Squawk1200

Yup, out with the student certificate and in with the private.  What can I say?  I’m riding on air now. Now, before I get into today’s events, I do want to take time out to paint a picture of sorts.  We start with a kid who grew out of being scared to death of fighter jets buzzing his childhood home and ended up fascinated by the sky.  For his 12th birthday, he got perhaps the coolest gift ever- a sightseeing trip in a 172 over the coast of North Carolina.  He could hardly see over the panel, but he still flew the plane (at least in a manner of speaking) for a bit.  Wonderful.  Then years went by, interests changed… probably like most any teenager.  The bug came back in his 20s… but by this time, there had been some subpar life choices… setbacks, if you will.  The next ten years were a constant rehash of the same tune… maybe next year, I can do it.  Then maybe the next, the next, and so on.  By the time that third decade was drawing to a close, he’d mostly quit believing even himself when that “maybe next year” junk came out.

So that’s pretty much where I was last fall when I got what would be described very inadequately as An Opportunity I Couldn’t Refuse.  In the space of six months, I’ve gone from somewhere in the neighborhood of mental surrender to sneaking peeks every few minutes at my new certificate.  So hopefully this illustrates the meaning of this achievement to me- it’s not just “something I always wantd to do,” it pretty much was the thing I wanted to do.  Anyways, I digress… I’d hate to bore anyone out of reading the rest of this missive.

When the alarm went off this morning, it seemed I’d just gotten to sleep- well, that pretty much was the case actually.  My plans for a 10 PM bedtime worked out to more like 1 or so… I kept finding a few more things I wanted to go over or be sure about.  Still, I didn’t really feel too tired- I knew what the day had in store, and it was still far enough out that I could feel anticipation instead of nervousness. (the latter condition usually only kicks in for me just before the event in question… interview, test, etc.)  As planned, I met Scott over at PDK at the ungodly hour of 7 AM.  Here, he bestowed upon me the final logbook endorsement… I was deemed ready for the practical test.  Preflight went like any other day… taxi out, airborne, turn north on course.  A bit of a tailwind got us to CHA in no time… in fact, we were 30 minutes early.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite enough time to make a breakfast run… besides, there was no one at the FBO to get us the courtesy car.

Before long, Ben showed up, and Scott introduced me.  After a bit of small talk, we migrated back to Ben’s office to get things under way.  The first order of business was to review my application and ensure everything was in order… check.  Ben then gave me a rundown of what was going to happen.  This speech did a lot to calm my nerves- the entire process was clearly laid out, and I began to feel (somewhat) at ease.  A few more record checks of my student certificate and logbook, and it was time to get down to the fun part.  What followed was a minor barrage of questions: show me the plane is airworthy and ready to fly, let’s look at your planned cross-country, what would be minimums to fly in Class G below 1200′ during the daytime, what about above 1200′, what about Class E, what equipment do you need to fly in Class C, etc.  I only bungled two questions here: the duration of my third-class medical (five years, not three!) and the required interval for transponder inspection. (24 months, not “unspecified blank look”)  Then it was on to the sectional… what’s this?  What does this mean?  Show me Class D airspace. What’s this funny gray line that says VR546?  What about this white line around Atlanta?  The final portion involved Ben showing me various weather products and making sure I knew what I was doing with weather checks.

All told, the oral was far less grueling than I had expected.  Those few bungles were rathr isolated- for the most part, I had all the answers ready to go, and only suffered a few brain farts.  But now it was on to the next phase- flying the airplane.  I gathered my junk and went out to the plane.  During my preflight, Ben would occasionally ask me a question… what’s that hole in the wing? (stall horn)  What about this triangular thing on the wing? (stall strip)  How do we know when the tires are unusable?  Do you know why the wingtips curve up slightly?

