We’re in Mt. Holyoke for Stevie’s parent’s weekend, and getting here was a bit of an adventure. Or a series of adventures, starting when Vicki suggested that we take a club plane.
Unfortunately we couldn’t get the Lance, since Jim F had it booked, and he’s got a pretty good track record of actually using the plane when he’s booked it. Never mind, the club’s Dakota 8323Y was available and between the new paint job, the good radios and the fantastic rate of climb, it’s really my favourite plane for a mission like this. So what if the seats are too close together?
I found out that I really had a choice of two airports, Barnes in Westfield/Springfield, or Westover Air Reserve Base in Springfield/Chicopee. And the air base had a list of restrictions a mile long, plus one of the instrument approaches had a glitch (which I pointed out to the FAA, and they pointed it out to the USAF, and next chart cycle they’re going to fix – don’t *I* feel like a pro pilot?). So I decided to go to Barnes, a much quieter and more GA-friendly airport.
The next “adventure” came this morning. I had booked the plane for 4pm, but in discussing it with Vicki we’d decided a few days ago that we really need to leave at 3pm, which for me means having the plane at 2:30 at the latest so I can get it pre-flighted. So I procrastinated about changing the booking, and first thing this morning I went to the scheduling system to change, and found that somebody had booked the plane from 2pm to 4pm. Oh oh. The person who had it booked was Margaret C, and she’s usually pretty reasonable. ScheduleMaster told me that she’d made the booking at 2:48:11 that morning, so I was a bit reluctant to call her too early, but at 10:00am I called, only to find that she’s in Nova Scotia and has no memory of any late-night plane booking activity. So I used my authority as an officer of the club and cancelled her booking, and then modified mine. I wondered if somebody had accidentally used her ScheduleMaster password instead of their own, so I resolved to get to the airport before 2pm and head off any plane stealers. And sure enough Greg M called me to see if I was really going to use the plane from 2 since he had been planning to do something – I didn’t ask him if he might have Margaret’s id on his computer for some reason.
The next adventure happened at 1:30 when I called Buffalo Flight Service for a weather briefing. I’d used DUATS earlier, but I always like to talk to a real live human being, and for an afternoon departure I like to wait until after the afternoon updated weather forecasts come out, which is around 1:00. I got busy signal after busy signal after busy signal. Something was wrong with Buffalo Flight Service. Ok, I checked DUATS again instead, and drove to the airport. As usual, the first thing I did was pull out my hand-held radio to pick up the ATIS (automated terminal information system – a continuous broadcast of weather and other information). But there was nothing on the frequency. I tried the radios in the plane, same result. I decided to give the flight service number another try, and this time the number didn’t give me Buffalo Flight Service, it gave me one in Pennsylvania. I guess they’d bypassed whatever was wrong in Buffalo. Also, the flight service briefer told me that the ATIS was out of service until 3:00pm. Thank goodness it wasn’t my radios.
The next bad omen was that when I tuned one of the nav radios to the VOR on the field, that OBS navigation indicator started swinging back and forth like a crazy thing. I’ve never seen anything like it. The flight was do-able without it, but I wasn’t happy about it. I turned it off and continued with my pre-flight.
Vicki arrived, and when I went out to get her I foolishly left the master switch on so the beacon and nav lights were burning. Not that I expected any problems from that. We got ready to leave. I got the most sought-after clearance “Radar vectors, then as filed”. And I went to start the plane. It didn’t want to start. I primed it the usual 5 squirts, and nothing. Then I gave it another 3 squirts. That’s not unusual with this plane. But I could smell gas, and I convinced myself that I’d flooded it, so I pulled the mixture back and tried cranking with no more gas flowing to try and unflood it. And that wore down the battery. I didn’t have any cranking power at all. After swearing and hitting things a bit, I went and got the start-cart, which has an external power supply that plugs into the plane’s electrical system. The only problem with that is that after the plane’s started, somebody has to put away the start-cart and the long extension cord, and I can’t leave the controls when the plane is running, and I don’t particularly want a non-pilot like Vicki running around the ramp when there is a prop spinning.
Fortunately there was a fellow member of the club and flight instructor, Jim W, hanging around waiting to do something with another instructor. He volunteered to come out and help, and he was a big help. The plane needed a bit of primer, so I guess it wasn’t flooded. (I found out later that you could smell gas whenever you switched fuel tanks in the air, so I guess that was what I smelled.)
Take off was uneventful, and I found that when I wasn’t in the shadow of the hangar that the number 1 nav radio worked perfectly, which was a big relief. We punched through a nearly overcast layer at 1800 feet, were between layers for a few seconds, then through a very overcast layer, and finally on top in a beautiful clear sky at 5,000 feet, climbing to 9,000.
Enroute, we had a problem with a high whine whenever Vicki talked. And I don’t mean her, I mean a problem in the intercomm. She switched headphones, and it didn’t solve the problem. I played around with the squelch and volume on the intercomm, no help. Then I noticed that the alternator guage was pegged full on. I cycled the alternator switch, and it came back on at a normal level, and the whine was gone. I guess I turned on the alternator too soon after the jump start or something, and screwed it up. I hope I didn’t damage anything.
The trip was smooth and beautiful. There was no more cloud below us before we hit Syracuse, and we got a good view of the autumn leaves. It clouded over beneath us by the time we left Albany, though. The temperature had dropped quite a bit, and I sat up and took notice when somebody below me reported a trace of rime ice on the descent. The controller was alert as hell to it, though, and was offering people very quick descents to below the clouds. I tuned the Barnes ATIS, and they were reporting two layers at 6,000 and 4,000 feet. There was obviously going to be a gap between them, so probably both layers were quite thin.
Around about this time we noticed a “glory” on the clouds at about my 10 o’clock position and at about a 45 degree angle down. We were quite a way from the clouds, so you could see a bright central circle, then three bands of rainbow colours.
The controller told us to start our descent down to 6,000 feet. I was worried about the clouds, so I started down at 500 fpm (feet per minute), planning to descend slowly until I hit the clouds, then slam dunk in at 1200 fpm or so. As we got closer to the clouds, though, something interesting happened to the glory. In the middle of the bright circle in the middle, you could start to make out the sillouhette of the plane. I know it’s just my shadow, but I swear it looked like a 3 dimensional image of the plane in the middle. And then the image of the plane got bigger than the inner ring, and was overlapping the coloured bands. It was so cool. Unfortunately that happened *just* as we were about the penetrate the clouds, so I had to concentrate on going on the guages and increasing the descent rate. Before I hit 6,000 feet the controller cleared me down to 4,000 feet. The 6,000 foot layer turned out to be about 4 inches thick (not literally, but I was through it before I was even sure I was in it). The 4,000 foot layer wasn’t much deeper, and I broke out and saw the airport right in front of us and pretty damn close. We got cleared for the visual, and then I had to make the steep fast descent that I’d been planning for in the cloud layers.
An uneventful landing and a trip to the food simulators in the FBO, and we were on our way. Two hours in the air to replace a six hour car trip. Not a hard decision to make.