KSEZ: Sedona, Arizona – Red Rock Aviation
This is our standard first stop out of Los Angeles, this fuel stop introduces us to the idea that people are going to be outgoing, friendly, and helpful as we make our way across the country. The plane was fueled quickly and cleanly while we took a short walk around the airport. My younger son left his laptop charger in the passenger lounge (not technically part of Red Rock’s business), and the Red Rock guys located it, called us, and mailed it back to us on the East Coast. Outstanding service from great people.

KSAF: Santa Fe, New Mexico – Santa Fe Jet Center
I am pretty sure we were the poor cousins landing at this place. Santa Fe is a destination for a lot of second wives on their journey to find themselves, so NetJets and the other charter operations land here regularly. The crew car we borrowed really was a car for a jet crew and the FBO wanted it back in two hours. That gave us just enough time to nip into town, stroll a little in the heat, and grab a bite. Rudy reviewed the restaurant on Yelp! which was great to see. Oddly, the FBO is not on AirNav. I’m not sure why such a large operation would let themselves slip off that page. On our return there were four Citations waiting for their aura-aligned passengers to return from Santa Fe and nearby Taos.

KLBL: Liberal, Kansas – Lydden Aero Center
This is the real deal. We were coming in very close to ten o’clock at night, their closing time, from Santa Fe. I was worried they would be closed, but figured if they were we would self-serve fuel and hop to the closest 24hr place for the night. Jesus was there to wave us in after we announced our arrival on the CTAF. He not only helped us pick out a hotel for the night (not good enough to recommend, not bad enough to warn you off of), he let us have a crew car for the entire night. With two sleepy little boys dragging their luggage around, he was really kind, helpful and spot on. After we got to the hotel we realized that we had flown into a new time zone and it was, in fact, eleven o’clock instead. In the morning the plane was topped off as requested and the morning staff was just as pleasant. This is an FBO from another time.

KMKC: Kansas City, Missouri – Executive Beechcraft
I was sad to hear that EB would be switching over to the Signature brand in the coming months. They were the remnants of a great, iconic name in general aviation. We stopped here on the way across the country so our boys could have some real Kansas City BBQ. EB dropped us at Jack Stack’s, and when it turned out it was too long a wait for a table they zipped back to pick us up at the take-away window. We had our delicious lunch in their break room. It required multiple calls to the front desk and they could not have been more pleasant and friendly.

KHUF: Terre Haute, Indiana – Terre Haute Air Services
Although it was a little difficult to find (they recently moved into the terminal building itself), the FBO was very friendly. They are a complete training facility, so they are familiar with student pilots and little planes. They fueled the plane for our quick turn and were polite and helpful.

KISZ: Blue Ash, Ohio – Blue Ash Aviation
Was a little nervous given the recent comment, but had a great experience. Apparently when their fuel delivery is missed (not their fault) they are forced to limit transient customers. Delivery was on time this week, I guess. Terry stayed past his 7pm quitting time to make sure I got tied down and fueled tonight so I can leave early tomorrow. He suggested the Wyndham and said there was an $83 special. I will stop here again.

KELM: Elmira, New York – Atlantic Aviation
This was a compulsory forty-five minute stop on a day with two long legs, so it was nice to be in a spot that offered some comfort. There’s a soft serve ice cream machine, a popcorn machine, and some vending machines. Our two boys had ice cream with crumbled cookies as topping. The Corning Glass Museum is ten minutes away and they offered us a crew car to go check it out, but we decided to push on. We didn’t pay a ramp or handling fee and the fuel price seemed reasonable for that large an airport. They were very friendly and we will be back.

KLEB: Lebanon, New Hampshire – Signal Aviation
I am confused by my three years of experience with Signal Aviation. I have called to have the plane pulled up for my arrival so it’s easier to load, and it’s still at the tie down. But the second time I flew out this summer it was right up next to the FBO like it was a jet. Sometimes when I land there’s no one there to help with the plane, or the lineman that shows up seems put out, other times they are all over it. It’s a mixed bag and I have told myself that they are the only FBO on the field (so there’s no competition to respond to), and it is vacation land, so I try to switch over to “island time.” They have also done a lot that is great customer service, like calling us in the rental car when we left something behind, and driving us over to the terminal when our rental car was over there.

KRUT: Rutland, Vermont – Columbia Air Services
Don’t use the email address; I sent several emails to it over a week-long period and there was never a response. But this FBO definitely went above-and-beyond during the five days I was based at Rutland. They worked hard to get a rental car up from town and out onto the tarmac even through I would be returning to the field after they were closed. I was flying in and out in the middle of July and they let my passengers cool off inside while I was pre-flighting the plane. They had the plane fueled right when I needed it, and had a suggestion for a maintenance possibility when I was curious about getting the oil changed. Other than the email problem, a top notch FBO even though it is a small operation.

1B2: Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts – Katama Airfield
As soon as you have enough hours to comfortable do a turf landing, you should journey out to this little gem. Our DA40 has a little longer (low) wingspan and the taxiways aren’t mowed quite wide enough for it, so we picked up a few grass stains on the ailerons on the way in. But it is worth it. The diner (The Right Fork) is great. Our group had burgers, floats and salads. All delicious. The parking wasn’t outrageously expensive. Airnav doesn’t have a diagram of the field, which is too bad. We parked by the diner, but there’s another parking ramp that is steps from the sand of South Beach. We walked out there instead and swam for two hours. It was fantastic.

KPSM: Portsmouth, New Hampshire – Port City Air
I flew in on July 17th to visit my son at nearby Exeter. They obviously monitor the frequencies and a lineman was trotting out to guide us in even before we were on the ramp. They were very helpful with directions, arranging the rental car, and discussing the fueling arrangements. It was the middle of a heat wave and for just $20 they put the little Diamondstar in the shade of one of the quonset huts. Those WW2 shelters are so cool I had to go out and take a photo of the plane tucked into one. This is a very professional operation with great people.

