Perfectly Practiced

Some things in life are decidedly not like riding a bicycle. Flying via instruments in a light aircraft is definitely one of those skills that does not endure. In fact, we call the IFR scan a "perishable" commodity. If you don't practice it with some regularity it will rot on the vine.

With that definite knowledge, honed over more than 30 years as an instrument-rated pilot, I went out with my flight instructor in the RV-10 for a practice session (and a nice breakfast at KSEF) this morning. The weather was fine, the worst of it being five miles and mist, with light winds and essentially no cloud cover we fired up and taxied out for my first practice IFR in about two months.

I felt it. The good news was that my checklist did not fail me. I managed to get both GPS programmed and the iPad set up for the RNAV GPS 5 approach at KOBE without problems. Yes, having a digital autopilot that I can trust and a feel for the airplane's natural speeds / attitudes helped. All was fine until I was given a hold. I hit the "sequence suspend" button (ours is a '90s era IFR GPS) and my flightpath disappeared from the moving map on my MFD. Crap. I'd forgotten to copy the number 1 GPS flightplan into the number 2 GPS and switch over before hitting "sequence suspend." A little incompatibility between the '90s era GPS and the 2006 MFD cause this glitch, and I know about it. I just forgot the work around.

No big deal. I still had several moving maps, including the iPad, to enhance my situational awareness. I flew the holding pattern without fault and re-intercepted the final approach course, unsuspended the sequence by hitting the button again, and completed the approach.

Practice continued to the next airport, where my two axis autopilot "suddenly" failed. Not really a big

deal, since I have to fly the vertical on any approach manually. I'm always part of the approach in this airplane, and that helps facilitate transition from what I'd call semi-automatic pilot flying to human pilot flying.

The landing was a full stop, and breakfast gave us time for debrief. I'd done okay. Slow to each segment, but not so behind that it destroyed the safety and smoothness of the flight. I was on altitude, on heading just in time. Not a second too soon, but just in time. I know with a little more practice it would feel natural again.



The last segment wasn't straight home, and wasn't with autopilot at all. I'd call it full-engagement practice. There's a lot to controlling an airplane that moves through the air at 170 knots, climbing a quick 700 fpm  at cruise climb, all while setting up for another approach in just 25 miles. It is easy to look away and find yourself 10 or more degrees off course in seconds. Altitude control is essential, and that means getting and keeping the power under control in this beast.

That said, I nailed it, right down to anticipating and correctly performing the 90 degree turn in from "base" to "final" on the RNAV GPS 15 approach into KPGD. I flew to minimums and executed the missed approach at the proper point without forgetting to retract flaps on the climb out. (In this airplane, with just 10 degrees flaps out, it is real easy to forget.)

We were home just a few minutes later. The tally? Three approaches, three airports. Leg one: 60 nm. Leg two: 30 nm. Leg three: 25 plus 9 nm. Total fuel burned over 1.3 hours and three climb outs: 16.5 gallons. I love this airplane. 

A New Home for Baby...38 Years Young

Yesterday was all about travel around here. I was confined to the back of two MD90s halfway across the country on what turned out to be a challenging weather day (not, apparently, as bad as others had dealt with earlier in the week, thank goodness!). My mechanic husband, on the other hand, made a 600 mile run northwest to do a pre-buy on a lovely Cessna 182 for some old friends.

The guys left in the RV-10 early, and skirted the worst of the weather. That didn't mean they weren't in the soup at 10,000 feet. And then the iPad began to act up. It runs WingXPro 7, most current version, and it dropped the GPS signal completely. Who knows why? It wasn't a big problem, as the aircraft has two panel mounted GPS that worked fine.

Next the Nexrad signal painting on the MFD appeared to get confused. It showed the weather moving off to the east, and then on the next paint, showed the weather back right in front of them. Not comforting at all when you are in actual IFR attempting to circumnavigate the worst of it. They got kicked around a bit, but no harm was done. It was, however, one of the first times that ADS-B has let us down. Note to self: remember, it is only a digital signal, and delayed, at that.

While I was stuck in ATL waiting on equipment the guys were hard at work checking out the "new to

you" machine. Turns out it had a Stormscope (not noted on the Trade-A-Plane ad) and a better autopilot than they'd thought. It also had cosmetic hail damage. Ouch. Fortunately, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. With a strong engine and good paint and interior, plus a WAAS GPS navigator, this bird was a good deal for the new owner.

This morning the RV-10 landed back home before noon, having had a quick ride with a decent push behind the cold front. The Cessna enjoyed the push, too. Flightaware pegged it at a blistering 155 knots as it tracked direct on its way here. Not bad for a 38 year old piece of hardware.

She's safe and sound in her temporary hangar (still a little bit of tweaking to be done, and a short list of squawks to go through). Her new owner? He made like Superman, swapping civi's for his airline uniform in the hangar, and hightailed it out to make his commute to work. Ah, the life! 

