My Flying Career

Wow, 2010 already?  Time flies when you’re having fun (John, do not make a lame joke using this pun).  I have yet to fly this year because  have been studying diligently for my CFI-A Knowledge Test.  I really want to get a good score on this test and even more, I want to REALLY know this stuff backwards and forwards.  So that’s where I am at.

My IFR PIC currency lapsed at the end of November because I did not meet the requirements in the last 6 months to remain current.  The way the currency works, for IFR at least, is that you must have accomplished, in the last 6 months, the following:

• At least six instrument approaches;
• Holding procedures; and
• Intercepting and tracking courses through the use of navigation systems.

You can find all this information in Part 61.57 of the Code of Federal Regulations.  Well by the end of November I had all but 4 instrument approaches.  It had just been such nice weather the last 6 months, I haven’t had to shoot an approach.  So what happens when you lapse like I did?  Well you are given a 6 month grace period where the FAA allows you to go up with a Safety Pilot and shoot the remaining requirements in simulated conditions.  Who qualifies as a Safety Pilot?  All they have to possess is at least a Private Pilot’s Certificate and a current medical certificate.  I decided to give my Grandpa a call and ask him to be my safety pilot.

My grandpa is a corporate pilot out of Hillsboro and used to be an airline pilot for Eastern Airlines before they went bankrupt.  So you can imagine how much fun we have when we both are in the cockpit.  I really enjoy flying with him and I get a kick out of his comments on how slow the Cessna is compared to the Learjet 35 he currently flies.  So I flew up to Hillsboro, picked him up and we got my required 4 approaches in.  Did the ILS to Aurora, ILS to McMinneville, the VOR approach to Hillsboro, then got radar vectors for the ILS back into Hillsboro.  It reminded me of when I was training for my Instrument Rating.  Approach after approach after approach.  It mentally wears on you.  I think it is one of the toughest things I’ve had to do in aviation.  I think the only way to make it more difficult would be to have to do it in a light twin.

Well I’ve rambled on long enough.  Happy new year everyone and hopefully my next post will be on how well I did on my CFI-A Knowledge Test!

My longest flight to date is now my non-stop flight from Salem, OR to Redding CA.  What for you ask?  Well besides still needing to build time for my Commercial, my friends birthday was coming up and he really wanted to get some In-N-Out burgers.  So we flew down to Redding for the sole purpose of eating some delicious In-N-Out burgers!  How cool is that!  I’m really going to miss it when I no longer have to build time, and can pick my destinations.  Here’s how the flight went:

Before we left, the only interesting things I got from the flight briefer for my flight was reported light rime ice at 7,700 feet near Eugene.  The tops, according to the Area Forecast (FA) were reported at 8,000 feet, and it was reportedly overcast all the way to Medford.  That’s only 300 feet from the reported ice and the tops of the clouds.  Not to mention the ice report was so high up, I knew that if it got bad enough, I could always descend out of it as I would still be in the Willamette Valley.  Ok, so I knew what to expect, had a plan, and an alternative plan.  I felt comfortable to continue the flight.  I filed 9,000 feet and figured I could always ask for 11,000 if I was bobbing in and out of the tops.

We took off at 8:40am, the climb was fairly uneventful until we got to, how high you ask?  It was freaky, at exactly 7,700 feet we started to notice a little ice building.  I reported the ice to ATC and continued climbing, hoping for the tops to appear any minute.  Again, it blew me away at how accurate the forecast was, because at 8,000 we saw blue skies.  I continued my climb to 9,000 feet, however it was a few degrees below freezing, so it took a while for the little ice we had accumulated to break away.  But it finally did.

The cruise portion of the flight was uneventful.  We were about 1,000 feet above the overcast layer, so there was too much to look at, and we had almost 3 hours of this!  Nearing the Siskiyous I opted to cancel my IFR flight plan as there were some tall Cumulous clouds that I didn’t want to go through, and I could see that it was becoming broken, to scattered and the MEA for that portion would make me climb to 11,000 feet.  Also Redding was reporting Clear skies so I had no doubt that we would be able to descend into Redding completely VFR.  It was really weird watching as we approached the California border, how it almost instantly went from Overcast to clear.  It’s sad really.

Descending into Redding, we got a great view of Shasta Lake.  It also really tested my VFR navigation skills.  I haven’t had to find an airport I haven’t been to, not being IFR, in a little while.  But we found it, called ‘em 10 miles out and made a very nice landing.

We asked the lady at the FBO’s desk if we could borrow the courtesy car.  The look on her face when my friend piped up, “Yeah, we just flew down here for my birthday from Salem, JUST to get In-N-Out burgers” was priceless.  I love seeing what kind of car I get when I land at a new airport.  The car we got was an old Lincoln Towncar.  Actually is was fairly nice compared to some of the cars I’ve used.  Best of all, the A/C worked.  It was 85 degrees, and that may not seem like much, but we just descended out of below freezing temperatures.  So we were happy the A/C worked.  With both of us on our iPhone’s trying to figure out how to get to In-N-Out, we pressed onward.