7B2: North Hampton, Massachusetts – Northampton Aeronautics
This was one of the smaller airports we had landed at recently and we’re flying a little single engine piston. We were treated like we had rolled out on the ramp at Jackson Hole in a Gulfstream. They had a golf cart take us back out to the plane, used the cart to tow the plane to the pumps, ran back to get us a funnel to dump in the quart of oil, and kept us entertained the whole time. Our rental car was ready and waiting, the bathrooms are clean, and the air conditioning was blowing full blast. A wonderful place to have stopped.

N07: Lincoln Park, NJ – Lincoln Park Aviation
This place is a gem, hidden away in the hills of Morris County. If your plane is small enough to land here, you should. This isn’t really an FBO (or, at least, I didn’t find the passenger lounge), but they collected me from the bus stop, did great maintenance work on the little Diamondstar (oil change, found a cracked spark plug), and were friendly every time I called. The field is straight out of the fifties, so small that people stroll across the runway to get to their hangar. There’s a delicious grill on the field with a patio overlooking the runway. It was hopping with live music when I landed on Sunday night. This is my new base when I am in New York City.

I’m going to keep this summary up at the top of the blog until I complete all the daily entries, then I will let it age down into the archive.

Here are the days of flying for the summer, all the way from Santa Monica, California to New Lebanon, New Hampshire, up into Canada and down to Morristown, New Jersey before the return trip home.

Friday, July 30: Santa Monica, CA to Jackson Hole, WY

Saturday, July 31: Jackson Hole, WY to Madison, WI

Sunday, August 1: Madison, WI to Lebanon, NH

Thursday, August 6: Lebanon, NH to Parry Sound, Ontario

Tuesday, August 11: Parry Sound, Ontario to Antrium County, MI

Wednesday, August 12: Antrium County, MI to Traverse City, MI

Friday, August 13: Traverse City, MI to Morristown, NJ

Saturday, August 22: Morristown, NJ to Springfield, IL

Sunday, August 23: Springfield, IL to Albuquerque, NM

Monday, August 24: Albuquerque, NM to Santa Monica, CA

I even got photo credit.

How exciting! My first article for Plane & Pilot magazine is up on their website. It will be in the physical magazine on August 10th.

Obviously, I already wrote here on the blog about the wonders of the iPad as an electronic flight bag, but it was fun to write blurbs for a bunch of applications I tried out.

I wish there weren’t people touting the iPad as a navigation device or a pseudo-HUD (Heads Up Display), because the hardware inside it makes that really dangerous, but other than that I loved all the development going on for the platform in the aviation space.

We hopped from Santa Monica, California to Sedona, Arizona. On to Santa Fe, New Mexico and then here for the night. We are hoping to make the edge of Cinncinati by the end of the day.

Garmin

electronic instruments in the plane, some of which sample air pressure in the pitot-static system, or sense the earth’s electromagnetic field. The very first airplanes only had a compass mounted on the panel and a spring-loaded device to suggest the airspeed. N971RD is loaded with more electronics and computer power than went to the moon. Actually, it is probably more computing power than was in the lunar mission or back on earth in Houston.

Does it need more?

Steam Gauges

There is a question about how much equipment is necessary, what makes a plane safe? The very first airmail pilots (the first long distance flyers) flew without an artificial horizon at the beginning. Of course, they also wore parachutes, so when they became lost in the clouds they could jump out. (Lindbergh was famous for having survived three exits of his Mail plane.) Many, many airplanes on any particular airfield today have what is called “a basic six pack.” These are just simple round gauges. A turn coordinator, a skid-slip indicator, an artificial horizon, a directional gyro (that shows the course of the plane’s flight), an altimeter, an airspeed indicator and a few engine instruments with a single VOR for navigation. Can these planes fly an instrument approach down through the clouds to get to an airport? Sure. Are they safe? Absolutely, as long as the pilot is aware of the limitations of the equipment and has been trained appropriately. The pilot should also be an expert navigator, since they will need to fly with a chart in their lap.

Our plane has electronics and backup electronics, and analog backups in case the electronics fail. The moving map uses the GPS information to show where the plane is, and shades the surrounding terrain appropriately. It shows traffic, significant obstacles (like transmitter towers), weather, airports, and a vast amount of data from the surroundings. It is excellent for helping the pilot maintain “situational awareness,” which is a key ingredient in safety. A large number of the entries in the NTSB database can trace the beginnings of their troubles to a loss of situational awareness.

I am all about trying to stay out of the NTSB database.

The best thing is to get an instrument rating, since the training is all about developing a method for gathering situational awareness and understanding what to do when you lose some of your instruments. And, really, the training  – which allows you to fly down and land when your destination airport is hidden by clouds – is invaluable.

When you are making an instrument approach there are two basic types: precision and non-precision. When they were first set up, there were only non-precision approaches. You followed a radio beam toward the airport, which provided lateral guidance. By using a timer, or other navigation aid, you knew how far you were along the approach and there were safe altitudes to pass each point on the approach. The only instrument approach into Santa Monica’s airport is one of these leftover non-precision approaches. You cross BEVEY (a point over Beverly Hills) at 2,600 feet above sea level, then drop to 1,120 feet until you cross CULVE, a point over Culver City. Then you can drop to 680 feet, which is 500 feet above the runway (which is at 177 feet). The whole time you are following the 212° radial, a radio beam from the Santa Monica (SMO) VOR.

All of these things can have errors. The radio beam might have some atmospheric interference, maybe the equipment itself has an error. Your altimeter might have a pitot-static system connected to it with an insect stuck in there. Who knows. These errors are all calculated, and the approach is designed so that if you are the victim of a few compounded errors you still won’t fly into a building or a mountain. Ideally, though, you would have more guidance.

