tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-109911352024-03-15T20:11:42.594-05:00Taking WingBeauty, adventure, and life as a young pilot working my way up through the aviation industry.Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.comBlogger601125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-86748572347414052162016-11-26T22:38:00.000-06:002016-11-26T22:38:14.924-06:00Testing 1 2 3<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Hello, hello...is this thing on...anybody here?<br />
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All joking aside, this is the longest I've gone without posting in the 11 years I've had this blog, and if you read <a href="http://wotwater.blogspot.com/">the other blog</a> you know why. We've been so busy working on our new boat and preparing to go cruising that we've scarcely had time to update <i>that</i> one. And most of the interesting happenings in our lives these days are sailing related, so it's the sailing blog that gets the posts.<br />
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If you don't read the other blog, here's what's happened in the last few months. Dawn and I sold our house and moved into a temporary apartment in June. We bought a Tayana 42 sailboat in Myrtle Beach, the sale was delayed a bit, and three days after it closed in August the boat took a lightning strike (or near strike) that fried a bunch of electronics. We've purchased replacement electronics but most of that work still has to be done; we've been busy doing other things necessary to get it down to the Bahamas this winter. We did a bit of coastal cruising in the Carolinas and brought the boat down to Charleston at the end of September; it was hauled at the beginning of October, just in time for Charleston to take a direct hit from hurricane Matthew. We had the boat well-prepped and it survived unscathed. However, between the hurricane and general boatyard disorganization our planned one-month refit is now at two months and counting. We have the mast down and are replacing chainplates and standing rigging in addition to normal haulout chores like bottom painting, lubing seacocks, and repacking propshaft and rudder post bearings. A marine electronics company down here will be doing the electronics installation; they haven't started yet, though Dawn and I have already installed the new radar radome and masthead wind transducer on the mast. We moved down to Charleston full-time at the beginning of November but have been renting a vacation rental on Isle of Palms until the boat is in the water, or is at least a bit more habitable (salon cabinetry currently torn apart to get chainplates out).<br />
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In flying developments, I'm still on the Boeing 757 and 767 fleet, and now have around 500 hours. I'm really enjoying myself - both airplanes are a joy to fly, the flying has great variety, and overall going to work feels like a vacation compared to flying the Mad Dog. I transferred my base to Atlanta on October 1st; I'm a little more senior here than Minneapolis, and they have more international flying down here. I've really only been on the line for eight months and I've already taken the plane to all five continents we fly it to, though about 75% of my flying is still domestic or near-international. I just spent Thanksgiving in London on a 48-hour layover; thankfully, Dawn was able to come with and we had a really nice time (finally saw The Book of Mormon, among other things). Once we start cruising I plan to drop my schedule down to a bare minimum to maintain currency until May or so; my category's staffing is "fat" enough to do that in the winter.<br />
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My last post here told the sad story of the demise of our Piper Pacer. I still had the Yellow Cub Club membership and flew it a few times this summer, though not nearly as much as I'd have liked to, but then sold my share back to the club when we moved south this month. I'm going to miss that J-3. I already miss the Pacer a lot. Dawn and I had some great adventures in that airplane in only 18 months. But we'll have some great adventures in Windbird, too, once we finally get her back in the water and move aboard! I'm looking forward to that, very much. In the meantime there's a lot of work to be done, and some very expensive bills to be paid. </div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com206tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-58390651470497287332016-06-13T14:15:00.002-05:002016-06-13T14:15:50.586-05:00Worst. Email. Ever.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My 35th birthday was on April 17th, and I spent it in about the best way I could imagine: Dawn and I cruising up the west coast in our Piper Pacer. The day prior we started in Torrance, CA, where the plane had been kept since our February Baja trip, worked our way north via Big Sur, Napa, and the Siskayou Mountains, then stopped for the night in scenic Ashland, OR. On my birthday we made it to Vancouver, WA in one long leg, then picked up my friend Brad and farted around a bit, landing at a mutual friend's private strip to check out his new Maule M5. Later that week I had a long PDX overnight, and I took advantage by taking my good friend Duncan and his two young boys for a loop of Mt. St. Helens and the Columbia River Gorge. This was the last flight before the annual I had scheduled with Aero Maintenance at <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/kvuo">Pearson Field (KVUO)</a>.<br />
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I few days later, I was still on a work trip when I got the email that every aircraft owner having their plane annualed dreads. "Bad News... we found a lot of brass & bronze in your oil." I had just changed the oil 15 hours prior in Southern California and had removed the oil screen for inspection as I always do; it was perfectly clean, and a magnet picked up no shavings. I called the lead mechanic at Aero Maintenance and he confirmed that this was a <i>lot</i> of metal, enough to immediately ground the airplane. If your engine starts making a <i>little</i> metal, standard procedure is to change the oil and fly it for a few hours and see if it makes more, but this wasn't the case here. He sent me a few photos with the oil screen and a ruler for reference, and they were damning: big flakes, likely a good half-teaspoon or more of them. I authorized a little more exploration and it didn't take long for bad to go to worse: in the sump and sump screen they found more flakes plus a large chunk of metal about 3/4" long that appeared to be a piece of main bearing. There was no question about it, the engine had to come off the airplane, and an expensive major overhaul was in the offing.<br />
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I looked over all my options. A local engine shop quoted a minimum of $23,000 for the overhaul. I could have it shipped out and a high-volume shop could do it for as little as $13,000. Both quotes were potentially on the low end as I had a hollow crankshaft with inner diameter pitting that was virtually condemned by AD, and my O-320-B2A was a narrow deck that requires expensive factory cylinders. If I was really looking to splurge I could buy a remanufactured engine from Lycoming for close to twice what I paid for the airplane. The cheapest option was to find a mid-time used O-320 and hope it lasted longer than this one. The last option was to simply sell her as she sat. I doubted there was much of a market for Pacers with blown-up engines but figured I could at least get $8 or $9k for her. This represented a major loss from the $23k purchase price, but I was likely to lose that much or more by having the overhaul done. Remember, we were already planning to sell the plane later this summer, after flying it to Montana and then up to Alaska.<br />
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I finally concluded that it was stupid to stick a ton of money into a plane that I was going to sell anyways, as much as I wanted to take her to Alaska. Our house was in the process of selling, we were getting serious about the boat search, and there was just too much going on to commit to a major resuscitation of our airplane. Better to find someone qualified and local to do it. I listed the plane for $10k on Barnstormers.com and was immediately inundated with response. Turns out there <i>is</i> a market for run-out Pacers. Several people dropped by Pearson Field to look at the plane, and an A&P from near Anacortes WA who works for Boeing ended up buying her. After overhaul, he intends to fly her to Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. That makes me feel better about what was overall a pretty major bummer. That engine had less than 1000 hours since major overhaul and I had babied it during my ownership. That said, it was overhauled in 1988 and there were years prior to my ownership where it was hardly ever run. Thus were sown the seeds of its destruction, I'm guessing. <br />
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There's one other thing that kept this from being a major downer for me. At some point in the last 15 hours, that engine had started tearing itself apart from the inside out, and yet it ran perfectly. Many of those 15 hours were spent over extremely inhospitable terrain. There were quite a few cases where my best option after engine failure would have been to find the flattest part of a mountainside and put it between two trees. That last flight in particular, with my buddy and his two young boys in the plane as we circled Mt. St. Helens and traversed miles of rugged tree-covered hills to the Gorge, and then flew low over downtown Portland, could have ended very, very badly. I'm so thankful that the engine kept running and got us all back to an airport safely. I'm also glad I decided to have the annual done in Vancouver; I was originally planning on having it done in Montana. <br />
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Shortly after I sold the plane, but before the new owner showed up to take off the wings and trailer her home, I had another PDX overnight. I took the opportunity to go across the river and retrieve my headsets, camping equipment, and personal effects from the airplane. I walked around her one last time, softly drumming the fabric, ducked my head inside the cockpit for a whiff of that familiar old airplane smell, and patted the cowling as I walked away. In eighteen short months of ownership we had 200 flight hours and a lot of great adventures together. Dawn and I will miss our good old Pacer for a long time, I think. That said, I suspect there will be some other great old airplanes in our future too.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-29419256116340473192016-05-23T15:32:00.002-05:002016-05-23T15:58:13.618-05:00Anchors Aweigh<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Last post I alluded to some pretty major developments in my and Dawn's lives, and I won't keep you in suspense. Last August we decided we want to do something completely different. Dawn was starting to get burned out on teaching and I'm not growing any fonder of Minnesota winters; there's really nothing keeping us here. My airline has seven different 7ER bases and MSP is one of the most senior and is slowly shrinking. We talked about various places we could move, and then I broached an idea I'd been mulling over for some time: what if we moved onto a 40' sailboat and cruised the Bahamas and Caribbean for a few years? Surprisingly, Dawn loved the idea. Once upon a time she would have rejected it outright but we've since done a number of bareboat charters in California, the Bahamas and the BVI. She's been getting a lot more confident (not to mention competent) with the sailing part, and in fact has really enjoyed the weeklong stints of living on a boat. When I brought up the idea, we had just returned from another BVI charter on a 50-foot Beneteau with six friends, none of whom had sailed much before, and Dawn was a fantastic first mate. I guess that experience was a turning point, because her reaction to my cautious suggestion was to immediately start brainstorming ways to make it happen.<br />
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And so over the course of the next few days we crafted an ambitious plan to sell everything, buy a boat, Dawn quit her job, go cruising for 7-8 months of the year for the next three years, drop my schedule to a minimum and commute from the Caribbean during the cruising season, and come back north (and earn most of the year's income) while the boat is <a href="http://spiceislandmarine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/spiceislandmarine-slider31.jpg">stored on land</a> during hurricane season. This "part time pilot" plan is possibly largely because my airline (my airplane especially) is so seasonal, with summer block hours much higher than winter. In high season it's all hands on deck, but the rest of the year it's pretty easy to take time off. Pretty slick that our high season correlates with the Caribbean hurricane season. <br />
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Our original plan was for Dawn to teach the 2016-2017 school year, buy the boat this fall and sell our house next year, moving aboard in June 2017. We started in on the plan with research, budgeting, and prepping our Washington townhouse for sale (it's been rented out since we moved back to MN in 2008). The real estate market out west has really recovered strongly within the last year, including for townhouses which were even more severely depressed than the rest of the market for several years. To our surprise and delight, the townhouse sold on the very first day of listing, for our full (and ambitious, I thought) listing price.<br />
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We have since moved our plan up by nearly a year for two reasons. First, Dawn is just completely 100% burned out on teaching. This has been the worst year since she started, it's really taken a toll on her, and she's just flat-out done, for now anyways. At the least she needs to take a break, and perhaps in a few years she'll be ready to go back to it. Secondly, considering how hot the real estate market has been lately and the potential for market volatility and interest rate hikes after the election, we decided to sell our home in Minnesota a year early. This has happened really quickly: we made the decision to sell at the end of March, put in new carpet and paint in early April, and had an (even more ambitious) full-priced offer on April 21st - a full nine days before we were planning to officially list the house! We close on June 7th and have been very busy packing and downsizing and preparing to move to our interim housing, a one-bedroom apartment in a historic building in downtown St. Paul. This has involved selling, donating, giving away, or borrowing out the majority of our possessions, with a few pieces of furniture retained for the five months we'll be in the apartment. We're keeping a few personal items with sentimental value, like gifts from good friends or the artwork in our house (all our own photography from our various travels); these will be stored for the duration. Otherwise, the only stuff we're keeping is that which will be helpful enough on the boat to merit valuable stowage space.<br />
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You're probably wondering about the Pacer. I initially concocted a <a href="http://www.buffettworld.com/aviation/albatross/">Parrothead fantasy</a> of bringing it to the Caribbean with us and island-hopping around whilst keeping it abreast of the boat, but soon concluded that a tropical marine environment would be murderous on a fabric-covered airplane left outside and also that our new boat would need the full attention of her two crew and our pocketbook. I then considered storing it for the 8 months we're on the boat and using it during the 4 offseason months (when we're supposed to be devoting our attention to earning income), but eventually decided this was a waste of resources and in direct contravention to my resolution to fly any airplane I own at least 10 hours a month. And so we decided to sell the Pacer this summer - but in the meantime, to embark on a grand adventure flying clockwise around the country visiting friends and venturing down Baja and getting in some backcountry flying in Idaho and Montana before making the bucket-list pilgrimage to Alaska, where we would sell her. It was a grand idea and <a href="http://www.flyingmag.com/taking-wing-touring-america-by-air">we had a wonderful time</a> for the 75 hours and 3/4 of the way around the country that it lasted. That all came to a screeching halt in Portland, Oregon when I received the news that every plane owner dreads during the annual inspection. This led to me selling the plane earlier this month at a significant loss, but that's a tale of woe best left for another post.<br />
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So now we're pretty seriously into the search for our floating home for the next three years. Our perfect sailboat is a medium-displacement cutter or ketch between 40 and 45 feet long, preferably a center-cockpit design with two good-sized staterooms and private heads fore and aft. It will be set up to be easily single-or-double-handed while offering comfortable living quarters for four; we plan to bring friends and family down to sail with us regularly. The onboard equipment will allow for sustainable living "on the hook" in serene anchorages away from marinas for weeks on end. Our midrange budget means that most potential candidates will be 30+ years old, but we can still afford to look at only those that have been well-maintained with most major systems replaced and/or upgraded. We're unlikely to find a boat that's <i>exactly </i>what we want and in bristol condition, and so our budget includes money to upgrade and refit the boat both at the start of our cruise and each off-season.<br />
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We've whittled the field to six models that particularly suit our needs: the <a href="http://www.cruisingworld.com/sailboats/vancouver-42-stately-passagemaker">Tayana 42CC</a>, the <a href="http://bluewaterboats.org/bristol-411/">Bristol 41.1</a>/43.3/45.5, the <a href="http://www.jordanyachts.com/archives/3709">Brewer 12.8/44</a>, the <a href="http://www.jordanyachts.com/archives/1805">Gulfstar 44</a>, the <a href="http://www.kp44.org/index.php">Kelly Peterson 44/46</a>, and the <a href="http://www.boatus.com/boatreviews/sail/Whitby42.asp">Whitby 42</a>. Of these there are about ten specific boats currently on the market that we're interested in, and we're making our way down that list as time allows given everything else going on. One Tayana that I've already seen, <a href="http://handleysail.com/">Windbird</a>, is a strong candidate and we may end up making an offer on her, but I'm trying to be logical and not get my heart set on a specific boat yet; being inexperienced boat shoppers, we really do need to see quite a few more in person before deciding. To that end, Dawn and I will be taking a boat-searching roadtrip down North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida this coming Memorial Day Weekend. Windbird is one of the boats on the list as Dawn hasn't seen her yet, but there are a few others that could well end up being stronger candidates. And really, nothing says we have to buy right now, or even this summer, or even this year. I don't want to be rushed into buying a boat simply because we sold the house earlier than planned; it wouldn't hurt us to go back to the original timeline and build our cruising kitty in the meantime.<br />
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This is all rather outside the scope of an aviation blog, and Dawn and I have decided that our new adventure merits its own blog, one to which we'll contribute collaboratively. Many cruising blog titles incorporate the boat name, but we don't have one yet so we've decided upon "<a href="http://wotwater.blogspot.com/">Weigels on the Water</a>," mostly thanks to the catchy URL <a href="http://wotwater.blogspot.com/">wotwater.blogspot.com</a>. You can follow our maritime adventures there, although my posts here will likely include some of the highlights.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-17333481179521428412016-05-06T22:42:00.001-05:002016-05-08T11:12:08.073-05:00Six Months In (Sorta)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Considering my lack of posting you might think that my airline is working me to death, but no, that's not the case. Recently I passed 120 hours on the B757/767...just over six months since I went to class! Keep in mind that I was originally awarded the slot way back in Feb 2015, meaning I'm only nine months away from my seat lock expiring. I'm not planning on going anywhere but it keeps options open.<br />
