Colin and I strapped in again on Thursday for an airport bounce. The aim was to really try out the Diamond DA20 as well as get some more new airports into the log book. We rented the plane from South Bay Aviation at Torrance Airport. No doubt this is the best rental place we have used. They have a large fleet, a really nice FBO, reasonable prices and very nice staff. Colin got checked out in the DA20 while I was at work on Wednesday. We showed up early to find the airport socked in (fog) with and no estimate of when it might clear to VFR. That turned out to be almost 11 o’clock before it was marginal VFR. We hopped in the DA20 and got a special VFR clearance.

Colin thinks I was optimistic when I reported to the tower that we were in VFR at twelve hundred feet, but the next fellow on the ground was cleared VFR and he to reported clear at about twelve hundred. In any case, Colin took the first leg, up to Oxnard and off we went through the special flight rules corridor over LAX to the Santa Monica mountains. Colin is thinking of buying a Diamond DA40. He has a bunch of hours in the plane and has really researched it. The troubling thing has been that he does not feel as confident landing it as he does the Piper. Our mission was to figure out how to land the airplane and get lunch. We were batting five hundred on return to Torrance.

The DA20 and DA40 share a common ancestry in Austrian sailplanes. They have long, slippery wings and a very slick fuselage. This means they glide very well and are quite fast for the power plant in them. We had not realized until very late in the day what it means for a pilot trying to unlearn Piper and Cessna tricks and get the bird smoothly onto the ground. Colin has written before about the physics of landing, but I will just reiterate that the idea is to have the plane at near stall speed just a few inches off the ground. As it crashes from the stall the wheels will be right on the ground and all will be right in your cockpit. Click to continue »

My brother and I are not two peas in a pod as pilots, or as people. We got into this at the same time and progressed equally smoothly, but we are quite different in temperament, and subtly different in the things we do well. Our parents think we are equally good pilots who have an agreement to always praise the other one. This could not be further from the truth. In our own way we are quite competitive, and it has really helped that we can talk about the parts of flying we do well and the parts we don’t. Since there is little overlap in our weak areas we make a good flying team.

I’m better at landing the airplane than Colin. I think this is a direct result of a large difference in our personalities. I love adventure and change and challenges and am apt to throw myself into them without thinking particularly hard about the consequences. I also am lacking the imagination needed to feel fear under most circumstances. This has led me to revel in trying out new airplanes. Given a choice between one I know and one I don’t, I will always opt for the unknown even if it seems inferior. That’s why at this point I have flown ten types of airplanes and fourteen tail numbers while Colin has flown six. I delight in getting up in a new plane and figuring out the glide angle that gives me the approach speed that makes for a smooth transition from flying to rolling. Click to continue »

Adam was having such fun flying Mom and Alex around that I had to figure out a way to take them up. The problem was that I didn’t really need to go anywhere. I don’t know where Adam is getting his flying dollars, but my budget appears to be a little tighter. I did need to go up in Two Sierra to try out the autopilot, try a couple landings, make sure the push-to-talk switch was working, so I scheduled a flight on Friday morning.

Of course, I arrived at SMO on time and the plane wasn’t ready. The door was open and there was a mechanic up under the firewall fixing a wire. I stood and talked with Nick and a student for a little while about whether to buy a new airplane or an old airplane. I was amazed that both of them were against buying a new airplane when the reason to stay away from old airplanes was contorted between the seats of Two Sierra at that very moment. Click to continue »

I realized Sharalyn and my mom were not much worried about flying with me as I took off from the bleak and windy airport at Bullhead City. My passengers all have headsets and each headset has a mic. I can’t imagine flying around in one of these little tin cans without being able to talk to everyone, pilot included, or being stuck listening to the howl of the engine for hours on end. It was an expensive investment but right after I got my pilot’s license I found three Lightspeed headsets on EBay and snapped ‘em up. This means my passengers are allowed to chat while I fly, and chat they do.

I was relieved when Colin explained that air traffic can only hear what is coming out of my mic. I no longer live in fear of Alex pointing out a cool formation just as I ask for flight following: ‘Excellent butte… is that how you say that?’ In any case I just talk over, and listen through the constant stream of observations and remarks that come from my loved ones who are willing to risk life and limb to scoot about the sky with me. As we neared rotation speed out of Bullhead the peanut gallery in back were loudly discussing the differences between dropping a stitch and binding one off. Apparently there was a knitting circle in full swing back there as I coaxed the 172SP to defy gravity once again. Click to continue »

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 »

As great as it was to fly all over the Los Angeles basin and out into the desert with Adam, yesterday was really the image in my head that brought me down to Santa Monica airport to begin with. I soared over the Malibu coastline, checked in with SoCal and then looked across at Nell. She smiled at me. I looked over my shoulder and saw the boys singing into their voice-activated microphones, listening in their headsets, and each looking out the window on occasion at the landscape sliding below. Rudy had a Calvin and Hobbes book in his lap.