That’s the ILS, the instrument landing system. They first started research and design in the nineteen thirties and installed the first working system in 1941. It provides much higher accuracy and allows the plane to get within two hundred fifty feet of the runway, instead of the five hundred for the non-precision approach.

My plane is equipped to fly an ILS, to show a little green diamond representing the ideal glide to touchdown (next to the tape showing my altitude), and I have happily flown many of them. There is a real jump in confidence knowing that you have lateral and vertical guidance.

In general, though, ILS approaches are at larger airports (or lucky training airports). They are expensive to install and maintain, and require a lot of real estate for the antennae. Santa Monica has ruled out installing one. In fact, the FAA says they are not going to install any more of them at all in the country.

Enter WAAS.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) was a huge help to en route navigation for small planes (and, for that matter, cars both big AND small). Being able to fly directly to another small airport, without meandering from VOR to VOR to get there, has saved many hours of flight. Years if you add it all up. It is now standard equipment in most new small planes. It can be used for instrument approaches, but only in a similar way that the VORs can, which means that it only provides lateral navigation and it is non-precision. Your GPS position is only accurate to within fifty feet laterally and not much use at all vertically.

A few years ago they worked out a way to augment the GPS signals. They would create stations on the ground to transmit additional data about the satellite signals received in the area. Essentially, the ground stations provide correction information for the signals slipping through the atmosphere. Now the position reported is accurate to ten feet, and it provides accurate enough data about the altitude that a plane equipped with the right equipment can fly an approach with vertical guidance.

This system of augmentation is provided over a wide area. So it is a Wide Area Augmentation System. WAAS.It’s pronounced with a Z.

All new GPS systems use WAAS. Even the little handheld systems that provide the turn-by-turn navigation in cars. In planes, the avionics manufacturers have provided “upgrade paths” for most of the installed systems, which is a way of saying they saw an opportunity to squeeze some more money out of their customers.

Is it worth it to upgrade to WAAS?

That’s so hard to say. I discussed it at length on the online community I am a part of. I discussed it with fellow plane owners, pilots, and my brother. It was the flight across the country, particular Kansas and Texas, that convinced me.

We don’t regularly fly instrument approaches. I mean, I do, to keep current as an instrument pilot, but the number of instrument approaches we have flown as a family can probably be counted on two hands. We are fair-weather travelers. Mostly we fly into big airports, especially if we are landing somewhere in poor weather. Those airports all have ILS approaches, so do we need WAAS?

Bad News in the Sky

If it only worked on instrument approaches I would probably say we don’t need it. But it is on all the time. Our position on the moving map in the plane is now accurate to within ten feet instead of fifty. That’s a lot of peace of mind when you are descending into the area around the Goodland, Kansas airport, which is dotted with antennae, all of them hundreds of feet tall. As I am coming back down to land, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of knowing where a tower is by fifty feet. That sounds very fatal.

We’ve made one critical WAAS approach. In the Summer of 2009 I flew from Parry Sound, Ontario to Antrim County, Michigan. The forecast for the day in Michigan was all clear skies for the entire day. As we approach Antrim County a set of clouds blew in off Lake Michigan and closed over the airport. They cooled and sunk a little and sat over the airport with a ceiling lower than the non-precision (VOR) approach would allow us to descend to. We requested the WAAS approach and followed our vertical guidance down to drop out of the clouds at five hundred feet above the runway.

So Worth the WAAS

It is difficult to make capital investments in the plane, which is already an expensive hobby, mode of travel, vacation entertainment or whatever it should be called. In this case it is clear that with the sort of flying we do, into a lot of little towns we are unfamiliar with, the security of knowing a little more accurately exactly where you are is worth it.

One of the people that I took flying with me was the father of a friend of mine. Tom flies a lot of interesting planes just sitting in the right seat. Antique warbirds and Civil Air Patrol planes. One of the things he said when I was about to taxi out onto the runway was, “Do you mind if I follow along?” That’s apparently a standard procedure: he just holds the controls lightly so he can really feel what I am doing as I take off, land, or do a barrel roll. (I rarely do barrel rolls.) Now everyone can follow along. It’s a tiny plane, so stay seated in front of your computer. I’ll explain.

The plane has a lot of technology in it. The two big screens are just the most visible part of a system that is all grouped as “the G1000.” Garmin makes all the pieces. One of the great things about the plane having a computer network (several computers, connected via redundant Ethernet, a little flying LAN in the sky) is that the software can be upgraded without too much trouble. That’s how I gained a fuel pressure display. The sensor and information was always coming from the engine and one of the software updates made a new gauge appear on the screen under fuel flow. Now I know if the fuel pressure is a little low.

The most recent software update had a whole slew of cool features. Some of the new features were even on a wish list I sent Garmin a couple years ago. Development for avionics must be excruciating because you face a certification process and a maze of lawyers over the liability issues. But Garmin piled a slew of new things into the last .22 release for the G1000.

One of the additions was logging. Ten times a second the system will now write to an SD card inserted in the G1000. It will record a whole bunch of parameters. The position reported by the GPS, the altitude and airspeed, the manifold pressure, number of revolutions per minute that the engine is turning, the temperature of each individual cylinder and the exhaust gasses they are spitting out. More information than you might suspect is useful. Certainly more information than I can take in ten times a second.

This logging is new to Garmin’s fancy system, but their simpler systems have had it for a while. And the Cirrus airplanes have had a logging system which wrote similar files. So a fellow out on the Internet wrote a web application where you could download your files from the SD card and take a look at the data graphically. Who doesn’t want to see their hottest cylinder graphed against their altitude? Exactly.

Of course, it is cooler than that. You can go to this page:

http://cirrusreports.com/flights/N971RD/

and see the flights which I have logged for our plane. (You can still go to FlightAware and peruse flights tracked by ATC, but that’s not all of the flights and the data is not nearly as complete. I wrote about that before.)

