fly: September 2007 Archives

This morning was exhausting. I just took a two-hour nap and feel like I've slept for a week.

Phase checks aren't graded, and they aren't pass/fail either. They are what they're called; a "check" at this "phase" of flight training that the student is moving in the right direction. But they certainly could be graded like school exams, and if they were, I'd have passed with a C+ grade.

The ground review section was fine. As usual I had to think for a few seconds before coming up with the right answers for some airspace questions, and there was an interesting question about a new kind of emergency (stuck throttle). I didn't know a few answers (What does HIWAS stand for? What is the cause of an overvoltage problem?), but there weren't any chronically deficient areas.

We got in the plane and flew off to our imaginary destination, a desolate spot in Nevada. In spite of my examiner's proper concern that error induced from the unpredictable liftoff from SQL (runway 12 or 30) plus various traffic conditions can lead to quite a different heading toward a waypoint, I got lucky and arrived at the Sunol Golf Course VFR waypoint right on time. However, I had to make things more interesting than that. I looked down to my left and confirmed we were over the lake, but the golf course was up ahead to the left, so I waited until we were overhead it, and then a minute longer to get to SUNOL, then turned onto the Victor airway toward Sacramento.

Unfortunately, I was about to learn that I had identified the wrong golf course: one that was about six miles past the one that constitutes the informal visual checkpoint west of SUNOL. We'd turned a significant distance north of our course.

Ever the optimist, Patti turned the situation into a genuine version of the lost procedure, and asked me to look out the window (as opposed to using GPS or the VORs) to figure out where we were. Although I quickly identified the lake near Byron, I didn't have enough of a sense of scale to quickly turn that into a fix on our position. I had to circle for quite a while to decide that we were right between Tracy and Modesto, close to the north side of Tracy. I got the right answer, but it just took too long.

Next, Patti asked me to divert to New Jerusalem. I got this essentially right: heading 140, about eight nm away, arrive in four minutes, use 0.6 gallons of gas. I put us on course for the airport and sure enough saw a lonely runway below us at the expected time. However, it took me far too long to convince myself that it was the right airport; I didn't have the A/FD in the front seat, and that was the only way to tell that New Jerusalem's runway was indeed 12/30. So I had to reach into the back seat and fumble around for the book. But eventually it worked out, and when I announced my answer, Patti said it was correct. Again, right answer, just too long to get it.

We talked through the entry and landing pattern, and unfortunately Patti was satisfied, because she skipped straight to a simulated engine-out emergency. I went through this procedure correctly, but my spiral downward wasn't lined up properly such that I could exit right onto final. Instead, my entry into the spiral was on the centerline. So on exit, I had to turn to get on final. This led to a sequence of problems: getting on centerline late caused me to be late to adjust the glide slope, which caused me to be too high, which gave me too little time to get my approach speed correct. I was too fast, too high, and too close to the runway. About halfway down the runway I decided to go around, which I did. This was the right decision in the situation, but I shouldn't have gotten into the situation. I clearly failed the engine-out emergency.

Next was hood work and navigation to a VOR. This was fine. Coming home to SQL was fine. There was a 7-knot right crosswind on the soft-field landing that I handled OK, but I fell into an old habit of relaxing the controls on touchdown and didn't keep the ailerons pushing against the crosswind, so we drifted off centerline on the post-landing roll.

Something new: it turns out that Tower can hand you to Ground without saying "taxi to parking, monitor ground point six." What he actually said was "Contact ground point six" but didn't clear me to taxi. I would have failed this on a checkride because I misheard this as clearance to taxi and started rolling before Patti kindly pointed out the mistake.

And finally, I let my mind distract myself in the parking area. While running through all the mistakes I'd made during the phase check, I skipped pulling the mixture full lean and just shut off the mags. I didn't notice the problem right away because this particular plane sometimes takes a while to sputter to a stop with the mixture full lean, and the behavior was identical to that. Patti quickly figured out the problem, though, and all was well. We later joked that we needed a new section on the phase check for how to shut off an airplane.

For my loyal readers, if any, I'd like to squish a nanomeme that is thriving amid the Steve Fossett search. Here's an example:

"The search has been complicated by the fact that the 63-year-old veteran of numerous record-breaking solo airplane and balloon flights failed to file a flight-plan for what was supposed to be a routine three-hour jaunt."

This is flat-out wrong. A flight plan for an area flight (that is, one where the origination and destination airports are the same) would not specify anything other than the name of the airport and how long the flight was expected to be. Here's how the phone call would go:

"Hello, I'd like to file a VFR flight plan. Tail number N240R. Decathlon slant golf. 100 knots, leaving from Flying M Ranch near Smith Valley. Cruise altitude 2,500 feet AGL. Destination Flying M Ranch. Time enroute two hours. Five hours of fuel. One person onboard. Contact telephone xxx-xxx-xxxx. Aircraft is blue with yellow. OK, thanks, bye."

This helps explain why he didn't file a flight plan -- because it would be nearly useless. Flight plans don't help rescuers when your route is imprecise. The purpose of Fossett's flight was to scout out ground locations for a car, so the route was necessarily imprecise.

At this point, all we know is that the plane is probably within a circle of radius 500 nautical miles (5 hours of fuel @ 100 knots), centered at the Flying M Ranch (only "probably" because of the chance of winds, UFOs, and government coverups). That is unfortunately over a million square miles, and the area wouldn't have been any smaller if Fossett had filed a flight plan.