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Basically what happened is that my airline was originally planning on retiring a significant portion of the 7ER fleet, didn't train many new pilots on it for a while, then decided to keep many of the airplanes after all at the same time that a bunch of senior 7ER FOs took captain slots on other fleets. Whoops, big training logjam! It's just now finally clearing.<br />
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So here's basically how my training went:<br />
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Oct-6Nov15: Home study for 7ER course (we basically teach ourselves the systems on our own time via computer based training, honestly not my favorite way to train).<br />
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6Nov15-6Dec15: 7ER Initial training. You may recall from Mad Dog school that we break our initial training into four blocks, numbered 100 to 400, that roughly correspond with systems training, procedures training, maneuvers training, and line-oriented training. These all end in checkrides but the two most important are 34X (Maneuvers Validation) and 44X (Line-Oriented Evaluation). Unlike Mad Dog school, I was paired with an FO rather than a CA, which complicated things a bit in that we each had to learn left-seat duties and got only half the time we otherwise would in the right seat. However, my sim partner (who is only a few numbers senior to me) is an extremely sharp guy, we worked very well together, and we made it through the course without problems. One happy footnote: we weren't stuck in "the schoolhouse" the entire time, our 300-series sims were all down at the Boeing training facility in Miami. We passed our 44X checkrides easily on December 6th and were sent home indefinitely waiting on IOE.<br />
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31Jan15-05Feb15: Initial Operating Experience (IOE). I flew with a super-nice Detroit-based Line Check Airman, he was completely understanding that I hadn't been in training for eight weeks and might take a little more time to get spooled up. My very first leg was in a B757-200 and operated from Detroit to Cancun for a 24 hour overnight, a very nice way to kick things off! Our subsequent layovers were in Orlando, Fort Myers, and Atlanta. I ended up flying the B752 for 5 legs, the B753 for 2 legs, and even our GE-powered domestic B767-300 for 2 legs. I liked the legendary power and performance of the B752, but I loved the fingertip-light control feel of the B763 (due to the additional inboard ailerons). You simply think about turning, and she's turning.<br />
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29Feb-04Mar: Transoceanic Operating Experience (TOE), 2 crossings of 4 required. There was less time off before this so I didn't have much catchup on the airplane itself, but there's a <i>lot</i> to cover over the course of the first 8-hour crossing (during which I was in the rest seat for 2 hours) and it's all stuff that I'd last covered in mid-December. I crammed to catch up in the days before the TOE, and the LCA was happy with my preparation. We flew one leg from Atlanta to London-Heathrow in the B767-300ER, and after a 18 hour layover flew an ETOPS B757-200 back across to PHL. We even got tagged for a couple domestic legs the next day, the better to increase my landing count. I gotta say, though, I've found all the variants pretty easy to land. It just takes the first few to adjust to the higher sight picture.<br />
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06Mar-10Mar: TOE crossings 3 & 4. Only one day off before straight into my 2nd TOE, which was based out of Seattle and consisted of only two legs, SEA-PVG-SEA. This was my first time to China, and I had a really nice 48 hour layover to explore Shanghai. The takeoff out of Seattle, at 407,000 lbs, is my heaviest to date. Like I said the B767 is really light on the controls, so you don't <i>feel</i> that heavy, but acceleration obviously takes longer and you have to be really sharp with your pitch control to avoid overspeeding the flaps while retracting them at the proper speed and keeping the airplane accelerating. On the way over we were in VHF coverage the whole way, flying north via Alaska, the Bering Sea, Russia, and arriving from over Beijing. The Russian and Chinese controllers weren't too hard to understand, but once in China you switch to flying metric altitudes, which is a little different. The weather really stunk in Shanghai when we landed, with a big gusty crosswind, but the rainy runway made for a nice landing. On the way back we flew via Japan and then over the water. Because this is such a long flight, it was a 4-man crew, meaning I spent nearly half of each crossing in the bunk (and these particular B767s actually have bunks - so nice!). Pretty easy work if you can get it.<br />
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And that's it, I was released to the line on 10Mar, didn't work again thanks to creative bidding until early April, and have done a few trips since, all domestic. I'm getting pretty comfortable with the airplane - as expected, it's superior to the MadDog in every way possible, but there are also a surprising number of similarities that make for an easy transition. I've been quite busy taking advantage of all the free time for the last six months, and have done the following trips:<br />
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mid-October: Interline Regatta, British Virgin Islands.<br />
Christmas/New Years: Dawn and I flew the Pacer from Minnesota to Connecticut and then down to Key West.<br />
early Jan: flew around Florida visiting friends.<br />
mid-Jan: Dawn and I flew the Pacer from Florida to Phoenix.<br />
mid-Feb: Dawn and I flew the Pacer down Baja with our friends Brad and Amber (they rented a 182 out of San Diego). Awesome, epic trip - story is coming out in July issue of <i>Flying</i>. <br />
late-Mar: Went to Thailand to visit my sister and her kids in Chiang Rai, flew down to Phuket, met my parents, chartered a 39' Leopard catamaran for 5 days of sailing the Andaman Sea.<br />
mid-Apr: Dawn and I flew the Pacer up the west coast to Portland, OR.<br />
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Besides all that, there are some pretty major developments in my and Dawn's plans, dating back to last August. As a result, we sold our rented-out townhome in Vancouver WA back in February, and just sold our house in Minnesota a few weeks ago. We close on June 7th, and are renting a small apartment in downtown St. Paul for the summer before taking off for "new horizons." Yes, I have some pretty serious catch-up blogging to do. <br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-20315675951464942302016-03-15T12:21:00.000-05:002016-03-15T12:21:44.320-05:00ModAero<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is rather last minute, but I wasn't entirely sure I was going to make it until fairly recently. The <a href="http://www.modaero.net/">ModAero NextGen Aviation Festival</a> will be happening in Conroe, TX (just north of Houston) this Weds-Sat March 16th-19th, and I'll be speaking on the main stage at 12:30PM on Friday. I'll also be participating in a few panel discussions throughout the day. ModAero is an interesting concept, a fly-in/aviation symposium/music festival aimed at younger pilots & aviation enthusiasts. This is their first year, and it'll be interesting to see how it goes. So if you're in the area, come check it out. </div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-35881325099047379572016-03-14T18:01:00.002-05:002016-03-14T18:02:21.510-05:00Southern Sun, Part II<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I flew back down to Tampa on January 15th, caught an Uber ride to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KTPF">Peter O Knight Airport,</a> and inspected the Pacer. The local mechanics had completed the required 50-hour muffler inspection, but hadn't been able to hunt down a slight oil leak I had noticed the previous week on the way over from Orlando. Nothing to do but fly and try to figure out where it was coming from on subsequent legs, I figured. I launched to the north, into the teeth of a fierce headwind that spawned moderate turbulence and miserably slow groundspeed. Finally I ducked down low and just offshore alongside the Gulf Coast, where the ride improved considerably and progress improved by a couple knots. I landed at <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KCTY">Cross City, FL</a> for cheap gas - as I had on my way <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2015/05/in-search-of-sunshine-part-iv-cruising.html">north from the Bahamas last spring</a> - which involved a pretty nasty crosswind and a wild ride down final. In the hour and a half since Tampa a fine mist of oil had again coated the right side of the windscreen, and this time I also saw oil on the righthand wing struts. Now I knew the culprit: after the crankshaft inspection AD was accomplished in Bartow the previous week, the crankshaft plug hadn't been sufficiently seated, allowing oil to leak out and be slung outward by the propeller. No mechanics on the field here, though, not on a Friday afternoon. There wasn't any danger of the plug coming out altogether, as it was held in place by the propeller flange. I decided to press on and just clean up the oil after each leg. <br />
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It was a slow couple hours to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KDTS">Destin Executive Airport</a>, where I landed and booked a nearby hotel room for the night. While waiting in the FBO lobby, a younger pilot came in looking for the guy with the yellow Pacer. Turned out David has a J-3 Cub and a family T-6 Texan (!) and wanted to tell me he liked my airplane. I told him about my round-the-US trip and noted that I was planning on going to a fly-in at nearby Brewton, AL the next morning; he decided to go too, flying his Cub. We ended up meeting for drinks that night, but didn't stay up too late in the interest of getting an early start to Brewton.<br />
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Alas, Saturday morning dawned rather foggy, and by the time it finally burned off it was time for me to get going to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KPNS">Pensacola</a>; I had to miss the fly-in. Dawn was flying in on Delta via Atlanta, and just like in Nassau last year I landed right after her flight. The folks at <a href="http://pensacolaaviation.com/">Pensacola Aviation Center </a>were exceptionally nice, picked Dawn up from the terminal, and declined to charge me a ramp fee even though I had just fueled in Destin and didn't need gas. It was just after noon when we took off to the northwest; we hoped to meet our friends Rob and Lori in Dallas that night.<br />
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Our first stop was only 40 miles northwest, in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/1R8">Bay Minette, Alabama</a>. Dawn had three states left to visit to make 50 - Alabama, Mississippi, and New Mexico - and we figured we'd knock out all three over the weekend. We borrowed an awesomely dilapidated 1994 Buick LeSabre - I once owned one of that exact year, which my friends mercilessly dubbed "The GrandpaMobile" - and sought out a decent Mexican restaurant in the little town center. From there it was a two-hour hop west to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KHEZ">Natchez, MS</a>, where a quick fuel stop satisfied the visitation requirements of Dawn's second-to-last state. From there we flew west across the broad Mississippi River and the plains of northern Louisiana as the sky grew increasingly grey and the south winds freshened. We were approaching a cold front that was blocking our route to Dallas with widespread rain over the TX-LA border. Initially I thought we could go through it, but as we came nearer I watched the weather steadily deteriorate via my <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2016/01/ads-b-for-cheapskates.html">stratux ADS-B receiver</a>, with increasingly strong rain showers and lowering ceilings. That matched what I saw out the window as we approached the frontal boundary - and worse, we were starting to lose daylight. Nope, I wasn't going to scudrun through that. I turned to the southwest and paralleled the leaden wall, looking for a way through.<br />
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We went over fifty miles southwest before I found what I was looking for, a southern crease in the front, where the rain was light and the ceiling not so low. We turned westward and plunged into darkness under the soggy clouds. Twice, the ceilings lowered enough that I nearly turned around - but each time, we abruptly broke out into a much clearer area. By the time I worked my way back northwest to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KPSN">Palestine, TX</a>, the ceilings were back up to a good 2500 feet with decent visibility underneath. Oh, but was that airport dark! Landing was the easy part; groping my way to the fuel pumps via a pitch-black spiderweb of taxiways was trickier. Thankfully the pilot lounge had a code lock with instructions, so we could warm up and dry out a bit while pondering our options. Dallas had gone completely IFR and was forecast to stay that way for another couple hours. There was no point going to see our friends if we didn't get up there until almost midnight. Waco was only 70 miles west of us, with much better weather. So that's where we went, arriving at the barren and windswept <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KCNW">TSTC Waco Airport (KCNW)</a> well after everyone had locked up and gone home. Fortunately there were rooms available at a brand new and charmless Holiday Inn a few miles away, and an Uber driver came to get us before we froze to death huddled in the lee of the cavernous TSTC hangars. Too cold and tired to explore Waco, we ate dinner at the deserted hotel restaurant and collapsed into bed.<br />
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Sunday morning was cold, clear and still; when we showed up at CNW just after 7am, there was a thick deposit of frost on the Pacer's upper surfaces. We spun it to face the rising sun and then rotated it periodically, as on a spit; eventually the frost softened enough to brush it off with a long-handled broom. We finally departed at 9am and had a lovely first flight against light headwinds to our first fuel stop at <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KCOM">Coleman</a>. After this the terrain grew rugged and periodically jumped to a higher elevation. At the same time the headwinds piped up, so I flew low among the rocks for a while to keep the groundspeed up. But then the surroundings started looking rather inhospitable in case of a forced landing; that slow oil leak that was forcing us to clean the windscreen at every fuel stop was still nagging at the back of my mind, and I went back up to an altitude that would give us a few options in case the worst happened. From there it was a slow slog to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KODO">Odessa</a>, where we landed around 12:30. The friendly folks at <a href="http://www.wildcatteraviation.com/">Wildcatter Aviation</a> borrowed us a beautiful new crew car to scarf down lunch at colorful (and busy!) local establishment <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/dumplins-y-amigos-odessa">"Dumplins Y Amigos."</a><br />
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Just as we were about to start up for our next leg, a truck came roaring up to the Pacer with a middle-aged guy, a kid, and an old guy. Turns out the old guy used to own a Pacer and the middle-aged guy currently owns one, just across the field, and is an active member of the <a href="https://www.shortwingpiperclub.org/">Short Wing Piper Club</a>, a type club to which I belong and follow on Facebook. I mentioned that my bungees needed renewal and I had the replacement bungees along; he remarked that he had the necessary tool in his hangar and we could get the job done in an hour or so. In retrospect it would have been a good time to do the bungees and save some money, maybe while also pulling the prop to reseat the crankshaft plug. At the time I was anxious to continue westbound, especially since the winds aloft forecast was such that I wasn't sure I could make it to El Paso nonstop. I thanked him and declined, and a few minutes later we took off and started climbing to find the most favorable winds.<br />
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As it turned out, the winds were much more northerly than forecast at both 6500' and then 8500', altitudes at which the Pacer absolutely sips fuel while still giving a decent turn of speed. Consequently, not only did we make it to El Paso, we overflew it to land in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KLRU">Las Cruces, NM</a>. It was a gorgeous flight along the way, skirting past the iconic sentinel mount of the west, Guadalupe Peak. My original intention was to continue to Silver City, NM for the night, but the winds were blowing stink up there, promising a miserable ride up in the mountains, so we decided to call it a night at Las Cruces. The FBO there originally quoted us $60 for a rental car, but then allowed that we could take their courtesy car overnight if we returned it early the next morning. That suited us just fine. We got a very cool room for quite cheap at the <a href="http://www.innofthearts.com/">Lundeen Inn of the Arts</a>, a southwestern gallery-cum-B&B. Las Cruces was very quiet on Sunday night, but we enjoyed walking around town and then found an <a href="http://www.nopalitosrestaurants.com/">excellent restaurant</a> at which to celebrate Dawn's having visited all 50 states. As an aside, my 50th was Alaska when we <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2011/08/up-alcan-part-2.html">rode our motorcycles there five years ago</a>....but that was only because I had boarded the wrong hotel van on a PHL overnight and unintentionally ended up in Delaware.<br />
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We started early again the next morning, mindful that we had a mid-afternoon flight to make from PHX to MSP. This time there was no frost in the dry desert air, and we departed Runway 31 as the sun topped the eastern mountains. This was mostly noteworthy because I meant to depart Runway 26...I realized the discrepancy just after liftoff. Look at the <a href="http://img.airnav.com/aptdiag/w240/01231.gif">airport chart</a>, and you can see how it could happen. It's a similar layout to Lexington at the time of the Comair accident. This is the first time I've ever landed or taken off on a runway other than the one I intended. Las Cruces is a non-controlled airport so there was no clearance violation, and Runway 31 is plenty long, but it was still a huge eye-opener. I felt sick about it for a while.<br />
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Fortunately it was an absolutely stunning flight and my goofup was mostly forgotten as we marveled at the gorgeous scenery bathed in slanting morning light. We landed in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KSAD">Safford, AZ </a>to top off on cheap gas - unnecessary given the excellent groundspeed, but it seemed like (and was) a nice friendly airport deep in the shadow of Mount Graham, and it was the sort of blissful morning aloft that you want to stretch out. All too soon we were descending over the sprawling metropolis of Phoenix, dodging airspace and then landing at surprisingly busy <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KCHD">Chandler, Arizona.</a> I wanted to get the Pacer in for maintenance, and as luck would have it, as we cleared runway 4L I spied Chandler Aviation with its doors wide open and an empty tiedown beckoning. Soon after we shut down, Frank Setzler came over to talk. He's the owner and head mechanic at <a href="http://www.chandleraviation.com/">Chandler Aviation</a>, and it turns out he used to own a Pacer. Funny how many mechanics used to own Pacers! Upon investigation it would turn out that the Pacer actually needed a bit more care than I realized, but after all I had flown it some 60 hours since leaving Minnesota, and in Chandler it was in good hands. That's good, because next we were headed to a place you'd really rather not run into unexpected maintenance problems: Baja California, Mexico.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-13735018709661772612016-01-29T18:41:00.002-06:002016-01-29T18:59:28.337-06:00Southern Sun<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Growing up in the Great White North, I knew a few snowbirds among my parents' circle of friends and supposed that everything south of the Mason-Dixon line was perpetual glorious summer. I wasn't fully disabused of this notion <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2010/01/somewhere-in-middle-of-nowhere.html">until my frigid motorcycle trip</a> <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2010/02/deep-south.html">across the South</a> six years ago, which comprised two legs of a nearly-15,000 mile ride around the Lower 48. I rode shivering in temperatures mostly in the 20s and 30s - the warmest it got between San Diego and Florida was 49 degrees, in El Paso - and an enormous winter storm that dumped a foot of snow on Dallas chased me all the way from Texas to Tampa. I'd already been flying airliners to the south and southeast for a few years and should have known better: <i>of course</i> the South has winter. It's merely more moderate than the North, and only really stays nice in a few localized spots: Southern California, the low desert around Phoenix and Tucson, the Gulf Coast, and most of Florida - basically, all the places the snowbirds end up.<br />