Flights Stored

But best of all, there is a link, just above the map and to the right, called Cockpit View. If you download and install Google Earth and then click that link, you will download a file which will animate the entire flight as if you are sitting in the plane with me.

This will also serve as a rudimentary black box. If something were to go wrong on a flight there will be a detailed record of what happened. If I added a little voice recorder to the intercom, then there would be a very complete picture after any incident (provided those electronics survived, it’s not like they are made of that magic black box material).

On a slightly more practical front, the engine parameters are all recorded, so I could show my mechanic if there was something I was worried about.

Now I need to get some sort panoramic video camera so you can feel like you can look around while we are up there.

VOR-A into SMO

I’m going to shrink all these graphics, but clicking on them will make them nice and big. Here is the approach plate to fly into Santa Monica when you can’t see the airport because of an overcast layer of clouds. I had to do this recently when I was returning from San Diego, where I dropped off some friends. The weather looked great when I departed, was even better than forecast all the way down to Lindbergh Field, and then on the way back up the clouds closed in faster and faster over little KSMO until it was covered with an overcast layer of clouds, a ceiling of 1,600 feet.

So I called SoCal Approach Control on the radio and said I would need an instrument approach clearance into the airport. I let Otto take over while I copied the clearance. Once I was cleared to the airport, if I lost radio contact somehow, I was still allowed to fly the approach all the way to landing. I was to fly over LAX (right near the Los Angeles VOR in the map image) at 4,000 feet to the Santa Monica VOR. Then I would turn outbound to the ELMOO intersection (over land that was originally a dairy farm, get it?). At ELMOO I would turn inbound on the approach, descending on the steps detailed in the profile view. Somewhere between BEVEY (over Beverly Hills) and CULVE (over Culver City) I will fly out of the bottom of the clouds at 1,600 feet and see the airport.

If I don’t, I can only fly down to 680 feet before I have to “go missed,” which means I fly past the airport, out over the ocean and up toward the SADDE intersection (over Saddle Peak) and hang out until the air traffic people work out another plan with me. (That’s never happened to me, any time I have started an instrument approach to an airport I have landed there.)

Not every airport has an instrument approach procedure, but every medium-sized airport does. And I am always within range of such an airport. They are, as you can see in the example, very precise. If you fly exactly where they tell you to fly, following the navigational radio beams on the settings they describe, you will have a nice margin of error around your path (including clearance below you for terrain and obstacles). You will arrive safely at the airport.

It’s against regulations to fly the approach without a written description. (That’s why I am able to draw the approach into Santa Monica on a blank sheet of paper from memory. I always “have it with me.”) The approach plates expire every six weeks or so. The government printing office rolls them out in booklet form, with each book covering a state or several states. California has so many airports we need two books, one for Southern California and one for Northern. I subscribe to the two California books and the Nevada/Arizona/New Mexico book through a website and they send them every six weeks. That’s twenty-two bucks every month and a half.

Stack of Paper

Here is that stack of updates before I take the from the house to the plane. You have to have the green book, the facilities directory, with you. It counts as “all available information” about your flight into unfamiliar airports, something you are required to have by regulation. (What is the elevation of the airport? How long is the runway? What are the frequencies for communications related to the airport? Is there fuel available there? All that’s in the green book.) So each book is about three quarters of an inch and probably half a pound.

Flying across the country, I need to stock up on all the necessary approach books for the entire trip. Then I have to err on the side of including a book without knowing for sure what our route will be. Getting NE-1 and NE-2 is obviously, since that covers a lot of the Eastern seaboard and our destinations on that end. But do I need SC-1 for Oklahoma and Arkansas? We landed in Tulsa on the way back from Spring Break one year, steering a little south for weather. That means we skipped right out of NC-3 territory, even though that book was sitting quietly in the back, taking up space and a pound of our available payload.

Cross It All

Looking at the map you can see that to get across requires something like a dozen or fifteen books. With the associated green books it winds up being a hundred twenty dollars in charts. Between our spring and summer flights they all expire and need to be replaced. It’s a significant chunk of baggage space and needs to be accessible (Rudy will go rooting through the bag for me, passing up the NE-2 book when I ask for it.)

The part of the whole endeavor that really bothers me is that six weeks can easily go by and I won’t use the Arizona book. And I’ve almost never cracked open any of the green books. The last trip across for the summer (and return trip) we used three approach plates (Lebanon, NH, Antrim County, MI and a departure plate out of St. Louis, MO). We could have gotten away with just three books, but there is no way to know that. Hundreds of pages of newsprint dumped in the trash after each trip (and smaller amounts every six weeks for the three books I always need).

Why can’t technology save me from this mess?

I bought a Kindle when they first came out. I looked into getting the approach plates as PDF files (Portable Document Format, a sort of universal file for display and printing). But there is a little bit of subtlety in the display of the plates and I didn’t really like the way they looked on the Kindles screen. My Kindle 2 was a slicker item than my Kindle 1 (which was handed down to my eldest son for reading in the plane), but the screen was the same size. And it wasn’t really big enough for a full approach plate. The e-ink display the Kindle uses doesn’t do smooth scrolling or even smooth updates, so flipping back and forth between the plan and profile views of the approach is not natural. Navigating through a PDF file was no fun and not something I would want to do in the cockpit while bouncing around in the clouds.

I have an iPhone and I bought ForeFlight for it. It’s a great little application, especially for watching the radar map of precipitation sweep over the airport while you are having lunch nearby. Then you know to slow down, have a dessert, and that you’ll be on your way in another hour or so. And they let you download approach plates, but the iPhone screen is really tiny, so that’s not useful for anything other than a dreadful emergency.

