Saturday, January 26, 2008

Energy is the key!

‘So – whaddya learn today Abner?’

‘Well Maw, seems enegy’s whur-its at flyin them thar planes wit the lil wheel doohicky at the back an all’

‘Y’mean yoo bin flyin all this time an you ain’t figgurd that aht yet?’

‘No Maw, guess I’m not real smart lahk’



OK – so that sums up my lesson flying circuits in the RV6 taildragger. The weather was good, with about 10 kts just slightly off the runway of 22 at Gloucester. Of course as I took off a large nasty cloud appeared and kicked up some gusts. The tower gave me a running commentary on the weather on my first final. It started with.

‘Wind 230 at 12 gusting 30’

Then as if that wasn’t enough to get my attention,

‘Caution, turbulence reported over the buildings on short final’

OK – wide awake now! The first two T&G’s were tentative and workmanlike, but OK I guess. Controlling the roll was better as were the subsequent takes offs.

The next few were one good and one not so good. But on the not so good ones, Roly asked me what happened and I told him. I know what I am doing wrong and at least do correct it.

Well in the end, I guess I just ran out of different ways of screwing up the landings and started to do good ones fairly consistently. It helped that the nasty black cloud had moved off and at least the wind had died down.

I learned that energy is the key and that the RV6 is happiest landing at 65kts and that there is a huge difference between 65 and 70 kts. That extra five knots will have you holding off for quite some time at the mercy of every crazy gust of wind.

In the end, after 11 circuits, Roly offered to jump out (I think he planned to do this when we had stopped on the ground!) and let me do a couple of solo circuits. I was sorely tempted, but as I am going on holiday to Canada shortly, then moving house on the weekend I get back, all this means I won’t fly again until 23 February at the earliest, so I declined, saying I preferred to do this again in late February and take it from there when I know I can fly most weekends.

So the drill is to do some decent landings with Roly in simple wind conditions, then fly off myself a few times in winds of 10 kts or less and no more than 30 degrees off the runway to build my confidence, then come back to him for serious crosswind training and full sign off.

Sounds good and I can’t wait. My wife is starting to wince at landing and instructor fees!

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Circles in the sky

Another busy weekend with two flying lessons. Saturday was my FAA BFR in a plane I had never flown, with an instructor I didn’t know at an airfield I was unfamiliar with!

Sunday was more circuits in the RV6. The day looked ideal for it. Clear with a light and steady wind straight down runway 22.

Roly turned up his ever-cheerful self. I checked out the plane and hauled it out of the hangar that it shares with two large Citation business jets – sat tucked up in the corner like a little urchin who tries to stay out of the big boys dorm!

I am feeling a bit better finding things in the cockpit now, still not natural, but at least I know where to look. We started up and taxied out.

The take off was OK-ish, but I didn’t put enough right rudder in at the right time, so lurched a bit to the left of the runway. She climbs like a bat out of hell and I was at 1000’ on the upwind and turned while pulling the throttle and levelling out at the same time.

The circuit was reasonably quiet with only one other in and we were well spaced. Towards the end of the session, it started to get full with three and then four in the circuit, so I had to keep the speed well down on the downwind.

I all I did ten circuits and landed on the tenth at my request, mainly because I started to get tired!

The first few touch and go’s were not great. I only did one ‘bouncer’ and that wasn’t too bad. But I wasn’t holding off long enough and not putting right rudder in during the take-off.

However, in the last five or so, it started to come together, and the last two were very rewarding indeed.

Bottom line is that it was a very good session from my point of view, a real ‘learning experience’ with Roly allowing me to make the mistakes and correct them and learn from it. I think I am getting the hang of simple ‘slight wind straight down the runway’ taildragger landings, but I would like another full session doing the same just to cement them in. Then I expect he will want to take me onto the far more entertaining crosswind landings!

What a great aircraft. The range of speed it can operate over is amazing. Probably happiest at 150kts at one end but also quite content just ‘hanging there’ at 65kts trundling in on final. This is a real eye-opener for me. I can’t wait to do a bit of touring in it.

FAA BFR

Having established that it is easier to get a Canadian licence based on an FAA licence, the next hurdle was to get an FAA BFR to bring my FAA licence back into validity. I got my standalone FAA ticket just over three years ago and have not yet done the BFR that is due every two years.

