Before I flew up to take my check ride I looked at my logbook: I had sixty-eight hours of time in flight. That seemed rather amazing. Less than two weeks of full time work. The time away from my regular job over six months (April to October) was less than a two week vacation. Easily accomplished in weekends and in the evenings. The amount of ground school was probably less than ten hours, not including the time I spent studying for the FAA written exam (which was at home with some DVDs).

Using the plane to get back and forth to Las Vegas will save me time. Using it to get back and forth to our house in the desert or up to see friends in Santa Barbara will save us time. If it gives us the impetus to go all the way up to the Bay area (Nell has friends for us to visit in Sonoma Valley, and we could visit people in Atherton along the way) it will save us the drive time and give us the additional motivation to make a trip that we often say we would like to make but rarely schedule the time to do.

As I flew up to Paso Robles that day I thought about the plane as my time machine, both for snipping time off of travel and as a way to create a time apart, a time away from the concerns I have while on the ground. Occasionally while flying I also feel connected back to my grandfather’s time in a single engine plane, and so it is a bit of a time machine that way, stapling together similar moments generations apart.

Right now I am crossing the country at a speed that he couldn’t have guessed at when he was learning to fly. I am sitting next to Nell with Rudy and Dexter in the row in front of us, and we are crossing entire time zones without seeing the ground. We jetted across for a wedding in Washington DC and the boys got to take in the Mall and the Lincoln Memorial, the Air and Space wing of the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the National Gallery. We stood under the wings of Charles Lindbergh’s planes (the one that crossed the Atlantic and also the other one which he and his wife flew north to the Orient), and stared up at the nose needle on the X1 which Chuck Yeager flew faster than sound.

As I sit here at close to three hundred fifty knots (I’m sure we have at least a hundred mile per hour headwind), it feels like sitting in the cramped aisle of some strange reading room. Nell types away next to me while the boys watch their cartoons. People around me are reading, but mostly watching television. No one on the plane (with the possible exception of those on the flight deck) are enjoying the wonders of flight, only the advantages of it. There’s cloud cover so we can’t see the land slipping away beneath us, or enjoy our perspective.

It reminds me that one of the things I wondered about Lindbergh was that he didn’t fly when he was older. He said that the passenger jets stole his sense of flight and insulated him from the motion of flying. He didn’t like flying first class because it insulated him even farther. Why didn’t he fly everywhere? Why didn’t he live at an air park (a community of a few houses around an airstrip) and fly whenever he had a meeting somewhere? If he had to be in Connecticut (they lived there on the shore), why didn’t he have a float plane, or a sea plane, so that when he had to fly to Detroit or Washington he just pushed off from the dock? That’s mysterious to me.

If I could, I would be flying us everywhere already. It would have taken two days to fly across the country in one of the little planes, but if I moved up to a small jet we could have made it in a day. Along the way we could have seen the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, St. Louis’ arch… just the sort of tour you should take a couple little boys on of their country.

Maybe in the spring for the cherry blossoms.

Alex summed it up when we taxied into the jet center at Santa Maria to find our rental car waiting with doors open… “I feel like a sheik.” The day seemed foggy from the home base, but a check of the computer revealed VFR everywhere but my deck. We piled into the car and headed to Zamperini Field (Torrance). The flight out to Catalina was magical. Mom and Alex took turns ooohing and ahhhhing as we thrummed over the patchy, low-lying fog. There was an excellent view of Two Harbors, and then a pretty turn towards the airport in the sky.

The pattern altitude is 2,600 feet but with the odd perspective of the mountaintop strip and the sheer, grassy slope to the sea 2,600 feet seems about level with the runway. I did my best to drive in a nice rectangular pattern, announcing my intentions on CTAF though no one was answering. We lined up and I dropped the 172 about fifty feet past the numbers and rumbled up the hill to the first exit. Alex and mom were enchanted by the airport (which is one of the most striking I have landed) and did not mind the twenty dollar landing fee a bit.

Mom bought tee shirts, Alex and I chatted and sat on the deck looking out at the sea. Eventually, we decided we were going to be late for our next pickup if we dawdled further. I fired up the plane and we shot across to Palos Verdes, then made a left through the LAX class B. We flew the special flight rules route, and a few minutes later were dropping into Santa Monica. We refueled and loaded Bob into the plane, called Al to give him an ETA and headed up north to Sideways country for a picnic lunch. It’s a bit more than a hundred miles up to Santa Maria as the crow flies. An odd phrase that, I mean, I have never seen a crow fly straight for very long. Perhaps it would be better to say that it is a bit more than a hundred miles in a straight line. I flew the crow route, looking here and there, staying by the coast for a bit then wandering inland. We had flight following so we occasionally got sent off course to avoid getting in the way of people in a hurry.