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When we <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2016/01/on-road.html">set out for the East Coast with the Pacer</a> on Christmas Day, it was with the intention of reprising the motorcycle trip, in stages as in 2010, but from the air this time and clockwise around the country with additional forays to Mexico and Alaska. This time I had no illusions as to the weather difficulties associated with making such a trip in the winter, and the first two legs to the Northeast and down to Florida did not disappoint. We made our easting between two major, fast-moving systems, had one nasty cold front pass over while holed up in Connecticut, and snuck down to North Carolina ahead of the next. From there we fought our way down through strong southerly flow funneled between a warm front over the Atlantic and a stationary front stalled over the Appalachians. Basically we made the most of each short weather window, and in fact spent three of the first four nights in different places than originally planned. Once in Florida, however, all signs of winter weather disappeared.<br />
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We flew back to Minneapolis on January 1st for a few post-Christmas family events; I returned south the following Tuesday, alone, to fly around Florida visiting friends and procuring routine maintenance for the Pacer. But in the meantime, winter had come to Florida with a vengeance. I drove from the Miami airport to my cousins' place in Key Largo through driving rain courtesy of a strong cold front, and it had scarcely improved when I drove up to the <a href="https://www.airnav.com/airport/X51">Homestead General Aviation Airport</a> the next day. Finally the rain abated and the ceilings rose just enough for me to sneak north to <a href="https://www.airnav.com/airport/KSEF">Sebring</a>. There I visited a friend who is a 777 captain for my airline, toured the <a href="http://www.aircam.com/">Lockwood</a> factory, and flew an <a href="http://www.aircam.com/">AirCam</a> during a brief window between rain showers and low ceilings. What a fun airplane! I'll admit that the first time I shoved the twin throttles forward, I was wholly unprepared to be airborne and climbing at a vertiginous angle within the span of about three seconds.<br />
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The next morning I was intending to fly up to Orlando early to tour the <i><a href="http://www.flyingmag.com/">Flying Magazine</a></i> offices and give a few staff members plane rides, but the ceilings were low - <i>way </i>low, with fog that persisted well after it was forecast to clear. I postponed the Orlando engagements 'till the following morning, and concentrated on just getting to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KBOW">Bartow</a> for Pacer maintenance. It needed an oil change and I was also within a few hours of two recurring ADs being due. My 160-horsepower <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-320">Lycoming O-320-B2A</a> has a hollow crankshaft that <a href="http://yeeles.com/Reference/AD/Lycoming/98-02-08.pdf">requires periodic inspections</a> for corrosion and cracking. A few years ago, before I bought it, surface pitting was found in the inner diameter of the crankshaft, which mandates a fluorescent penetrant inspection (FPI) to check for cracks every year or every 100 flight hours, whichever comes first. It's not a big deal to do it during the annual - but if you put on more than 100 hours between annuals, it's kind of a pain.<br />
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My friend Dick Karl, who resides in Tampa and <a href="http://www.flyingmag.com/authors/dick-karl">also writes for <i>Flying</i></a>, gets his Cheyenne maintained by Bill Turley at <a href="http://www.aircraftengineeringinc.com/">Aircraft Engineering Inc</a>. I had met Turley on a Tampa overnight when Dick and I flew his plane over to have a new ELT installed, and Bill remembered me when I called about having his busy shop do the oil change and FPI inspection. Due to the weather, I wasn't able to land in Bartow until 1:30pm, but the shop got me right in. To do the FPI, you have to remove the spinner and propeller, drill out and remove a thin disk that acts as a plug on the end of the crankshaft, clean out the first 3.5 inches of the inner diameter, apply the penetrant, let it sit, apply developer, and then inspect with a blacklight. The last step is to bang a new crankshaft disk into place and reinstall the propeller and spinner. To make the oil change easier I also removed the upper cowling. Because of my late arrival, the shop didn't have time to take care of my <a href="http://myplace.frontier.com/~air.bourn/Pacer/ADs/AD68-05-01.htm">50-hour muffler AD</a>. I figured I'd get it done at another airport within a few days. Once the Pacer was put back together, I flew up to <a href="https://www.airnav.com/airport/KORL">Orlando Executive Airport</a>, where I had a couch to crash on at a nearby friend's apartment.<br />
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The next morning dawned - what else - cold, foggy and overcast, with rain showers. The forecast called for improvement so Flying's art director and his 7-year-old son picked me up and headed to the airport, where the weather already looked much better. We preflighted, started up, and taxied out only to hear an IFR arrival on short final report breaking out at 400 feet. Low ceilings were rapidly moving onto the field, so we taxied back and spent the next two hours in the FBO watching a massive rainstorm lash the airport. Finally there was just enough of a break in the weather to get in a pleasant 30-minute Young Eagles flight. The boy was nervous beforehand but ended up loving it. On our return we were met by <i>Flying's</i> staff photographer. The Pacer and I had been roped into serving as models for a story on marginal VFR flying, and you couldn't have asked for a much better day for the subject material - especially for Florida. I can't say I've ever been a model before, and I felt a bit foolish posing with my iPad or "talking to FSS" on my cell phone - "look more worried!" - but the results, with the atmospheric rain-slicked ramp and a backdrop of ominous-looking clouds, were pretty spectacular. And then the photographer and I went flying and managed to sample pretty much every marginal VFR situation ever invented: scudrunning under low ceilings, reduced visibility in mist, VFR over the top of a thickening broken layer, spiraling through a suckerhole, dodging rain showers. I actually had to pick up a special VFR clearance to get in under a 900-foot broken layer, the first time I've done that since my CFI days. You'll be able to see the photos in <i>Flying's</i> March issue, out in a few weeks.<br />
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The weather cleared considerably by the afternoon, when I took off for <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/ktpf">Tampa's Peter O Knight Airport</a>. Like Sebring, I had stopped here on my <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2015/05/in-search-of-sunshine-part-iv-cruising.html">way back from the Bahamas</a> last year and found it a great little seaside field tucked between Tampa's downtown and seaport. On my way there, I noticed a fine mist of oil slowly forming on the windscreen. Uh-oh. After landing I went to see the resident mechanics to see if they could take a look and, oh, maybe take care of the muffler AD while they were at it. At 3pm on a Friday afternoon? Not a chance! I assumed the oil was coming from within the cowling, so I opened it up and started looking. There was some residual oil, though it was possible that was from the unavoidable mess that's made when removing the oil screen during an oil change. I checked the oil screen bolts and found one fairly loose. Maybe that was it? Everything else I checked was tight. Concluding I'd have to fly it again and recheck tomorrow, I secured the airplane, ubered to the decent downtown hotel I got cheap on Hotwire, and then headed to Dick Karl's beautiful waterside home for a "guys' night in" dinner party. It was a lovely evening with interesting company, an eclectic mix of doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, and younger Part 135 pilots. It was fairly late by the time my shared uber ride dropped me off downtown.<br />
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Dick may have fed me just one too many dirty martinis, as I woke with a splitting headache. No big deal, it was solid IFR anyways and not forecast to improve until noon. Meanwhile my intended destination, the Florida panhandle, was overcast at 200' with 2 miles visibility and no great improvement in the offing. Screw it - I was done fighting the weather, for now at least. I called Peter O Knight and arranged for the mechanics to complete the muffler AD inspection and hunt down the oil leak the following week, then headed out to TPA and caught a Mad Dog to frigid (but clear!) Minnesota. I'd be back less than a week later with a daunting goal: flying 1600 miles west, clear across the continent, against winter headwinds and whatever weather systems came marching across the plains.<br />
<a href="https://skyvector.com/?ll=26.7137203536626,-81.50207518919316&chart=301&zoom=7&fpl=%20X51%20KSEF%20KBOW%20KORL%20KTPF%20KTPF"><br /></a>
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Part II to follow....</div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-35356341223235266122016-01-21T14:35:00.005-06:002016-01-21T15:16:08.930-06:00On The Road<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: airplanes are meant to fly, they like to fly, and the worst thing for them is to sit unused. This is one of the reasons flying clubs make so much more sense to me than sole ownership, at least for the average owner: the use rate on a large portion of the GA fleet is abysmally low. When we bought the Pacer on December 15, 2014, we set a goal of flying it 10 hours a month. Well wouldn't you know it, as of December 15, 2015, I had exactly 119.7 hours in the airplane. Not bad.<br />
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In the five weeks since then, I've put on another 54.5 hours...46 hours since Christmas on a cross-country totaling over 4200 miles. Yeah, you may have guessed that I still haven't been assigned OE on the 757/767, the check airmen are still backed up. It's been a nice holiday season collecting paychecks to stay at home...or rather, not.<br />
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On Christmas morning, Dawn and I departed Flying Cloud early and turned the nose eastward. We landed in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/klse" target="_blank">LaCrosse</a> only an hour later to wait out low ceilings across central Wisconsin, a harbinger of things to come. Four hours later it had improved to marginal VFR, and not wanting to be caught by the large snowstorm nipping at our heels, we scudran an hour east to find clear skies near Lake Michigan. It was a lovely cruise past the Chicago skyline (albeit bittersweet to see the ruins of Meigs Field), and then we landed in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/kppo" target="_blank">La Porte, Indiana</a> for fuel. We were able to go high for a sweet tailwind on our next leg due east; I landed in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KPCW" target="_blank">Port Clinton, Ohio</a> for three solo bounces to reestablish night currency before we continued onto Cleveland, were we were planning to meet up with friends. Unfortunately the new TAF that <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2016/01/ads-b-for-cheapskates.html" target="_blank">popped up on my stratux</a> showed low ceilings and rain the next morning; rather than risk getting trapped, I continued on to a very dark <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/jhw" target="_blank">Jamestown, New York</a> airport to spend the night. We found a cheap and comfy hotel easily enough, but scrounging a late dinner on Christmas night took some doing; even the Chinese places were closing. We finally located a pizzeria still delivering.<br />
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The next morning dawned considerably nicer than forecast, even back in Cleveland. Our extra easting made for an easy day, though, as we climbed high to cover the 307NM to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KSNC" target="_blank">Chester, Connecticut</a> in a single leg. Here we visited my former student Johnny G and his beautiful family. Johnny recently sold his pristine 1981 Piper Warrior which we f<a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2012/03/cross-country.html" target="_blank">lew from coast-to-coast a few years back</a>, unfortunately, but it was great seeing them again. <br />
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That night low ceilings and rain moved in, and it didn't dissipate as forecast the next day until very late. In the meantime Dawn and I borrowed a car and explored the colonial town of <a href="http://www.essexct.com/" target="_blank">Essex</a>. Chester was the last place to go VFR (it's on a 300 ft MSL hill), around sunset, at which point we were looking at very marginal VFR through the Hudson River VFR corridor after dark. We reluctantly called our Jersey friends Jeremy & Crystal to tell them we wouldn't be coming, then found a cozy B&B in a 1746 house in <a href="http://www.visitoldsaybrookct.com/" target="_blank">Old Saybrook, CT</a>.<br />
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The weather was much improved the next morning, albeit with a brisk north wind that foretold the approach of the next cold front. We took off around sunrise and enjoyed a fast, pleasant ride along the Connecticut coast and down the Hudson. It was pretty neat seeing the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty from the left seat of the Pacer. We landed in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KBLM" target="_blank">Monmouth, NJ</a> to go to breakfast with Jeremy & Crystal and their four rambunctious young boys, and then continued past Cape May and across Delaware Bay to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KGED" target="_blank">Georgetown, DE</a>. We didn't really need gas yet, but Delaware was one of only four states that Dawn hadn't been to at the start of this trip. The only reason I'd been there was because I got on the wrong hotel shuttle in PHL some years ago.<br />
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The strong tailwinds continued as we scooted southward over the DelMarVa peninsula, albeit under steadily lowering ceilings. It was down to 1500' overcast as we passed Norfolk, and we decided to land in <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KECG" target="_blank">Elizabeth City, NC</a> as the stratux showed a persistent 100-mile-wide band of IFR ceilings with rain showers starting 40nm south of there. We tarried in the <a href="http://www.ecgairport.com/for-visitors/the-terminal.html" target="_blank">extremely accommodating FBO's</a> lounge for a few minutes before I decided it wouldn't be clearing that afternoon; we tied down the plane, rented an old Buick LeSabre beater, and found the steal of the trip: a $65 room in a <a href="http://www.culpepperinn.com/" target="_blank">gorgeous B&B</a> in an old mansion. <a href="http://discoverelizabethcity.com/" target="_blank">Downtown Elizabeth City</a> was a bit more abandoned-feeling than I thought it would be, but we enjoyed surveying the cruising sailboats on the intercoastal waterway, hung out in a <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/coasters-downtown-draught-house-elizabeth-city" target="_blank">friendly pub</a> with a fantastic beer selection, and had a <a href="http://cypresscreekgrill.com/" target="_blank">superb fresh seafood dinner</a>.<br />
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Overnight a warm front passed through, the fresh northeast winds flipped to the southwest and became even gustier, and temperature rose twenty degrees. The low ceiling persisted until 9am; as soon as the skies cleared we took off into 30 knot winds and started bashing our way southwest. Even with clear skies I stayed at 500 feet where we could at least maintain 75-80 knots groundspeed; climbing to 1000 feet slowed us to 60 knots (45 kt headwind). It was a miserable 2.5 hour turbulent slog to cover the 193nm to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KCRE" target="_blank">North Myrtle Beach, SC</a>. Dawn handled it masterfully, as she did the entire trip. I must say she's the only woman I know who would be ecstatic to spend her vacation in a cramped small airplane clawing its way cross-country through unpredictable winter weather -- and I married her! The ride improved for the next leg as we hugged the coastline, though there was a localized patch of unexpectedly low ceilings between Charleston and Hilton Head, and the groundspeed stayed stubbornly stuck at 80 knots all the way to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KSSI" target="_blank">St. Simon's Island, Georgia</a>. From there, though, the winds died down as we continued southward over the north Florida beaches, and it was a thoroughly pleasant, warm afternoon by the time we touched down at <a href="http://www.7fl6.com/" target="_blank">Spruce Creek Fly-In Community</a>.<br />
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Our friends Mike and Traci from the <a href="http://www.airventurecuprace.com/" target="_blank">AirVenture Cup Race</a> welcomed us to Spruce Creek with much-appreciated cocktails, followed by a scrumptious dinner at the Downwind Cafe. Later we popped into <a href="http://www.eaa.org/eaa/person/keith-phillips?id=22A0AA49B41E417180F1AFFB2D5676C6" target="_blank">Keith Phillips'</a> hangar/bar for Darts Night, and had a great time visiting with Keith and other EAAers we know from the race and Oshkosh. I can't say I'd ever choose to move to Florida - but if I ever do, Spruce Creek would be at the top of my list.<br />
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The next morning we got a bit of a late start due to fog and a slow breakfast at the Downwind (they lost our order, oops); once airborne, I was dismayed to see that the southeasterly flow was as strong as ever, promising a slow ride southbound. We stopped fairly early to refuel at the Pacer's old haunt of <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/X26" target="_blank">Sebastian</a>, which is where we began and ended the <a href="http://www.flyingmag.com/pilots-in-paradise-flying-bahamas-out-islands" target="_blank">Bahamas trip</a>. From there we followed the beaches southward; at Stuart I started talking to ATC, and they had me stay below 1000 feet in the West Palm Beach Class C and below 500 (!) passing Fort Lauderdale. It was interesting mixing it up with all the helicopters and banner towers as we flew at eye level with a nearly uninterrupted string of beachfront high-rises for nearly a hundred miles. South Florida is such a zoo.<br />