First takeoff was a normal one, after which I flew to the VOR and then turned on my initial course to Savannah.  I hadn’t gone far when (as expected) Ben told me to divert to Dalton.  I wasn’t sure if cheating- I mean using the GPS- was permissible, so I asked.  GPS was fine- ok, works for me.  Get the direct route to DNN and we were on our way.  This was where I’d perform my required takeoffs and landings.  Number 1 was to be my short-field, with a simulated obstacle at the beginning of the runway.  I selected the 1000′ markers as my touchdown point and got to work.  I still felt a bit iffy on short-fields, and was as worried about this as anything else, but I absolutely nailed it, dropping the mains right in the middle of the markers and making the first turnoff.  Short-field takeoff went great- nothing too hard about those, really.  Next time around was soft-field time, and here I bungled a bit.  I kept my approach speed under control, but flared a bit high… and as soon as I flared, the stall horn sounded.  This would be a good sound if I was just off the runway, but I wasn’t.  Putting in a bit of power would have been the right thing to do, but instead I tried to monkey the stick, and I ended up plunking the plane down much harder than I wanted.  I waited for Ben to call me on it, but there was no sound.  This would seem to indicate it was satisfactory, but I couldn’t help but doubt it.  Anyway, can’t dwell on it, got other stuff to do.  Next takeoff was a soft-field- I leveled out a bit higher than I wanted, but recovered nicely and departed the pattern to the north.

Next up was my ground reference maneuver- in this case, a turn around a point.  The point was at my discretion; an additional consideration was that I was going to have an engine failure just after completion, so a point with an adjacent field would be nice. (if only real-life engine failures came with such advanced notice!)  I first picked out a water tower, flew to it, and executed my clearing turns, but as I got closer, I saw that there was a ridge nearby with a tower on it.  Probably outside my turn radius, but I wasn’t comfortable with it, so I continued north in search of a better spot.  I settled on a rusty tin-roofed barn surrounded by farmland, and flew a nice circle around it.  Coming back ot my original course- oh no, my engine failed! (Surprise!)  “What are you going to do?”  Pitch for best glide, no time to run checklists at 1000′ AGL, that field over there looks good… ok, time to recover.  Far easier than I expected.

But ohh, now it was time for my favorite torture device, the foggles.  Been took the airplane while I donned the cursed things, and then I was instructed to climb on course to 3000′.  With the exception of accidentally leveling off at 2000′, this went fine.  Took me a few minutes to get my scan going right, but I did OK in the meantime.  Once I was at 3000′, I demonstrated two course reversals. (simulating turning to get out of the clouds I just flew into)  No problem here… time for unusual attitudes.  These were easy- both times, I picked my head up to find the airplane just in a steep bank with the nose on the horizon.

Oboy, slow flight!  Throttle back, flaps out, stick the plane down at about 55 knots.  Ben gave me a turn to the right, no problem, followed by a power-off stall, and then a power-on stall.  These went without a hitch.  Finally, it was time for those steep turns I’d practiced so much.  Dammit, I knew I was going to get these right!  Cleared the area for traffic, and then started my turn to the left.  Only problem was that about 1/4 of the way in, I realized I hadn’t noted my entry heading or picked out a landmark for the rollout.  So I used my best guess, which turned out to be about 30 degrees off.  I confessed my sin to Ben, then nailed my turn to the right- hardly any altitude drift, rollout right on heading.  Much better.

OK, now take out the sectional and show me where we are.  Witha little help from the Chattanooga VOR, I figured out the general area.  OK, now find me this airport.  That didn’t go quite as well as I planned, but I got in the vicinity and eventually spotted it over my left shoulder. (the runway was somewhat concealed by trees along the edges)  And that was it- get on course to CHA and take us home!  Too bad that last landing wasn’t my soft-field, because it was a squeaker.  A bit of a crosswind had kicked up, but I yawed the plane straight before putting the wheels down.

On the taxi back, I started wondering… I thought I’d done well overall, but was acutely aware that I hadn’t done so well on the steep turn and soft-field landing.  Ben had said that he’d make it clear if I failed any portion, but even the lack of that feedback didn’t quite convince me.  Ben headed inside with Scott while I secured the airplane.  He still hadn’t indicated whether or not I passed.  Once I got inside, I found Ben and Scott talking to a guy from the FBO.  All this small talk… I WANT AN ANSWER!  ARGH!!!  But then the conversation ended and Ben let out a wonderful sentence: “Let’s go back and get your certificate signed.”  And so we did.

