Texas and North Carolina. It’s always interesting to take on the elements in a Piper Archer.

Fighting the elements is usually best done in advance. Earlier in the week, I didn’t like the way the weather was shaping up and moved our route south. Originally the plan was to fly through northern Arizona and wind up in Santa Fe for the night. Watching the weather this week, it looked like those areas would be having some weather (and they are), so I’m typing this in El Paso, TX. I like to be out of the weather’s way. We’ll see if I’m still out of its way tomorrow. :-)

I also got to see a black hole today. If you’re a pilot, you know that landing on an isolated runway at night without surrounding lights for reference can lead to the black hole illusion. The effect is that one can come in much lower than one intends with the result of hitting terrain or stalling. Flying into El Paso tonight (IFR) I was vectored to 26R for landing. As I’m on approach, I realize that I’m looking at the very definition of a black hole: no lights but runway markings, no VASI, no PAPI, no ILS. And the wind’s behind me. So I look at my altimeter and it reads lower than I’d guessed I was – not terrifyingly low or anything – but lower than I thought.
Now, I think it’s within my abilities to land on such a runway. But I’ve already hand flown more than 6 hours today, I’m at an unfamiliar airport, and it’s a sizable international airport. I can hear Southwest jets landing and taking off over on runway 4 oriented appropriately with the wind and I know it’s got an ILS and a PAPI. I think lots of people just land where they’re told, but I (cancelled IFR and) went around on 26R and requested runway 4. The result was a nice uneventful landing and a longer taxi.

I’m pretty sure a fair number of people just take the original landing clearance – and that the landing is usually without incident – but I’m pretty happy with myself for taking the better runway.

I took a new guy at ISI, John Hickey, flying this week, because he was vaguely interested and I love to take people up. Another good thing is that when I take new people up something fun usually happens. This trip was no exception.

On departure we got ordered on and then off the runway as things got tight and then an IFR release came through. Not a problem for me, but it wasn’t the kind of smooth, orderly operations that you like to show a new GA passenger. John took it all in stride, but it wouldn’t have been fun for a nervous flyer, I expect.
It was a clear day, but pretty hazy in the basin itself. We took my usual tour of the basin, down towards Torrance and Long Beach, up past Anaheim and Fullerton, out as far as Chino and then back past Santa Monica. We did get to pick out a few sights through the haze – I’m grousing more than I should, the view was pretty good – and then headed out to Camarillo.

Camarillo’s usually a good choice for new flyers who like airplanes. The airport has such an active pilot community with so many experimentals and a strong CAF presence that there’s usually something interesting to see. Boy did they not disappoint today. Just getting in things were busy enough that I had to fly a modified entry – basically an overhead entry for beginners – while a flight of Lancairs departed. But the ramp was the real treat.

It’s not every day you come across a mirror-polished P-51 Mustang sitting on the flight line, even at CMA. I don’t really know where the pilot was coming from or going to, but he was going in that brilliant piece of aviation art. We spend more than a couple minutes gawking at it and taking pictures. Times like these I’m happy that I carry a camera in my flight bag!

After lunch we cruised over to the CAF hangar and had the run of the place for $5. Not to be outdone, the CAF had a spectacularly restored Corsair on the ramp that another transient pilot had parked there while he did whatever brought him to Camarillo. We got to both get a close up view of the Corsair and to hear the restoration folks chat about the details of the restoration. I never tire of hearing skilled restorers pick over a beautiful plane like this one.

The trip back was pretty boring, though we did get a nice view of the Getty Villa. If John attracts planes like that I’ll have to drag him around more often.

Here’s a video from a Citation overrun accident at Bader Field in Atlantic City. This bozo’s not doing aviation any favors. Fortunately, it looks like no one was injured. You’ll have to watch until about 5:00 in to see how bad this driver’s ideas get.

Alert plane spotters from ISI forwarded this to me from another aviation list.

I spent last weekend, as in 20-24 October, hanging out with my parents in San Francisco. Much of the time my parents arew attracted to a city because of one of the many quilting/knitting/other-fiber-related conferences that my Mom attends. but this time they just wanted to see the place. Because it’s so close we went up to see it with them. Of course this was a good excuse to fly.

