I took another two week hiatus from flying to be with my family in Oregon. I'm running out of time to get my ticket in LA without having to re-do a bunch of stuff to learn how to speak 'Cessna' (the plane I'm flying in a very different from the Cessna's in Oregon), so my schedule is going to be pretty aggressive now.
Today was a holiday, so I scheduled a bunch of flying. I had an 8-10 lesson with my instructor planned, a solo from 11-12, another solo from 1PM to 2PM, and a night flight at 6. I get in late last night, and fall asleep around 2 in the morning. I wake up a minute before my 7AM alarm (which is my cell phone, sitting on a cardboard box next to the couch I'm sleeping on) goes off. My head is pounding, my eyes are bleary from lack of sleep, and I keep hearing this rhythmic splatter noise. As I come full awake, the alarm goes off, vibrating my phone off the box and onto the floor. I scramble through the detritus to shut it off before it wakes the friend who's letting me live in his livingroom when I realize the odd noise from outside is heavy rain.
I look out the window just as I hear a peal of thunder in the distance, and I begin to suspect that my flying plans are somewhat in doubt.
I roll into the flight school and, with a cup of $1.09 candy coffee in one hand and my newly stocked flight bag (inventory below) in the other, casually stroll up to the classroom. At least, as casually as a man with his jacket covering his head from the torrential downpour of a southern storm can be. Maybe I can finagle some way to fly the pattern, I'm thinking. I passingly entertain the idea that my instructor doesn't realize what the sky looks like, and I briefly entertain the fantasy that he'll just say 'Go ahead and fly some pattern work around the airport' because he thinks its just rain. After all, that thunder could be miles away!
"Hi Ben!" I turn around, and the idle fantasy is dashed (much like my plane would have been against the Santa Monica mountains if I had really flown into the towering cumulonimbus clouds, but it was a momentary musing, never a real plan) as I see my instructor running up behind me with some vending machine coffee from the pilots lounge. The free trip planning computer up there never seems to work for me, but I hear that the pay vending machines are eerily reliable. No matter, the jig is up.
"Howdy! I was thinking we should get started on that instrument rating, ready to fly?" It's a weak shot, but I'll take what I can get. Sadly, he laughs at the joke and directs me to the classroom.
We did an hour of review and went over some aerodynamics stuff that helped me grasp some subtleties of doing slips. I've always been worried about inducing a cross-controlled stall/spin (think Goose in Top Gun) when slipping, as the control inputs for both are identical. When my instructor talks about the some sideeffects of stalls, it suddenly clicks in my head that the control inputs ARE identical, the real difference is the AIRSPEED when you do them. If you're slow and do it, bam, you could fall out of the sky (for at least a few seconds). If you do it with 80knots in the Piper Cherokee I fly, though, it's nothing. Sure, you still fall out of the sky, but it's in short, controlled bursts of coordinated falling where you're pointed at the runway the whole time. Airliners do it all the time, right? So I tell myself not to worry.
Afterwards, I head out. I spend some time buzzing around town running various errands. I Xerox part of one of my air charts so that I can see a whole route I plan on flying on one page instead of half of it being on the other side of the chart, go get some lunch at the Souplantation (Generic clam chowder, when 'augmented' with several ounces of bacon bits and half a cup of shredded cheddar with a serious pour of Tobasco sauce, becomes a whole new animal. If you're from maine, please don't kill me.)
I somehow find myself in Van Nuys at the pilot supply store SunVal and marvel at their high priced stock of aviation gear. I think the cheapest part of flying I've found is the $5 stack of 'flight planning' sheets. And even THOSE are disposable, so it hardly counts. I grab a nicely printed copy of the poem 'High Flight':
"High Flight"
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I'm not much for potree, but this one touched me, especially the first time I heard it back in 1986 when President Reagan quoted it in his memorial to the brave crew of the Challenger.
As each hour passed, I grew more and more anxious. Like someone needing a 'fix', I kept watching the skies above Los Angeles. Around one in the afternoon, the sun starts peeking out over my area. I quickly call the weather robot at Santa Monica and it tells me that the conditions have improved enough to go flying. Chortling, I call my instructor and ask if he wants to fly. Cheese it, he's got a student until three! I see storm clouds in the distance, and I know weather can move in any time, but I tell him I'll be there and cross my fingers.
I head out to Santa Monica and go up to the Pilot's Lounge. I'm anxious to try out my new eBay acquisition, a nice pair of David Clark HL10-40 pilot headset. It's green, looks like it was made out of bakelite in WWII, and has a kickin' articulated steel microphone boom that can double as a weapon in close quarters combat. That, and it's the same model I've been borrowing for training, so I know I'll like 'em. Turns out the planning computer is busted (they should have installed our software) and the headphone jack doesn't fit, so I sit down and start chatting with another pilot who's hanging out. After a few minutes, my cell rings, and it's my intstructor telling me that his two o'clock "just cancelled and would I be interes-"
BAM! I'm already out the door running to the plane.
I get there and start preflighting it, and he shows up just as I finish. I'm standing there right before he arrives, feeling the wind, and call the weather robot again. He had told me that the wind was 7 knots earlier, but it feels somewhat stronger. This time, he tells me that the winds are now only 5 knots, but I suspect this to be inaccurate when I notice the palm trees bent over at a 45 degree angle. That, and the occasional rock that blows across the pavement in front of me gives me pause, but my instructor shrugs and says we should trust the weather guys and make our call by the runway, because maybe it's not so bad up there.
Sure enough, as we pull up to the runway, I notice the 15 knot windsock is almost sticking straight out, but it's directly down the runway with no crosswind, so... we call ATIS and get a new report of 13-14 knot winds, but no mention of windshear or gusts, so we get clearance and take off. At this point, I'm overjoyed to find that my headset is working perfectly. The control tower is getting ever syllable of my confident Chuck Yeager-like radio voice, and I can hear them clearly.
After this, it's pretty much normal flying. I take off (like a helicopter, those headwinds really shorten your ground roll) and do some work in the pattern to get de-rusted after my extended absence from the controls. Everything is clicking, I'm doing everything right, and I make four take offs and landings before we put the plane away.
At six, I show up again and we go for a night flight. We stay in the pattern because there are some menacing clouds staring at us around the airport, and we don't want to be trapped elsewhere if they roll in and eat the airport.
My instructor throws various emergencies at me, including flap failure (landing without flaps is FAST), landing light failure (landing in the dark without headlights is DARK) and an "Oh no, there's a fuel truck on the runway!" right as I flare about 5 feet above the ground. I cram the throttle, set a climb attitude, then clean up the aircraft by carefully getting rid of flaps one notch at a time. My instructor shakes his fist in the air and tells me I got it perfect and he's really happy to see my reactions to the various emergencies.
I might not have gotten the 5 hours of flying I was hoping for, but the 1.4 hours I DID get were a lot better then sitting on a guest couch with a laptop, wasting a holiday.
I have 8-10AM flights all week plus any lunchtime flying I can cram in, so hopefully I'll be close to 40 hours by Friday the 4th when I head back up to spend some time with my family. I can't wait until my new job gets going (theoretically, at the end of March) but I'm also sorta hoping I can get my Private Pilot Certificate before the move, so... it's hard, I'm betwixt.
I'll try to keep some of my other updates this week shorter, I couldn't stop these fingers from typing tonight as I'm still all hopped up of flying. Being out of the cockpit is like going cold turkey on coffee. You don't like it much, but when you come back, it hits you twice as hard as usual.
I'll take mine with sugar and avgas.