Bottom line: I gather that I did much better than the average stundet, both in training and the practical.  Total flight time, including the checkride, comes out to 48.1 hours.  Now it’s time for new goals… first steps will probably be some endorsements (complex, high perf, tailwheel), and further down the road, an instrument rating.  Who knows where else I might go…

At long last, the battle to squeeze in that last hour or so of solo time has been won, and none to soon- checkride time is now a mere 3.5 days away.  And what an interesting bit of flight it was… more on that later.

First, let’s wind the clock back to Sunday morning.  This had been my original time I’d intended to go do my solo time… but the winds were a bit stiff.  I knew Scott wanted to go up for a bit more dual to polish my short-field landings, so I kidnapped him and solo time turned into dual time.  The flight started with a first for both Scott and I- using runway 27 at PDK.  Winds were above 10 knots and almost straight out of the west, so 27 became the active for small folks like us.  I actually had to get assistance from the ground controller to figure out how to get there.

The flight was relatively benign- we spent some time in the pattern for 27, pulling four or so short-field landings.  With the exception of the first attempt, I put the airplane down fairly close to the numbers.  After that, we requested to switch to 2L, the long runway, for some crosswind practice.  After the last crosswind outing, I’d spent some time reading up on sideslipping and was ready to give it a try.  So once I got established on final, I did what I remembered- step on the rudder to align the plane with the runway, and dip a wing to control sideways drift.  The slip set up nicely… but the problem was that that added workload of maintaining the slip caused me to really lose control of my speed and slope.  Within a few seconds, I’d tacked on an extra 10 knots and was getting close to exceeded Vfe.  After a bit of struggling, I abandoned the slip in the interests of getting the plane down safely, but by this time I was way low, and was in danger of touching down in the displaced threshold.  Not good.  A bit of power carried me into the legal landing area, but a big ugly bounce and a go-around wrapped up that ugly approach.

Second time around, I decided to try those slipping fundamentals again, but to wait to apply them in the flare.  This worked out much better for me, and while the landing wasn’t brag-worthy, it was safe.  The next time around, I had Scott demonstrate a good sideslip for me… jeez, maybe I’ll be able to do that one day.  I tried slipping earlier in the approach next time around, but once again my pitch control went to crap.  I think I just need to practice this on a day with a gentle crosswind until I can maintain the slip without getting overloaded.  In the meantime, I can at least fairly competently crab the airplane in and transition to the slip in the flare.

That brings us to today’s activities.  546 spent the morning over at LZU getting the radio looked at.  I had the choice of either driving to LZU in the evening traffic (yuck), or else Scott could fly the plane to PDK and meet me there.  His car would still be at LZU, but I’d planned on doing pattern work at LZU instead, so I offered to just run him back out there from PDK.  After bailing out of work, I found he was running a bit behind, so I went out to the observation park and enjoyed the view until I spotted a familiar Diamond in the pattern.

Over on the ramp, we hoped in the plane and things started to go wrong.  Got the plane started OK, flipped on the master, and went to put my headset on.  First I pressed the power button on the headset’s control box, but the light wouldn’t come on.  Crap, guess the batteries are dead.  Well, it still works OK without the ANR, I’ll be OK.  Then, as I put the set over my ears, a popping noise issued from the left side and I saw a couple bits of… something flying off the set.  Closer look showed that a couple of screws had departed, and a test-fit demonstrated that the headset was not going to be usable until fixed.  Crap again.  I killed the engine and Scott ran inside the get the school’s loaner headset, nickname Brain Squeezer 5000.  My favorite.

Dum de dum, taxi, takeoff, turn east… and now Scott is really getting in mock exam mode.  During the taxi, he casually reached up and unlatched his side of the canopy, apparently just to check if I was payng attention.  As for the airborne portion- well, I tend to fly with my hand always on the throttle, so I suspect Scott must have been waiting anxiously for me to scratch my nose or something.  I don’t even remember what I was doing with my hand, but a movement out of the corner of my eye preceded a sudden decrease in engine noise.  I was completely caught off-guard, and it took me a full fifteen seconds or so to get my brain working and start pitching for best glide.  After that, I started looking outside the plane… I was at 2500′ in the suburbs of Atlanta.  Landing spots were, to say the least, not plentiful.  I-85 was nearby and probably would have been my best bet, but with evening traffic, even that probably wouldn’t have been pleasant.  I had to be prompted to run the checklist and simulate other tasks like squawking 7700 and calling on 121.5.  Not a great performance.

