"TheRealBicycleBuck" (therealbicyclebuck)
01/28/2019 at 00:35 • Filed to: None
10
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"TheRealBicycleBuck" (therealbicyclebuck)
01/28/2019 at 00:35 • Filed to: None | 10
| 21 |
I started out at 8:00 this morning. The plan was to do some navigation work and maybe a stop at College Station . We did our pre-plan, gathering all of the information we would need - primarily tower and navigation frequencies - then we taxied out to the runway. I think I’ve mentioned before that the taxiways at this airport don’t quite reach the south end, so when the big birds want to fly, they have to taxi to the runway, then enter the runway and back-taxi all the way to the end so they have plenty of runway for takeoff. This morning was the same story. I had to wait on a big bird.
When a small plane follows a big one, there’s always the risk of running into wake turbulence. The solution is to either wait for the turbulence to dissipate, or take off above the flight path of the bigger bird. In order to do this, the tower instructed us to taxi back and take off from the end of the runway! Who’s the big bird now?!?
We got into the air and turned northwest, tuning in the beacon on the VOR and I got my first experience navigating with g
auges instead of GPS
. Unfortunately, College Station was smothered by low-lying clouds, so we had to divert to Brenham.
That was OK. It gave me a chance to look up the airways while in flight and determine which radial to fly outbound to get to my target. The line of clouds was drifting south, so we barely had enough time to get in a single touch-and-go before the clouds overtook Brenham. Whew!
From there it was a fast dash back to home base. As I was leaving, I passed through the hangars to take a few pictures. Check these out!
Cessna Skymaster
Pitts Biplane. I’m not sure how old this fellow was, but he was definitely of retirement age. He was wearing a flight suit, military-style helmet, and a parachute. I was told later he does his best to fly the wings off that plane every weekend.
Here we have a V-tail Bonanza and what one pilot identified as a Harmon Rocket.
After an afternoon break, I went back to the airport for my first night flight.
This is Houston from the air at night. I found out how bad the iPhone camera is for night shots.
We practiced navigation at night with a quick trip up to Navasota where I had a chance to make my first night landing. We came back to Hooks so I could get one of the requirements out of the way - 10 take-offs and 10 landings at a controlled airport at night. That was a bit of a grind, but well worth it.
The next weekend of flying will feature two long cross-country flights, one during the day, the other at night!
Goggles Pizzano
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 01:24 |
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Yeah, but how’s your tooth? :-)x
MasterMario - Keeper of the V8s
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 01:29 |
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Looks like a ton of fun. My lottery dream would be to learn to fly and buy a twin engined sea plane
Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 01:42 |
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You have a working VOR receiver? Holy smokes. How old is that plane and who maintains it? That's nuts. DME too?
Jetstreamer
> Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief
01/28/2019 at 05:01 |
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Old school gauges are best gauges. It’s really not that strange to see planes with them though.
I’m always happy to hear when pilots get some proper training on “old” instruments instead of Garmin 1000 or similar from start to finish. I know the next sentence is generalization but it’s also just my experience. Pilots who come through training flying only glass panels tend to have a lacking understanding of VOR and NDB. I'm seeing it regularly in fresh copilots I fly with.
Having to picture it all in your head instead of on a moving map helps with understanding navigating by VOR and NDB I guess.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief
01/28/2019 at 07:35 |
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It’s a Piper PA-28-140 built in 1973. It has TWO working VOR receivers! It also has an ADF (gauge not in frame below ) and yes, it still works. We were listening to a gardening show over the ADF just yesterday. :)
The upper VOR is new to the plane and was installed when they put in a Garmin 430 GPS a few weeks ago. It can take direction from either the VOR or GPS (it’s in GPS mode in the picture). We were using the two VORs in tandem to determine our location when we were practicing navigation over the weekend.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Jetstreamer
01/28/2019 at 07:39 |
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The best thing to me is that steam-gauge s kills transfer forward, but glass panel skills don’t transfer backward very well.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Goggles Pizzano
01/28/2019 at 07:40 |
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It must be too early for me . I’m missing the joke. :(
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Goggles Pizzano
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 12:02 |
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No joke, well other than asking in a totally unrelated post and downp la ying the awesomeness of your flight .
We haven’t crossed paths in quite
some time, fellow toothless one
.
Did your implant go okay?
Darkbrador
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 12:15 |
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Which airport do you fly from ?
