Up, Up and Away

It's COOOOOLD outside!

Since I still haven’t gotten my student certificate renewed, (another story for another day…but it involves my growing disdain for Federal Employees who don’t realize who their “clients” are) I met up with Kary this morning to bore some holes in the sky and just see what we could get into. He’d told me after the last lesson that he was comfortable giving me my 90-day sign-off, but with no Student Cert…I can only fly with him. (hopefully all of the certificate issues will be resolved by the time you read this on Friday).

So, I scheduled an 8:00am flight time with Kary late yesterday. I got to the airport about 7:30 to try to pre-heat the plane using a new setup Scott and I have with a small ready heater. When I scheduled the flight, I didn’t realize it was going to be 12 degrees during the preflight. I got the hangar opened up and setup the ready heater to blow into the engine cowling and let it go. As I froze my extremities, I started realizing that this new heater wasn’t quite powerful enough to do this job efficiently. But it was doing it.

For those of you who might not know, piston engine planes need to be preheated when they are extremely cold to help prevent excessive wear inside the engine. The crank and bearings are made of steel, while the crank case and such are made from aluminum. These 2 metals shrink and expand at different rates, so when it’s cold out, you can damage the engine by not preheating and allowing the 2 metals to have less than expected clearances while running.

So, after about 30 minutes of heating the engine and freezing my toes, the inside of the cowling was fairly warm and seemed like we might be in business. Anyway, we pulled out 51F and fired it up without issue. I was concerned about the battery. Although sluggish, it managed to fire up without a problem.

We let the engine warm up for a good while and discussed what we were going to do. Basically, we decided that we’d do a few laps of the pattern and then just see what happens. Since I only had an hour under my belt in the last 9 months, I figured a few more supervised landings couldn’t hurt. So, we taxied out to Rwy 6, did our runup and took off. As soon as the wheels left the ground, I realized that the “calm” part of the weather report on AWOS really meant “right crosswind”. But no problem, we climbed (“climbed”? “Clumb”? “Clumbed”?) out much faster than we do in July and made the pattern to do some Touch and Go’s.

The first approach reminded me of the “good ole days” of my flying. Too High and Too Fast. What was interesting is that I could tell from the time I turned final that we had a bit of a right-quartering head/crosswind. The plane weather-vaned into it enough to be noticeable, but I had just listened to the AWOS again and it was still reporting “calm”. The “interesting” part is how I had it in my head that “calm” meant this was going to be a straight in final, no crosswind adjustment, just fly it down. Even though I noticed the crosswind when we took off and now the plane was crabbing it’s way down, my “logic” kept trying to do away with what the plane was actually doing. Needless to say, the first landing was not pretty. Kary didn’t say much other than I wasn’t on the rudders enough. It wasn’t horrible, other than I knew that I had totally discounted the fact that the plane was telling me there was a slight crosswind and my mind refused to deal with it. Oh well, lesson learned…apparently AWOS isn’t always right :)

We managed another 7 landings and they did start getting better. We played with some Soft/Short field setups and Kary had me do a soft field T&G without letting the nosewheel touch the ground. Attempt #1 wasn’t great, but then Kary took a turn and showed me up, so I had to come back and do a better one. Gotta let the instructor win sometimes, I guess J
After the last landing, we taxied up to the gas pumps and line guy asked me if we’d been transmitting during the flight. I told him we had called at least twice per lap. Apparently, he could occassionaly hear a mic click, but never heard a radio call. After a quick look, I realized that my headset was plugged into the passenger side of the intercom, but my Push To Talk switch was hooked into the pilot side. So, every time I was transmitting, I wasn’t. So there is one more thing I need to check in preflight.

Overall, I was glad we spent the time to just “get back in the groove”. We discussed the next steps in my training and it sounds like we’re ready (again) to hit the cross countries, so maybe I can hit it hard for the next several weeks and get this thing wrapped up! We’ll see.

posted by Jeff Franks @ 9:47 PM