Category: Flying

Not winning friends and influencing people

As I already wrote about earlier, when I went to fly it on Sunday, the Lance had a flat nose gear strut, and red hydraulic fluid oil all over the cowling. At least one other member expressed concern about the amount of grease leaking out of the prop as well – it’s been leaking for several months now, and we’ve been advised by the guy who did the annual to “keep an eye on it” but there is no urgency.

Being Sunday, there wasn’t anybody around to call unless I wanted to pay huge call-out fees. So Monday, when I went flying again with Jim, I called the local on-field FBO, Peidmont-Hawthorne, recently renamed “Landmark Aviation”. They don’t normally do our maintenance because they’re expensive and geared towards jets – we normally take our planes out to Batavia so that Jeff Boshart can work on them, as he’s been doing for decades. Anyway, I was hoping that somebody at Landmark could come over, maybe pump the strut up enough that I could fly it over to Batavia, or tell us whether it needed a full overhaul. But the guy there said he couldn’t look at it until Wednesday at the earliest.

Now here’s where things went wrong – I’m pretty sure I told him we were going to try to find another alternative, but evidently he thought he had the go ahead to take it on Wednesday if he didn’t hear otherwise, and I thought I’d told him to call me first on Wednesday, but I wasn’t 100% sure.

I talked to the Maintenance Coordinator for the Lance (I’ve recently become the assistant MC for it), and he said he was going to take it to Batavia on Tuesday, so I thought there would be no problem about the ambiguity with Landmark. But on Wednesday, he called me and he was extremely irate. Evidently he didn’t take it on Tuesday and when he came to pick up the plane on Wednesday Landmark had already taken it. Now, I’d taken a pretty good look at the plane on Monday morning, and the strut was utterly flat, leaving just inches of clearance between the prop and the ground. Even if he’d gotten it pumped up immediately before start-up, I had my doubts that he could get it to Batavia and land without hitting the prop, but he was determined to try. And he was pissed because once the Landmark mechanic had seen it, it would be a liability nightmare to take it out of the shop without the service being done. And he complained about me to the V.P. of Maintenance.

Anyway, I talked to the Landmark mechanic, and convinced him not to deal with the prop since Boshart has been monitoring the situation. But he confirmed my feeling that the strut was so badly gone that pumping it up wouldn’t work. He also didn’t have the parts, so he had to order them. They came overnight, and the plane was ready by about 1pm on Thursday. As soon as it was ready, I took it over to Batavia. Jeff Boshart looked at the prop and pointed out that the grease wasn’t as bad as the other members had thought – I figure it had picked up some dirt from the strut oil which made it look darker and more visible than before. He said the same thing he always says – we need to schedule a prop overhaul pretty soon, but we don’t need to ground the plane until it’s done.

Good news for me since I’m still hoping to fly it to Allegeny County (KAGC) on Sunday. Although there are isolated thunderstorms in the forecast – I’ll have to keep an eye on that, because dodging thunderstorms or waiting on the ground for it to pass can kind of suck.

Decisions, decisions….

I want to fly Laura back to school this Sunday. Right now, there are two planes available in Schedule Master: our Warrior, which is slow, cramped, and doesn’t have much useful load, or the Lance, which is fast, roomy (relatively) and with enough useful load that she could be bringing bricks with her and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Oh, and the Warrior doesn’t have an autopilot either. I’m not even sure it has a heading bug. The Lance, on the other hand, has an HSI which is a god-send for instrument flying.

Normally this would be a no-brainer, but currently the Lance is sitting there with a totally flat nose gear strut, red oil streaks all over the cowl, and more worryingly, there is one streak of oil coming up through the spinner right where the leaky side of the prop comes through. (The prop has a tiny leak, and for the last couple of years our mechanic has said “that’s normal, but keep an eye on it”.) Obviously, the nose gear needs a new o-ring to keep the hydraulic fluid in, but there is also a small possibility that the prop needs a complete overhaul. The nose gear thing is a small job and if that’s all there is, it shouldn’t take more than a day to fix. But the prop thing could be a big job – if I book the Lance and it ends up grounded, there is a good possibility that the Warrior won’t be available if I need it. On the other hand, if I book the Warrior, I might end up flying in the Warrior when I could have taken the Lance.