Blue and Green

The Missouri River

The dominant colors of the day? Blue and green. Cerulean blue is the sky, nearly cloudless now as the sea breeze this afternoon has pushed what little moisture there is inland toward the lake. Verdant green is the spring foliage, growing as fast as it can before the earth dries out. We've had no rain for nearly a week. Is this the beginning of fire season? I wonder.

The hangar has been buzzing with action, as everyone brings their airplanes in at once. It seems like every pilot in the neighborhood wants his/her airplane inspected before their big summer trips. Or it could be that the weather has finally stabilized to the point where they want to fly again and are discovering the horrible truth: airplanes that sit tend to have more unairworthy items. Stinks, but airplanes aren't happy if they aren't flying.

Well, neither are some pilots. Count me among them. It's been a couple of weeks and I'm starting to get antsy for air time. Last week the hold up was an alternator retrofit. This week it is the log
jam of airplanes in the hangar. But this weekend? I'm feeling as if I'm just going to have to go fly.

Destination won't be important. It will be the exercise of preflight, climbing in, running the checklist, firing up, taxiing out, running up, and then clearing the area for takeoff. That's what counts. Once airborne I'll head west to the coastline, and run my typical patrol. It's a stunning sunrise or sunset tour, and not too bad even in the in-between hours.

Twenty minutes is all I need. Strange, isn't it? Twenty minutes in a perky little yellow machine at 1,000 AGL and my whole attitude resets. It's been like that with me for 35 years now. Let me alone at the controls of an aircraft in flight for a little while and I'm a new person, in a new world. When people ask me, why do I fly? I tell them: that's why.

Blow Wind, Blow!

March comes in like a lion in other places, but this year it was a lamb, at least until now. Usually March means big pressure differences between Lows and Highs and tight isogonic lines delineating such pressure differentials on the weather charts. And all that means big wind.

Last night, after days of balmy spring weather, I dreamed a wind storm. Woke at 3 a.m. to the sound of a stiff breeze making the slash pine moan and the saw palmetto rustle. The night air had turned humid with the southwesterly flow and smelled of the jasmine bushes just outside my window. No clouds to stop the nearly full moon from lighting the place up like dusk, but I swear you could feel the barometer dropping with each gust.

Throughout this morning and into the afternoon as I work here in my office on a totally unrelated story I am completely distracted by the sound of the wind working itself into a full gale right on the other side of the glass. It's hurricane glass, so I've nothing to fear. Even if the gale sent a chunk of pine forest flying into the panes they'd hold together (shatter, sure, but the membranes between the double panes would keep it all intact). "Good to keep out even 2X4's at 150mph!" said the salesman who talked us into protecting the house and ourselves this way. I've never had to test them, even through two hurricanes. Hope it stays that way.

In an hour or two, according to The Weather Channel, a squall line should cross the coastline on the

bias and slam into us with its full force of near hurricane force winds, lightning and, thank goodness rain (this kind of weather's only redeeming quality). We do need the rain to keep our fire season at bay just a little longer. We'll tolerate the hammering for a couple of hours to get to the cooler, dryer breezes behind the frontal boundary, and enjoy a breath or two of springtime before the tropical summer claws its way northward, helped along by the blocking action of the Bermuda High, due to shift into place sometime next month.

When that happens, hibernation begins. The world ceases to be civilized (okay maybe just in temperature and humidity) between the hours of 10 and 5. The air conditioner kicks on and stays on, and for us worker bees, vitamin D tablets are a good thing.

Summer in south Florida. I'm not looking forward to it. 

Differing Opinions

If there is one thing I've learned over my 30 years as a published writer it is that not everyone is going to love what you write. In fact, a healthy number of people are probably going to disagree with just about anything you put out there. Look, even weathermen have this problem, and all they have to do is translate a METAR into whatever language they are communicating in that day. A writer who wants others to read what she has written cannot win. My advice? Get over it.

So much more easily written than said! Yes, even I can get annoyed by reader comments from time to time. Most recently I wrote a blog piece for an alphabet-soup aviation group that was really just a reflection on the new year, and my aspirations for flying in it. Simple. Pretty. Chock-full of suggestions on where to go with your airplane. I was clear about where I live and fly: south Florida. Winter is our favorite flying season here because the weather is as perfect as it gets, and predictable, too.

Commentary included pithy reminders that half the country is covered in ice and snow and, given the general conditions under which ice and snow occur, why would anyone want to go fly in a light aircraft? Well, that may be true for that commenter—but I wish he'd had a little more whimsy.

Heck, I wish he'd just considered that some of the most beautiful flying one can do is on a crystal clear, ice-cold still-wind day. (I know; I've done it.) The sky doesn't get any bluer than when it contrasts with a prairie of pure white snow, perhaps pocked by cottonwoods, pine and spindly aspen or birch, or even framed by colossal granite mountains.