Some more oral quizzing followed during the remainder of the flight… electrical failure, flat tire or daamged main wheel, etc.  Entering the pattern, Scott took the plane, ostensibly to take a look at the traffic he’d be fighting on the way back into town.  That may or may not have been legit, but regardless, at the end of the downwind leg he pulled out the throttle again and looked at me.  “OK, land it.”  This I can do… got plenty of glide range, so first notch of flaps come out early.  As I turned base and got sight of the runway, I felt I was quite a bit high and close in, so I dropped the last notch of flaps early.  Closer to the ground, I started to regret that decision, but a glance at the airspeed conpared to my sight picture told me I could make it just past the numbers, and I did, though with a few bounces.  Not my best… with the long runway at LZU, I could have left the flaps out a bit longer.  Landing long beats landing in the grass.

After booting Scott out of the plane, it was time for me to get to work.  My plan was to spend some time in the pattern at LZU practicing short-field landings, then head up to the lake for a few maneuvers just for the sake of staying in the pattern.  As best I remember, the next few minutes went roughly like this:

“546DC, cleared for takeoff runway 25, make right closed traffic.”

I read back the instructions, performed a soft-field takeoff, and went about flying my pattern.  The downwind leg went by without a peep from the tower, which should have alerted me.  Got into my base leg, still hadn’t heard anything… should have alerted me, but I was busy thinking about making a nice short-field approach.  I was about to turn final when the tower controller spoke in my ear about traffic off to my left… and this was no minor report.  A Piper of some kind was maybe a quarter-mile away… he was on approach as well.  Quick action by the tower had him go missed while I continued my approach.  On short final, I got a stern reproach that I needed to call when making my base turn.

I’ve already alluded to what went wrong, and the core of it was me not thinking straight.  I was thinking about making a glorious approach and plunking the Diamond down on the numbers.  And while I hadn’t received any instructions contrary to continuing my pattern, nor had I heard any comms with the other aircraft on approach, alarm bells should have gone off when I hadn’t gotten a landing clearance prior to turning base.  I still think the tower could have informed me a bit better of the traffic situation, but the fact remains that I am responsible for safe operation of the aircraft, and I didn’t do that.  Luckily, the situation was resolved safely… when it comes to big, practical lessons, another airplane converging from about 1000′ away really does the trick.

That pretty much cast a pall on the rest of my flight.  I made four circuits at LZU, flying passable but far from stellar patterns.  I still got the airplane on or near the numbers on all but that first landing.  And I by-God made sure to talk to the tower on downwind.  After #4, I turned north towards the lake, pulled a few steep turns, and then decided that the sun was getting low enough that I needed to get back to PDK.

All in all, this wasn’t the flight I would have picked just before the checkride.  The near-miss was a serious blow to my confidence; a necessary blow perhaps, but a blow nonetheless.  Prior to today, I was confident about the checkride… there was always that little doubting voice in my mind, but I felt good.  I think what got me about today was the way the aftereffects of the near-miss- anxiety, nerves, whatever you want to call it- had a negative effect on my flying.  I can’t afford that on Saturday.  Hopefully the cross-country to CHA will get me back in a positive state of mind.

Sunday afternoon was beautiful, a really wonderful day to fly.  That was great, but the unfortunate truth was that the flight I had in store was going to involve me spending a fair portion of the time not looking outside the plane… yep, plan of the day was to wrap up my hood time.  The secondary goal was to get myself some time in windy conditions- up until this point, almost all my flying has come on relatively calm days.  Sunday was quite different, though, with winds at about 10 knots gusting to 20 or so.  Well, got to get a feel for it some time, and better to have someon experienced up there with me.