The Maintenance Coordinator for the Lance says he’s taking the Lance to Batavia for our mechanic to look it over tomorrow. He was supposed to take it today but he got busy with something else, and didn’t bother to call me in spite of me being the Assistant Maintenance Coordinator.

Current again

This morning Jim and I met at the airport to do some flying. Because I’d done a bit already yesterday, I let him go first. It’s always interesting flying with another pilot, because everybody does things differently. First difference – because this was a practice flight, he decided not to “cheat” with his GPS – and he actually hand-flew the whole time. Second difference – he decided not to pre-heat the engine, even though it was below freezing. Third difference, and this was a doozy – he overcranked the engine like hell. I’ve always been taught not to crank more than 4 or 5 blades at a time, but he cranked a good 20 or 25 blades. That just about killed the battery, and when he couldn’t get it started after a couple more short cranks (because that’s all it would do) he decided to pre-heat. We dragged out the pre-heat cart and heated it up, but then he put the cart away before trying again. The battery was still shot, so I dragged out the pre-heat cart again and used it to jump start the plane. It started in 2 blades that time, and so I got my first taste of getting in the plane while the prop was turning. I also clonked the back of my head really badly when I stood up while coiling the extension cord for the pre-heater cart and hit the hangar door. I have a big scab there now.

When he did the take-off, he used two notches of flaps like it was a short field take-off, and was airborne right off the hump that’s about 1/3rd of the way down Runway 7.

He went out to the Geneseo VOR and did the published hold for the Canadagua VOR-A approach. Or at least he tried – I don’t think he intercepted the inbound radial more than half a mile from the VOR once in three tries. The reason I “cheat” with a GPS was abundantly clear – each time round, even though he was south of the inbound radial, on the outbound radial he was still correcting to the south. Then when it came time to do the actual approach, he dialed the heading in wrong by 5 degrees on the VOR (even though it had been set right while he was in the hold). And yet, in spite of that, he managed to end up closer to the airport than I usually do when I do that approach. So maybe he knows something I don’t.

Then he came in to Rochester to do the ILS 4 a couple of times. Another difference between him and I: he slowed down to 90 knots for the approach – I like to do them at 110 to 120 knots, since an ILS is generally to a nice long runway and you never know when some kerosene burner will be breathing down your neck.

He did two, and both times he a fine job of holding the localizer, and a not quite as good job on the glide slope. But it was bumpy and it’s easier to criticize than to do.

I was a bit surprised when he requested a circle to land on runway 7 and a full stop for his second ILS. I thought he was going to do a full 6. But he’d had enough and it was my turn. I decided to skip the hold and the non-precision approach, and just do 4 ILSes to get current. And in spite of the bumps and everything, I think I did pretty good on them. They kept turning me onto the localizer about 2 miles from the outer marker, and sometimes I wasn’t even properly established by the time I got there. One time they didn’t switch me over to the tower, leaving me on the approach frequency right the way down to decision height. Another time, I heard the approach controller about to give a regional jet behind us a speed restriction and then change his mind, and then the tower controller cleared us for “the option”. If we’d taken the option and done a stop-and-go, I wonder what would have happened to that regional jet?

By the time I’d finished my 4 ILS 04s, I was well and truly finished. The bumps weren’t as bad as yesterdays, but there is only so much bumping around at low altitude wearing foggles you can take. I’m glad that’s over, and hopefully I can get some real approaches and stay current that way.

