Almost There

Sorry for the delay of posting. I had a challenging week to say the least. I was on vacation last week and wanted to get some things done around the house and in my office. My wife was on vacation also. On Monday my wife was out working in the yard and I heard a sound like someone had fallen. I jumped up from my chair and as soon as I got up, I heard her calling me. I got out there and she tried to jump over a small wall of bricks on our front porch but did not make it. She hurt her arm pretty bad but wouldn't go to the doctor. So I had to tend to her and run a lot of errands. When I got back, my "medicine" I had given her was starting to take effect. She was in a lot of pain.

Tuesday wasn't good for her either. I was going flying Tuesday morning and she was going to the doctor (finally). I got in about 1.3 hours of instrument work. Richard had me shoot 2 ILS approaches on top of some slow flight under the hood. Slow flight is very interesting. Everything happens a lot faster than you would think. The turning radius is much smaller so the airplane really turns (an the possibility of stalls) quick. An ILS approach is one of the most accurate approaches you can make. The ILS at McKinney takes you down to about 200 feet off of the ground. When I took my hood off on the first pass, it was a quick transition from looking at the instruments to getting the airplane ready to land and go missed. No time to be nervous about landings, just do it (Thanks Nike). The second one was a full stop landing, not a missed approach. When I took the hood off, I was lined up perfectly and still on the glide slope so my height was just right. Just slowed it up a little, add about 10 degrees of flaps and wait for the ground effects to kick in then put it down.

I only need 0.3 hours of instrument work before I fullfill my requirements to take my check ride. I need to do some more work on ground refrence manuevers, soft and short field landings then do a phase check with another instructor (a practice check ride). I'm hoping that I'll be ready around Christmas.

Part of the other reason for the late post was obviously my wife but also I had to take my daughter to her allergist, my computer died, was ressurrected, died again (really dead this time), got a new computer that died also and had to be returned. I finally got the new computer running but wasted a lot of time on it. I was able to retrieve all of my old emails. After getting throught all of this, we left on wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with my mother who lives about 5 hours away. All of the time we were gone, my wife was in terrible pain and now her whole arm is swolen. To make it even worse, my daughter got sick (new medicine) every night. Then we get home and we have to take my daughter to the doctor because her cough is getting worse. We find out that she is in the early stages of pnuemonia.

It gets better. I had to leave town Sunday for a business trip and my wife calls and said that she is going to have to have a MRI done to her arm and her sinuses are draining and her throat is scratchy. The only thing that would make this worse was the traffic on my trip. It usually takes me 4.5 - 5 hours. This time it was 6.5 hours.

I'm going to bed and when I wake up, this will all have been an episode of Dallas. RIGHT?

My-Elogbook

Todays Video is one I found about "Dangerous" landings. Let's just say that you wouldn't want to be a passenger on any of these flights. Pay attention to the last one and look at how short the runway is. He also touched down a little early on the displaced threshold.

Night Flying Done

Here we are in November and I am finished with my night flying. The requirements for night flying are 3 hours, 10 landings and one cross country leg over 50 miles and 100 miles or greater for the whole trip. Last week I got in the first part by flying to Denton, Addison, Rockwall and back to McKinney. I also had 8 landings so all I needed was 1.1 hours and 2 more landings. This week, we went to Addison, Durant OK and then back to McKinney. A total of about 125 nm. If we would have had no wind, this would have taken about 1:20 minutes. But I had 2 legs where I had to fight the wind. I had a 27 kt wind coming out of the south-southwest. As it was, it took a little over 1.5 hours.


A couple of reasons we picked Addison were that it is where the DPE I am going to go to for my check ride is based there, I needed an intermediate place to fly so my leg to Durant was over 50nm and also because Addison is in class B airspace and you have to talk to DFW approach control in order to get in there. One thing I have learned about night flying is that it is very hard to find an airport at night, no matter how well lit it is. everyone thinks that with all of the runway lights that it is easy to see. The problem is that the street lights and all of the other lights that illuminate a city are much brighter than the runway lights. You can't really see the pattern of lights until you get close to tracking the centerline of the runway. One thing I have found that helps is to first look for the beacon (the green and white light that denotes an airport) and a dark spot. Addison is in the middle of a lot of bright lights so I just look for the big dark spot, with a beacon, near the bright lights.

