They say that pilots by default have type A personality and many times they just ‘have to’ to prove themselves. I was always saying that I’m immune to this ‘disease’. It turns out not so much. Last Saturday and entered spot landing contest our club held during Annual Flour Drop event. Mostly to just check my skills. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that after my very first attempt I took the lead! And here is where things got interesting – I was in the lead for the whole competition until at the very end my CFI came and said ‘it can’t be’ and he won it. I have to admit that despite being sure he’ll bit me I had hope. My competitive nature wanted me to win. Oh well. I’ve got two months to practice before Pumpkin Splat!.
Remember your PPL training? You were required to log in at least 3h of dual instrument training to fullfil the requirements. Now he question – when was the last time you did it again afterwards? In my case it was almost two years since I had the hood on for the last time. Remembering the fact that I’ve just entered the killing zone I’ve just started training for instrument rating. Today was the first lesson.
I met with Nick at 7am ready for takeoff, and shortly afterwards we were up in the air. Simulating low ceiling I put the hood at about 700ft AGL and off we went. As I still need some cross country time for IR ticket we headed in the general direction of Newton for the intention of making a landing there so I can log it as 50nm XC flight.
As for every first lessons today’s covered basics. Straight and level flight, standard rate turns, constant speed and constant rate climbs and descents. Nothing fancy. But that simply stuff was enough to show me that I almost completely forgot what I have learned during my PPL course. It wasn’t anything major, but still keeping the scan going and all needles where they were supposed to be was harder than I expected.
Especially altitude was playing tricks on me. And that is going to take a lot of skills honing as Arrow is quite pitch sensitive and likes to run away from you, especially if you have a tendency to use death grip on the yoke (which unfortunately I still have from time to time).
Turns weren’t that much nicer in the beginning until I forced myself to stop flying it by the feel and started to actually see and react to instruments. Couple of last turns turned out really nicely.
One very interesting thing (and the reason why I picked Nick for my instructor) was approach and landing at Newton. Nick works as an airline pilot in his day job and as such works the system every day. So he decided to play a little bit of ATC on me and vectored me for the visual approach like it was given by real controller:
- Arrow 36T turn left heading 160, maintain 2000ft expect visual approach runway 14
then just seconds after I turned 160 he added
- Arrow 36T cleared for visual approach runway 14… now take your googles off and land the airplane.
I looked outside and here I was – almost perfectly aligned with the runway on 5 miles final. Pretty damn neat considering that last time I knew where I was was back at the home airport some 60nm away 
. Quick touch and go and we were back in the air. This time the ceiling was even lower, I ‘lost visual’ at 400ft AGL in climbing left turn. Same thing happened back at Green Castle. I start to like it a lot. Can’t wait until we get to VOR tracking and all this stuff that will let me know where I am a little bit more often.
GPS track
1.5h (1.4h inst) : 2 to/ldg logged
107.1h (4.6h inst): 429 to/ldg total
On Friday I had a chance to do some ferry flight, we needed to retrieve our Arrow from annual. The flight was quite uneventful, if you do not count nice tailwind.
What is important is that during this flight I have reached 100h total time and as such I have entered the famous ‘Killing zone’. Apparently pilots between 100 and 250h total time are the most risky ones, the think they know it all already and tend to make mistakes which due to lack of experience are often deadly. I’m quite sure I do not know it all. Even more – to mitigate the risks I’m just starting my instrument training. Adding IR to my ticket seems to be good risk mitigation technique, don’t you think?
0.7h : 1 to/ldg logged
100.5h : 413 to/ldg total
It was my first flight alone in Arrow since I got checked out in it. The weather was great. When I climbed above the surface’s turbulence layer the air was so smooth like I was standing still. I’ve trimmed it out and was actually able to fly all the way without even touching the controls.
But if it was for the weather this flight wouldn’t ever make this column. But, as it happens, many (if not most) CFII tent to teach that we should operate constant speed propellers in a ‘squared’ manner. Some even say that you should never operate aircraft engines with manifold pressure (in inches Hg) higher than RPMs (in hundreds). Hence the famous 23 (or 24) squared meaning 23″ of manifold pressure and 2300 RPM. Being an engineer myself I always question such strong statements (always/never) especially when engine manufacturer’s manual clearly shows that the engine can be operated in other ways. Over the last few weeks I was reading some materials on the Internet. I especially like John Deakin’s column at AvWeb. His arguments make a lot of sense in my precise brain and I agree with (almost) all he says. One of the things he teaches is that whenever it’s possible we should fly WOT (wide open throttle). So knowing that I’ll have 0.5h each way to (literally) burn off I prepared myself and decided to try what John Deakin teaches in practice.
