Grey sky with light spots, chance of rain
Temperature: 4°C
QNH: 1019hPa
Location: EDAY (Strausberg)
Equipment: MD3 Rider (D-MALJ)
The morning has been over cast and there were a few drops of rain earlier. But now the sky gets lighter and I have high hopes for good weather as I do my pre-flight.
I check in with the tower and start taxiing to the runway. A large rain drop lands right in the middle of the wind shield with a thud. It is slowly being smeared across the plexi glass by the wind of the propeller. The flight instructor is not concerned. We have checked the weather radar in the flight school and the tower did not expect more rain either.
By the time we have reached the runway, the single rain drop is in the middle of a family reunion. Not a big problem, the sky still looks relatively light. The aircraft does not have wind shield wipers but as I push the throttle forward for take off, the propeller blows the screen clear of the rain.
The vertical visibility in the traffic pattern is around the legal minimum of 1.5 kilometers. On the crosswind leg of the departure (the first 90 degree turn after take-off) I have to be able to see to the end of the runway (1.2 kilometers) and a bit beyond that. I see the road behind the runway, because I know it’s there.
We do one touch and go, still hoping the rain shower is going to go away. On the downwind leg of the second round we lose visibility of the runway. The aircraft is shaking, the rain is getting stronger by the second. An Individual rain drop is coming through a crack and lands on my arm. The propeller is not blowing the rain away from the wind shield any more but blowing more water onto it. I’m having a difficult time keeping the runway in sight on the base leg. After landing we taxi over to the hangar. The sky is now black, only minutes after we were still hoping for sun.
13 minutes, 2 landings and dryining off the aircraft. Actually that was a good lesson about weather!
To be continued…
(Originally posted on March 16, 2011 by tilbo at aloft.blog.com/rainy-day/)
I’m not a big breakfast person. When my wife is not home, I often don’t even have coffee before I leave for work. On days like this I usually have breakfast at work around 11 with the second or third cup of coffee.
When I fly, I’m usually in the air by 11 am. On these days I have to eat strategically so that I don’t have low blood sugar when I should be concentrated. So I set my alarm clock a bit earlier and eat a real breakfast with little appetite.
To add insult to injury, the coffee maker will stay cold on these mornings. I am a heavy coffee drinker. I usually start the day with black coffee and keep going strong until the last steaming cup after dinner. On flying days however, I have to factor in the availability of toilets aboard the air plane – or the lack thereof. And for this calculation, the amount of coffee I start my day with does make a difference. Sad but true.
The guys in the flight school joke about a case of beer as the universal currency for making up for mistakes. Running late? No problem, it will cost you a crate of beer! Hard landing? Nothing a crate of beer can’t fix! In real life however, this is nothing more than a line of jokes. Alcohol is dealt with very responsibly amongst the aviators I have met so far.
“24 hours from bottle to throttle”
This catchy rule is what I have learned as the code of honour. It refers more to a state of mind then to a glass of beer with dinner the day before a flight. It means that a pilot should be rested, focused and at the peak of his or her mental capacity during a flight. Very much the way one does not feel, 24 hours after attending your best friends stag party for example.
I was still surprised when I learned that the official FAA ruling is “only” 8 hours between consuming alcoholic beverages and operating a commercial air plane. The maximum allowed blood alcohol is 0.04 % (0.4 promille). This seems like a lot to me.
Flying is all new and exciting for me. It requires my full attention. It is hard for me to picture how the routine of a commercial pilot with thousands of hours must be like. But I know how I feel at my boring desk job when I come to work on the day after a big night out. Usually these are not the most efficient work days.
So for now I will stick with my 24 hours. It helps me prepare for the flight mentally. I will see how it goes once I’m in the 3 or 4 digits with my flight hours. Right now I’m still in the low 2 digits and I guess it is okay to still focus on every aspect of flying very much!
To be continued…
(Originally posted on March 9, 2011 by tilbo at aloft.blog.com/eat-drink-fly/)
We start moving and I hit the start button on the timer. The preset time for the first leg of our trip starts counting down. It will start flashing and beeping once the previously calculated time is up.
I have a pretty fancy flight timer. It is a very specialized stop watch. It has a fuel timer, it can time up to 12 legs of a flight and it has a clock in my local time as well as in UTC. The Universal Time Coordinated is the international aviation time. All flight plans all over the world use UTC and UTC only. This is very important to avoid misunderstandings on trips across time zones.
The fuel timer is also very important. Obviously you don’t want to run out of fuel. But there is more: many airplanes have several tanks. They are not always used at the same time. The reason for that can be weight and balance or fuel overflow. So it is important to remember to change tanks as this is very easy to forget. The fuel timer is a count down timer. As soon as it reaches zero, it starts counting up again as well as giving its warning message. So the pilot knows how long it has been since he should have changed the tanks.
The count down of leg #1 is up and I get a beep. For every part of my trip (leg) I calculate the time that I will approximately need to complete it. As air is a dynamic medium and winds are changing, this is not an exact science. But the leg timer alerts me that I should be getting close to my next way point. It is a good idea to make sure now that I know where I am and that I am prepared for the change of course.
The change is completed. I turn the big, friendly knob on the timer and the D2 leg appears (Destination 2). I hit the start button again. The second leg is longer and I get my morning paper out. The timer starts beeping once more right as the train approaches my stop. Nobody pays attention to the guy with the funny looking stop watch. They have all seen worse things than a flight timer dry run on the subway. I love the big city!