This was really the first day I’d felt compelled to pay close attention to procedures for taxiing into the wind; with the gusts moving the plan about noticeably, it didn’t take much encouragement for me to hold the ailersons and elevators to help keep the plane pinned down.  The strong headwind on runway 34 made for a short roll and a nice rate of climb… but I scarcely got to enjoy it before Scott took the plane an instructed me to bring out the foggles.  The good thing was that my flying was vastly improved over the previous instrument outing; despite the gusty and bumpy conditions, I did a better job holding my altitude, course, and so on than before.  The climbout was a bit of a workout as Scott kept vectoring me to stay clear of clouds that I, of course, couldn’t see.

Soon, however, we were on course for Winder.  After a bit of basic flying, we had a go at unusual attitudes.  I’d done this before without the foggles, and recalled the procedures just fine.  Head down, let Scott fly all over the place, la-de-da, ok, heads up.  Climbing turn… full throttle, nose down, wings level.  Nothing to it. (though it’s fairly easy to anticipate what I’ll see when Scott’s flying ends with a big pull)  We pulled a few more- one of which I briefly boggled as I responded to nose-down with full throttle.  Nope, wrong answer- throttle to idle.

Next up were some simulated instrument failures.  Uh-oh, looks like the vacuum system has failed. (Common symptoms of vacuum failure include yellow Post-It notes appearing on the DG and AI)  Without these two instruments, the secondary instruments come into play.  Turn indicator gives an initial look at whether I’m turning, and the altimeter, VSI, and to a lesser extent, airspeed indicator give me an idea of pitch.  Direction falls back to the wonderful magnetic compass.  I did OK with some compass turns, though I had to deal with barely being able to see the thing- it’s located at the top of the panel, under the shroud, and I’m tall, which requieres me to sort of hunch down to eyeball the thing.  All told, I found it far less challenging than I expected to maintain attitude and altitude without the gyro instruments.

With that, we were nearly on top of Winder.  Off came the foggles, and my first challenge was to pick out the airport and get set up for landing.  I had a bit of trouble spotting it; I was used to seeing it from a different direction.  In the pattern, the wind had a rather negative effect upon my ground track- even though the crosswind component was small, the wind still played havoc with my base and final turns.  On final, the changing wind kept my glide slop constantly changing, and my first touchdown was a bit rough.  Scott advised me to keep the power in a bit longer than usual to kept counter the changing wind; this helped out a lot on my next few landings.  After a bit, we pulled a full-stop, with the intention of stopping in at the Spitfire Deli for some lunch.  Scott announced our taxi destination as we cleared the runway, only to hear a rather disheartening response on CTAF: ‘Restaurant is closed on Sunday.”  Well poop.  Guess we’ll taxi back and move on to other things.

“Other things,” in this case, meant more foggle time!  Yay!  Had to be done, though.  While I resumed concentrating on the instruments, Scott had me fly towards LZU for a bit more pattern work.  While Winder had a runway favorable to the wind conditions, Gwinnett would instead present nearly a direct crosswind.  This proved to be a pretty strenuous experience- I was keeping a pretty impressive (to me, at least) crab angle to stay aligned with the runway, and got blown all over the place during the flare. (I say “the flare” rather than “my flare” because Scott was doing most of the work while I turned into a quivering blob of Jell-O)  As if that wasn’t enough fun, once I stuck in power and got off the ground, a nice gust flipped the left wing up- not exactly a fun experience when you’re just off the ground.  On the downwind, I was amazed at how much wind correction I had dialed in to stay parallel to the runway.  Landing #2 was mostly my doing, but far from pretty.  Yup, gusty crosswinds make everything more fun.

Then it was back to PDK for (I think) my first experience landing on 34.  Despite knowing my position and where to expect the runway, I saw 9/27 off my wing first and had to fight my urge to line up with it- it was a rather tempting sight, but I knew better.  I wrapped up with a nice landing on 34 and a bobble when calling ground. (told them the wrong taxiway, but caught myself before I finished my transmission)

This flight wrapped up nearly all of my dual time requirements- the only thing remaining was a required 3 hours of practical review.  I need to log another hour and a half or so of solo time to get to the minimums.  All told, I’m getting pretty close to being ready for the checkride- but first I’ve got to stop procrastinating and get the written knocked out.  I’m hoping to work that in this coming weekend, and then I’ll be ready to schedule my checkride and maybe even become a real private pilot.  Somehow, Sunday’s flight made checkride time seem a lot more imminent than before…