Nell said, “When you are driving around down there it seems so random, but when you get up here and look down it all makes sense.” In ten minutes in the plane she nailed exactly one of the things I struggled with for months to get a handle on, one of the enticing things about being in the air.

We flew from Santa Monica up to Santa Barbara. It was about a fifty-minute flight. We were in N2902S (zero-two-sierra), which is nearly identical to Victor Pappa, which I have flown over sixty hours in. Tiny little things were different, which made me nervous. That meant that I looked over at Nell and said, “Sorry it’s so hot up here, usually it cools off nicely at altitude.” She glanced at me and smiled, “It’s perfectly nice in the airplane. You’re just sweating a lot.”

The push-to-talk button on my yoke failed eight minutes after take off. That was a drag. I swapped intercom places with Nell (by passing her my headphone plugs while she passed me hers.) From then on I spoke on the radio by pressing the button on Nell’s yoke (she wasn’t using it).

The boys certainly liked it more than riding in a car. There were times I looked back and it didn’t seem any different from being in a car, but they looked out here and there and they asked questions over the headsets. Neither one seemed uncomfortable in the plane and they amused one another.

We were meant to have Victor Pappa available at ten o’clock. When we arrived it was not yet back from it’s early morning flight. We waited around for half an hour. Nell went up to the Farmer’s market with Rudy and I went down and got the boys each a flight log so that they could record their flights from now on. The plane still wasn’t back so we decided to take Two Sierra.

It was hazy near Santa Monica (the Santa Ana’s are blowing and pushing a few hundred feet of dirt up into the atmosphere. That meant there wasn’t a great view of Santa Monica, the Palisades or the beginning of Malibu, but it cleared around Point Dume.

Flying over Oxnard it seemed like that would be a good place to have a beach house. It looks like you can walk from the Oxnard airport to the beach.

Santa Barbara approach vectored us inland at the harbor and we followed the 101 to the airport. I lined up nicely for one-five-left and touched down with a slight bump but no bounce. I’ve talked to Nell a lot about landings and she said that bumps don’t bother her. Adam and I will remain much harsher critics of our touch downs than most of our passengers.

I had arranged a cheap-as-possible rental car for our arrival. We taxied to Mercury Air, a service that is at a lot of general aviation airports. They waved us to parking (I felt like I was piloting a much larger plane, follow a guy in a gold cart who was waving a fluorescent baton) and we walked to their little building and out to the rental car.

We drove down to our friend Rodman’s beach house and had lunch with him and his son at a nearby Chinese place. Nell took each of the boys for a nice walk on the beach. We drove the fifteen miles back up to the airport and started home in the late afternoon. It was really a great day for flying. As we headed south we watched the sun set into the Pacific. For a short while we had the grey haze that makes it hard to see the horizon, but I just kept my eye on the artificial horizon.

It had turned into a real night flight as we came in over the Palisades. It was a little clearer over Santa Monica. As we glided over the intersection of the 10 and the 405 it was nothing but brake lights down there. I did a passable landing for my second night landing without an instructor.

It really couldn’t have been better. Flying is a whole other world and being able to bring Nell and the boys along into it is better than I could have hoped.

There is tremendous satisfaction in flying precisely by instruments. Keeping the altitude at exactly four thousand five hundred feet as you glide along held in the fingertips of the atmosphere is an accomplishment. As it becomes more and more automatic, so that you can both keep the altitude correct and follow a heading while occasionally enjoying the view from above, there is a surge of confidence about being able to fly well.

And it keeps you alive. That’s always a nice bonus.

A lot of flying, for me, is about risk assessment and management. It is dangerous to loop or roll and airplane not rated to loop or roll, so I don’t do it. That keeps that risk (all the accidents of acrobatics performed in a non-acrobatic airplane) off my chart. Eventually, by making sure that I always perform my pre-flight check, by making sure I always fly with full tanks on take-off, I get down to risks that I find acceptable. Really, I deal with risks that I know to be lower than using the freeways around Los Angeles (particularly at night, particularly on a weekend night).

The way I examine the risk is by reading accident reports in the database of the National Traffic and Safety Board, and by looking at the aggregate statistics of those accidents.