Eventually, long after I supposed it might appear, Santa Maria hove into view. A regional jet landed on 30 while I flew he pattern for 02. The landing was feather soft, so my passengers judged me a good pilot. I was all over the sky for forty-five minutes, but for that last thirty seconds I am golden. Fortunately, in the world of impressing mothers and fathers it is the thirty seconds that count. No bounce? Good pilot.

We jumped in the rental car and followed Al and Rudi to Sissoq winery. It is a beautiful place tucked into the base of the hills with a scattering of picnic tables set on a large lawn. Alex bought a couple bottles of wine and Rudi and I started putting out the picnic. It was like watching forty clowns get out of a car. She kept producing more food from what seemed like bottomless paper bags, plastic boxes, satchels and bins. We spread the table so thick with food there was barely room to eat. To solve the problem we each ate a clear spot in front of us and then moved food from the more crowded regions to our opened space. We ate for about two hours. There was chatter, but mostly we were eating and getting through two bottles of wine.

After the meal we headed to Al and Rudi’s to see the changes they have made to their house. Alex and mom began to wonder about darkness and Bob, quite rightly, worried about marine layers. I called flight services and found that Santa Monica was already special VFR. We shoved off and headed back to the airport. The line guy greeted me with the news that the rental airplane had a cracked spinner. I looked and sure enough it did. The crack had been stop drilled but then had spread further. In my estimation it was not going to break in flight so I refused a kind offer to remove it by the lineman.

We hopped in and were shortly cruising back towards home. The tower gave me the flight following frequency and as I turned in I heard a pilot call ‘jumpers away.’ I checked in and Santa Barbara Approach told me they would give me a hand getting home but to stay away from Lompoc as there were skydivers in the area. No problem I replied then looked down. I was about a mile west of Lompoc . At least that is what I figured when I was able to make what I saw on the ground fit the chart. Ooops. At least by the time I got there I would not have chopped up any divers that did a free fall jump. If they opened the chute right after jumping I might have dinged one though.

As we got close to Santa Monica it was clear that it was clear. Or at least pretty clear. The tower said it was still SVFR so I had to ask for clearance, but then I dropped Bob with another nice landing and prepared to head back to Torrance . As we taxied to the run up to await a mini-route clearance the low fuel light went on. I have never seen that before so I felt obliged to return to the pump and put a pile more fuel in before trying again. I had checked the fuel before we left and there was enough for an hour, but I just could not take off thinking about what people would say if I ran out of fuel after ignoring a warning light. On arrival at Torrance it was just us, there was not another plane in the sky. A nearly full moon, the lights of LA and the darkness of the ocean made for a wonderful backdrop to the best landing I have had so far. I actually looked around for applause.

The best part was seeing how much fun mom and Alex had. We have a great picture of the three of us standing outside the plane after five landings at four airports. What a blast.

The hardest thing, by far, has been learning to land the airplane. Part of it is the pressure to do a good landing. When I flew by myself to three different airports in a little over four hours I was mostly concerned with getting the plane onto the ground safely. I knew I no longer had to worry about damaging the airplane or hurting myself, I had enough control over the plane that I would go around and try again if either of those were a possibility, and I didn’t mind a bump or a bounce. So I would just bring the plane in and whatever landing I managed was the landing I took. Some of them were good, including the one out at Bakersfield where there was a cross wind and some turbulence down low. A long runway helps.

When I took Nell and the boys to Santa Barbara I was aware that the flight was an hour and that the landing takes about a minute and that most people flying judge the flight (and by extension, the pilot) by the landing. That means that all the good airmanship leading up to the landing (keeping the heading within five degrees either direction, maintaining the altitude within fifty feet in either direction, keeping communications with Air Traffic Control crisp and professional), all of that is up against a hard thump or a bounce-bounce-bounce down the runway. Click to continue »

The weather is nearly perfect and tomorrow I am going flying. Mom and Alex are being very good sports about the new obsession. When they land from their commercial flight they are making me (and a few guests) a nice dinner then trundling off to get enough sleep to head out to Catalina for breakfast and Santa Maria for lunch. Friends have a house up in Sideways country and they will meet us at the airport and head to a vineyard with us for a picnic. I feel like a jet setter. Then next weekend I am taking them to the Grand Canyon for Saturday and Sunday. Yippeee.

