My Flying Career

Why do I always start out my posts with an apology for taking so long to post. grrr

So I have been taking the required cross-country flights for my commercial certificate this last few weeks while studying for my oral and practicing the single-engine commercial maneuvers in the club plane.  It’s keeping me pretty busy, but I love it.

I took a day VFR cross country to Yakima, which was fun.  Rather uneventful though.  I took my night VFR cross country to Paine Field in Everett, WA.  That was a lot of fun.  It has been a while since I have done any night flying.  It seams like every airport that remotely gets any traffic in the northwest is doing something to their runways/taxiways.  All the airports I was picking for my destination had runway/taxiway closures.  Paine had it’s two longer runways closed and left the shorter(3000 feet) runway open.  3,000 feet is the minimum Hillsboro Aviation will allow their Seminoles to fly into, and it’s the minimum I’d probably fly into as well in a twin.

We left hillsboro enroute for Paine with all the weather and NOTAMS and feeling very confident and excited about the flight.  Once we got within distance to pick up the ATIS report, we tuned in and listened to the long list of NOTAMS confirming that we are allowed to land on the planned runway.  However they mentioned something I wasn’t told when I called Flight Service about the flight.  The ATIS threw in at the end, “Pilot Controlled Lighting Inoperative”.  Now we both hear that thinking, uh, does that mean we can’t turn the lights on?  We radioed Seattle Approach asking if they could find out if the lights were on.  They replied that they believed the lights were on.  So we decided to continue with the flight and told Approach that if we didn’t see any lights we’d be coming back with intentions to land somewhere else, probably Boeing  Field.  Long story short, we were clicking the mic, trying to get the lights on, and I don’t know if they turned on from the mic clicking or if they were always on, but I didn’t see them til we were right over the top of the runway.  We landed, closed and opened our new VFR flight plan, and were off enroute to hillsboro.  That flight was fairly uneventful, just chatted with my flight instructor on the way back.

Ok back to studying.

I am very sorry it has been so long since I’ve given you all an update on what’s going on.  I have no excuse other than pure laziness.

I have had so much fun flying all over recently.  I am still building time for my Commercial Rating and let me tell you.  I will miss the day when I don’t get to build time on my own like this.  I am really enjoying going out and flying wherever I want to go.  My last two most memorable time-building flights were to Yakima, Washington and Redding California.

For my Yakima flight, I flew at 9,000 feet and flew east down near the Columbia River until about The Dalles, then went north up to Yakima.  The reason I chose that less direct route was because any other (more direct route) would take me over more mountanous terrain and would require me to go to 12,000 or 16,000 feet.  When I got to Yakima, I parked at Noland-Decoto Flying Services to fuel and find a place to eat.  The people were very friendly and one of the guys that worked their let me take his car into town to find something to eat.  And what did I find.  One of my all time favorite burger places.  Red Robin!  After eating my bacon cheeseburger I drove back to the airport, checked the weather, filed my IFR flight plan and began my preflight to head back home.  The flight both there and back were fairly uneventful.  Stayed mostly on-top of the cloud deck.  I put together an album of photos of my trip..be sure and read the captions!

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My next post, which I hope to write soon, will be about my trip to Redding California for In-N-Out burgers, where I logged a total of 6.3 hours.

Thanks for reading.

I consider all my flights an adventure.  And I could probably find something interesting to write about for each one.  But this flight, I don’t have to “find” something interesting.  It found me!

I started out on an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) flight plan to North Bend, OR.  Cruising along at 7000 feet, I encountered a bit of icing for the first time!  Now in a 1974 Cessna 172, a plane that is 35 years old, and an engine that is past TBO (Time Between Overhaul), you/I don’t want to push your luck with ice!  There just isn’t a whole lot of power there to keep you airborne when you weight more and the camber of your wing has changed.  I opted to divert to my alternate of Eugene.  Shot the ILS perfectly and re-thought my afternoons flying.

My new plan is to fly to Hillsboro (KHIO) see if my new Instructor is there and say hello.  Well when I left, it was moderate rain at Eugene, but I knew the rain would stop before reaching Corvallis.  I took off in the moderate rain and began a climb to 6000 feet.  At about 4500 feet, the moderate rain became moderate snow.  Once reaching 6000 feet, I began to pick up some more ice.  I asked to descend to 4000, they granted my request, and the ice slowly began to slide off.  Once I arrive in Hillsboro, unfortunately my instructor wasn’t there to surprise, so I took off and started heading home.

I was kind of tired of all the hard IFR flying and the icing.  And Salem’s METAR showed VFR, and it was only about 30 minutes away, so I decided to fly back VFR (Visual Flight Rules).  Well about 20 miles north of Salem, I hear Salem Tower say they have 3 miles visibility and hear reports of 3/4 mile visibility coming to their area.  So again, I decided to divert to McMinnville (KMMV) and wait it out, or file IFR out of there.  After waiting about 30 minutes, there was a wall of moderate rain between McMinnville and Salem.  Salem’s METAR reports VFR and 4500 broken.  So I decide to file IFR out of McMinnville and after taking off, I found out it was a good choice. Salem was IFR again and I had to shoot the backcourse (which was fun because I hadn’t done that since my checkride!)

All in all I got to experience light icing for the first time, diversion and crazy weather.  A very fun and educational trip, but man am I mentally drained.  Flying single-pilot IFR with no autopilot or GPS is just one of the hardest mental workouts ever.

On another note, I have a meeting with my instructor on Monday to “officially” enroll me in the school and to go over my more detailed syllabus!  I’ll let you know how it goes probably on Tuesday.  And don’t forget to check out my pictures.  I left my digital camera at the FBO in Salem, so I had to take these with my iPhone.  So they aren’t the most detailed.  But they are better than nothing.

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I received my loan check in the mail yesterday.  I have never seen a check this big before in my life.  Too bad they have to show how much you owe back on the same page.  What a downer there.

First things first, I plan on purchasing the Instrument and Multi-Engine ground school courses from King Schools and start studying for my knowledge tests.  A lot of people think the Kings’ videos are boring and I can definitely see why, but for some reason they work for me.  I have used them on my Private and Instrument knowledge tests, and got above a 90% on both.  So no complaints coming from me.

I also will start flying as much as possible to accumulate as much TT (Total Time) as possible in the club plane I use at Salem.  I plan on making as much of this TT cross-country time as well.  Might as well hit two birds with one stone right?

Hope the weather holds out, I need to do a VOR check before I can fly IFR in the club plane again.  And it hasn’t been too promising.