To be continued…
(Originally posted on March 8, 2011 by tilbo at aloft.blog.com/dry-run/)
Visibility: Low up until 2000 feet, above that unlimited (inversion)
Temperature: -1°C
QNH: 1039hPa (high pressure)
Location: EDAY (Strausberg)
Equipment: MD3 Rider (D-MASL)
The morning is sunny but a bit hazy. Visibility in the traffic pattern is not great but from about 2000 feet upwards it is almost unlimited. There is only light traffic with a Cessna doing pattern work (touch and go’s) and another plane getting ready to go. The plan for today is practicing precision landings. The point of this exercise is to make it to your chosen landing site in case of an engine failure. We climb up to 2.000 feet and fly over the threshold of the runway. Then I pull the throttle to idle and fly a wide circle and land the aircraft with idle power exactly in the middle of the touch down zone – a marked part of the runway.
At least this is how the theory goes. In real life I have practiced this maneuver many times already to get it right. It is difficult to get a good feeling for the wind, for the distance to the runway and a good landing still requires a lot of my attention.
Today the first try is a bit rustic, the second one is acceptable. After the second time, the flight instructor gets out of the plane. This is my third solo flight and the first time I do a precision landing on my own. The air is cold and dense and the trusted Rider is light with only me to carry. I reach 2.000 feet long before I am at the threshold. So I have time to level the airplane out and remember the width of the circles I made just minutes ago.
At the threshold I tell flight control that I begin a precision landing now, I pull the throttle to idle and then turn the vernier to the left all the way. I push the nose down ever so slightly to control my speed. 130 km/h is perfect. The engine gets very quiet at 1600 rpm and the noise of the wind gets louder. I push the yoke to the right and Sierra Lima banks into a right turn. I want the first part of the turn to be as tight as possible until I see my landing area to the right. When I have the runway in sight, I adjust the circle in order to loose the right amount of altitude.
On the first attempt I come in way too high. Sierra Lima wants to fly and with the weight of the second person missing, she has her way with me. At 1200 feet I force her to slip towards the ground. I step on the right pedal to bring the rudder to the right. At the same time I push the stick to the left which uses the ailerons to force the left tip of the wing down and the right up. I make sure the nose stays down and Sierra Lima begins to simultaniously bank to the left and yaw to the right. She screams at me and shakes as the contradicting commands are using up the kinetic energy which she would have wanted to use for maintaining altitude. The needle of the change indicator points straight down as the rate of our descent rises.
After a few seconds of slipping I am down to 600 feet. I carefully bring rudder and ailerons back to neutral and keep an eye on the airspeed and on my heading at the same time. At least this is what I try to do – more or less successfully. I still am high on short final but I don’t think I have enough altitude any more to try another slip. I come in way above the touch down zone. When I’m sure that I can’t make it any more, I push the throttle all the way forward to go around. The Rotax engine jumps to life instantly and yanks me towards the sky.
I try again. This time I loose my altitude more quickly and on short final it looks much better. About 200 meters away from the threshold I am actually too low and I turn the vernier a half turn to the right. The engine comes out of idle and slows my descent enough to get me right in the middle of the touch down zone. Better.
On the third attempt I come in high again, but this time I see it in time. I set full flaps and once I’m sure I’ll make it to the runway, I force Sierra Lima into a few seconds of slip once more. This time I am extra careful as it is easy to exceed the maximum flap speed of 120 km/h while slipping. The wheels touch the runway on the second of the three landing zone markers – perfect. We’ll do this again until it works every time.
Back at the office of the flight school, the instructor pushes the log book over to me. It is the first time I fill it in myself. Not a big thing but enough to put a little smile onto my face.
To be continued…
(Originally posted on March 2, 2011 by tilbo at aloft.blog.com/precision-landing-at-eday/)
Flying has nothing to do with high tech. This is one of the very first things that a new entry into flight training learns. Flying is about weight and reliability. Reliability equals safety and it is achieved through redundancy (which creates weight issues again) and through proven concepts. Every novelty requires a lot of very costly testing and still has an inherent risk of new, unforeseen, previously unknown reliability issues. Combine this with an extremely small market and you have an environment which is very averse to innovation.
My trusted Rider MD3 aircraft is powered by a Rotax 912 engine. It is a very popular modern engine for light aircrafts. If compared to the engine in your new Toyota Corola however, it is anachronistic. Relatively inefficient, no electronic engine management and not even fuel injection. It and it has a carburetor despite the fact that it was developed in the early 90s.
But it is light, it is very reliable and every certifyed technician can fully understand every aspect of it. It can handle the constant mix of hot and cold that comes with changing altitudes and the pilot can hear if the engine is happy or not. These qualities are worth something. After all, if the engine in your Toyota stops the worst thing that can happen is that you are stranded by the side of the road.
My precious power plant costs about 15.000,- Euros. Sounds like a lot? It is a lot compared to the Toyota again. But Rotax has probably sold as many 912s since they were introduced 20 years ago as Toyota does in a month. Maybe less. The market for airplanes and all of their parts is tiny compared to cars or other industrial goods. Every airplane is hand made and there is almost no automation in the production.
Pilots have a very attentive relationship with their engines. Of course they want to avoid engine failure but they also want to make sure that their expensive power plants remain in working order for many years and thousands of operating hours.
Most airplanes are flown for decades. It is more rule than exception that a new student will be taught on equipment that is older than himself. But airplanes age well and they are constantly checked and updated and if all anuals are current, they can generally be considered safe.
So the development of the Rotax 912 is about 20 years old and the development of the airframe of the Rider MD3 is about 10 years old. Both is considered modern in aviation terms and I’m sure I’ll encounter some much older equipment as I gain more experience in flying.
To be continued…
(Originally posted on March 1, 2011 by tilbo at aloft.blog.com/rotax-912/)