The G1000 has a couple nice big 10” diagonal screens. For $800 a year Jeppesen will deliver the instrument procedures for the country to a little card that I can update every six weeks and the plates will show up on the screen right there in front of my co-pilot. I’ve tried it (there was a trial version for free). I don’t like losing the moving map on that screen. And I don’t want to look over for the approach plate information. It really didn’t feel like a very good solution. I bet if I had a Mustang jet with three screens (moving map in the middle), and a co-pilot who was in charge of reading the information off the approach plate for me it would work really well. I’ll keep that in mind for when I get the Mustang.

A friend has the Kindle DX. A much larger screen and it looked like it would be big enough for a full approach plate. I looked into Nacomatic again and another solution that packaged the PDFs up for you. It still didn’t feel comfortable and there was a rumor Apple was coming out with a tablet. A game changer.

Exactly.

Foreflight iPad

This is my iPad (just the lowest-end WiFi model) running ForeFlight HD. Right now it automatically updates itself with all of the VFR and IFR charts for my region of the country and all of the instrument procedures for California, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. In July when I fly across I will set it to download the entire country of charts and instrument procedures.

It has diagrams of every airport across the country and the FBOs at each of those airports, complete with phone numbers. That means when we land at our lunch stop and plan where to land for dinner, Nell can call ahead and talk to them about possible hotels. It downloads weather information. You can see weather maps, the VFR chart for an area, or the Victor airways of the IFR chart. Most importantly, it downloads all of the instrument procedures for each airport. So as I am flying into Santa Monica from Las Vegas if they say, “Expect the KIMMO-2 arrival I can bring that up on the iPad in a couple taps of my finger.

(Incidentally, there’s a departure procedure out of Van Nuys airport. It’s the Glendale-9 departure and I am pretty sure I have gotten every time I’ve flown out of KVNY on an instrument flight. It’s simple: climb on the runway heading until 2.2 nautical miles from the VNY VOR, then turn to a heading of 110 degrees to get vectors to the VNY 095 radial to the ADAMM intersection. I could probably fly it from memory (especially in VFR conditions, which is what I am usually doing), but I am meant to have a written description of it at hand when I start the flight. For whatever reason it is hard to find in the NACO book. Other procedures I find easily, but that one hides from me. On the iPad it was tap-tap-tap and there it was. Amazing.)

I had to get this big, padded case for the iPad. The huge glass surface is an invitation for scratches and when I am flying the plane I don’t worry that much about things getting banged around in the cockpit; I’m very focused on making sure the plane stays where it needs to and is pointed the right way. So the incase case has a lot of padding, stiffness, and covers up the iPad nicely. it adds a little weight to Apple’s slim little package, but that’s all fine in the name of making it less vulnerable.

Safely Encased

So here it is as it will sit in the cockpit, all neatly wrapped up. You can see that I’ve pulled down the favorites menu in ForeFlight, which shows me the airports I go to most often, with their weather. Currently I can only update if I have WiFi connectivity, but friends have the 3g model and I’m waiting to see what a couple months with this is like. I’ve already flown into Chino using the iPad and I used it on the return from San Diego that I mentioned before. It’s been perfect. I can’t wait for the trip across this summer.

(The iPad was $500. The Foreflight subscription works for both the iPhone and the iPad and is $70 a year. The year we flew across on both spring and summer breaks we spent $120 each break for charts along with the $180 for the six-week updates throughout the year. $420 for charts in the year. And I think I can ditch the little brown Airport Guide books, which are another $30 each (three cover the country). But the truth is I love not carrying the things I don’t use, and I like not throwing away paper I have never seen.)

Through the Desert

KSPI – KRVS – KBGD – KABQ

Part of the lost trip report.

Lincoln Stood Here, But Taller

Nell is great at finding us something interesting where we are. Bob and I flew in and out of Springfield, Illinois and, other than debating a visit to the Lincoln museum, saw nothing but the Outback Steakhouse. I know, typical American tourism. Terrible. But, fortunately, the boys and I have Nell. After breakfast we wandered outside, crossed one long parking lot and then we were traipsing about the capital of Illinois. Somehow there was a lot of information just on the plaques and various tour spot points. We learned how Illinois was (and still is) a farming state, that the revenue is really from the agriculture and animal husbandry across the state. We learned about the capital and it’s dome, which we peered up into. It was a little nippy, since it was early morning, but so clear and beautiful.

We finally called it a morning and headed back to the hotel. Collecting our bags we packed the beat up crew car and headed back to the airport. There seemed to be some sort of event at Lincoln’s graveside, but we were already booking toward the airport. We took off into a crisp, clear morning over cornfields, heading west.

Happy to be Aloft

Thunderstorms were already blocking a bit of our direct western route, so we dropped a little south. We flew over some wonderful lake country by the Lake of the Ozarks State Park. Some of them were crammed with houses, docks, and little jet skis buzzing about. The parts (probably part of the park) left untouched looked so peaceful while the developed parts looked as relaxing as downtown Manhattan. We are a mysterious culture. “I’ve got to get away from it all. Over where those people are getting away from it all.”

We landed in Tulsa, at one of their smaller airports. As we were directed under the Class C airspace around their big airport we flew over some glass recycling center, or something similarly industrial, with an other-worldly azure glitter pile. It was getting hotter as we descended and between the sweat-in-the-eyes, the hunger, the tension from not knowing when we would be allowed to fly directly toward out little airport, the pile of glass might have been a hallucination.

It was hot at Richard Lloyd Jones airport. The boys found the cold water and popcorn in the air conditioning in short order, while Nell negotiated for a BBQ lunch. Sunday meant all the good places were closed, and the crew cards had both been taken by charter crews. The FBO was nice and dropped us off at a chain BBQ place. It was an okay lunch, but we vowed to have no more fried food for the trip. That was enough to

Lakes in Missouri or Okalahoma

last us.