I fought a headwind to Addison but it made for a really slow approach (slow ground speed). After we took off I requested flight following to Durant. The tower handed us off to DFW departure and had me climb up to 3500 feet which put me right in the middle of class B airspace. Once I leveled off and got the airplane trimmed, I was getting about 108 kts indicated but 137 kts on the ground. We were going to be in Durant very quickly (ETA was about 33 min). Richard had me do an interesting thing to get lined up with the runway for my approach. since I was coming at the airport from the southwest and the runway is 172 degrees, I never was going to be able to see it straight on. So he had me dial in the GPS 35 approach on the GPS and fly an intercept to the final approach fix for the approach. I turned to head about 70 degrees (my original track was about 20 degrees) until the needle started moving. Then as the needle started moving, I started to turn until it stopped, then center it. After doing this, I looked straight ahead and there was the airport. I descended and moved over to fly the downwind leg where I got slowed up and readied myself for the approach to 17. The hard headwind I was experiencing died down at about 500 feet off of the ground. We got it put down and readied ourselves for the flight back to McKinney.

On the way back I had the opposite effect from the wind. 108 indicated and 87 kts on the ground. This gave me time to fine tune my mixture. This airplane has an EGT (Exhaust Gas Temperature) gauge that rarely works. It was working this night. I started to lean the mixture and watched the temp go up. The proper way to lean an airplane, using the EGT, is to lean it until the needle stops going up and starts back down. Then richen the mixture until you get past the peak temp and it goes down a little bit again. This makes the mixture short of peak temp on the rich side. This gives you the best performance while conserving fuel. I was able to lean it pretty good for a cool night at 4500 feet.

Once we got less than halfway, I mentioned that I would like to track the localizer in on the approach without flying the official ILS approach. so I turned more to the west so that I could intercept the localizer pretty far out. I called McKinney tower and told them that I was about 16 miles out and wanted to join the localizer for a full stop landing. They told me to give them a call when I was 4 miles out (which is where the outer marker is). By then I had already intercepted the localizer and glide slope and was dead on for a perfect no flaps landing. I added some carb heat and put it down a little faster than usual, because of no flaps, and taxied to parking. It was a beautiful night for flying but it had to come to an end. I'm starting to like this night flying. You can see everything that you lose during the day and can see airplanes for 20 to 30 miles.

My E-Logbook

This weeks video is from a clip I found on how an airplane is made. I got to fly a Diamond DA-40 last week and when I found this, I thought it was kind of cool, even though they dumb this stuff down a lot for this show.

A New Airplane to Fly

I was sitting around wondering what I could do today with my daughter and then I got the call. My friend Darren called and wanted to know if I wanted to go flying with him in Denton. He got checked out in a Diamond DA-40 a couple of weeks ago and has had nothing but fantastic things to say about it.

It has the same horsepower that the flying club's N733NB has (180 HP). The big difference is that this airplane has a higher takeoff weight but it sure felt a lot lighter. Maybe it's because of all of the carbon fiber construction. I do know that this airplane is a lot more slippery as it moves through the air. The yellow arc on the airspeed indicator covers a lot wider range than on the Cessnas that the club owns. According to the specs, this airplane cruises at 150 ktas (this airplane doesn't have wheel fairings and is 75% power) and burns 10 gph. It also says that it has a 860 lb useful load. Subtract 240 lbs for fuel and it can carry 620 lbs. Even with Darren and myself, that is a nice useful load. You can see a lot more at Diamond's web site. Below is a picture of a DA-40.

Part of the other reason I jumped so quickly on this chance to go flying (like I need an excuse) was the fact that I got a new toy this week and wanted to check it out before I have to use it for real on Monday night. I figured that after a year and a half of using my old David Clark headset, I was ready for something a little more modern. So I went out and bought me a Lightspeed Zulu. This is one cool headset. Part of my reasoning for buying it was that Darren has one and and my CFI has one too. I have heard nothing but great things about them so I bought one. They aren't cheap by any means so that is one of the reasons that I have waited so long to get one. The cheapest you will find on the internet is $850. After using it for the first time, I am sold. They have amazing noise cancellation and I even tried the feature that allows you to connect to an iPod and listen but mutes as soon as something from the panel comes through. It can also connect to a cell phone through Bluetooth. How cool is that? I opted for the included iPhone (yes, I have an iPhone) cable that would allow for me to use my iPhone to play music but if I should receive a call, the iPhone mutes the music and the phone takes over. Then if something comes through the panel, all of that gets muted and the real reason you have a headset on, takes over. It may not look like much but it is quite a step up for me.


Sorry but no logable hours and I'll save the next video for after my night flying tomorrow night. I'll be going from TKI to ADS to DUA to TKI (about 125 nm) for the last of my night flying.