Main principle in his theory is that the air is free and any operations when the throttle is not wide open (unless it’s of course warranted by other flight conditions) it’s basically just a waste of time, speed and ultimately money, as the airplane engine with closed throttle is not as efficient as at WOT operations. So following John’s advice I took off and left the throttle wide open. As you may remember Green Castle lies below Cedar Rapid’s class C airspace so quick communication ordeal was in order. After having squawk assigned I kept climbing at rather brisk pace and quickly reached 5500ft. Somewhere in between I started to slowly back retard propeller handle and got RPMs down to about 2300 and my destination altitude. At that altitude the engine was getting only about 25″ of manifold pressure. Preparing for this flight I’ve checked Arrow’s POH and Piper allows to operate it’s engine about 4″ oversquare so my 2″ were right within allowed range. I kept waiting for any negative symptoms of such operations but couldn’t find any. The engine was humming and pulling me along. The airplane was flying around 130KTAS smooth and happy. Next time I had to touch the throttle was wen I started the descent to Ford Madison. One OWT (old wives tale) put to bed. Operating WOT will now became my modus operandi.
During that flight I did one more thing I’ve read in John’s articles – for the first time I did ‘the big pull’. So for the most of the flight my quadrant looked like this:
. But that’s a material for another story, when I get more data in.
Last couple of days didn’t really encourage flying at all. Despite clear skies and unlimited visibility you couldn’t really hear many airplanes flying around. It’s the wind that was causing all that quietness. Blowing steady in 25-30kt range put many (if not most) pilots and airplanes around outside their crosswind component comfort zone.
Today wind was a little more cooperating. Still blowing strong, but this time the direction was almost exactly down the runway, so it looked promising.
I went to the airport with the intention to finish my Arrow checkout. These days aviation is ruled by insurance companies and more often that not they are dictating what is legal or not. The FAA says that I need a complex rating to fly the Arrow. Our insurance company says, that I need at least 10h dual in the Arrow to do it. Good for me that I did not have the complex rating so I could use some of those 10 to get one. Which I did. Terry endorsed me after 5.5h dual. But I still needed to burn off those remaining 4.5.
After last week trip for lunch I was left with 1.7h required to finish the job today. So I opened weathermeister website and tried to pick up a route that would give me about 120-140 nautical miles range and 2 or 3 landings at different airports. Trying to rack up some hours for my IFR ticket I also needed to have at least one 50nm leg. So I’ve picked the 133.5 nm route: IA24 KTNU KPEA IA24. All three airports have runway that were more or less aligned with the wind (down to 10 degrees off the centerline).
The flight was good. Visibility was great and when I climbed a bit you could easily spot landmarks some 20 miles away. Strong winds made some interesting landings too. With wind gusting up to 30kt your groundspeed at touchdown is just around 40mph which gives quite short ground rolls. So short that I had to actually taxi on the runway in Newton to make the first taxiway despite it being at 1000ft mark.
After we got back to Green Castle it turned out that I’m still missing couple of tenths so we taxied back and took off for another round. But this time there was a surprise waiting for me. Just when I dropped down the gear and started configuring the airplane for landing the engine coughed and went to idle. No previous signs of any trouble no warning at all. Short evaluation led to the decision – I will make the runway. I trimmed the airplane immediately to keep the best glide speed and started turning towards the runway. Keeping in mind that speed is everything I went through emergency restart checklist, but everything looked normal. Not having time to play with it anymore I committed myself to landing. Now the biggest part of it all wat to not hit the trees. If you’ve seen Green Castle before you know what I mean. Bunch of trees on the left side of the runway 33 threshold makes for some interesting flying around the trees there. I made it easily but there was one more surprise coming at me. The ground rush. So severe I’ve never experienced it before. Neither C-172 nor Cherokee weren’t coming down nearly as fast as the Arrow does. Grass was completely blurred. That caught me a little by surprise, but I got it together quickly. When I was maybe 15-20 ft above the runway I quickly pulled all flaps (thans to johnson bar it’s trivial in Arrow). That instantaneously stabilized the airplane and made for one of the nicest landings I made today. Not only I was able to walk away, but the airplane was still flyable.
Yes, it was just simulated emergency landing. But because it wasn’t being called for before it was almost like real – definitely bumped things up a notch.
When we taxied back to the hangar, the hobs meter just clicked past the 1.7h mark for the flight completing my 10h dual insurance requirement.
1.7h : 4 to/ldg logged
86h : 384 to/ldg total