Fortunately, there is an FAA instructor that lives in Oxford, so I can do it there. Next snag is that I am not signed off for tailwheel differences, so I couldn’t use the RV6 I have a share in. So I arranged to hire an old Piper Cherokee 180 from Pilot Flight Training at Oxford.

The day was fairly clear with good visibility and cold. There was a bit of a wind and at 240 / 15 it made for a nice crosswind on runway 19 at Oxford.

Bill Tollett turned up after I checked the aircraft and while it was being refuelled. So we had a briefing.

FAA BFR’s are merely flight reviews where you have to do a couple of hours review of the FAA Regulations and air law and then one hours flying training. There is no pass or fail, it is merely proof that you have had one hours flying instruction. I handed Bill the written questions he emailed me a few weeks ago with the answers and FAR / AIM references clearly indicated. One of them was a swine as for a long time, I couldn’t find where it listed the maintenance tasks a pilot was allowed to do – I knew it was in there, but could I find it? Could I buffalo! I did eventually find it tucked away.

G-AYEE

Bill suggested we do the usual upper air work, steep turns, stalls etc. Including the US speciality – the departure stall! This is a fun one – you clean the aircraft up into take-off configuration, stuff in full power and nose up and up and up until it stalls at quite a steep climb angle. The upper airwork was fine. I find the contrast between the PA28 and the RV6 very stark indeed, but the PA28 felt like an old friend as I had trained on it and flown an Arrow for a while.

He gave me a simulated engine failure around Enstone and radioed for a landing on the northside grass. I went through the drill and must have been a bit dopey as I lined up downwind in the wrong direction! Bill didn’t say anything until fairly late when he realised I really hadn’t twigged that landing with a tailwind wasn’t a good idea! He did mention it though and I felt a perfect idiot and turned hard to line up for a more conventional approach. I thought the height was good, pulled on one stage of flaps, but obviously misjudged the headwind as I had to take the flap off as it was touch and go whether we would make it or not. Bill decided on a go-around as we may have made it but may also have taken the aerial off the control tower that stood between me and the threshold of the northside grass! CONCENTRATE STEVE!

We headed back to Oxford for a few circuits in various configurations. First was a normal approach and landing. The circuit height at Oxford is 1200’ QFE and left myself quite high and I probably cut too short a final. I got the height off with a sideslip and landed for a touch and go.

Next up a flapless. Again, left myself too high (what’s wrong with me today?), but got it off with sideslip and did a pretty fair crosswind flapless landing. I remembered from my training that I always seemed to do better flapless landings in the PA28’s than conventional landings for some reason.

Then the US favourite, landing with the wheels touching on a particular spot on the runway. In this case, the intersection of the two runways. I was determined to hit this. Handled it well and at low speed I was just over the spot but still a couple of feet up so I cheated and nudged the yoke down slightly then up again. We touched sure enough – not hard, but there was no doubt we were down! I apologised for cheating!

The final one was a glide approach with me pulling the power when I felt I could get in. While on the downwind leg a medivac Beech twin overtook us and had priority landing clearance with a vehicle following him down the runway. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the plane, but perhaps the passenger. So we extended a bit. Once that was clear I approached final and was pretty close and high. I could almost feel Bill biting his tongue thinking ‘pull the power, pull the power….’, I did pull it and yep – waaaayyyy too high. But this time I was determined not the cut it fine like I had at Enstone.

Full flaps, best glide, still way too high. So into a full sideslip as we started to hurtle down. This was doing the trick. I held the slip in until about 50’, then unwound it with an airspeed of 75kts and dropped to the flare and just flew level until the airspeed dropped. Made a reasonable landing of it in the crosswind, which I felt may have made up for the poor height judgement.

Back to the flight school and Bill signed the BFR off. The feedback was that apart from just missing at Enstone, my checks were a bit fast and he advised me to slow down and be more deliberate. Also he said my landings were good, but my circuits were a bit scrappy and the approaches were not great, the fact that I could land well off of such approaches didn’t disguise the average circuits. Thinking on it I do see what he means and vow to make amends in future. It is always good to have a variety of different instructor’s views – you never quite know what they will spot that you could do better.