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Civilization abruptly and mercifully ceased at Biscayne Cay, where we left all traffic behind and began a delightful hour-long jaunt down the Keys. I had originally planned to refuel at Pompano Beach, but once there our groundspeed was sufficient to make Marathon Key with an hour reserve. Now, as the Keys turned westward, our groundspeed kept increasing until we were able to make it nonstop to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/keyw" target="_blank">Key West</a>. We landed at 2:30pm on December 30th and found the FBO unsurprisingly chock-a-block. We stayed at the new 24 North Hotel, and while I'm not sure I've ever paid $260 for a hotel room, it was a comparative bargain & we would have paid $450+ had we stayed New Years Eve. Key West has become insanely expensive, at least during peak periods - but hey, we had the good sense to come here, why wouldn't everyone else? Duval Street was busy but not horribly crowded that night; we hung out at Sloppy Joes for a couple hours, but didn't stay out too late.<br />
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We headed back up the Keys late the next morning. Dawn flew most of the way, as she had on several previous legs. The wind had shifted to the southwest, and we enjoyed a rare tailwind as we cut across from Islamorada to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/x51" target="_blank">Homestead GA Airport</a> on the mainland. There we tied the plane down and put on its cover, ending the first leg of our ambitious trip. We rented a car and backtracked to Key Largo where we spent New Years Eve with my cousins Nate and Billie, and nonrevved from Miami to Minneapolis the next day. Over the seven days from December 25-31, we covered 2333nm in 25.2 hours, making 17 landings. The Pacer flew flawlessly but was just about due for some maintenance, for which it didn't have to wait very long at all.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-64871738550469159762016-01-11T09:21:00.001-06:002016-01-11T09:29:00.282-06:00ADS-B For Cheapskates<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Never say I never give you anything, dear readers. I'm about to show you how to make a homebuilt 978MHz ADS-B receiver in 30 minutes and for under $100. I built this a month and a half ago in preparation for a major trip with the Pacer that I'll be writing about shortly, and it has worked flawlessly and been an invaluable addition to the flight bag. I used it with an iPad 2 running WingX Pro7, but it purportedly works just as well with ForeFlight and various other EFB apps on a wide variety of platforms. The commercial versions of this box (Stratus, Garmin GDL39, etc) retail for $500-800. The original parts list, assembly instructions, and code were put together by a pilot whiz named Christopher Young, who<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/3fscia/the_11390_adsb_receiver_for_foreflight_or_pretty/" target="_blank"> posted it to Reddit</a>. I've just expanded, simplified and illustrated his instructions using my own recent stratux build.<br />
<br />
Stratux is based on the Raspberry Pi, an ultra-cheap miniturized Linux computer designed for student experimentation. Don't let that scare you; you won't be dealing with the Linux OS at all. A number of Raspberry Pi kits are now offered online, such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MV6TAJI/ref=cm_sw_su_dp" target="_blank">this $70 one from Amazon</a>; it comes with everything needed for the stratux build <i>except</i> for a DC power source (AC power cord is included). We'll cover that at the end. The other piece of the puzzle is a USB Software Defined Radio (SDR) dongle with antenna; stratux uses the $22<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P2UOU72/ref=cm_sw_su_dp" target="_blank"> NooElec NESDR Mini2</a>. Here's everything as it came from Amazon:<br />
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Here's everything unwrapped. You can set aside the HDMI cord and the SDR remote control, you won't be using them. <br />
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Making sure you've grounded yourself first, remove the motherboard and the two small metal heat sinks from their packages. Remove the adhesive backing from the heat sinks and apply them to the appropriate chips on the motherboard (see below). Separate the two halves of the clear plastic case, insert the motherboard, and mate the case halves again until you hear a definite click.<br />
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Take the tiny Edimax wifi dongle out of its package and plug it into one of the four USB ports. Plug the NooElec SDR dongle into another USB port, and connect the antenna. The assembled computer should look like this:<br />
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Next, take the microSD card, use the full-size SD adapter if necessary, and put it into a computer with a SD card reader (if you don't have one, USB readers <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-SuperSpeed-Windows-Certain-Android/dp/B00OJ5WBUE/ref=sr_1_5?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1452522964&sr=1-5&keywords=SD+card+reader" target="_blank">can be had for $6</a>). Next, <a href="https://github.com/cyoung/stratux/releases" target="_blank">download the most recent release of the stratux software from this page</a> (I used v0.4r4) and decompress the ZIP file. The resultant image file includes both the Raspbian (neé Linux) operating system as well as the stratux code. You'll need a way to flash the IMG onto the SD card, such as <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/windows.md" target="_blank">Win32DiskImager</a> for Windows or <a href="http://ivanx.com/raspberrypi/" target="_blank">PiFiller</a> for Mac. Once complete, eject the microSD card and insert it into the microSD slot on the Raspberry Pi.<br />
<br />
That's it. Plug the Raspberry Pi in using the wall adapter and fire up the tablet computer that houses our EFB app. Go to Wifi settings and select the Wifi network "stratux," which will appear as soon as the Pi has finished its short bootup sequence. From here the procedure will vary by EFB app; WingX automatically connects and you'll see "stratux" in a green field on the lower right of the screen when in Moving Map mode. Note that you won't actually be receiving ADS-B data unless you live right next to one of the FAA's transmitters.<br />
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Time to go flying. Here's where you have to figure out a 12V power source. If your plane has a cigarette lighter and you don't mind a little power cord spaghetti, use a 12V USB adapter and a 5v/1.2A USB-to-microUSB cord like the one that comes with practically every non-Apple phone these days. If you don't have a cigarette lighter or want a cleaner out-of-the-way setup, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JM59JPG/ref=cm_sw_su_dp" target="_blank">a lithium ion battery pack like this one</a> is a cheap option. I normally use the cigarette lighter and keep two battery packs handy as backups (for both the iPad and stratux). You can experiment with mounting options using velcro or zipties; so far I've just left mine sitting on the glareshield (on the right side, below pic was while testing). <br />
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So far I've found that the antenna works best in its retracted position; orientation doesn't seem to make a difference. I start receiving ADS-B data somewhere between 500 and 3000 feet depending on how close I am to a transmitter. The text weather is very quick; it only takes a second or two to update every airport within a 250 mile radius of the transmitter. The radar takes a little longer, sometimes doesn't load at all if ADS-B signal strength is weak, and of course there are the well-known latency issues, but its still a valuable resource for making strategic decisions.<br />
<br />
I expected to mostly use the stratux for weather updates but I've found the traffic feature unexpectedly useful. True, it doesn't show all targets and sometimes it doesn't work at all (since I don't have ADS-B Out, another airplane that does has to be within 25nm of me) but is nevertheless a welcome aid to the Mark I eyeball. Several times already I've been alerted to potential threats before ATC called them out, and on one occasion I declined an erroneous instruction by an overwhelmed tower controller based on traffic I didn't see but ADS-B showed was there. I'm still a bit miffed at the way the FAA is handling the ADS-B Out mandate, but I can certainly see the practical upside to the system once everyone is participating. I just wish there was a VFR ADS-B Out solution as cheap and elegant as the stratux. </div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-5052582675812688862015-12-14T02:27:00.002-06:002015-12-14T02:28:39.437-06:00The Last Tour<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was originally <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2015/04/dear-maddog.html" target="_blank">awarded the 757/767 </a>back in February, but this came on a fairly open-ended bid that allowed the company to converted awarded pilots more or less when they pleased (though always in seniority order). At the time the thinking was that they needed us on the line yesterday, and I assumed I'd be trained and on the line by July. As it turned out, I was dead wrong and got to enjoy <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2015/06/hot-dog.html" target="_blank">another sweaty summer</a> on the Mad Dog. I then would have been placed in training in October, except that was when I had two weeks of vacation, and in the bid preferences I had asked for the vacation to be honored. After all, that was when I was heading down to the BVI for my fourth year of <a href="http://fl250.blogspot.com/2012/11/have-wings-will-sail.html" target="_blank">sailing in the Interline Regatta</a>. Because of the vacation, PBS only assigned me six days of flying in October, a four-day trip before the regatta and a two-day to end the month. I was subsequently assigned a 6 Nov class date, and despite my best efforts to get 1-5Nov off, PBS assigned a two-day trip on the 1st and 2nd.<br />
<br />
I caught a lucky break and had my early October trip pulled for newhire OE, since I was paired up with a line check airman. This left me with only four days of flying to finish up my stint on the Mad Dog, 30Oct-2Nov. Coming back to any airplane after a full month off is a little uncomfortable, but once you've been on it a while it only takes a leg or two to get back into the swing of things. Of course I'd already been hard at work studying for my new airplane for a few weeks, and I had a couple minor screwups due to the negative transfer (on one takeoff roll I accidentally called "80 knots, throttle hold, thrust normal" instead of "Clamp, 80 knots, thrust normal" - which the captain thought was hilarious). Overall, though, I didn't make too many "short-timer's" mistakes.<br />
<br />
Lord knows there was plenty of opportunity to screw the pooch. The first three days were a hilariously bad compendium of the assorted and well-known ravages of Mad Dog flying that keep senior FOs on widebody fleets long after they can hold MD captain. The weather was dogshit all up and down the east coast - low ceilings, wind, and rain - with the attendant flow programs and major delays going in and out of hub airports. We seemed to have maintenance issues on nearly every leg: a bunch of MELs, or unusual ones that required extra study, or open writeups from prior crew, breakages during preflight, and glitches enroute. We had the exact same malfunction <a href="http://www.flyingmag.com/technique/proficiency/taking-wing-experience-matters" target="_blank">I wrote about in my column</a> earlier this year: the FMS spontaneously dumped all route and performance data, apparently due to a momentary power interruption. This time it happened while descending at night on a complex RNAV arrival (and getting the snot kicked out of us in heavy rain); I saw the problem right away and immediately reverted to lower automation levels while the captain coaxed a simpler clearance out of the clearly-displeased controller. That was on leg three of a long four-leg day - with two plane swaps - in and out of our largest hub. The next leg (different airplane) saw me hand-flying a no-kidding ILS approach into mountainous Asheville, NC, after the autopilot did a decidedly unsatisfactory job of tracking the localizer. We broke out about a hundred feet above minimums. Despite our late-night arrival and the driving rain, the captain accompanied me to one of my favorite Asheville watering holes for a nightcap. The brew went down easy on my last Mad Dog layover.<br />
<br />
The last day started the same as the first three, with rain and low ceilings prompting flow delays into "Mecca." Our last leg to Minneapolis, thankfully, was blissfully smooth once we got past Nashville. The weather was decent in Minnesota, we broke out of the high overcast to see the lights of the Twin Cities stretched before us, and ATC cleared us for the visual approach quite early. I clicked off the autopilot and autothrottles at 8000 feet and enjoyed my last time handflying the old gal around the pattern to Runway 12R. My last landing wasn't perfect, but it wasn't horrible either; I'll take it. It was a little surreal to think I may have landed that plane for the last time, though I rather suspect I'll have another crack at Mad Dog wrangling at some point in my career. In the meantime, I've been advised that any misplaced nostalgia for the Mad Dog will likely disappear right about when I land the Boeing 757 for the first time!<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-53422490510459079882015-12-02T10:56:00.001-06:002015-12-02T10:58:16.749-06:00Ode to Mad Dog<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Long before I was assigned the Mad Dog, I knew I was destined
to fly her. My company assigns seniority within new-hire classes according to
the last four digits of your social security number, and with a sub-0300 SSN I
was guaranteed to be one of the most junior in my class and assigned by default
to the most junior seat at the airline: New York Mad Dog FO. I was at peace
with that, and after six plus years of the stultifyingly automated JungleBus I
was honestly ready for a challenge and a change of pace. The Mad Dog’s rugged
design and old-school cockpit held a certain attraction for me, and my only
real regret was that I never got a chance to fly the DC-9 before it was
retired.
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That said, I wasn’t quite prepared for just how busy the Mad
Dog is, particularly in the right seat during ground operations. The preflight,
pushback, after engine start, taxi, before takeoff, after takeoff, descent,
approach, before landing, after landing, and shutdown flow patterns and
checklists are all considerably longer than on the JungleBus (a couple of those nearly three times as long). Engine starts just about require three hands. Quite
a few switches on the right side of the cockpit belong to the FO even while
Pilot Flying with the autopilot off. The airplane has VNAV and autothrottles,
but both are glitchy enough to require close attention and frequent
intervention to smooth out their operation and ensure compliance with
restrictions. The relatively small wing means that very careful attention must
be paid to speed and maneuvering margins both after takeoff and at cruise
altitude, which seldom exceeds FL330. The brakes are by turns pitifully weak
and unpredictably grabby, and it’s nigh impossible to symmetrically deploy and
spool up the thrust reversers. This is an airplane with a fairly steep learning
curve; I did well in training only by studying my ass off (it also helped to
have a sharp training partner with experience on the airplane). </div>
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Coming to the line as a brand new FO was an eye-opening
workout. Many of the captains I initially flew with on reserve had been on the
airplane for years and were used to an experienced FO’s pace of operations. I
sometimes had to remind them that I was new and needed a little more time.
Every trip I made mistakes, found more gotchas, learned new tips and tricks,
and saw more unfamiliar glitches and failure modes. There’s a lot of tribal
knowledge among Mad Dog drivers, much of it not written down anywhere. And
then, after a couple months, I was able to hold a junior line and often flew
with captains who were themselves brand new to both the airplane and the left
seat. With only a couple hundred hours in the airplane, I was occasionally the
“experienced guy” passing on my scant slice of the tribal knowledge. </div>
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I passed the magic 400-hour mark, releasing me from
probation, after only five months of line flying. Remarkably, I found myself
getting comfortable with the airplane. Actually, that’s not exactly the right
way to put it, because I continued watching the Mad Dog as closely as ever, if
not more so. Perhaps it is better to say that I got comfortable with being
uncomfortable. Relaxed preflights, clean uncluttered cockpits, flawlessly smooth
autopilots and autothrottles, and trying to stay awake as we blithely cruised
across the country at FL370 all faded from memory until they seemed like
distant, fanciful dreams. I came to simply accept the Mad Dog’s flaws and
quirks as just the way life is. I didn’t pine for a more relaxed, more
sophisticated airplane. The hardest part of coming to the Mad Dog is coming to
the Mad Dog, and that was already done. </div>
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And in fact, once I accepted the plane’s busyness and
quirkiness, I actually found quite a few things about it that I really liked.
For starters, it’s built like a brick shithouse. The systems are simple and
robust, and while there’s not a great deal of redundancy the plane doesn’t
really need it as it’s not horribly dependent on hydraulics, electric, etc. The
primary flight controls are all manual, with control cables driving servo tabs.
It hand flies pretty well for being a notorious truck; though control forces
are fairly high, it’s easy to put the plane right where you want it and keep it
there. Near-centerline thrust makes single-engine work a cakewalk. The
extension speeds on the very draggy flaps are ridiculously high (starting at
280 kts) so it’s easy to get down when you find yourself high. The pilots are so
far forward of the engines that even on the JT8D model it’s really quiet, and
though the cockpit looks like the bridge of a Russian submarine, it's actually
laid out pretty logically. The Flight Mode Annunciator may look like a 1980s
football scoreboard but it’s large and visible in any lighting conditions. And
once you figure out the myriad controls for the cockpit lighting, it’s almost
infinitely customizable which makes for a very comfortable nighttime
environment. </div>
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I found myself growing downright fond of the airplane. More
than one friend suggested that my newfound appreciation for the Mad Dog was
nothing more than Stockholm Syndrome. Perhaps. The reality is that, much like
taildraggers, a certain amount of the Mad Dog’s cachet comes not despite its
flaws but because of them. It’s frequently stated to be a “real man’s airplane”
(though I hasten to add that several female friends have flown it for years and
claim to love it). Airbus pilots, like Cherokee drivers, are considered perhaps
a little suspect for no other reason than that their airplanes can camouflage
weak flying skills, while Mad Dog wranglers, like tailwheel pilots, get a (sometimes
undeserved!) presumption of competence. In 757/767 training, each instructor
has asked what fleet I’m coming from and, informed of my Mad Dog status, to a
man they’ve given a relieved little wave and assured me I’d do great on the
Boeing. </div>
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Given all this, I wasn’t planning on leaving the Mad Dog
anytime soon. I enjoyed the fruits of its juniority, spending a mere six weeks
on reserve in New York, soon thereafter holding weekends-off regular lines, and
then getting back to Minneapolis after eight months of commuting. Of the other
aircraft in my base, the Airbus has remained improbably senior (nobody wants to
leave it!) and the 757/767 category was slowly shrinking. But then pending
aircraft retirements were cancelled, the category got additional flying, there
was movement from senior FOs upgrading to captain, and suddenly there was a bid
out for fifty (!) MSP 757/767 FOs. I ran the numbers and concluded I’d have about
the same seniority in either airplane. The Boeing paid more and had better
trips, though I might not be able to hold international flying. I was still
undecided when I had lunch with (now-former) Flying editor Robert Goyer on an
Austin layover. I mentioned the possibility of bidding the Boeing but noted I’d
have to spend a month at training. “Don’t you like training for new airplanes?”