I should have kept a blog as I was reading these books, but I didn’t know how long my interest in aviation was going to last and certainly didn’t know that I might want to share my musings about it with an audience larger than Adam.Free Flight is the story of two airplanes and the system that NASA and the FAA envisions allowing the population at large to fly them. James Fallows is an easy, clear writer and none of the book is difficult to get through. Although there’s some technical information presented he somehow keeps it light.

The best two chapters, both of which I asked Nell to read before we took our first flight together, were the first and last. Fallows flew across the country with his college-aged son and his wife. They went from the bay area to the Boston area to drop his son at college. His descriptions of the flight are entrancing. Somehow, during a rather pedestrian activity, he ties all of the wonder of flight, all of the magic of knowing how to fly, into the string of anecdotes which connect the Palo Alto airport and one near Boston’s Back Bay.

Fallows writes about two planes, the SR20 from Cirrus and the Eclipse 500 VLJ (Very Light Jet). Both are fascinating to me, although I will probably never be in an Eclipse. They represent a sea change in General Aviation, and certainly a change for the way planes are manufactured and flown in the United States. He wrote his book a few years back, and the revolution that he foretold is still gathering momentum. (September 11 had a real chilling effect on a lot of general aviation.)

There are two pieces to his revolution, but the part we will see as pilots is the glass cockpit.

I learned to fly in a thirty year old Piper Cherokee airplane made of aluminum. The important gauges in the Cherokee are run by a vacuum pump and by the pitot-static system. The vacuum pump spins a few gyroscopes which are used to display the artificial horizon, a directional indicator (because a compass is too bouncy to easily follow a heading) and the turn indicator. The pitot-static system, where air from outside the plane and air from the front edge of the wing, is used to display the airspeed, altitude, and vertical speed (how fast the plane is climbing or descending). Each of these gauges is a black dial with a white needle spinning over white numbers. As soon as you climb in you feel like you are in a WW2 serial, about to head over the English Channel in your Spitfire.

Where is the computer revolution? Why does a student pilot or general aviation pilot have to look at all these little dials? Surely in this day and age there is a better way to present this information. There is.

The Cirrus, described by Fallows, and the DA40, which I flew to Las Vegas, have two large LCD displays. (There’s a picture of the Diamond’s instrument panel.)

The screen in front of the pilot (the Primary Function Display, PDF) combines all of the information found in the little dials in my training Cherokee. It is what was once seen only by fighter pilots in a heads-up display projected inside their goggles. The entire display is an artificial horizon, so that bottom is brown and the top is blue. The directional gyroscope is a small circle at the bottom, but the important part (heading) is at the top edge of that circle, clearly in the center of the display. The airspeed is a “tape” on the left side and the altitude is a tape on the right. The turn indicator, bank angle and turn rate are all grouped in icons and graphic marks right around the center.

With a standard set of instruments the pilot develops a scan, looking at the artificial horizon, then the airspeed, altitude and vertical speed indicators. Then a glance at the radio navigation gauges. In a glass cockpit all of these things are on a single screen and by watching it, the pilot has all of the information. It’s a stunning difference to move from one to the other.

The screen in front of the right seat (the Multi-Function Display) is a moving map. It is listening to the satellites and knows exactly where the plane is. It has the world, in digital form, loaded in. There is a lot of work which goes into communicating the right information in the best way. The MFD displays the map (so you can see the nearest airports), the terrain (so you know which portions of the surrounding hills are above you), navigation (your course is a purple line on the G1000 I flew), traffic (you see other planes), and weather (you can see the rain clouds).

It gives you a total situational awareness as you fly. It is as if they went through the accident database, figuring out what it was that took planes from the sky, and built a system that allowed the pilot to avoid those difficulties.

Flying around the Long Beach practice area on Thursday I could see all of the other airplanes on the MFD. (When Adam and I were flying our airport-hopping trip we head the air traffic controller tell another aircraft, “You have traffic at your eleven o’clock in three miles, opposite direction.” The pilot answered, “I’ve got him on the fish finder and we’re looking.”) For me, developing “aviator’s eyes” has been one of the harder parts of flying. Today from a JetBlue window, looking past Nell into the same training area, I saw a Cessna above the container ships. It was a speck and it took a while to point it out to Nell. Spotting a plane flying the opposite direction against haze or landscape is really hard. The fish finder doesn’t eliminate the task, but it helps a significant amount.