The trip up was a nice easy VFR flight, scarcely worth mentioning. It seriously went very smoothly. We had considered a stop at Paso Robles to check out their restaurant, which is from all reports excellent, but a late start put us on the non-stop.

We met the folks at San Carlos Airport and after the requisite waiting for Mom & Dad to find the airport, we took off for a fun weekend.

We had a great time. The weather was unbelievably good, with several days of completely unrestricted visibilities, which made for spectacular views of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge. Between my parents and Brenda, we had a fine selection of things to see including Muir Woods, the SF Art Institute cafe, many things in Golden Gate Park, the Winchester Mystery House, and a bunch of little restaurants in Burlingame. We even enjoyed a meal with Rod.  My parents are always fun to see, and we had a great time.

The return flight was Tuesday night, departing around 6:00 and I was hoping to get back to Santa Monica(SMO) before the tower closed at 9:00. Fortunately we had a good tailwind and got a timely reroute that shaved some time off our trip. We were IFR, both because I like to be IFR at night and because SMO was reporting 800 feet overcast when we left.

The flight was pretty routine. I did get a reroute, and got to hear a bunch of people shooting approaches in the Monterey area. Still, out over the Central Valley at night at 11,000 it’s quiet. The only troubling fact was that SMO’s weather had gone down to 600′ OVC. The approach bottoms out at 505′ AGL, so this was sounding a lot like an approach to minimums.

And it was, but still a really easy approach. I wouldn’t have though that made any sense, but here’s how it was. There was probably a 200′ thick overcast over SMO that got thinner as it went inland. For much of the approach we had pretty solid ground contact, and we reached BEVEY – a point about 6 miles from SMO – in good VFR over a thickening undercast. It quickly thickened up so we couldn’t see the ground, but at the last stepdown fix we plunged through about 200-300′ of clouds and popped out quickly enough to set up for a straightforward landing. Brenda actually enjoyed the approach quite a bit, and so did I, but it wasn’t a really challenging approach.

Fun flights and a great weekend.

My jaunt to do approaches Saturday was also interesting because it was the last entry in my first logbook.  When I started taking flying lessons on 12 Feb 2000, I bought a student pilot package that included a Jeppesen logbook.  Now the first 6 years of my flying experience are in one place, with a bow wrapped around them.
I’ve got an electronic copy of all the stuff, but the physical book is an interesting artifact in its own right.  There are the out of order entries around 9/11 that show how desperate I was to fly, but how I couldn’t look at my logbook while I was grounded for fear that I wouldn’t get to add another entry.  After I got to fly again and started instrument training I added the missing entries, but in the excitement I’d forgotten to add them in order.

There are a lot of firsts in there, too.  First passengers, first flight in 32169, first trip out of state, first everything, really.

As a nice coincidence, I didn’t get to make the last entry.  Flying with Andy as a CFI he gets to make and sign the entry.  Just like he made and signed the first one in 2000.
Now I get to start another one.  I’m a lucky guy.

My CFI and I were up shooting approaches Saturday morning. We actually filed each leg IFR through the tower entoute control (TEC) that the LA basin employs, which makes it super easy to fly IFR legs locally. We filed 3 legs, the first two one after the other and the last one after an hour or so break for lunch.

I was issued the same squawk code for all three legs.

I don’t remember ever getting the same squawk for 2 legs, much less 3 with an hour between two legs. Weird luck.

… then back into one.  Then back out again.  Link courtesy of John Heidemann.  The comments are well worth a look, too.

A 30-second jabber session with Tim Shepard yielded this incredible report of a Zlin wing failure during aerobatics written from the pilot’s perspective.  Clearly I should chat with Tim more often.

32169 is back in service after being inspected again.  Mostly minor things needed to be fixed, but it won’t be my cheapest annual ever or anything.  We’re still wrestling with the EGT and making sure that nothing weird happened to the vacuum pump – and the vacuum pump is by far the more important.

I spent a bunch of time this weekend getting reacquainted with her, and mostly working landings.  Every now and again, most pilots get a bug to work on their landings, and I have it.  I’ve been reading the aviation mags and seeing some of the bad habits they describe in my landings, so I’ve been working to tune them back up.  I’m making good progress, I think, but I suspect that next time I go up for IFR currency with Andy, my CFI, I’ll spend some time landing.