prodded Goyer. He had a point, I actually do, and I've wanted to fly the 757 since I was ten years old. That decided it; I put the bid in
that night. </div>
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I was awarded the Boeing in February and didn’t start
training until November 5<sup>th</sup>, so I had plenty of extra time to
appreciate the Mad Dog. The last four days on the plane were so hilariously
Maddogish that they merit their own separate post. Meanwhile I wrap up training
on the Boeing in a couple days and will be enjoying some paid time off over the
holidays while I wait to be assigned OE/TOE. </div>
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-42579208024966705622015-11-28T16:40:00.000-06:002015-11-28T16:41:04.108-06:00Across the Sea<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(Originally written back in August) </i></span><br />
<br />
"So, you're an airline pilot, huh? Do you fly the big planes?"<br />
<br />
"Eh, more medium-ish. 149 to 160 passengers."<br />
<br />
"I see. What's your route?"<br />
<br />
"It changes from week to week. I go all over the U.S., but probably 75% East Coast."<br />
<br />
"Oh. Any overseas routes?" <br />
<br />
"No, the plane I fly is pretty range limited. I do a little close-in international."<br />
<br />
"Like South America?"<br />
<br />
"No. Like Nassau."<br />
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Such is cocktail party conversation as a Mad Dog pilot. My 757/767 friends talk of Paris and Palau and Rio, and such exotic ports of call may well beckon in my near future, but for now I mostly ply my trade to places like Huntsville, Buffalo, and Columbus. I have not yet landed in the Great White North with my new company. I have flown turns to Nassau several times, but was rerouted out of my one overnight there. I've laid over in Kingston, Jamaica; a tropical paradise it is not. Atlanta-based Mad Dog driver friends report dreamy wanderings to Providenciales (Turks and Caicos), Montego Bay, and Grand Cayman, but I do not believe any MSP Mad Dog wrangler has ever laid eyes on those bejeweled realms. We do, however, fly to Cancun, Mexico, and in fact I have gone there twice, most recently this past week.<br />
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Cancun is actually about as International as our humble fleet gets, for it involves legitimate "offshore" flying. Our other Caribbean destinations involve going "feet wet" (our New York-Florida routes also go offshore more often than not), but always within 162nm of land. This is as far as we can go without life rafts, with which only a handful of the Mad Dogs are equipped. The Cancun route nearly always goes further out and thus requires the raft-equipped aircraft. I'm not sure how 162nm came to be the magic number, as it seems somewhat arbitrary, but I surmise it must somehow relate to the offshore capability of rescue helicopters. I'm not certain that I would want to be <i>161nm</i> from land with nothing but a life vest keeping me afloat and marginally visible to would-be rescuers, but don't ever plan on testing this scenario in depth.<br />
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Our jaunt across the Gulf of Mexico also exposes us to the world of Class II navigation, meaning outside of the reception area of most VORs. Not to worry, the Mad Dog's modern navigation equipment frees it from dependence on obsolescent land-based navaids. No, not GPS, silly! A $50 burner flip phone may have GPS accurate to within a couple feet, but not the Mad Dog! We use Inertial Navigation System, or INS, for long-range navigation. We have to do a full realignment before such a long flight, and then check it against a trusty ground-based NavAid before launching out into the trackless ether.<br />
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We also fly outside of the reach of radar for a short stretch, right around the changeover from Houston Center to Merida Center. Thus, we get a little practice in making position reports, usually on first contract with Merida southbound or Houston northbound. This still takes place within voice VHF communications range - we don't have HF radios installed, much less the CPDLC datalink systems now commonly used for trans-oceanic communications. The only communications challenges on Mad Dog international flights are of the linguistic variety: Mexican and Cuban controllers converse with local pilots in Spanish, making it a bit harder to keep track of who's doing what (my high-school/traveler smattering of Spanglish helps); their accents when speaking English also vary considerably, from slight to barely comprehensible. You just have to listen carefully and make inquiries if anything isn't perfectly clear. Recording the ATIS usually takes a few loops, and you definitely want the captain listening in before attempting to transcribe your clearance.<br />
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On my next fleet, of course, there will be far more opportunities to do overwater flying. This is an airplane that we operate to five continents, and I see all five represented in the MSP bid packet. Of course I'll be fairly junior so it's likely the majority of my flying will be domestic, but I think I'll be able to occasionally sample trips that take me further afield. The variety of flying was one of the reasons I bid the new category. Dawn and I have traveled to many of the places that the Boeing flies, so it's not necessarily the attraction of visiting new places, but moreso the appeal of doing something completely different than I've been doing for the last twelve years. I'm both a night-owl and able to sleep almost on command, so I think I'll be able to adjust well to the schedules (fingers crossed). And, of course, far-flung flying adventures always make good fodder for blogging!</div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-12336500699982080462015-11-16T12:00:00.000-06:002015-11-16T12:05:06.797-06:00Not Quite Dead<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Well, uh, sorry bout that folks - I went NORDO for a couple months, which had readers wondering and querying whether the blog was dead. Nope, it's not dead - it's just restin'! But I think its rest is just about over.<br />
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Here's the long and short of it. You may have heard that my airline had a minor labor kurkuffle this summer when our pilots - for the first time ever - turned down a tentative agreement (65%-35%) and subsequently pretty much overturned the apple cart at our chapter of ALPA. I took an active and somewhat visible role in the fight against the TA, heard through the grapevine that my name had come up in high places, and decided I'd better lower my profile for a little while. I wasn't about to stop writing for Flying, but figured I could take a little break from blogging until things settled down. Well, now that the dust has cleared, we have a new MEC Chairman, a new Negotiating Committee, and a lot of new reps - all this a full month before our current contract becomes amendable. I suspect the more traditional contract negotiation process we're about to enter will drag on for several years, as it has at other companies. I'm not going to refrain from blogging that long. Writing has a certain intertia to it. Start writing, and you'll tend to keep going. Stop writing, and you tend to stay inert. In reality I probably could have resumed blogging a month or two ago.<br />
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The good news is that I have a bit of a backlog of things to write about. I actually have a few already-written posts that I'll release over the next couple days, and then I'll reflect on my last days on the Mad Dog and the preparation for and first several weeks of 757/767 training (I'm about halfway through right now). In the meantime, you should definitely check out Flying's December issue. Besides my usual column, I have a six-page feature about the flying/sailing trip to the Bahamas that I think turned out really well. Enjoy!<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-1539118982599780392015-07-27T09:20:00.001-05:002015-12-14T02:29:18.301-06:00If Every Day Were Like Oshkosh...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You'd awake every morning at 6:30am to the beautiful music of Merlin V12s at full power as half a dozen P-51s roar overhead to embark on the dawn patrol....<br />
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You'd cheerfully chat with perfect strangers while standing in line for a lukewarm shower in a portable shower block....<br />
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You'd plan every day over eggs & pancakes at Tall Pines Cafe, deciding who you want to hear speak more that afternoon: Burt Rutan or Bob Hoover....<br />
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You'd forget that air conditioning exists, spend every day gloriously bathed in sweat, thank heaven for every little wisp of wind, and find yourself pausing in the shadows of DC-3s, B-17s, and A350s....<br />
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You'd come to find farmer's tans incredibly sexy...and your standards for attractiveness in the opposite sex would ease considerably....<br />
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Instead of traveling overseas, you'd take a 10-minute bus ride to the Seaplane Base and marvel at how quaint and beautiful and relaxed it is....<br />
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You'd almost never see litter on the street. On the rare occasions you did, someone would usually swoop in to pick it up before you could get to it....<br />
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You'd live off of burgers and cheese curds, and you'd still stay skinny from walking twenty miles a day....<br />
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You'd never actually talk to Air Traffic Control, only rocking your wings in reply. All air traffic controllers would be extremely proficient, calm under fire, and unfailingly friendly....<br />
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You'd think IFR stands for "I Follow Railroads...." <br />
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You'd be an ace at last-minute runway changes, short approaches, and spot landings.... <br />
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You'd check your Facebook feed, see that a good friend just landed, and arrange to meet under the Brown Arch in an hour. Really good friends would insist on trekking two miles to admire your airplane parked in the South 40....<br />
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Your musical tastes would narrow to 70s rock, modern country, and Jerry's One Man Band....<br />
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You'd swear off airshows forever, declaring you've seen Sean Tucker doing enough impossibly violent things to airplanes to last a lifetime, only to spy a new act featuring something improbable, graceful, and arresting, and you'd end up right back on the flight line with every other slack-jawed, sky-gazing rube....<br />
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You'd go to an off-airport party, run into random friends and former coworkers and aviation journalists and airshow performers and aviation legends, and the most remarkable coincidence of the night would be meeting a guy whose hangar is right next to yours back home....<br />
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You'd find sitting in the bleachers of the ultralight grass strip at dusk, watching powered parachutes making endless circuits and passes just for the sheer joy of flight, a perfectly acceptable form of evening entertainment.... <br />
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You'd drift off to sleep every night under the wing of your own airplane, bedded on soft grass, knowing you'll wake up to the roar of Merlin V12s and the promise of another full day in Airplane Heaven....<br />
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Alas, Oshkosh comes but once a year. Only 51 more weeks to go!<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-11409335659818664252015-06-18T14:33:00.003-05:002015-06-18T14:59:06.399-05:00Hot Dog!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As mentioned a while ago, I've been awarded a slot on the 757/767, but training isn't until late October and that means I get another four months on the Mad Dog. I just had lunch with a couple of guys down in Atlanta yesterday, and though they now all fly the 757/767 one noted that he had spent "five summers on the Mad Dog...because you always measure time on that airplane in summers!" I suggested that if he's ever really bored in cruise, he should attempt to calculate how many gallons of sweat he shed over those five summers. Or not - I guess that's kinda gross.<br />
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The basic problem is that as the Mad Dog was stretched from earlier airplanes, the Auxiliary Power Unit and Air Cycle Machines ("packs") were not also upgraded to accommodate the increased cabin volume. In moderate temperatures or with both engines running at high power to put out a lot of bleed air, it's not really a problem. On the ground with a high OAT, though, both the amount of airflow and output temperature are wholly inadequate. The cockpit is a bit worse than the cabin, because you have a lot of windows, the old CRTs, electronics, and incandescent lighting put out a lot of heat, and you're sitting 120 feet forward of the packs with resulting efficiency losses through the ductwork. At times it can get miserably hot in the cockpit, especially when you're busy just before pushback. In the summer you just about have to pack a new uniform shirt & undershirt for every day of the trip. <br />
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Out of my duties as a Mad Dog FO is running the AC, largely because most of the controls are on the right side of the overhead panel. There are some tips and tricks to getting the most out of the system, and most FOs get pretty good at it. The primary controls are the packs supply switches with OFF, AUTO, and HP BLEED OFF positions, and two selector knobs, one for CKPT TEMP and one for CABIN TEMP. The indicators are L and R valve position gauges and flow gauges, as well as a larger temperature gauge that indicates either cabin temp or cabin supply duct temperature, depending on the position of a TEMP SEL knob. Most of the time this is left in the CABIN SPLY position, which along with the valve indicators is a good measure of what the system is doing at any given moment; every couple of minutes I'll flip the TEMP SEL knob over to Cabin to see how we're doing overall.<br />
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We nearly always leave the Supply switches in the AUTO position except when parked at the gate with APU off and the conditioned air hose attached to the aircraft, at which point we turn them OFF. The HP BLD OFF ("High Pressure Bleed Off") position is rarely used, though there are circumstances when it can slightly increase airflow. The temp selector switches can also usually be left in the AUTO range, which commands the system to try to attain and maintain a specific cockpit and cabin temperature. The problem is that the exact temperature you're commanding is not labeled, and every airplane is different! Most airplanes have little ink marks that previous FOs have added to show a position that works, and this makes a good starting point, but there are often multiple marks as the system changes over time with wear, maintenance and repairs. Sometimes it seems to change over the course of a single flight!<br />
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On the ground with OATs warmer than about 60º F, we leave both selector knobs pointing at about the 9 o'clock position, which commands both valves full cold and gives you about as cold of air as you can expect (sometimes adjusting them slightly higher can increase airflow, however). After takeoff, we turn the cockpit selector knob to around the 10:30 position and the cabin selector knob to slightly below whichever ink mark we've decided to use as a reference. The idea is to get the cockpit valve slightly above full cold, and the cabin valve right around the first index mark (as shown in the picture above). You want the cabin supply temperature to come off the bottom peg (lest you freeze the passengers out before decreasing the overall cabin temp to comfortable levels); I've found an initial supply temp of 50-60ºF works well. As the cabin temp comes down to the desired level (I shoot for 68° or so), I adjust the temp knob slightly higher into auto range - usually right around the reference mark - where ideally the system will modulate the supply valve to maintain a comfortable temp on its own (80-90° supply temp works well). Any further adjustments to the temperature knob are best made slowly and in small increments, lest you drive the valve full hot or cold. I've found that in about 75% of the fleet, you'll end up turning the cabin temp selector slightly lower over the course of the flight, and the cockpit temp selector slightly higher.<br />
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Sometimes AUTO mode just isn't working no matter what you do, and then we turn the affected temp selector knob to the six-o'clock position, which puts the respective pack in manual mode. At this point you are directly driving the supply valve with momentary selections hotter or colder; however, output temperature can still vary depending on engine power / bleed output, and more than one pilot has left a pack in MANUAL mode, didn't pay attention when the throttles came back on descent, and was surprised to find that the output temperature was driven so high that it tripped the pack offline altogether. The preferred technique if MANUAL mode is needed is to get the supply valve where you want it, let output temp stabilize for a minute or two, and then switch back to AUTO mode and see if it does a better job of maintaining supply valve position. <br />
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On descent, depending on destination OAT, you'll typically once again turn both knobs to the 9 o'clock position in an attempt to cold-soak the cabin before arrival - as temps are nearly guaranteed to rise on taxi-in. If it's very warm at all, I start the APU immediately after landing and open the crossbleed valves so it can assist with airflow. We normally shut down the #2 engine three minutes after landing for fuel savings, but with OAT over 85ºF we occasionally keep both engines running to the gate (especially in an airplane that has trouble keeping up on a single idling engine + APU). Once both engines are shut down at the gate, the cabin temperature is almost guaranteed to climb on APU alone; it's basically a question of how quickly you can get the warm bodies to exit the airplane! Nearly all of our gates have large and capable air conditioning machines with supply hoses, and the better rampers get these hooked up and running very quickly. In warm weather they almost always do. The problem is that in 60º-70º weather they often don't realize that this conditioned air is still very necessary on the Mad Dog. The proactive pilot will go outside and make sure they still hook up the air. Once this is complete, you can save fuel by shutting down the APU in all but the hottest temperatures.<br />
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This all applies to the normal Mad Dog. On the Big Dog, which makes up about 30% of our fleet, the controls are the same but the actual system components are different and require a different technique. The good news is that the APU is bigger and has more bleed output, and is often able to maintain a comfortable cabin temperature on the ground all on its own or with a single engine running. The bad news is that the system is far more aggressive and volatile in AUTO mode. It will run the supply valves from full cold to full hot with a tiny movement of the temperature selector knob, or sometimes all on its own. The initial after takoff setting of the knobs requires particularly close attention for the first several minutes, meaning that at a fairly busy time I'm looking up at the overhead panel every 30 seconds or so. It's far more common to have to run for a while in manual mode on the Big Dog.<br />
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This all sounds fairly labor intensive, and it is when you're new to the system, but once you're acquainted with its quirks it becomes second nature, much like the rest of the Mad Dog. I have a feeling that once I go to the 757/767 I'm going to initially be a little restless, feeling like I ought to be doing far more than I am. I'm sure I'll get used to the reduced workload, though - not to mention skating through summer as cool as a cucumber!</div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-31410620003740978252015-05-18T23:41:00.000-05:002015-05-18T23:42:19.495-05:00In Search of Sunshine Part IV: Cruising the Abacos<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
After departing Staniel Cay on the morning of March 31st, the six of us in my Piper Pacer and our rented Piper Warrior headed northeast to the island of Eleuthera, site of the Bahamas' oldest settlement (in 1646, by Pilgrims expelled from Bermuda). Ours was a short visit: we flew low up the island's rocky eastern coast, checked out the impressive reef just offshore, buzzed the quaint colonial houses of Harbour Island, and landed at the nearby North Eleuthera Airport for a closer look. I'll confess that I found Harbour Island's pink sand beach a bit overhyped: it's essentially just a really nice white sand beach with a slight pinkish hue. But we enjoyed lounging on it for a bit, and I liked the island's 18th-century architecture bedecked in bright Bahamian pastels.<br />
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After lunch, we hightailed it out to the airport and took off for our destination for the afternoon, and the next four days: Abaco. It was another quick bluewater crossing in loose formation at 3500 feet, then we dropped low and tightened up as we approached Little Harbour, an eastern promontory of Great Abaco Island. From there we flew up the chain of cays on the eastern side of the Sea of Abaco; the beautiful, shallow waters and myriad islets made an excellent photographic background that kept Steve busily snapping away from his temporary perch in the Warrior (Jacquie rode in the Pacer for this leg).<br />
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After landing in Marsh Harbour and tying down the planes securely, we took a taxi into town to the Conch Inn & Marina, which doubles as the base for The Moorings boat charter company. We checked in and got a thorough cruising area & chart briefing, then boarded our home for the next few days. <i>Tack-A-Cardia</i> is a Moorings 4600 (Leopard 46) sailing catamaran with four double cabins and two singles, plus a large saloon & galley and generous communal areas abovedecks. We'd need all that space, for we were joined by five new friends for this portion of the adventure. Andy and Ivy are fellow airline pilots and dear friends of mine who've been on several Interline Regattas and other sailing trips with me. Jeff, Sarah, and Hailey were Steve's Californian friends who I'd never met before. The first night we stayed on the dock unpacking and provisioning, enjoying a delicious dinner of jerk chicken grilled on the stern barbeque, and talking and laughing around the deck table late into the night.<br />