One out of nine accidents is a mechanical failure. A control cable snaps; a piece of the cowling flies off and smashes through the windscreen; the fuel line clogs. These are difficult to control, but keeping the plane in good working order is not impossible and, to me, mostly seems like a question of budget.

Then we have pilot error (which will be discussed in a later entry) and weather-related accidents. Seven out of ten weather related accidents are known as “VFR into IMC” or “VFR into IFR conditions.” In short, a pilot rated to fly only in Visual Flight Rules conditions winds up “in weather.” In a cloud, in a fog bank, trapped in haze… just unable to fly the plane by reference to things outside. In these conditions it is very easy to become disoriented, to believe your body instead of the instruments, and to wind up spiraling down to the ground in a steep diving turn. This is known as the death spiral. It is what killed JFK Jr and his two passengers. Before there were instruments, the death spiral killed hundreds of pilots, most of them air mail pilots flying at night.

So seven out of ten planes go down in weather because the pilot is trained only to fly when he can see. It’s not difficult to learn to fly while looking at the flight instruments. It’s not hard to trust them, but you have to learn to do it. While learning VFR you have to do three hours of IFR flying, so that you know what it is about. The basic idea is that they want you to learn enough so that if you fly into a cloud you can turn around and fly back out. JFK Jr had those three hours of training and I guess it just wasn’t enough.

There’s a lot to learn in instrument flying. There is a system in the sky for flying without visual reference. The air traffic controllers keep the planes separated from one another (by three miles horizontally and a couple thousand feet vertically). When you are flying in reference to instruments you give up some freedom, the controllers will tell you where to go, when to turn and when you should descend to land. The tradeoff is that they are protecting you and helping you find your way. All of the commercial jets are flying IFR from the moment they take off to the moment they land. No zooming around in the sky for them.

Additionally, there are instrument approaches to most airports (except the really small ones), and you need to learn the maneuvers for entering and executing these procedures.

I haven’t decided to go all the way through with Instrument Training, but I have started to keep track of the hours I would need to take the practical exam and Adam and I will start doing some hood time (simulated instrument time) whenever we are flying together. A lot of the people that I talk to about flying private planes think it is dangerous. They act like I am crazy for suggesting that Nell and I could fly somewhere for lunch together. I guess the crashes of small planes get a lot of press. The statistics say that Nell and I are safer than if I drove us to the same place. I will continue to decrease our risks with more training.

Into the clouds!

This is the last of the Germany flight posts and while the airplane was conventional all the rest of the flight was not. When I returned from flying the Katana my host at the Max Planck noticed I was beaming and asked about my morning. Much to his surprise he was immediately subjected to my usual torrent of aviation related information and trivia complete with hand motions to signify the most important aspects of the flight. I am used to folks glazing over after just a few minutes, an effect I enjoy because it usually means I can chat on for at least another ten minutes before their fight or flight response kicks in. Stas however seemed fascinated. After just a few really expressive hand dives with appropriate motor noises he asked why I had not asked him along. I allowed that it was just a two seater airplane and riding on the wing would be a poor introduction to this wonderful sport.

As luck would have it there was only one more day of clear weather expected before the overcast that had been haunting Spain made it to southern Germany. I proposed we scoot over to the airport the next day and rent a plane. After all I had the FBO’s assurance that I could take one of their flivvers out for a spin after a checkout ride with an instructor. We arrived to find that this was not even close to the case. In spite of calling to confirm the facts of the situation it transpired that the Europeans take a dim view of an FAA license and will only allow you off the ground in a German registered plane if you have a JAA ticket. A bummer. There we were, at an airport but we could not fly. The checkout instructor could not take us up because he was on his rest period from his regular flying job. Another instructor could not be summoned for hours.

Fortunately we looked appropriately disappointed and the check ride instructor Joachim decided he was willing to bend a few rules. We rented a Cessna 172 and Joachim agreed to take us on a forty-five minute circuit. Turns out this fellow in the truly worn leather flight jacket had over 9,000 hours and had been flying the Baden-Wurtemburg area since he was a fourteen-year-old glider pilot. I did not at first understand the true implications of either of these facts.

Apparently my young nephew once told me he was depressed. My reply, though the exchange is gone from my memory banks, was to tell him that when I feel depressed I go do something truly dangerous and that always perks me up. Ride a motorcycle I told him, or climb a high tree, as long as there is adrenaline there can be no sadness. Said interaction took place in front of my sister-in-law who reminded me of the story at some point recently when I was surprised someone would call my good judgment into question. So, maybe it is not the perfect advice for a child, nevertheless I have been self-medicating myself in this fashion as long as I can remember. It means that I am nearly always happy and that rather than using adrenaline to chase away the blues I use it to elevate my normally upbeat self into euphoria.