The good news about this particular blog is that it is read by a huge faction of aviators, and before I could even argue with myself over whether to respond to the commenter another commenter came to my defense, noting that the other half of the country was basking in the best possible flying weather, from California to South Carolina and destinations south all was CAVU on that particular morning—a typical winter flying day for 95% of those locales.

My point precisely. Good to know at least one reader agreed. 

The View From Above

One thing about me, wherever I go, whatever I do, if I haven't seen the place, experienced the country from the cockpit of a light aircraft, well, then, I haven't really been there. That's just me. So wherever I travel, if I can't fly there in my own aircraft, I work hard to uncover opportunities to at least ride shotgun with another pilot and capture that bird's eye view of the world from on high (but not too high up--that would be like an airliner!).

Why this compulsion? I've been flying in light aircraft since before I could read, and piloting them more than half my life now. I dream of being airborne, floating on air currents the way I flew through lava pinnacles and chutes when scuba diving in the Pacific. I see the ground rushing past me as when I've skydived. And clouds—anyone who has flown the gauntlet of towering cumulous midday in Florida en route to home before they overdevelop into dreaded cumulonimbus knows the thrill. Climbing and sinking to get around a craggy outcropping, weaving a path while always straining for ground contact, the heat-soaked, limp, languid, humidity of the afternoon left ever so far below you. I love it.

I can remember these gold and green fields of Stellenbosch, South Africa, glowing in the buttery late afternoon light of a springtime. The pilot, Marc, offered to take my husband and I for a ride around the Cape Town area in his relatively new RV-10. Robin Coss, of Coss Aviation, a builder of Van's Aircraft,  hooked us up with him. Marc's hangar at the tiny Stellenbosch Aerodrome (good luck finding
it on a map—use Google Earth) was a pilot's paradise, with rare motorcycles tucked in behind the beautiful blue and white RV-10's wings. A classy bar was tucked into a corner for after-flying libations, too.

We pushed the airplane out into the warm afternoon light and clambered up into our seats. The bright MGL dual screen system came to life and Marc cranked the Lycoming up front. We were off shortly thereafter, heading toward Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held in the apartheid years. From there we turned east, and headed toward Table Mountain, which defines the geography of Cape Town. We skirted the massive mount, weaving our way out toward its point, then around past Simon's Town, Muizenberg and down the beach low, at the request of ATC, dropping under the traffic landing at the international airport.

From there we zoomed up and over the Kogelberg Nature Reserve, dropping down again off the cliffs at Hermanus, where a mother humpback whale and her calf surfaced as we circled, watching us as intently as we watched them.

We broke off after a couple of circuits, not wanting to disturb them much, and with the sun sinking on the horizon anyhow. Zooming back over the cliffs at Hermanus I looked off to see the ever pervasive tendrils of fog stretching from the cap cloud on Table mountain, rushing toward the beaches as the air cooled in the late afternoon.

Sure, I'd driven this entire route in the weeks before this flight, but in just one hour aloft I'd finally seen it—I mean really seen it—and began to understand the diversity and complexity of such an amazing, blessed, cursed, blessed country. That flight made me want to understand it better, know it's people, be a part of it's survival. You don't get that from your seat in row 27. Not even if it's a window seat. 

Begin at the Beginning

Not to steal from the Sound of Music or anything but, today, this post, heck, this blog is all about where I am going next. At 50-something this pilot, writer, mom, wife, well, yeah, you name it is stepping, well, not exactly off a cliff and into the blue (nice image--but frankly starting a blog isn't that big of a deal), but definitely heading out on a new trajectory. So, interested? Stay tuned as I begin the journey.

It's a beautiful January afternoon in South Florida, the sky a perfect cerulean blue, the breeze popping just enough to make flying my taildragger interesting. It's an experimental Kitfox IV that's been my "fun and functional" airplane for more than 21 years and we've just resuscitated another cylinder on the more than 10-year-old Jabiru 80 hp engine. This trip was 45 minutes into the wind north to visit my web and internet media expert and good friend Jack Hodgson, of UCAP fame, and my trusty editor from Aviation Safety magazine Jeb Burnside. I must say I compensated for the recent mechanical fixes with a little more altitude, even though it cost me 10 knots of speed (fairly expensive in the Kitfox, which only goes 100 knots full-bore across the ground on a no-wind afternoon). Found the airport sans GPS from no more than 1500 AGL, so at least my pilotage and ded reckoning skills are still intact.

Now we are in the thick of setting up a few good projects, so...stay tuned!

P.S. Wondering about that background image? My buddies from Cape Town can tell you more about it. South Africa is one of the most beautiful and friendly places in the world for light aircraft flight.