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The next morning we got underway at a reasonable hour, and were rewarded with a nice shore breeze as soon as we left Marsh Harbor despite a forecast of calm winds for the next several days. It built steadily as we tacked northward until we were close-reaching at an impressive eight knots. It only took a bit over two hours to reach Treasure Cay, where we winded our way through the narrow, shallow harbor entrance. The reward, after we anchored and ate lunch, was a visit to the most incredibly beautiful beach I've ever seen, a shock to the senses with the purest white sand and electric blue water straight out of a Bombay Sapphire bottle. We lingered long enough that we ended up skipping the reef we were planning to snorkel at and proceeded straight to our anchorage for the night, Fischer's Bay on Great Guana Island. We swam a bit after anchoring, piled into the dinghy (no small feat with 11 people!) to watch the sunset among cruisers at Grabbers Bar, then walked across the island for dinner at the famous/infamous Nipper's Bar. </div>
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Thursday morning, the forecast for calm winds proved woefully correct, and we motored out from Fischer's Bay and several miles southward to Fowl Cay Marine Park. This took us slightly outside the Sea of Abaco, between Fowl Cay and a very large barrier reef. We anchored in sand and took the dinghy to a mooring ball closer to the reef, and spent several hours snorkeling. That afternoon, as we steamed further south to Elbow Cay, we were transiting an area about a half-mile east of a cut to the open ocean when I noticed that the water ahead looked shallow. Mind you, it's shallow everywhere in the Sea of Abaco, it's something you just get used to. Anyways, the chartplotter as well as my newly-published cruising guide showed 7-9 feet of depth in the surrounding area. Should have listened to my gut - we plowed into a 3' sandbar doing six knots under power. Apparently, a storm had recently shifted the sand inland from the cut. It wasn't a big deal - we had everyone jump into the waist-high water and I was able to back the boat off the sandbar with no damage to the keels. Had I been only 100 feet west, the water was much deeper. <br />
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We spent the afternoon and night at Tahiti Beach on the south end of Elbow Cay. A few of us took the dinghy to explore the nearby Tilloo Cut and adjacent shallow waters, and others in our group went hiking on Elbow Cay. They unknowingly wandered onto private property, but the owner was nice about it and invited us all to a party that night at the marina she and her husband own. It was a long dinghy ride there at sunset - and even longer returning in the dark!<br />
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On Friday we got underway shortly after 8am to transit the very shallow Lubbers Quarters Channel just before high tide, and the early start plus lovely 20-knot winds meant we were able to sail further south than originally planned, all the way down to Little Harbour. This rocky outpost on the Abaco mainland was originally settled by Canadian artist Randolph Johnson and his family, who initially lived in a cave; it grew into something of an artists' commune, and today the centerpiece of the little settlement is Pete's Pub, also a metalworks foundry and gallery owned by Randolph's son. Unfortunately a falling tide and a very shallow harbor entrance meant we couldn't stay for too long.</div>
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It was a long sail northward that afternoon, with an enroute stop at Sandy Cay, so it was after 5pm when we entered Hope Town Harbour. Hope Town is a beautiful, quaint colonial village founded by loyalists from the southern United States after the Revolutionary War. We climbed its iconic candy-striped lighthouse to watch the sunset, then dinghied across the harbour to explore the town and have dinner and drinks at the waterside Captain Jack's. </div>
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April 4th was our last day in the Bahamas. We woke early, made breakfast, and cleaned the boat while steaming back to Marsh Harbour. After returning the boat, we said goodbye to our old and new friends who were flying out via airlines the next day; the rest of us headed back to the airport's GA terminal. It took a while to file our flight plans, notify U.S. customs, clear Bahamian customs, and pay for our fuel and parking, but we were taxiing out by 11:15am. The Marsh Harbour airport was notably busy on this Saturday morning, but we were able to sneak out between arrivals and formed up for our flight up the Abaco chain all the way out to Walker Cay. Initially this took us over the northern Sea of Abaco where we'd sailed on Wednesday, including Treasure Cay; the beach didn't look quite as amazing from the air. The rest of the Abacos were quite nice, and I noticed a few airstrips on isolated cays. Over Walker Cay we called Miami Radio and got our transponder codes for transiting the ADIZ, and a bit later got VFR flight following with Miami Center. Two hours after takeoff we landed in Fort Pierce, cleared customs, returned our life rafts at the FBO, and hopped over to Sebastian to return the Warrior. Kevin and Jeannie were driving back to Atlanta from Sebastian, and they gave Jacquie and Dawn a ride to the Orlando airport. <br />
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Steve and I continued on with the Pacer, stopping in Sebring to visit an airline friend and then at Tampa for the night. On Sunday we flew to Clarksville TN, where we spent the night with my good friends Sylv & Hugh, and on Monday we landed at Flying Cloud Airport in the early afternoon. Incredibly, we had a tailwind the entire way home - it only took 10.3 hours from Tampa to Minneapolis. All told, I'd put 33 hours on the Pacer since leaving FCM the month prior, and she performed splendidly without missing a beat. It was a fantastic first adventure with my airplane, and all the better that I shared it with Dawn, Steve, and a literal boatload of friends. I'll be taking the plane to Oshkosh in July and Montana/Idaho in September; next spring break I'm thinking Baja, and then Alaska awaits! It's not exactly cheap owning an airplane - but it sure is fun!<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-41528090241608486402015-04-21T15:39:00.001-05:002015-04-21T16:04:23.088-05:00In Search of Sunshine, Part III: Flying the Bahamas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Never having flown a small plane to a foreign country or across a long stretch of open water, I expected the flying portion of our flying/sailing trip to be a challenge. I'm not sure what I expected - paperwork hassles, mostly, and ATC communications difficulties, maybe some substandard airports, perhaps even unscheduled maintenance in the middle of nowhere. In fact, the flying turned out to be a breeze. Bahamian officials were welcoming and helpful, flying procedures were easy, communication was straightforward once we left U.S. airspace (!), and the airports were all lovely, if a bit busy at times. My Pacer and our rented Piper Warrior didn't so much as hiccup for the nine hours. Everyone in our group - me, Dawn, my brother Steve, his friend Jacquie, my friend & erstwhile sim partner Kevin, and his wife Jeannie - really enjoyed our time flying through the islands.<br />
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In fact the hardest part turned out to be getting Dawn down to Florida in the first place. Kevin and Jeannie drove from Atlanta, Steve and Jacquie used buddy passes several days in advance, and I was able to jumpseat - but Dawn found herself trying to non-rev out of Minneapolis on the first day of spring break for many Minnesotan kids. We came within one seat of getting out several times on Friday, were left at the gate that night with 32 seats open to Grand Rapids due to a gate agent's incompetence, and the next day found ourselves far down several standby lists of over 100 nonrevs. I finally took the jumpseat through Atlanta, arriving in Melbourne in the early afternoon. Dawn went home and instead flew directly to Nassau the next day. Thus, she missed the first day of our adventure - but was rewarded with a fairly memorable arrival.<br />
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We took off from Sebastian only two hours after I landed at Melbourne; my non-rev hassles meant a fairly hasty departure, which added considerably to my stress level. I refiled my <a href="https://eapis.cbp.dhs.gov/" target="_blank">eAPIS manifest </a>with U.S. Customs & Border Patrol to reflect Dawn's absence from the Pacer, got a weather briefing from FSS, and filed international flight plans for both the Pacer and Warrior. There was a TFR out for President Obama's visit/golfing vacation to Fort Pierce; Sebastian was just outside the 30 mile ring, and by flying due east for 20 miles before turning towards Freeport we would remain clear. When ready to launch, I called FSS to open our flight plans, only to be told Sebastian was within the TFR boundaries (it actually wasn't active until the President's departure the next day; there was a steady stream of airplanes clearly not "squawking and talking") and put on an apparently indefinite hold for a squawk code. After 15 minutes I lost patience, decided we'd open in the air, and hung up. After takeoff, though, neither I in the Pacer nor Kevin in Warrior 27K could raise Miami Radio on any of the published frequencies! An active flight plan is an absolute must for crossing an active ADIZ, but because of the TFR, we couldn't turn south to delay crossing the ADIZ. I slowed down and called Miami Center, who said they couldn't open the flight plan but gave me an alternate frequency to contact Miami Radio. Thankfully this one worked, and just in time to enter the ADIZ. <br />
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By the time I had it all sorted out, we were nearly halfway to <a href="https://www.airnav.com/airport/MYGF" target="_blank">Freeport</a>, pushed along by a 25 knot tailwind on the tail end of a cold front. We landed at 5:05PM, officially five minutes after customs closes. They cheerfully waited for us, but charged us a $50/airplane late fee in addition to the usual $50 cruising permit free. We spent the night at the cheap-but-cheerful <a href="http://bellchannelinn.com/" target="_blank">Bell Channel Inn</a>, walking to the Port Lucaya Marketplace for dinner and sneaking onto the <a href="http://www.grandlucayan.com/" target="_blank">Grand Lucayan</a>'s palatial grounds to access the beach. The next morning we departed Freeport early for the 60 mile crossing to the Berry Islands, where we overflew several cruise ships at Great and Little Stirrup Cays before cruising down miles of beautiful deserted beach at <a href="http://airnav.com/airport/mybg" target="_blank">Great Harbour Cay</a>. We landed here and took a short cab ride to <a href="http://www.carriearl.com/" target="_blank">Carriearl Boutique Hotel</a> for their famous Sunday Brunch.<br />
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After brunch, we took off again for some low altitude air-to-air photography down the Berries before climbing for the 40-mile crossing to New Providence Island - better known by the name of its bustling city, Nassau. Here we had decided to split up; Steve and I would stop at the busy <a href="http://airnav.com/airport/mynn" target="_blank">Lynden Pindling International Airport</a> to pick up Dawn while the other three continued on in the Warrior to Norman's Cay, at the north end of the Exumas, for some beach time. This worked well as Nassau was extremely busy on this Sunday afternoon; it would have been much more stressful if I hadn't been here several times with the Mad Dog. We landed right after the Airbus from Minneapolis on which Dawn was sitting in First Class, sipping mimosas; upon exiting customs, she was met by her personal pilot and whisked off to her private airplane!<br />
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Thirty minutes later we were climbing southeastbound for the 44nm crossing to Norman's Cay, once the <a href="http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2004/April/1/Return-to-Normans-Cay" target="_blank">private lair of an infamous international drug kingpin</a>. I was relieved to see Warrior 27K sitting safely on the ramp; I buzzed the beach to alert our friends to our arrival, circled over the visible wreckage of a DC-3 in the shallow lagoon, and landed for a few minutes to bask in the warm sunshine. Then we took off together and flew formation for 32 stunning miles of the Exuma Islands chain: the turquoise of the Grand Bahama Bank to the west, bleached cays and scrub-covered islets, shallow lagoons, narrow cuts, pristine reefs, empty sugar-sand beaches, and the deep dark blue of the Atlantic to the east. <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/myes" target="_blank">Staniel Cay</a> came into view, and we entered the right downwind for Runway 35. The wind was blowing stink out of the northeast (as it had been all day), making for a rough ride down final and a last-minute sinker that resulted in a bad bounce and go-around. The second attempt was more successful and we shut down at the <a href="http://skyvector.com/?ll=26.101516828835816,-79.0334472593499&chart=301&zoom=8&plan=A.K7.X26:G.27.66958272576936,-79.99658202503568:A.MY.MYGF:A.MY.MYBG:A.MY.MYNN:G.24.599244479444863,-76.82135009124153:A.MY.MYES" target="_blank">southernmost point of our adventure</a> - over 1500nm from my Pacer's home base of Flying Cloud Airport.<br />
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We stayed two nights on Staniel Cay, renting a brand-new 3BR villa at the still-unfinished <a href="http://embraceresort.com/" target="_blank">Embrace Resort</a> steps away from the airport. The island is very small and remote, though it is the most developed settlement between Georgetown and Nassau. There are a few stores with limited hours and stock and quite expensive prices, making us wish we'd done more provisioning in Freeport (you can bring some provisions in from the U.S., and we did, but fresh fruits & veggies must be acquired locally). The famous <a href="http://www.stanielcay.com/" target="_blank">Staniel Cay Yacht Club</a>, with its large coterie of resident nurse sharks and stingrays, is a pleasant 10-minute walk from the villa. Overall, though, there's not a ton to do on Staniel Cay; like most of the Bahamas, the main action is on the water, making a boat a near-necessity. To this end we rented a 17' Boston Whaler to explore the beautiful, shallow surrounding waters on our "lay day." The nearly-mandatory first stop was Big Major's Spot, home to the infamous swimming pigs. Legend has it that passing sailors deposited a couple of porkers on the uninhabited islet about 40 years ago, intending to return for a feast that never materialized. Instead the pigs went feral, multiplied, learned to swim, and rooted out a lucrative niche hamming it up for tourists and cruisers in exchange for food scraps. Indeed, we weren't even to the beach when several large sows and boars boldly swam up, hoisting their torsos onto the gunwhales as they noisily begged for leftovers! They turned out to be very friendly pigs, and we spent a pleasant hour on their beach.<br />
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After that we explored a few small sandy cays with gorgeous beaches, and then powered on over to Thunderball Grotto, made famous by the James Bond movie of the same name. This is an island with a large sea-cave hidden inside; you access it by swimming through a low entrance, hidden at high tide, or jumping through a hole in the roof into water 25 feet below. It's a nice spot for snorkeling with a plethora of small fish at the entrances, and we had a lot of fun filming our jumps into the dark cave. By now it was 1pm so we had lunch in the boat, stopped at SCYC to stock up on (expensive!) cold Kalik beers, and motored a few miles south to Bitter Guana Cay to spend the afternoon exploring and checking out the endangered Exuma Island Iguanas. As the shadows got longer we returned the Boston Whaler and walked down to the Staniel Cay Yacht Club for conch fritters and sundowners. I wouldn't have minded another night or two at Staniel Cay to better explore the Exumas, but the next day we'd be flying north to start the next phase of our adventures aloft and afloat.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-59614209224993576032015-04-13T10:51:00.002-05:002015-04-13T10:53:09.289-05:00Dear MadDog<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is one of the hardest letters I will ever write. I'm leaving you. I didn't make this decision lightly. You're a great airplane, quirks and all, and we had some great times - even when you occasionally tried to kill me or get me violated. I grew to love you despite your faults, or maybe because of them. But now I've met someone new, somebody wonderful, and it's time for you and I to part company. <br />
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When we first met, I was both intrigued and intimidated by your age and experience, your heavy manual controls, your various aerodynamic protuberances, and your reputation as the heartbreaker of the fleet. I stayed up late at night studying your systems and practicing my flow patterns, and later flying the simulator in preparation for our first liason. And then we were together, at long last, and at first I was completely overwhelmed. Heck, it takes three hands just to get you started! But over the next several hundred hours, I became comfortable with your heavy demands, your old-school design, and your occasional nonsensical outbursts. I even started to think of them as normal. Right engine spools up eight seconds slower than the left engine? "It's a Mad Dog." VNAV mysteriously levels off at 6250 feet and refuses to descend further? "It's a Mad Dog." Get sent around because your Vref is 30 knots faster than the preceding 757? "It's a Mad Dog." Bumping through the tops because stall margin won't let you climb above FL310? "It's a Mad Dog." Number 17 in line for takeoff in ATL and it's 87 degrees in the cabin with the packs full cold? "It's a Mad Dog." I came to accept that this was just the way things were. <br />
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And yet...I heard tantalizing rumors of a sweeter, kinder plane, a pilot's airplane with boosted controls, great big engines, a long efficient wing, and a lithe, sexy airframe free of unsightly strakes and vortilons. Many of my captains knew her before they upgraded to your left seat, and in your more temperamental moments I'd hear them mutter, "Never should have left the ER!" Some of my fellow new hires were fortunate enough to fly her right out of the gate, and I couldn't help overhearing their gushing accolades of her attributes. I tried to defend you. "Yeah, well...the Mad Dog has control cables! She'll keep flying through a nuclear holocaust! And look how senior I am in the Mad Dog! I held a Saturday off last month!" But every time that other airplane taxied past, I couldn't help but cast an appreciative gaze her way. And when this bid came out, with a whole bunch of new slots in my home base, I couldn't resist her siren call. I had to find out for myself what all the fuss is about.<br />
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So I'm off on a whirlwind romance with the plane they call "<i>The </i>Boeing" in October. But you and still have the summer to make some last sweaty memories together. I'll never forget you, Mad Dog. And somehow I get the feeling that fate with bring us together once again, perhaps sooner than I think.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-23660595397343119102015-03-23T11:41:00.000-05:002015-03-23T12:00:32.764-05:00In Search of Sunshine, Part II: Atlanta to Sebastian<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When the Bahamas plan first came together, my sailor/pilot friend Andy was planning on flying the rental Piper Warrior. As a fairly junior captain at NewCo, though, he ended up getting a trip that conflicted with our schedule, and couldn't get out of it because the company put his annual line check on that trip. Andy is still joining us in Marsh Harbour for the sailing portion of our adventure, but I needed to find a second pilot to come with us, and on fairly short notice. All the friends I contacted were enthusiastic about the trip, but had schedule conflicts or were tight on money at the time. "You should have told me last week!" or "I'll do it next year!" were common responses. I was just about at the end of my rope when I thought to give Kevin a call. Kevin and I were training partners on the Mad Dog last year, and we rode motorcycles and hung out during that month quite a bit. He and his wife are really cool, adventurous people, ideal for the trip - except I knew Kevin hadn't flown a small plane in a long time. After some hesitation due to that fact, he said they were in, and he'd just do whatever was necessary to get current. Within a week, the plan came together, and it ended up working really well. <br />
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The night that I landed the Pacer at Falcon Field, I stayed at Kevin and Jeannie's house in Peachtree City, GA. The next morning, Kevin and I were back out to the airport at 9am, with a preliminary stop at the nearby Aircraft Spruce and Specialty East. A steady drizzle was falling, but it only extended a few miles south and wasn't forecast to get heavy until later in the day; ceilings and visibilities remained high. We took off just after 9am for the short, bumpy hop to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/kopn" target="_blank">Upson County</a> to top off with cheap gas. There was a strong crosswind out of the south, though, and my landing left a bit to be desired. From there we set course for St. Augustine, Florida, 234nm to the southeast. The winds aloft clocked around more to the west at higher altitudes, so we climbed to 7500 feet and were rewarded with a 90 knot groundspeed - not great, but better than the 80 knots I was showing at 2000 feet on the way to Upson County, and with a much smoother ride. Shortly after takeoff, I turned the controls over to Kevin, and he flew most of the rest of the day except for takeoffs and landings. He quickly adapted to the lighter control forces and flew smoothly, but I had to continually remind him to stay coordinated. "I haven't touched rudder pedals except for takeoff and landing in 20 years!" he protested.<br />