Poor Stas knew none of this. In fact, I do not believe that he fully comprehended just how recently I had been allowed to fly by myself. Somehow I think he got the idea that my grandfather taught me to fly, or that I had been at it at least since college. In any case, we boarded the plane and taxied out Golf to runway 07. Full throttle and we were climbing towards the Swabian Alps. We headed down to the Hohenzollern castle as I had the previous day. This time we took a nice long look at an unusual glider field on a flat topped hill. Our arrival at the castle was heralded by the click and whine of Stas’ Canon digital SLR. After I took the plane around the castle twice I asked Joachim if we could get a little closer. His enthusiastic ‘sure’ inspired me to run a little wider on the next pass so I could edge in and do a straight flyby about two hundred feet off the building. It was very nice to be able to see all the dental work and full ashtrays in the castle courtyard.

Next we north and east a bit to the Lichtenstein Castle. This a really pretty pile of a building set on the edge of a cliff overlooking a valley. I flew quite close this time, but Stas was not ready with the wide angle so he could get nothing but a picture of one of the windows, complete with an interested bystander looking out at us. Joachim offered to show me how to fly photographers so Stas could get some better views. We practiced on a cow. A steep bank turn, perhaps fifty degrees to circle the cow. Once it was well established ease out the ailerons and ease in rudder to compensate. The high wing of the Cessna vanishes from the viewfinder as the plane scoots around in a skidding turn. I remember something from the private pilot course about cross control stalls, but if Joachim is not worried, neither am I.

We make another pass at Lichtenstein, this time sneaking up from the table land and pouncing at the very edge of the cliff. Joachim keeps his hands in his lap as I throw us around the top of the building in a horrid slip that gives Stas a great view. Joachim’s only comment is that ‘if you are not smelling exhaust you are not doing it right’. The exhaust comes straight back to the plane because the side of the plane, rather than the front, is leading the aeronautical parade. We could smell it.

The last stop on the way back to Stuttgart was a pass over the glider field. On a Tuesday no one was at the field and it looked so pretty surrounded by the changing leaves of the unseasonably late German autumn. Actually, it looked rather like an aircraft carrier with the narrow well trodden track of the glider tow return worn into the grass all along the length. I asked if I could make a low pass, since it looked so nice. Joachim said sure, and once again showed his mettle by leaving his hands in his lap. I approached the field at about eighty feet above ground level (AGL) and as I cleared the first trees dropped down to fifteen feet. With the engine screaming full on we whipped across the top of that hill like a War Two night fighter was hot on our tail. The cabin of the little plane was loud with the theme from Top Gun (at lest in my head) as I pulled us up a the end of the field to clear the lovely trees. We did not catch a single leaf in the wheels, though it was not for lack of trying.

As we returned to Stuttgart I managed to do an acceptable job of hitting entryway sierra and getting us established on the route to the pattern. The tower was their usual happy selves with exchanges of ‘gruss Gott’ and ‘Tcheuss’. There were two planes on long finals and it looked like we would have to do some circling to give them time to clear when the tower asked us if we could make a direct approach for immediate landing. Joachim looked at me and I immediately nodded hard. We were about a mile out flying straight at the center point of the runway. I put us in a slip to lose altitude and started inching a bit towards the numbers, not wanting to do other than a direct approach but hoping to get a little more runway in case something unfortunate happened. I got us to eighty feet above the runway as we got close and I started my turn. It was clear my turn was going to swing us wide and we would waste runway getting back and lined up. Joachim asked for the controls and flipped us up into a sixty degree bank, pointed the nose straight at the ground and said ‘your plane’. Apparently he too thought I had been flying for more than two weeks. I got the plane leveled out and we were ten feet up right over the centerline. I plopped us down and we had 200 feet before we were even at the far end of the 1,000 foot markers.

All this time I had sort of forgotten Stas. It was such a wonderfully exciting landing for me, but I suddenly was reluctant to look behind. Fortunately Stas sounded okay when I asked whether all was well in the back seat. We taxied back to the hanger and tied down the plane. As we walked back to the FBO, Stas grabbed my arm and asked ‘are all small plane landings like that?’ I assured him that most are quite sedate affairs and that had I not forgotten he was there I would have gone the long way around and he could have enjoyed the approach. He maintains that it was great fun and that he was not at all worried, just surprised to be so very vertical so very close to the ground. He wants to take a flying lesson when he visits me in my lab. Not everyone would have that reaction. I got lucky. We returned to work and both of us did the data collection of ten men as the adrenaline powered a fine afternoon.