We took off, turning directly, but not disastrously, toward the Oral Roberts Prayer Tower at his university. I called my friend Dean when we were wandering the strip mall and said, “I’m in Tulsa!” He’s from Oklahoma. He said, “I’m sorry.” Apparently that’s not really the best the state has to offer. I could tell, having flown in over some of the lake country, and I know that a lot of Texas comes up into Oklahoma for the weekend. So the strip mall and chain restaurants and lack of ice cream were not really representative.

We flew on into north Texas.

We hoped to land at Santa Fe for the night. We hadn’t been there, Nell’s sister Julie liked it, and we knew the flight from the Albuquerque area to home was not a difficult one. Plugging it into the G1000, our fuel stop looked to be Hutchinson County airport in Borger, Texas.

Sometimes you see great places like Marfa, Texas, where you realize that without taking a trip in a little plane like we were, you wouldn’t get to see them. And it would be a real loss. Other times, you land in Borger. This is a town that was created by the refinery, and with the death of the refinery (for whatever reason, it sounded like it was connected to Enron somehow), the town has been dropped into a hole, thrown back through time to the Great Depression. I had to drive to get more AA batteries, and went past houses which had already claimed generations living in poverty and were totally prepared to do it for another few generations. Nothing grew here, nothing was made, it was all people waiting for their unemployment check, their welfare check, their social security or disability check. Limping forward through each day. The fellow who pumped our plane full of fuel said that the Iraq war was a real boon for the town since at least it gave a few younger guys the chance to get out. Brutal landscape and bleak future. We took off in midday Texas heat, turning happily to the west.

(You can actually look Borger, Texas up on Google maps and use their street view feature to drive around.)

The weather I saw on the laptop before we left Borger looked clear. But I look again when I get to cruising altitude. We hoped to land in Santa Fe because that was a new place and we’d gotten stuck in Albuquerque enough. Twenty minutes after takeoff I showed Nell the huge thunderstorm line sweeping toward Albuquerque from the south. It looked like we would be a lot better off landing at Roswell. That looked interesting, too, with all sorts of UFO-related things to do in a tiny desert town.

We cruised on toward a point where we have to go north or south. South would take us to Roswell. Finally we decided to press on toward Albuquerque, but we would land at Tucumcari. We would need the FBO to be open, though, since the airport was out of town a ways. As we closed in, and watched the storm pounding Albuquerque, we called down to the airport and FBO frequencies. There was no answer. It was evening. We talked with the ABQ approach controllers. They said the storm was blowing out of the basin, toward Santa Fe. So we plotted our course to ABQ, steering carefully around the trailing pieces of precipitation. Finally, the weather at ABQ reported clear and, in failing light, we descended toward the field, coming in over the ridge. Nell said the mountains made her a little nervous and she wanted to stay higher, so I relayed that to the controller. He gave us a nice long downwind for the descent and we came in behind a Long EZ on a five mile final.

I was bushed. A van took us to a hotel from the FBO. Rudy and Nell went out and found grilled chicken for me and something that Dexter found passable. I collapsed into a deep sleep.

The last two legs

KABQ – KDVT – KSMO

Part of the lost trip report.

The last day was easy flying. I think we all slept well, but I don’t know because I stumbled into dreamland, tripped over something, and came to eight hours later. The breakfast at the hotel was not horrific and we headed to the airport. 

I really like Cutter in Albuquerque. It’s not the fanciest or most modern FBO we have been to, but the people are really good at their jobs and they don’t treat the little planes as second class citizens. We were tied down around the corner from the main ramp, fully fueled, and the tie down job was really secure. That’s important when you are in for a night of fast moving storms.

The sky was still quite angry, but it wasn’t actually raining. We loaded the plane up, taxied over to the edge of the ramp and called for our clearance out of ABQ heading west. We launched and flew a little north before turning southwest. Dexter wanted to stop in Phoenix again (where he and I spent the night the spring before), and that worked fine for a fuel stop. The terrain was quite high around Albuquerque (mountains ranging from six thousand to eight thousand feet high). The freezing level, even though it was August, was around ten thousand feet. And ahead of us there was a set of nine thousand foot peaks. The ceiling of the overcast clouds seemed to get lower as we approached the Cibola National Forest, and I finally had to call ATC and ask for an instrument clearance to Phoenix. As we climbed into the clouds I kept a careful eye on our outside air temperature and the leading edge of the wing. I turned on the pitot heat, which would keep ice forming on the probe which tells us how fast the airplane is sliding through the air.

As we rode the victor airways through the mountains I would occasionally ask ATC if we could descend out of the clouds. The controller was polite, but explained that we were as low as he was allowed to let us be. There was no way to climb above the clouds, since these were the remains of the thunderstorms from the day before and they reached up to twenty thousand feet.

Finally, we were allowed lower a little bit after the Arizona border. We flew over Show Low, an airport in the foothills for a town named after the turn of a card, and then we were on the other side and dropping quickly for Phoenix. We were not in our reserve fuel as we entered the pattern at Deer Valley, but we were certainly close enough that I didn’t like having to go around due to the tower controller’s poor spacing of the incoming planes.

The FBO loaned us a car for lunch and we found PF Changs. An excellent meal in powerful air conditioning and we headed back to the plane. Nell said I looked a little wiped out, which was probably the hard flight the night before and the time in the clouds over the mountains, so I napped for twenty-five minutes in the sleep room at the FBO. The boys played on a computer in the crew room and Nell worked on her laptop. We loaded up in ninety-five degree heat to roll down a very long runway and a takeoff to the west.

On climb out we saw another plane climbing with us for longer than I can ever remember a plane pacing us. The controller was talking to them, and the instructor (it was a student pilot) had us in sight. So I wasn’t worried, but it was still a strange feeling to be dogged by another plane. They eventually turned south.