We arrived at In-N-Out and ate our burgers (I had the Double-Double).  Mission Accomplished.  We also met up with my boss, who had just started his family vacation driving around the country.  Took him I think a little over 6 hours to get to In-N-Out.  Took us 3.  I tried not to rub it in….too much.

I will continue the rest of my journey on my next blog post, where we got into hail, moderate rain, and was VMC for about an hour(which seemed like forever when you don’t have an autopilot).

To be continue…

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.

So I need to apologize for taking so long to write this post.  I keep putting it off, and partially I feel I have nothing super exciting to write about.

The last couple weeks we have been practicing steep turns, slow flight, power-on and power-off stalls, Vmc demo, and of course lots of single engine operations.  For the most part I feel like I’m getting the maneuvers down.  I think the only thing I need to work on is memorizing the power settings for the different maneuvers.  But all in all, I’m beginning to feel comfortable flying the plane (unlike at first, when everything was just CRAZY).  I also got to fly for my first time in an FTD (Flight Training Device).  Which is basically a flight simulator with all the controls and a cockpit cutout, but doesn’t move (like a full-motion simulator).  That was kind of fun, it was helpful because we would be 50 feet above the runway, and then my instructor would kill an engine.  And I got to see “somewhat” what that would be like, and how incredibly fast you need to recognize what’s going on. I’ve got Identify, Verify, and Feather stuck in my head.  Those of you who have taken multi-engine training I’m sure know what I’m talking about.  Sometime in the next few lessons I will be doing a single-engine instrument approach!  Which I think sounds crazy hard, but Chris (my instructor) assures me that it’s not as hard as it sounds.  We’ll see.

On another note, I have been doing some time-building in the club plane here and there.  I shot the VOR-A approach into North Bend all the way to minimums, could barely see the airport, and went missed.  Picked up my clearance back to Salem and shot the ILS, went missed, then turned around and shot the back course to a full stop.  What a mentally busy day!  The weather wasn’t “terrible” in Salem, but the approach in North Bend was TOTALLY in the soup and was a lot of fun!

Finally the weather started clearing up and I flew VFR to corvallis, then west out to the beach, then north up the coast, and then east to Hillsboro for my multi-engine lesson.  What a great flight!  Not a cloud in the sky, the beach was beautiful!  I can’t remember the last time I flew to the beach in VFR conditions (without the hood on).  Flying north up the coast I even saw some Whales!  I scrambled for my camera and circled around, but was too late.  That had gone back down and I couldn’t find them again.  Sorry.  However I did take a bunch of pictures of the coast.   Hope you enjoy!

Alright, back to studying.  I’ll try and keep you all more up-to-date and not take so long on posting this time around.

Also, wanted to mention, if you aren’t subscribing to the RSS feed and want to receive email notifications when I post a new blog entry, be sure and subscribe here.

Thanks for reading,

John

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Well, I have officially flown an approach to minimums due to weather!  What an exhilarating experience! Took some friends for an evening flight last Friday to get some dinner in Scappoose, Oregon (KSPB). Before I was assigned the LOC/DME 15 approach, I snagged the local ASOS (Automated Surface Observation System) and it was reporting a ceiling of 2,000 broken. Sounds like a piece of cake approach. The FAF (Final Approach Fix) was 1800 feet, so I should be out of the clouds by then. Well, I got vectored around for the approach, reached the FAF, descended to the step down fix, and I was still in the clouds. Now I’m at 1100 feet, reached my next step down fix and descended to 600 feet. STILL in the clouds! I can look straight down and see the ground (A little scary, I tell you what), but straight in front of me is nothing but that misty fog Oregon is known for. I reached my last step down fix and descended to the MDA (Minimum Descent Altitude) of 460 feet. And as soon as I got to about 500 feet and began to run through the Missed approach in my head one more time, there it was! Perfectly lined up! It was amazing! At that moment, I truly felt like all that training under the hood down to “simulated” minimums was put to good use! I was definitely not planning on shooting that approach to minimums, but once I landed, I could see that sure enough RIGHT above the airport it was about 2,000 feet broken.  But out to the north, where I was shooting the approach, it was nothing but fog.  Having said all that, I learned a valuable lesson.  You can’t necessarily trust the airport weather observation for the approach.  You can really only rely on them for weather AT the airport.

One of the guys I took with me on that trip, Nick Lopez, is a really good photographer, and he was in the back with all of his camera gear snapping pictures.  So I thought I would share those pictures with all of you.

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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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