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Passing Macon we left the cloudy skies behind, and I regretted not packing a cap to keep the bright southern sun out of my eyes. We got VFR flight following from Atlanta and Jacksonville Centers, whose low sectors were rather quiet on this Tuesday morning. We veered a bit east while crossing the Okefenokee Swamp to remain within gliding distance of civilization, and then dropped down to 5500 feet. Jacksonville Approach was fairly busy, and we waited until we were past the extended centerline for Runway 7 at JAX to descend further to 3500. Approach cancelled our flight following when we were 10 miles north of <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/ksgj" target="_blank">St. Augustine</a>, and as soon as I contacted the tower it was clear we had walked into a bee's nest. There were six or seven planes in the pattern, mostly student pilots speaking poor english, and the controller was just losing it. He instructed us to enter a left downwind for 13, then told another aircraft to disregard and make a seven mile straight-in for 13. I set up for the midfield downwind, and then got yelled at for not making a seven mile straight-in - the controller had mixed up our callsigns. He still made me go seven miles east, pirouette around a smoke column (controlled burn), and then drag it in on an excruciatingly long final approach - with nobody ahead of us for miles. The student pilot behind us had to greatly extend his own downwind, the controller called us out to him (misidentifying us as a Cherokee), and the poor kid's "looking!" responses sounded increasingly frantic. After all that, my high flare and plunker of a landing on the 150' x 8000' runway wasn't very surprising. Hey, at least I didn't groundloop - it was an even bigger crosswind than at Upson County. To top it off, ground control informed us that the municipal fuel pumps - the ones with the 2nd cheapest AvGas in the entire United States - were out of gas. He instead directed us to Atlantic Aviation, a beautiful facility with excellent service and $6.65 AvGas. C'est la vie.<br />
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Kevin and I had a very good lunch at the Fly-By Cafe, paid for our gas (hey, thanks, a 25¢/gal "local's discount"), and took off on our last leg down the coast. A new controller was on tower frequency, and sounded even more overwhelmed than the last guy (I later found out it's a non-FAA contract tower). I was happy to switch over to Jax Approach, who readily granted our request for VFR flight following. We cruised at 5500 feet for most of the way, the better to stay in smooth, cool air above most of the swarming GA traffic, until thickening afternoon cumulus forced us down into the bumps at 3500 feet. Most of the restricted areas for Cape Canaveral were cold, and we got a nice view of the shuttle assembly building and landing strip. Passing Titusville, I glanced down and was shocked to see a Space Shuttle sitting on the ground directly underneath us; I wheeled over for a circle. I later found out it's a full-scale mock-up on the grounds of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.<br />
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Like everywhere else, <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/x26" target="_blank">Sebastian</a> was quite windy - a 30 degree southeasterly crosswind gusting well above 20 knots. I finally made a good landing considering the conditions, and taxied over to <a href="http://www.skydiveseb.com/" target="_blank">Skydive Sebastian</a>. We are renting the Warrior for the trip from <a href="http://www.xenaaviationfl.com/" target="_blank">Xena Aviation</a>, whose owners Stacey and Jerry also work for the dropzone. I got Kevin familiarized with the Warrior while Jerry flew a couple loads of skydivers in a Cessna Caravan, and when he was done for the day we went flying - Kevin in the left seat, Jerry in the right, and me observing from the backseat. The wind was still pretty gusty so it was less than ideal conditions to get a rusty light plane pilot current again. Kevin did some airwork in the practice area - rediscovering those rudder pedals again - and then came back to the airport for pattern work. It was pretty neat watching Kevin steadily remembering things that were obviously still somewhere in a long-disused part of his brain. His landings weren't great by the end of the lesson, but the rest of his flying had improved by leaps and bounds. The sun was setting as we tied the Warrior down next to my Pacer, and after checking into the hotel we enjoyed a good dinner and some much-deserved cold beers. That night I also got some really exciting news on the job front; I'll share that in the next post.<br />
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Early the next morning we flew again, departing shortly after sunrise to enjoy some mercifully calm air, and Kevin's landings got steadily better. By the end of the hour, he was clearly comfortable with the plane, and Jerry gave him his blessing. In all the checkout took only 2.2 hours - not bad for someone who hadn't touched a small plane in 27 years! We took a couple of celebratory laps in the Pacer and Kevin made his first taildragger landing, and then we gassed up the plane, tied her down, put on her canopy cover, and caught a cab to Melbourne Airport. I have one more two-day trip for work tomorrow, and then we'll all be heading south next Friday for my first big adventure with my little yellow Pacer. We'll be back in the U.S. on April 4th, and I should have some really nice photos & video to share.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-2741652978874866982015-03-17T13:14:00.003-05:002015-03-22T09:09:59.787-05:00In Search of Sunshine, Part I: Minneapolis to Atlanta<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When Dawn and I bought the Pacer, a major motivation was being able to take it on long adventures, and turning some of those adventures into published stories. Even before I bought it, though, my brother Steve and I were planning a flying/sailing trip to the Bahamas with several friends over Dawn's Spring Break this year. The original plan was to take two rental planes, but once we bought the Pacer, it seemed silly not to use it for the exact purpose we bought it for. Sure, it's a long ways from Minnesota, and a rental plane would probably be more economical, but I bought the plane with the express intent of putting 120 hours a year on it. So the plan evolved: bring the Pacer south, rent a Piper Warrior as the second airplane, fly to Great Harbour Cay, Staniel Cay, and Eleuthera, and have several more friends airline it into Marsh Harbour to join us for 4 days of cruising the Abaco Sea on a 46' catamaran. The longer the winter dragged on, the better the plan sounded. There was just the small matter of getting the Pacer 1200 NM south before the trip.<br />
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Surprisingly, given that I'm in the bottom 10% of Minneapolis Mad Dog FOs, I didn't have too much trouble getting time off for the trip. I did, however, have a lot of flying in the middle of March, leaving last week as my best window for repositioning the plane. I had a four-day trip that was scheduled to finish at 8am on March 9th, so I tentatively set that as the departure date. Initially the long-term forecast looked good, then soured significantly in the days prior. A major system was pumping a ton of moisture from the Gulf into the southern states, and Atlanta was predicted to have a soggy week. Besides rain, low ceilings, and restricted visibilities, the southerly flow could potentially set up rather unfavorable winds aloft, making for a very long 1200 miles. It was looking pretty dicey over the weekend.<br />
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On Monday morning, I woke early in Pittsburgh and looked over the weather very carefully. My initial plan had been a nearly direct path to Atlanta, with two stops for fuel at convenient airports offering cheap gas. Atlanta's forecast had actually improved significantly, with rain not forecast to begin until after my evening arrival and possibly breaking in the morning for an escape to Florida. However, low ceilings and rain showers in southern Indiana, western Kentucky, and central Tennessee required a deviation from the direct routing. Strong northwesterly winds made a non-stop flight to Morris, IL a good choice for the first leg, and from there I could choose to fly to Glasgow, KY (<a href="http://skyvector.com/?ll=37.33755371307274,-86.63378905670452&chart=301&zoom=12&plan=A.K3.KFCM:A.K5.C09:A.K5.KGLW:A.K7.KFFC" target="_blank">the more direct route</a>) or if weather dictated, Danville, KY. Even the <a href="http://skyvector.com/?ll=39.57859674317314,-92.12695311955117&chart=301&zoom=13&plan=A.K3.KFCM:A.K5.C09:A.K5.KDVK:A.K7.KFFC" target="_blank">latter option </a>involved only about 40nm extra over the great circle route. I decided it was doable, suited up, and flew my one leg from PIT to MSP. After landing the Mad Dog at a breathtakingly clear and surprisingly warm Minneapolis, I scooted over to Flying Cloud airport, changed out of the monkey suit, gassed up the Pacer, and launched to the southeast.<br />
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I climbed to 9500 feet on the first leg to take advantage of a 35 knot tailwind. I enjoyed it while it lasted; as expected, it faded after the first 90 minutes, and I descended to 7500 feet for a slightly better true airspeed. I got VFR flight following with Minneapolis and Chicago Center, and then Rockford Approach. I landed at a beautifully sunny (but surprisingly still snowy) <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/c09" target="_blank">Morris Municipal Airport</a> at 12:35PM after 2:30 enroute for an average groundspeed of 120 kts. I filled up with $4.50 100LL, updated my weather database, and took off, initially climbing to 7500 feet. I knew lower ceilings would force me down at some point but wasn't sure when, or just how marginal they would be along my route. The METARs were all worse than previously forecast and several TAFs had been amended, but the airports directly along my route were still all reporting 1500' ceilings or better when I took off from Morris.<br />
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The scattered layer began along a very well-defined line around Lafayette (Indiana) and I descended to 3500' in preparation for ducking under. It grew progressively more broken, and I finally descended through one of the last big holes around Crawfordsville, IN. Initially I was able to maintain VFR at 1500' AGL, but the ceilings dropped and I ended up descending to 1200', then 1000'. The ceilings ahead appeared even lower. I dialed up an AWOS further south and it was reporting an 800' ceiling; another to the west, 300'. Indianapolis, however, was still reporting 1900' broken. My intended route was no longer tenable, I had to make a change, and east was clearly the way to go. I turned 45 degrees left, changed the route on WingX to reflect my new destination of Danville (KDVK), and scanned the chart for obstructions ahead. There were many short towers atop a ridge extending southwest from Indianapolis, but the ceilings had already started to rise by the time I got there, and I was enjoying a good 2000' ceiling by the time the ground dropped away again near Martinsville.<br />
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There was a new problem, however; by descending my slight tailwind had turned into a slight headwind, which along with the zig-zagging was going to put me at Danville with about 55 minutes of fuel remaining. That's legal, and I've grown pretty adept at estimating fuel used in the Pacer down to about a half-gallon, but I've always maintained a personal one-hour minimum reserve. It was tempting to fudge it this time, because Danville had cheap $3.95 gas and I could make it to Atlanta non-stop from there. Stopping short would mean an additional fuel stop with the associated delay. <i>If you do it this time, you'll do it again, </i>I told myself. <i>Next time it'll be 50 minutes, or 45. </i>No, I'd do the right thing. If I didn't make it to Atlanta tonight, so be it. Chattanooga would be a fine place to bed the Pacer down, and it has airline service if I subsequently got weathered in. <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/kser" target="_blank">Seymour, Indiana</a> was right along my route, and WingX showed that it had perfectly reasonable $4.45 self-serve AvGas. I landed at Seymour, topped off, and tried to check the weather. The pilot lounge weather terminal wasn't working, and there was no wifi. Oh well - the weather appeared to be excellent south and east, so I took off and called Flight Watch once airborne.<br />
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Flight Watch reported that the ceilings and visibilities were excellent east of a line extending southward from Louisville, so there was no longer a reason to go as far east as Danville. I adjusted my course more southward, skirting the eastern edge of Louisville's Class C and then proceeding directly to <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/k24" target="_blank">Russell County Airport</a> in Jamestown, KY. Besides offering cheap 24-hour AvGas (I would be arriving around 5:30pm EDT), it appeared to be a nice quiet little airport that would make for a quick pitstop. I was surprised to find it a virtual beehive of activity compared to my last two stops, with a Citation landing immediately after me and a Twin Commanche departing ahead of me! The FBO was closed but I was able to check the radar on my phone; there were a few scattered returns around Atlanta but so far the heavy stuff was holding off and the enroute METARs looked good.<br />
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My last leg of the day contained the most interesting scenery, crossing Lake Cumberland shortly after takeoff and then meandering through a wooded, hilly landscape criss-crossed by verdant river valleys and lonesome-looking byways and pockmarked by little dales with wisps of smoke rising from homesteads in the clearings. My <a href="http://www.flyingmag.com/pilots-places/pilots-adventures-more/day-life-rj-pilot" target="_blank">very first article for Flying</a> opened with a description of this exact area from 35,000 feet, but this was my first time seeing it at low altitude. The terrain changed dramatically once I crossed Walden Ridge just east of Hinch Mountain; the Cumberland Plateau fell away, replaced by the lowlands of the Tennessee River Valley. I've ridden motorcycle in this area quite a bit, and recognized the familiar form of the Great Smoky Mountains rising to my left through a light drizzle that began near Dayton, TN and continued all the way to Atlanta. Ceilings remained high, though, and visibility was generally excellent except for a few localized areas of around 6-7 miles vis.<br />
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I crossed into Georgia near Dalton, paralleled a low ridge for about 40 miles, and climbed slightly to clear the last bit of terrain near Pine Log. By now the last light was fading, but the terrain was flat the rest of the way to my destination of <a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/KFFC" target="_blank">Falcon Field</a> in Peachtree City, and the weather was good. I talked to tower controllers at Cobb County, Dobbins AFB, and Fulton County before ducking under the Atlanta Class B, passing about 8 miles west of Hartsfield and getting buzzed by a Mad Dog on final for 8L in the process. Pretty cool, though I suspect their TCAS had a thing or two to say about it. It was finally pitch dark when I crossed over Falcon Field and entered the left downwind for Runway 31. My sim partner from initial training, Kevin, was still a few hours from landing at ATL, but his wife Jeannie picked me up from KFFC, as their house is only a few miles away. The next day Kevin and I planned to fly the Pacer south to Sebastian, FL, but that would entirely depend on the weather. In the meantime, I was just happy to have safely made it <a href="http://skyvector.com/?ll=36.95713481227003,-85.12207030660913&chart=301&zoom=5&plan=A.K3.KFCM:A.K5.C09:A.K5.KSER:A.K5.K24:A.K7.KFFC" target="_blank">840 nm around a fairly active weather system</a> in 9 hours time (7.9 hrs in flight).<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-16077856293221120112015-03-17T10:01:00.001-05:002015-03-17T10:07:37.327-05:00Living the Dream!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I can't take credit for this one, but it's pretty freakin' brilliant. The cop/porter thing is hilarious, as I have indeed been mistaken for both, among other things. </div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-69503707700728953222015-03-13T10:01:00.001-05:002015-03-13T11:28:07.851-05:00Greater Leap Forward<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
After my last post about the Surface 2 EFB I use for work, I intended to write soon after about the iPad-based system I'm using in the Pacer, using a real-life cross-country flight as an example. However, the weather has been so crummy that what little Pacer flying I've been able to do on my days off has been entirely local - until this week, when I went cross country in a big way. On Sunday and Monday I flew from Flying Cloud to Peachtree City, GA, and then on to Sebastian, FL - a trip of 1230nm, 12 flying hours, and 7 landings. I'll write about that in the next post. It was an eventful trip weather-wise, and did a good job of showcasing where the modern GA EFB systems really shine, but the photos turned out useless due to glare off of the iPad's screen (I'm new to the iPad and didn't know how to take screenshots at the time). So, the below screenshots are from the last leg of the trip running in simulation mode, with weather from several days after I actually flew it. <br />
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There are a number of excellent EFB platforms available for the iPad, and a lesser number available for Android systems. The Surface 2's orphaned operating system, Windows RT, predictably has absolutely zero aviation apps available (indeed, few apps of any sort), other than the ported version of Jeppesen Flight Deck Pro that my company uses. Because GPS synchronicity, VFR charts, and weather overlays are all disabled on my airline's installation, it makes it fairly useless for general aviation purposes. I have <a href="http://apps4av.com/avare-overview/" target="_blank">Avare</a>, a freeware charting and GPS program with limited flight planning capabilities, on my Android-based phone, and it's fine as a backup but I wanted more capability, so I bought a used iPad 2 off of eBay. Though a few years old, a fairly basic 16GB iPad 2 makes a fine EFB platform so long as you have the 3G model for internal GPS, or an external GPS receiver. The addition of a rugged Otterbox case and/or a RAM mount, space permitting, completes the hardware package.<br />
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The most popular EFB applications for the iPad are (in rough order of popularity among GA pilots): <a href="https://www.foreflight.com/" target="_blank">Foreflight</a>, <a href="http://www.hiltonsoftware.com/" target="_blank">WingX Pro7</a>, <a href="https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/on-the-go/apps/garmin-pilot-/prod115856.html" target="_blank">Garmin Pilot</a>, and <a href="http://ww1.jeppesen.com/aviation/mobile-efb/" target="_blank">Jeppesen FlightDeck</a>. I have experience with the first two, and use a version of FlightDeck for work, but am most familiar with and comfortable with WingX. It helps that they're <a href="http://hiltonsoftware.com/cfi/" target="_blank">giving away free subscriptions to CFIs</a> (normally a subscription is $75/yr for VFR and $150/yr for full capability). A good friend and former student of mine whose Warrior I fly occasionally has been using WingX for years, and has always been very impressed with Hilton Software's frequent improvements and responsiveness to customer suggestions. I will say that I do think Foreflight seems a little more intuitive and better integrated, but WingX has a few neat features that Foreflight does not, and supports a greater range of external hardware options.<br />
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Here's what WingX, and all the other EFB programs, are at their very basic core: a way to display VFR sectional charts while superimposing your flight planned route and current position. For this, they're honestly not really any better than paper charts. I love paper charts, I still use them for local flights and Cub flying. They're easier to read than electronic charts, which need to be zoomed up to be readable, at which point it's easy to miss important information downrange. It's much easier to rotate a paper chart so that it is aligned with your course, while still being able to read labels upside down or sideways; with electronic charts you pretty much always have to switch back to "North Up" mode to read them (I just leave it there, myself). That said, sectionals are a pain to fold in a manner that's usable in the confines of a small cockpit, and planning a flight that goes between panels or between sectionals is a pain in the ass. Most of all, long flights end up requiring a lot of charts, which are expensive and take up space, and then they expire within six months (or if you're IFR, every 28 days). If you're going to do much cross country flying, a program like WingX will save you money over old-school charts.<br />
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Modern EFBs are, of course, much more than simple chart readers. They're fairly sophisticated flight planners and GPS navigators. On the above screenshot, notice that the top of the moving map prominently displays groundspeed, track, and GPS altitude (generally accurate within 100 feet, even using the iPad's internal GPS). Below that is cross-track error, next waypoint, distance, bearing, ETA, and ETE. In the map you can see several gray dots that show where I'll be in 5 and 15 minutes if I maintain my present track. Several overlays are available; I currently have 100LL prices displayed (you can see where my cheapskate priorities lie!) but at various points in the trip I chose to display flight rules (as in the last screenshot), ceilings, vis, or wind speed. More about weather overlays in a second. On the left-hand side I have both route and the Airport/Facility Directory (A/FD) displayed, but I usually only toggle that on when I need it. <br />
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You can plan flights from WingX's moving map route editor, or go over to the dedicated route planner. Here's one of the things I found really useful during my trip: if you've updated the weather database recently, you can use the altitude optimizer to find the best altitude considering winds aloft. It's still a little primitive (you can't store aircraft performance profiles, and it assumes a constant entered true airspeed regardless of pressure altitude and temperature) but it's a heck of a lot simpler than eyeballing winds aloft forecasts and interpolating between altitudes and forecast stations. I saved a significant amount of time and money on this trip by frequently going higher or lower than normal due to winds aloft, a major consideration in a 105-knot airplane. <br />