It was hot until we got above eight thousand feet. We had the windows filled with sunscreens. I really love that last leg home. We sailed over Interstate Ten, our wing gobbling up even the most ferocious desert speedsters. We saw desert communities like Blythe slide by beneath us, mysterious in their isolation and purpose. We turned north and could see the lens of shiny remains that is the Salton Sea, a sprawled monument to man’s hubris and ignorance of the power of nature. Palm Springs huddled in the shadow of it’s mountains. Sinatra used to lounge at a pool down there somewhere, looking up at this same sky. We are a white dot pulled across the smear of high cirrus.

As high as we were, the two peaks on either side of the Banning Pass are higher. My friend TW says, “That pass is littered with the shiny remains of people that tried to get through in too much wind.” So I always pay close attention. His plane was once slammed suddenly into an eighty degree right bank (so he looked out the side, down the wing to the ground). No warning. So while I enjoyed the view I kept my hand on the control stick, and I watched the wind speed indicator. I asked the controller “how the ride has been for the little guys.” All reports were smooth so far.

As we drew abeam Big Bear Lake I dialed in a descent for Santa Monica. We picked up speed and started to lose altitude. I warned the boys we were landing soon, so they started packing up their courier bags for the last time. SoCal Approach passed us off to Santa Monica Tower as we eased over Beverly Hills at a couple thousand feet. It was great to hear a familiar voice over the radio. We were cleared for a straight in approach to two-one and cleared to land.

Too many photos are missing Nell

Our wheels dragged onto the grooved concrete of the five thousand foot long runway of N971RD’s home base. It was a long taxi back to our tie-down, since I landed long and didn’t brake hard, but I enjoyed looking at the FBOs, hangars and usual characters of our field. When I shut down Nell hopped out and moved the car out of our spot and the boys helped me push the plane back in.

Another successful crossing completed.

Westward ho!

KMMU – KCAK – KCMI – KSPI

(Part of the lost trip report.)

MORRISTOWN

Our departure out of Morristown was our first return-to-field event as a family. (I had done this once with Art in the plane taking off out of Long Beach after service.) The truth is, I expected the plane to misbehave a little since it had been sitting for a week. Well, that and I always expect the engine to quit at any moment. That’s what I am planning for.

Being part of the art at MoMA

We packed it all up, the boys climbed in and turned on their Kindles. Nell settled in with her magazine. We taxied out to the the run-up area and I ran the engine up to 2,000rpm and checked each side of the ignition. It was all fine. We had an instrument clearance out of the airport because there was a thin layer of clouds over it (a few holes here and there up to blue sky). The clearance was rather simple: fly straight ahead climbing until you are above the clouds. The airspace around New York City is incredibly busy (three international airports: JFK, Newark and LaGuardia), so we had to wait on the ground for a little while.

We rolled out onto the centerline, I pushed the throttle forward and we finally returned to the sky. The clouds had a few more holes in them and the truth is that we just wandered up into the blue. As always, after take off I checked the engine instruments. One of the cylinders was exhausting gas a couple hundred degrees hotter than the others. That was bothersome. I tried pulling the mixture way back to really heat up the gases, in case I could burn off some gunk that was messing up the ignition. It didn’t work.

High exhaust gas temperatures could mean a lot of things. And it was possible that after climbing to

Crossing the Harbor with Cousin Freddy

altitude and leaning the cylinder way back the condition could be cleared. Note that in a less advanced aircraft like the one I trained in we wouldn’t even have the information that one of the cylinders was exhausting gas that was a few hundred degrees hotter than the others.

I spun through all the possible scenarios in my head and I didn’t really like any of them. The entire family was in the plane and if this was a hint that the engine was going south on us, I didn’t want to make an emergency landing in some farmer’s field with all four of us and our luggage on board. Besides, there weren’t that many farmer’s fields below us, most of it was housing developments.

There are a lot of regulations governing flying, even the littlest planes. There are additional regulations on top of those if you are flying under Instrument Flight Rules, which we were. Pilots spend a lot of their time worrying about regulations, how they are interpreted, how they are enforced, and whether they might be in violation of any of them inadvertently. Just for a simple flight you are embarking on a tour of hundreds of pages of federal legalese in the FAAR (Federal Aviation Administration Regulations) book. A lot of regulations that all disappear the moment I say, “Niner seven one romeo delta is declaring an emergency, we have an engine anomaly and need to return to field.”

The instant you declare an emergency all bets are off and you can do acrobatics, land on a road, or fly through a cloud without a clearance. As long as it is all in service of the safety of your flight, there are no regulations until everything is okay again.

I was already making a descending left turn back toward MMW and pulling some of the power back. I was watching the engine gauges carefully. (Most engine trouble in piston engines is triggered by a power change, so I am careful about when I make those changes.) The controller asked, “Do you need equipment?” That’s a polite way of asking if I want the airport’s fire trucks and paramedics to roll out to the landing strip to hose us down or cart us off to the nearest hospital as needed. I glanced at the altimeter, airspeed and the moving map. Everything looked very good, even if the engine stopped now. “Negative, no equipment necessary, we have a high exhaust temperature on one cylinder and can probably clear it once we’re on the ground.”

The Campus Library at Champaign-Urbana Awaited us...

Technically, we are still under an Instrument Flight Plan, we were just deviating from it. And, I believe, the airport was still technically IFR (the minimums for Visual Flight Rules were not met by the weather conditions: there was less than three miles visibility or the clouds were lower than a thousand feet). So I needed to fly an instrument approach back into the airport.

I wasn’t really thinking about that. I had a fancy moving map, I could see where I was in relation to the runway I was going to land on, and I had just flown up through a hole in the thin layer of clouds, so I knew I could fly back down through one. I was watching the ground flit in and out of view through the cloud layer that was broken and I was finding my way back to the start of the runway.