So, no midair collisions. And when you know which parts of the map are above you, it’s harder to run into something. (That’s CFIT in the accident database. Controlled Flight into Terrain. Stunningly popular.) When you know where you are going it is harder to wander lost and run out of fuel. (It’s also harder to run out of fuel because the system draws a green range circle around your plane on the map, so you know how far you can fly.) In an emergency you press one button and the system shows you the closest airports, the distance to each one, and the heading to fly to it.

Ultimately, there are synthetic vision systems, which could show the pilot the airfield and terrain even when the airplane itself is in a cloud or a fog bank. If these images were projected on the windscreen the pilot could land the plane even if a cloud was sitting on the runway. (The huge jets are able to do this, they have auto-land systems that allow them to fly the plane right onto the runway without seeing anything outside. It would be astounding to see technology that advanced show up in a little single-engine piston plane.)

I am glad that I learned to fly on steam gauges (which is what the older gauges are now called), because if your fancy electronics fail it’s a good idea not to panic and to be able to fly with the old dials. When I am in the Diamond, though, I just cannot believe the ease that is instantly a part of flying, the confidence that you can spend a little more time enjoying being in the sky because the plane keeps you aware of the situation around you.

I guess that was more about glass cockpits than about the book. Sorry, Mr. Fallows. It’s a good book. If you are interested in what is changing general aviation, you should read it. The story of the Klapmeier brothers building the Cirrus plane and the company building the Eclipse jet are both well told and are interesting stories.

I played hooky today. I was supposed to work on the kitchen, putting in the moldings, end cap for the dishwasher, kickplate all around, and other really rewarding tasks. These are the worst sort of home improvements because they take a really long time and no one notices unless you screw them up. It was gray until 10am and I pottered on the computer until it looked sunny enough to go to the plywood place and get a sheet of red birch. The sun broke out for real as I learned the new one hundred fifty dollar minimum policy at the yard. So, I headed over to Torrance to fly. I need a checkout in order to rent a Cessna to fly mom and Alex around while they are here. Today was the perfect day for it. The folks at Benbow rustled up an instructor (Enrst) for the checkout and we headed out. A turn around the pattern so Ernst could be a happy fellow as we headed to the sloped Catalina runway. The landing went well, so I firewalled the throttle and headed out over the Pacific.

Clouds were still hanging around inland, but the flight to the island was spectacular. Clear air, no wind and one hundred eighty horsepower engine make the odd little Catalina landing strip a piece of cake. The perspective is strange since the strip is up on top of a hill, and there is the hump in the middle of the runway means you can’t see the end when you land. If you fail to remember that it really is three thousand feet long you could get a bit panicky about how close the end looks when you touch down. We parked, I left the key in the plane, and we headed in to pay the twenty dollar landing fee. Then I decided we had time for a burger so I treated my new friend Ernst and ate my first hundred dollar hamburger.

The ride home was uneventful and I am now allowed to rent from Benbow. It’s a great feeling and I got flight time. I’ll be able to make it to the weekend.

I was foiled in my attempt to get a check ride in a 172 today by a need to be at work. The itch to fly was exacerbated by Colin having a flight lesson in Irvine in the Diamond DA40. When I woke up a beautiful solution popped into my head: I would go ride the back seat in the DA40 all morning while Colin did landings. This would teach me the DA40, it would let me watch the Garmin 1000 perform its miracles, and I would be up off the ground looking for new airports. A good morning followed by an afternoon of work. Click to continue »

Well here is a fine kettle of fish. I do not own a plane. I must rent other people’s airplanes. Unsuprpisingly, especially if they have read a word that is posted here, these people wish to have some concrete demostration of my flying ability before they will rent me the airplane. While my brother galivants all over the sky in airplanes he might buy I am skulking around trying to find a time and a place to take a Cessna 172 for a checkout ride so I do not have to drive all the way (fifteen minutes) to Santa Monica to fly. I want to fly out of Torrance or Hawthorne. Both have FBOs with planes. Both are quite close. Both would provide me with an airtime fix in return for a few of my dollars. All I need to do is find the time. It has been a hectic week and with daylight savings I have not been home before dark. Tomorrow will be more of the same, with the added fun of rain, but Thursday I am getting checked out. I need to if my secret plans to fly my folks around are to come to fruition.