Anyway, job done and FAA BFR in the book.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Solo aerobatics

On my last aerobatics lesson, my instructor, Max, had verbally ‘signed me off’ for solo aerobatics limited to loops and rolls only. His advice was to do four or five hours by myself until I got them really ‘off pat’ with no more than 5 weeks between sessions, then come back to him to polish up on stall turns and to do more complex aerobatics that required speeds and throttle control much closer to the margins for the versatile Robin.

So this was to be my first solo aerobatics session.

The weather looked OK, broken and thin cloud, hard to tell how high, but I envisaged climbing ‘on top’ and doing aerobatics up there with the cloud undercast as the ‘hard deck’.

I turned up at the airfield first thing in the morning, so no first hand advice on cloud height. Nevertheless, I checked the Robin out. It needs a careful check before solo aerobatics as I emptied my pockets, ditched the loose items in the aircraft and discovered a spare torch and a pen clip in the pilot foot well – accidents waiting to happen! I also strapped up and secured the passenger side five point harness – you don’t want to get smacked in the mouth by a flailing strap at the top of a loop!

Hmmm…. fuel just below the second mark. Given that I was solo (so less weight) and the cloud could close in beneath me and mean perhaps a hold and an NDB / DME let down, I opted to put a bit more fuel in. So I taxied over to the pumps and squirted a further 25 litres in – making me feel more comfortable – I don’t want a blinking fuel light if I have an instrument let down to do!

I lined up and took off and climbed to my stomping ground between Bredon Hill and Wellesborne Mountford airfield. At 3800’ I was scraping my head on the bottom of the clouds – drat – it is right at the height I don’t want it to be at. I could go above, but the undercast would probably be at 4200’, meaning I would have to be doing the manoeuvres between 5500’ and 4300’ – not a good altitude for the Robin as it is decidedly asthmatic much above 4500’. So I decided to start at 3700’ with the usual 3000’ as the hard deck.

Check and HASELL check complete, I popped 7004 into the transponder, turned the electric fuel pump on and turned on every light the plane had.

I started with rolls to both the left and right, with a ‘push’ while inverted to flatten out the bottom of the sacred circle. As I guess I expected, the first one or two to each side were not great (but OK-ish). After that, I have to say I found them pretty straightforward and I seem to have got the hang of when and how much to push, when to stop etc. Although the roll rate to the left is quicker than to the right, I seem to find rolling to the right a little better for me. I did about nine rolls to both sides (i.e. 18 in total), interspersed between some loops.

The loops were a bit different. The first three of four weren’t that good, in fact two of these were definitely dodgy! One was very lopsided (I must have pulled back crooked) and the other – well, suffice to say I lost a fair bit of altitude! Its odd how much you miss the visual and verbal clues you pick up on when the instructor is there, but then I guess that is what solo is all about, developing your own ‘inner voice’.

I think my own ‘inner voice’ started to come on-stream and I was working the loops much better towards the end of the session and losing much less altitude with a better float over the top. I think I got there by the end of the session, finishing off with what felt like two good loops. All in all, I probably did nine loops.

I checked the time and found I was already out for 1 hours and ten minutes – time to head back.

I composed myself and allowed the adrenaline to die down about and headed back at the leisurely 90 knots that the Robin does in the cruise. I had to wait for a gap in the combined tower and approach frequency, with the controller patiently trying to sort out what sounded like students all cutting in on each other (wait for a gap in transmissions then blurt your message despite the fact that the controller was expecting a read-back from the last transmission). The controller politely but firmly pointed out the error and why the offender was wrong, not to chastise, but to inform – nicely done I thought.

I go a standard overhead join for 22 with right hand circuits. I slotted in behind a Gloucester based yellow Slingsby and followed her onto final. Flaps down, I was given late clearance and put in a reasonable landing.

Parked up, shutdown and put all the loose stuff back in the aircraft. A good session and one that I badly needed to do solo to develop my ‘inner voice’. An hour and twenty in the end as P1 – the first P1 that I have done since August!

I booked another session for mid-January and will aim to do one of these every three weeks or month interspersed with training on the RV6.

However, next up is an overdue FAA BFR checkride, hopefully on Saturday 5th January at Oxford with Bill Tollett in a PA28 that I will hire from Oxford.