There are a couple things controllers are not allowed to “offer” or suggest to pilots. They tend to be higher risk procedures. The first that we learn about is the Special VFR clearance for take off and landing when the field is technically below basic VFR minimums, but not yet quite IFR. Student pilots cannot accept a special VFR clearance, but regular pilots, even without an instrument rating, can. But you have to know to ask for it. As you are arriving at the airport, the tower controller will say, “The field is below basic VFR minimums, what are your intentions?” You have to know to say, “I am requesting a special VFR clearance to land.” Some people think accepting a special VFR clearance is too risky and won’t do it.

The other procedure they can clear you for, but can’t suggest, is a contact approach. That’s where you have visual “contact” with the environs around the airport at your destination, but you can’t actually see the airport. If you know the airport well enough (or you have a fancy moving map and a GPS to lead you there), this is a fine way to find the runway, but it’s certainly higher risk than an ILS or WAAS approach. It assumes that neither of those are available for the runway you are trying to use, and that you can’t see the airport directly to get to it.

The controller asked me a couple times, “Do you have contact with the ground?” I see the ground often enough that I am using that as a reference to get back to the airport, but since I am also monitoring the engine instruments, letting Nell know what is going on, and getting my orientation to the runway figured out, it doesn’t sink in what he’s asking. I finally say that I have positive contact with the ground and the airport is in sight, in and out of the clouds. He says, “You are cleared for the contact approach, switch to tower.”

So the tower asked if I want equipment. If the runway were shorter, or if the engine were producing less than full power, I wouldn’t mind seeing the fire truck out there, but I was pretty sure this is just a fouled plug so I said that we’d be okay without the equipment, we just needed to get back on the ground.

Internal combustion engines mix fuel and air in a mist and then ignite the mixture. Because the technology in the plane’s engine is (primarily) from the 1940’s, there is lead in the fuel to keep the engine running smoothly. Not a lot of lead, not an environmentally significant amount, but some. When the plane is on the ground, engine idling, the temperatures in the cylinders are low. Too low to always burn the lead deposits off of the walls of the cylinder or the electrodes of the spark plug. When deposits build up on the spark plug it stops producing as big a spark. The ignition of the gas and air mixture lags a little, so some of the conflagration escapes the cylinder with the exhaust gases, showing up as an increased exhaust-gas temperature (EGT).

I know, fascinating.

So once I lined up for the runway, landed, and taxied to the run up area (for the second time that morning), I ran the engine at a little higher throttle setting and slowly pulled the mixture lever, letting less and less fuel into the cylinders. The result is a mixture that burns hotter and hotter, eventually burning the lead deposit off the fouled plug. Once I did that, I ran it for a little to check the EGTs, and they were all just about the same. While I was fiddling with the throttle and mixture levers and peering at the engine gauges Nell said, “What do you think these guys want?” I looked up and the huge yellow fire truck assigned to the field has rolled up next to us.

Reluctantly, I shut down and talked to the fire chief. He has forms to fill out every time there is an emergency landing, so he has to talk to the pilot. I explained the fouled plug and the extreme caution since the entire family was in the plane. He seemed satisfied. During our time on the ground the clouds had opened a lot more and we didn’t need to file for an instrument departure. That was good, since I think the wait for our instrument release was part of the problem. Twenty minutes after our first take off, we were climbing back up into the blue, steering around the occasional cloud. And soon the green hills of western New Jersey were sliding beneath us.

AKRON

It is difficult to fly across the country and not hit the same places all the time. We made an effort to NOT stop in Pittsburgh, where I had already been twice. Instead, we pushed a little further west (and a little north) and made it to Akron, Ohio. It felt like we had made up for the delay on departure by getting a little closer to the Pacific.

We ate lunch at a themed restaurant on the field. It was like Squadron 94,  where I have dined in Van Nuys, but it wasn’t part of the chain. I just wanted something a little better than McDonalds, and they delivered. The FBO found the tires missing a few pounds of air and it was a relief to have them back to the proper pressure. We considered our meal a heavy brunch and, sated, headed back into the sky to continue west.

CHAMPAGNE-URBANA

The Mysterious Man and an art lover

One of our best stops on a previous trip was accidental. It was our diversion to Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, where the University of Illinois has a campus. Last time we were a little aimless and killing time. This time we knew what we wanted and had a fantastic afternoon.

We went to the stir fry place for an early dinner. We checked out the college store for any good t-shirts. And we strolled the campus (which has the earliest experimental field ever planted). There’s some good architecture. The weather was perfect. It seemed that the freshman were just arriving for orientation. Rudy strolled past a few of the tables and I thought about how in five or six years he’ll really be on a campus for orientation.

There was a lot of urban-scale sculpture on the campus and some interesting architecture along with the

The Mysterious Man just before our launch to Springfield

older buildings. I enjoy campus planning and architecture, even though I didn’t enjoy my time on a campus. And as we strolled between the campus and an expansive graveyard, and then along the edge of a large cornfield, I thought about how this was the sort of place we would never get to unless we traversed the country in our little plane.

We wandered back to our “crew car,” drove back to the airport and I planned our last flight. We lifted off into the sun setting over the cornfields of Illinois.

SPRINGFIELD

By pushing on, we were sure that we could make it home with only two more days of flying, neither of them terribly difficult. I was a little warm (sweaty) climbing back into the plane, and by the end of the flight I was certainly ready for a hotel bed. It was an extremely peaceful flight, skimming over the flat, lush land with the light going grey and the sky changing color. We landed at an FBO that Bob and had used two summers before. They were just as helpful this time and gave us a (beat up) crew car to keep over night (unheard of). It helps to arrive with cute little boys in tow. Nell found us a great hotel downtown and we grumbled our way there in our Ford Escort circa 1987. The hotel was hip, which was a little odd since we were in what seemed like a downtrodden section of town. But it was a 1950s modern hotel that had been renovated to retro-hip in the past three years or so. I didn’t understand how great Nell’s pick was until the next morning.