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Goggles Pizzano
01/28/2019 at 13:06 |
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Oh, dang! I forgot you were going through that too!
Mine turned out ok, but I don’t like the numb feeling. Numb may not be the right word. I don’t like the lack of sensation. There was a difference when they did a root canal and crown. At least there were tooth roots pushing on soft tissue and I could feel that. The implant is hard-mounted into bone, so it doesn’t move around at all. There’s no feedback when I’m chomping on stuff.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Darkbrador
01/28/2019 at 13:07 |
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KDWH.
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Darkbrador
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 13:52 |
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Sweet.
I used to fly from ... what’s that called again, on the side of 290 in Jersey Village ... oh well. Good old days. Get off my lawn now, with your noisy 140 ... ;-)
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Darkbrador
01/28/2019 at 14:58 |
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Probably Weiser Air Park. It’s about to be sold. The original owner passed away and his kids aren’t interested in running an airport.
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Darkbrador
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/28/2019 at 15:40 |
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Weiser. Oh t hat’s too bad, it’s a tiny but convenient strip, not as busy as West Houston on sunny days. Le t’s hope it’s not turned into some McMansion extravaganza.
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Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief
> Jetstreamer
01/28/2019 at 15:45 |
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I believe the same. I got my instrument rating with the old stuff in the very busy SF Bay Area airspace, including a very real VOR/DME approach into Palo Alto in instrument conditions. The controller didn’t want to give me the approach as it starts over San Jose and there were some big jets rolling through and he didn’t want to deal with traffic separation headaches but once they realized I wasn’t kidding about not having a GPS they hooked me up.
I haven’t used any of those skills now in years and doubt I could keep up at all with the workload at the moment but for my checkride I did three approaches into Oakland and Hayward in about 15 minutes. The whole ride took less than an hour, including the examiner throwing curve balls to see how I’d keep up. However, he told me after
I pretty much had
passed the test the moment he saw I was taking the checkride with gauges instead of the G1000. I forget how he worded it but something along the lines of knowing how to actually navigate instead of just playing a video game, etc. I think it might have been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, getting that rating.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Darkbrador
01/28/2019 at 16:36 |
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I’m not sure what the plan is, but the fellow I was talking to was friends with the owner. He said t here are a couple of companies bidding on the property and the bidding is over $24M.
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Darkbrador
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/30/2019 at 13:04 |
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Unlikely for any body to fork $24M for a tiny landing strip and its assortment of shacks when there are so many other GA options in the area. Sounds like it’s going to end into s uburbia extravaganza with mcmansions and generic strip mall. T ’s’a s hame.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Darkbrador
01/30/2019 at 13:17 |
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It’s not going to be used for housing. The whole property is zoned commercial.
ttyymmnn
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/31/2019 at 15:14 |
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I found this comment in an article about a family who crash landed when their plane ran out of fuel. The family, including small children, was rescued from sub-zero temps by helicopter. Apparently, the pilot failed to take headwinds into account when he made his fuel calculations.
All new pilots get two buckets when they get their ticket. A full bucket of luck and an empty bucket of experience. The main goal of a pilot is then to fill your bucket of experience before your bucket of luck runs out. He used up a lot of his luck. Hopefully his experience bucket doesn’t have a hole in it.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> ttyymmnn
01/31/2019 at 15:39 |
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Scary. Ever heard of the “Gimli Glider”? A 767 ran out of fuel in flight and landed at an old airstrip which was being used as a drag strip. T here was miscommunication between the pilots and the ground crew when refueling the plane and somebody forgot to make the conversion between metric and imperial units.
There’s a lot of stuff to keep track of in the cockpit, including fuel. You’re supposed to swap between left and right fuel tanks every fifteen minutes or so to keep the left/right balance correct. It’s easy to forget when you’re going cross-country, but there are reminders on the checklist whenever you are preparing to land.
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ttyymmnn
> TheRealBicycleBuck
01/31/2019 at 16:04 |
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I have written about the Gimli glider. There was another similar situation when an Air Transat A330 flying form Toronto to Lisbon ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean. Fuel was leaking from a damaged fuel line , and the crew noticed an imbalance. However, when transferred fuel they inadvertently poured all of the fuel out of the leak. They diverted to the Azores and lost the first engine 150 nm out. The second flamed out 65 nm from the airport. They managed to glide it in, with help from military controllers, including some unpowered turns with limited hydraulics to scrub off altitude . It’s a harrowing read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236