Category: Flying

I had a strange dream last night. Mostly it’s unusual because I still remember it – usually when I wake up, I can feel any memory of my dreams slipping away and by the time I stumble to the bathroom it’s totally forgotten. This time I remember the last part of it.

I was taking some sort of exam. For reasons I don’t remember, I showed up an hour or so after everybody started, but didn’t think that would be a big problem because I was so awesome. Anyway, they handed me an exam booklet and I went upstairs to do it because exam room was too dark. Again, they probably let me leave the room but not the other test takers because I’m so awesome. So I was sitting at an outdoor picnic table looking at this problem that shows two cartoon like IFR standard terminal arrival route (STAR) charts. The charts were all full of bright colours with different VORs and airways in different colours, and the runway shown was longer than most of the airways. The problem had something to do with if you exceeded the minimum crossing height on this one VOR by 1500 feet on the first chart, how much would you exceed it by on the second chart after they moved the VOR and changed the airways around. I don’t remember being puzzled by what sort of wierd problem it was, but I also don’t remember answering it. But just then a bright red two seat aircraft pulled up, and 6 people got out. Don’t ask me why, but in the dream the plane was a “Robin Reliant”, which if I recall correctly is a strange little three wheel car from England. I overheard one of the 6 people saying that next time they could bring along a seventh person. Then I looked down at the exam book and there was a question about how badly they’d exceeded the gross weight and center of gravity envelope for this Robin Reliant, and I’d realized that the plane taxiing in was actually part of the exam (no, I didn’t ask how they’d done that for me and not for the other people who were still downstairs as far as I knew – maybe only I got the demostration because I was so awesome?). So I started looking through the rest of the exam book. Most of the exam book looked like an issue of Trade-A-Plane, with hundreds of classified ads and a few display ads on each page. So I was scanning each ad in vain trying to find out information on the weight and balance envelope of this plane, plus how much each of these people had weighed.

I guess that’s when I woke up. I can sort of understand the weight and balance thing, because last night Vicki and I and our neighbors had been talking about taking a flight up to Ottawa and I had discovered that the president of my flying club has managed to book the Lance for every weekend between now and August, and doing the trip with the Dakota with 4 people means giving some thought to baggage weight. But I have no idea where the airway thing came from. It’s certainly nothing like real world IFR flying.

Update: I wrote “the runway shown was longer than most of the runways” when I obviously meant “longer than most of the airways”. That’s fixed. Also, I wonder if the “Robin Reliant” is a reference to Big Red, a large Stinson Reliant at the Pinckneyville fly-in. It’s no two seater, though.

Last night I attempted to do an IPC with the instructor (Lenny) who I did my instrument rating with.

I’d booked our club’s Dakota because we’d just upgraded our GPS from the 530 to the 530W and I wanted to try a LNAV+VNAV approach in it to see how it compares to an ILS.

Because I’m the sort of geek that I am, the first thing I did was download the new 530W manual and the 530W simulator, and read through the manual and try a couple of approaches in the simulator. The new upgrade gives the 530 significantly more information, especially guidance through approach holds and procedure turns, and turn anticipation, which is pretty cool. One thing I couldn’t find was information about doing ad-hoc holds, like at an en-route VOR. Unfortunately, the simulator simulates an HSI which our plane doesn’t have, so I wasn’t sure if the method I worked out to do them on the sim was going to work with the Dakota.
Continue reading “Bleargh”

Greater Rochester International Airport (KROC) has two flying clubs, which through historical accident have a lot of overlap in our respective fleets, but huge differences in our operating philosophies. Both clubs are also suffering from the down turn in flying caused by the lousy economy, high fuel costs, ridiculous security theatre, stupid liability law climate, etc. Our costs are going up, which causes members to leave, which causes costs per member to go up further, which causes more members to leave, etc. It’s a bad spiral to be in. So naturally both clubs are wondering if we could combine forces to weather this down turn.
Continue reading “A tale of two flying clubs”

There is an old pilot’s expression: “It’s better to be down here wishing you were up there, than to be up there wishing you were down here”. In other words, it’s better to be disappointed than to be in trouble.
Continue reading “Another of those “better to be down here” experiences”

It’s time for pilot bloggers to think back and reflect on the highlights (and lowlights) of their flying “careers”, even for those of us for whom it is an avocation rather than a vocation.

The Good

There have been so many high points, but there are two that are definitely the highest:

1. The day I passed my checkride, I got to take my wife flying as a “thank you” for her patience while I obsessed over the studying and spent vast sums of money on flying.
2. The day I landed at Oshkosh. I felt like I had finally arrived as a pilot, even if I wasn’t manipulating the controls, I was PIC because we were IFR and the guy in the left seat wasn’t rated.

The Bad

Oh, this is embarrassing. I’ve never told anybody but my wife the truth about this.

The worst thing that happened to me flying was on my very first flight. I had just signed up with the Rochester Flying Club, and had interviewed a couple of instructors, and one of them, Geoff, wanted to take me for a flight, as a first lesson. The weather wasn’t great – it was overcast and the visibility stunk. But Geoff was ok with it, and who was I to say no? I had read books about flying and how to fly obsessively, so things went pretty well doing basic maneuvers. But the lack of a good horizon was making me air sick. I didn’t want to mention it, but he clued in and we headed home. But as we got close, he still had me flying but just as we turned downwind suddenly I doubled over with a cramp. And instead of spewing out the mouth, my sphincter let go and I did something I hadn’t done since kindergarten. I guess that big vindaloo curry I’d had the night before hadn’t agreed with the air sickness.

Geoff was a trooper. He went into the FBO and got some carpet cleaner while I tried to sneak into the toilet to clean up. Even more amazingly, he agreed to continue training me.

The (Plane) Weird

Hmmm. This category is harder. One of my aviation pet peeves is the fact that when you check in with a new controller en-route, some of them expect you to read back the altimeter setting and will prompt you again if you don’t, and some get annoyed if you do. There is no consistency. I find that weird.

Another weird thing is when you go to fly a route that you’ve flown before, and you file the same clearance you got last time, but this time they give you an entirely different route. And once or twice, I’ve gotten a full route clearance for a totally different route, and after I’ve gotten my GPS reprogrammed and into the air they give you a re-route back to what you filed. Or when you file a good route and they give you a full route clearance with what you filed instead of just saying “cleared as filed”. The whole process of handling IFR routes and clearances between flight service and air traffic control (ATC), and between different ATC sectors is seriously fucked up. You’d think by now they’d have it straight.