Well, I’m not going to get current like that…

I need to get IFR current again. I let 6 months go by without doing 6 approaches (actually, only did one). I wanted to fly to KAGC to pick up Laura on Friday, but I couldn’t because of a very thin looking broken layer at about 1500 feet – if I’d been IFR current I could have punched through that and been in VFR on top the whole way. This weekend was pretty clear, so I wanted to go up with a safety pilot and get current again. Saturday, I had to work. So it was Sunday or nothing. I had a brunch to go to earlier, so the plan was to get to the airport at around 1pm, and do some approaches with a safety pilot. My original plan was to do it with Jim, who wanted me to be his safety pilot as well, but he had to cancel. So I called another guy, Lance, who wanted to see what it was like to be a safety pilot. He was available.

When I got to the airport, I found the next problem: the plane I had booked, the Lance (yes, really) had a nose gear strut was almost completely flat. And even worse, the very slow leak of hydraulic fluid in the prop has turned into a veritable shower. There are red spatters all over the cowl, and a red streak covering most of the spinner. (Actually, I just this second got an email from a more experienced person who told me that the red oil is probably from the gear strut as well.) There is no way I wanted to be doing approaches in that. So Lance and I waited until one of the other pilots came back from their flight, which fortunately didn’t take too long.

Once we got into the air, I found the next problem: the breezy conditions made it quite turbulent, especially down low. I should have realized that this would be the case, but I’d put it out of my head. I went out to Geneseo VOR and did one turn around the hold – it was quite bumpy and hard to hold altitude and heading. There were two other planes doing holds there, one at 3,000 and one at 3,500, so I went to 4,000. It wasn’t any smoother up there. One turn was enough, and because of the bumps I decided to skip my usual non-precision approach to Le Roy or Canadiagua and go straight into the ILSes.

The first ILS went ok, except at about 300 feet above decision height there was a tremendous bump and suddenly the localizer needle went several dots off. I wasn’t at full deflection before DH, but it was bloody close. Getting vectored around for the second one, I was starting to feel airsick, so I told approach that I was going to make this one a full stop. Once again, I was right in the donuts until about 300 feet above DH, and it suddenly started going all wrong. At about 100 feet above DH I took off the foggles and landed uneventfully.

Now to figure out what to do with the Lance and its mystery oil leak.

Thinking about Oshkosh

Watching Steve Fossett’s record breaking flight, I started thinking about last year’s aborted trip to Oshkosh. Last year would have been amazing, with appearances by the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, Spaceship One, and more. I couldn’t get anybody to go with me, so I was planning to fly the Lance and camp. I only have a tiny one-man tent, but with the Lance, if things got bad I could sleep in the back there is so much room. But I had to cancel because Vicki and I bought this fantastic house and we needed to clear up 15 years of crud from the old place and prepare the new place. I have no regrets about the house, just about missing Oshkosh.

I was looking forward to camping because the previous time I’d gone with a bunch of guys from the flying club, and while it was fun, I felt let I was being pulled away from the grounds just at the best part of the daily airshows because they wanted to avoid the traffic and get something to eat. By camping, I wouldn’t have to leave the airfield at all. Of course, there is the slight problem that I don’t have much camping gear any more, and so I’d have to buy a camp stove and cooler and food and stuff like that. But that’s minor.

So then I read in Mark’s blog that he was thinking of driving out to Oshkosh. Hey, I thought, here’s a chance to do some flying with Mark, camp at Oshkosh, and have some fun.

I’ve booked the Dakota for the trip. Sure, the Lance is available, but as of this spring, the Dakota is going to have a new engine, new prop, new Garmin 530 GPS, a fairly new Stormscope, and a paint job barely two years old. It’s really the show piece of the club, and I’d be proud to fly a “Rochester Flying Club” banner from it while tied down in Oshkosh camping. Of course, taking the Lance is still an option, and maybe the extra room would come in handy, but with the ancient radios and old engine and all that, it just wouldn’t wow them (and Mark) like the Dakota will. And even the Dakota will seem roomy next to the Cessna 150s he’s used to flying.