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Here's another great feature that is worth its weight in gold. As long as you've downloaded the NOTAMs recently, WingX displays temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) for the next few days and makes them painfully obvious by outlining them in red. Simply tapping on the TFR brings up all the pertinent info. Instead of UTC dates and times, it simply tells you whether the TFR is currently active, and if not, how long from now it will go active. In this case, there's a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral in 8 hours, 27 minutes. Incidentally, there's also a lot of restricted airspace around that area. WingX makes it super easy to look up special use airspace (just tap it!) but unfortunately doesn't tell you whether it is currently active. I was on VFR flight following and just asked ATC; otherwise I could have called a FSS (I assume I could have found it somewhere on my DUATS briefing but didn't look hard enough, I guess). <br />
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WingX's best feature, in my opinion, is how easy it makes it for the pilot to obtain weather information. Tap on any airport, tap display wx, and this panel pops up, showing the METARs, TAFs, etc for the airport and surrounding area. Here's the fairly obvious problem: you need a way to update the weather for it to be useful on a longer flight. ADS-B is fantastic for this and is free once you buy the receiver, but reception is spotty below 3000 feet. On the ground and at low altitudes, a 3G-enabled iPad will often have connectivity, allowing you to regularly download weather. I don't yet have an ADS-B box and 3G isn't enabled on my iPad, so I was reduced to running into the FBO at each fuel stop and trying to download updated weather; they didn't always have WiFi. The weather was significantly worse than forecast for a portion of my trip, and better than forecast for another portion, and I ended up getting updates the good old fashion way: listening to AWOSes and ATISes downrange and calling Flight Watch. <br />
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If you do have an ADS-B-In source, WingX does a really nice job of integrating datalink weather with the moving map display. Here's a NEXRAD radar overlay. Pilots have gotten themselves into trouble trying to use datalink radar in a tactical fashion, but it's great for making long-range strategic decisions as long as you recognize that you're looking at what the weather was doing somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes ago.<br />
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I haven't really even begun to scratch the surface of WingX's features, like the GPWS display (top left), or how it displays which runway you're taking off on and counts down feet remaining, or the terrain profile view (bottom center button), or ability to split screens with multiple displays, or how it automatically brings up the airport diagram (and shows your position on it) when you're below 45 knots on landing. There's just a lot of really neat capability built into the program and I'm still constantly discovering new things. I've heard the same said of Foreflight and the other EFB programs. My point is, there's a heck of a lot of capability available to the VFR pilot for $75 a year - that's essentially all one need spend on flight information, once you have the hardware. It's a rare good deal in GA. Also worth mentioning is that, as usual, the general aviation community is enjoying the benefits of modern technology well, well before it trickles down to the airline guys. We're finally getting EFBs several years after they came into widespread usage within GA, and the capability in our expensive, custom, FAA blessed EFB software is a small portion of that contained in off-the-shelf consumer software one can download and be using in 5 minutes. <br />
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One final note...the iPad is a very reliable piece of hardware, but it's not infallible. You need to have a backup. For flights within 200 miles of my home base, I have paper charts available. I also, as mentioned, have the free Avare program on my Android phone. I'll be switching over to an iPhone 6 soon (I have a MacBook and iPad already, so why not complete the transition to total Apple fanboy!), and I'll be able to use my existing WingX subscription on that for no additional cost. </div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-66795247913512066972015-02-03T17:11:00.004-06:002015-02-03T17:12:34.288-06:00Great Leap Forward<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My airline recently rolled out our Electronic Flight Bag (EFB), a Microsoft Surface 2 tablet, and I've been using it for about a month now. The idea of a paperless cockpit has been around for a long time, and we're a bit late to the party; EFBs have been de rigueur at most major airlines for a couple of years. The most common platform, by far, is Apple's iPad; it's used by Alaska, American, United, FedEx, and UPS, plus many regional airlines, corporate flight departments, and thousands of private pilots. There's a wide variety of well-proven off-the-shelf EFB software available for the iPad, and reams of data on the system's reliability. The FAA is getting very experienced at approving iPad-based EFB installations.<br />
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For a variety of reasons, my airline chose not to go that route. First, we are a <i>very</i> Windows-based company - we Mac users are barely tolerated and most training & crew applications are not supported on our machines. Secondly, Microsoft is one of our largest corporate customers, and we're currently expanding in the Pacific Northwest. Frankly, we're not a company that's entirely known for its tech savvy. It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that our choice of a fairly uncommon tablet paired with an orphaned standalone operating system (Windows RT), combined with Jeppesen having to do a custom port of their FlightDeck Pro software, resulted in rather lengthy delays. Even now, we're merely in the test phase; until the EFB is fully proven, we're still carrying around ship sets of Jepp charts and operational manuals (individual subscriptions are thankfully a thing of the past - updating Jepps was always among the most hated of pilot chores).<br />
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That said, now that the EFB is finally here, I think Microsoft, Jeppesen, and my company absolutely knocked it out of the park. For what it was designed to do, both the hardware and software are beautiful, functional, and intuitive. Here's a good measure of just how easy it is to use: I received my tablet a few days before recurrent simulator training, did the hour-long training DVD, and was able to effectively use it for the first time during two intense days in the sim (one of which, the maneuvers validation, is a graded checkride). All the present features are contained in two programs: Jeppesen FlightDeck Pro is used to view IFR enroute charts and terminal/approach/airport plates, and Secure Content Locker provides access to all company and aircraft manuals and bulletins. The operating system incorporates a number of intuitive touchscreen gestures to make it easy to smoothly switch between programs or even split the screen between them. For example, the other day my Captain and I briefed a Category III ILS approach with the approach plate on one half of the screen and the company Cat III briefing card on the other half.<br />
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My favorite feature of the Surface 2 EFB, versus equivalent iPad-based systems, is the inclusion of a very nifty hinged cover that incorporates a backup battery and keyboard. It attaches to the Surface with a magnetic hinge / power connector. While connected, the backup battery recharges the main battery. I typically carry the Surface between flights with the cover connected and closed, take it out during the preflight and input the flight plan and other information with the keyboard, and then disconnect the cover/keyboard and stow the Surface in its RAM mount (which is suction-cupped to the side window). You can leave the backup battery / keyboard attached if needed, but I've found that the mount holds the Surface alone much more securely.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj3NgV1Z58o/VNFU6Gwt9eI/AAAAAAAAEGA/w3rP2oRxrQo/s1600/DSCN0461.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj3NgV1Z58o/VNFU6Gwt9eI/AAAAAAAAEGA/w3rP2oRxrQo/s1600/DSCN0461.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><br />
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Besides the company's stated reasons for going to an EFB system (to save fuel and waste by eliminating the paper charts, the weight of which is considerable), I believe its use also increases safety. There's a lot less heads-down time spent digging through Jepp binders for charts, especially in response to last-minute runway, procedure, and route changes. Finding and highlighting critical information is far easier than with paper charts & manuals, particularly in low-light conditions. The mounts allow for easy EFB removal for briefings; I've found that physically taking the EFB in my hands and turning towards the other pilot is far better for facilitating crew communication than facing the window as we talk. I'm also finding that having the EFB makes me far readier to dig into the manuals when I'm not quite sure about something or haven't done a particular procedure in a while; it's a lot more tempting to wing it when the definitive answers are hidden deep within one of about seven heavy paper manuals (good luck guessing which one!). Finally, casual studying for upcoming training is a lot more palatable on the Surface; I made heavy use of it for this purpose in the days before my recurrent events. <br />
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That said, there are some improvements I hope to see over time. Even though all the manuals are searchable, you still have to know <i>which</i> manual to search. The content locker includes a master index that tells you where various references are located but it's not clickable; it would be nice if each subject included hyperlinks to the relevant sections of each manual. We also have a paper "Fast Access Tab" that contains selections of most commonly-used reference pages from various manuals, but it's not on the EFB yet. The internal GPS is not enabled, so some nice Flight Deck Pro capabilities like geosynchronous charts & airport diagrams are not available. We are also prohibited from connecting to airborne WiFi, though it could provide invaluable updated weather, radar overlays, and turbulence plots. Both of these issues are primarily due to FAA restrictions. Hopefully once we have full approval for the EFB, we'll be able to make some headway in getting the feds to let us use its full potential. <br />
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Really, my only serious complaint is the Windows RT operating system. It's not really a bad OS, it's just completely orphaned. There are hardly any third-party apps available, and no aviation apps at all other than our custom, IFR-only copy of Flight Deck Pro. I had been hoping to use the Surface in the Pacer, but it turned out to be useless for VFR flight. I ended up buying an iPad 2 off of eBay and running WingX Pro7, which I'll write about in another post soon. Thus, we tripled the number of tablet computers in our household nearly overnight. That said, while my airline allows us to use our Surfaces for personal use (on the ground only), it was never a focus of the program. For strictly company use in the flight deck, I have very few complaints, and became an EFB addict within days of its introduction.</div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-76827185268662072112015-01-22T12:47:00.003-06:002015-01-22T12:51:39.190-06:00A New York Christmas Miracle<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm a bit late in relaying this anecdote, but I think it's a fitting epitaph of my stint in New York as my time here draws to an end this month. On one hand I really enjoy flying out of "The World's Greatest City." The crews based here are great, the chief pilots notably laid-back, and I even like the passengers: I prefer New Yorkers' brusque frankness to the oblique passive-aggressiveness that we Minnesotans have elevated to an artform. On the other hand, absolutely nothing here comes easy. Just getting to work on time can feel like an epic battle. I'm almost always commuting in the night before, often on the jumpseat of an oversold flight, waiting for the crashpad van, finding an open bunk, speaking Spanish while shopping at the corner tienda, reserving a shower time, trying to sleep as roommates snore, waking with a jolt to silence my alarm, trying to gather my belongings in the dark without waking anyone, hunting down the missing iron, waiting for the Q33 bus in the rain, schlepping my bags through crowded Roosevelt station to catch the E-train, running to make the JFK Airtrain, walking half a mile down Terminal 4's B concourse to the crew room. After all that, the ATC reroutes, ground metering, congested frequencies, bewildering taxi routes, and last-minute runway changes are a piece of cake!<br />
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Which is why I was dreading the trip that ended on Christmas Eve. When I originally bid it, I looked for an early release but failed to consult the flight schedules. It turned out they were greatly reduced for the holiday: my airline's last flight out of JFK left at noon, and the last flight out of LGA left at 4:25pm. My trip was scheduled to end at JFK at 3:25pm; a one-hour connection between airports during rush hour seemed very iffy. The one other option to get home late that night was trying to jumpseat on a full Sun Country flight at 9pm. Fortunately I was flying with a captain who was in the same boat, and we resolved to get out of Orlando early and fly fast on our last leg. The week prior I had ended a trip with a 45-minute-early arrival from Orlando and a repeat performance seemed my best chance of going home for Christmas.<br />
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It started out so promising: the gate agents were gung-ho to get us out early, our dispatcher agreed, and a Mad Dog load of merry passengers showed up at the gate on time. We were loaded and ready to go at 12 minutes prior to departure. Unfortunately the ramp was understaffed, so it took forever to load the bags; we pushed back several minutes late. Then ATC switched our runway from to 18L due to a birdstrike on 17R, and for possibly the first time ever, Southwest was taxiing at a snail's pace - right ahead of us! Once off the ground, ATC was slow to turn us onto our route over the water, and we weren't even to cruise altitude when they slowed us to 250 kts for in-trail separation to New York. Halfway up the eastern seaboard, the vectors started. At one point ATC offered normal speed - if we were willing to turn 80 degrees off course! I thought he was joking, but he wasn't. On descent into JFK, we were switched to Runway 4L (we usually get 4R from the CAMRN arrival), requiring a hasty re-brief, reconfiguration, and running the checklist again. No sooner was that accomplished than the visibility dropped below minimums for 4L and we were switched back to 4R. As soon as we set up for that, the vis came back up and we were again sent to 4L! This all took place while being vectored through a maze of cells with pelting rain and moderate turbulence at minimum approach airspeed. We broke out a couple hundred feet above minimums, the captain made a beautiful landing, and the taxi to the gate was mercifully short. We parked at 3:40pm, only 15 minutes late in spite of everything - and 45 minutes before my flight was scheduled to depart from LaGuardia. <br />
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After that flight from hell, the last thing I wanted to do was hang around JFK for 5 hours to finagle a jumpseat. I decided to go for broke. I ran outside to the taxi rank and (for the first time in my life) jumped the queue to tell the marshaller that I had a tight connection to LGA; she waved me to the next open cab.<br />
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"Hey bud, how's traffic looking on the Van Wyck?" I asked the cabbie.<br />
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He grimaced. "The usual. Not good." <br />
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"Well, there's a plane leaving LaGuardia in 40 minutes and it might be my only shot to get home tonight. Think it's doable?"<br />
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He thought for a short second and then nodded determinedly. "Get in, I'll get you there!"<br />
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God bless New York cabbies; this guy was a pro among pros, flying like the wind, shifting lanes, slithering through snarled traffic, tapping the horn every time a hapless motorist contemplated getting in his way, jumping off the Van Wyck at one point to leapfrog a mess of brake lights in a single bound down a surface street. Ten minutes in he looked back, grinned, and said "You'll make it, no problem!" Sure enough, we pulled up to terminal C at 4:08pm, only 23 minutes after leaving JFK during rush hour! I thanked the guy profusely, wished him a Merry Christmas, and gave him $50 for my $23 fare. I walked up to the gate just as the gate agent called my name with a seat to Minneapolis, and had just enough time to stow my bags, sit down, and text Dawn that I was coming home. We had a lovely Christmas Eve together, and early the next morning we headed to my folks' place for a really nice family Christmas with all five of my siblings and their kids and significant others.<br />
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I'll look back on my time in New York fondly, and there's probably a good chance that I'll be back at some point. In the meantime, I'm really going to enjoy my much improved commute to and from work - 25 minutes down US-212 and I-494, maybe as much as an hour in bad traffic!</div>
Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10991135.post-29496988106797261002015-01-20T13:16:00.000-06:002015-01-29T11:35:54.777-06:00Bringing Her Home<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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On December 8th, 2014, Dawn and I became the proud new owners of a Piper Pacer. It was a day I'd been dreaming of for over 20 years. However, there was one small detail to take care of before I could enjoy my new purchase: it was in Kalispell, Montana, some 880nm away from its new home at Flying Cloud Airport (<a href="http://www.airnav.com/airport/fcm" target="_blank">KFCM</a>). This is a long flight in any 110 knot airplane, but crossing the Rockies and northern plains in wintertime is especially challenging. Kalispell itself often gets socked in for weeks at a time; Pacific storms packing high winds and heavy snowfall alternate with high-pressure systems that fill every valley with dense, long-lasting fog. I needed a 2-3 day weather window that coincided with a stretch of days off work.<br />
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There was one other wrinkle. When I priced out insurance, a couple companies would have covered me without a checkout, but I ended up choosing a $400 cheaper policy that required my first 2 hours and 15 landings be with a CFI. Fortunately, Jeff Skiles had already asked if he could come along, and he happens to hold an active CFI certificate and has some Pacer time to boot. I put him on my insurance; his pilot history form reportedly caused a bit of a twitter in the AOPA insurance office, but they didn't hold his one $40m claim against him. Jeff's schedule was wide open as he was temporarily between gigs, but his US/AA flight bennies wouldn't get him to Kalispell, meaning he had to ride on a buddy pass I borrowed from a friend. Thus, flight loads to FCA became a consideration.<br />
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Our first try was December 10th. There was dense fog in the area for several days prior, but it looked like there would be a window to get out of Kalispell and across the Rockies. After that the prognosis was a bit iffy. Worse, there was no direct flight to Kalispell that day, and the flights going through Salt Lake City filled up in the last 24 hours. We decided to postpone and try again the following Monday, December 15th. There was a direct, wide-open flight to Kalispell, so the main question was the weather. I obsessed over it constantly during the weekend, reading and rereading the NWS forecast discussions. A Pacific storm was moving through, and the main question was whether we could get out of Kalispell before the fog rolled back in. Once across the Rockies, the prognosis looked excellent.<br />
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On the appointed day, I stashed my truck in our new T-hangar and Dawn dropped me off at MSP, where I met Jeff. We got on the FCA flight without a problem, and by the time we descended over the Rockies a low overcast had faded and the valley was bathed with afternoon sunlight. The Pacer's prior owner, Paul, was understandably emotional over the impending departure of his plane, but went over the box of parts he was including, gave me a few last tips, and shook my hand as we posed for a picture. I finished a thorough preflight, Jeff and I strapped in, I started up, and with one last wave to Paul we taxied away. A few minutes later we were airborne and headed northeast to Columbia Falls, where Highway 2 enters the Rockies.<br />
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Crossing the mountains turned out to be quite easy, for it was clear other than a few low scattered clouds on the western side. We climbed to a lofty 9500'; the Pacer performed quite well in the cold air despite being somewhat heavy. We followed the highway southeast and then cut northeast through Marias Pass, where turned towards Great Falls. Jeff had his iPad running Foreflight with a Stratus ADS-B box, which is how we got the new TAF for GTF as soon as it was issued. The airport was clear for the time being, but the new forecast called for dense fog starting around midnight and not clearing until noon. Helena, on the other hand, had no forecast fog whatsoever. We decided to go there instead though it was about 50 miles out of the way. We arrived shortly before sundown; my first landing in the Pacer wasn't really pretty, but it wasn't bad enough to scare me, either (I can't speak for Jeff!). I sprung for a heated hangar so we wouldn't have to deal with frost or preheating in the morning.<br />
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After a hearty meal and a good sleep, we were back at the airport by 7am and airborne at sunup. As forecast, Helena was beautifully clear and Great Falls was thoroughly socked in. Billings, also, was reporting low IFR. Lewistown, 107nm east of Helena, was clear and forecast to remain so. After that there were very few reporting stations to the east, but the weather was generally pretty crummy. We landed in Lewistown after a very nice morning flight, refueled, and discussed our plan. It seemed like the worst weather was southeast, while most airports to the northeast (Glasgow, Wolf Point, Sidney) were reporting marginal VFR. We ended up following US-87 east to Mosby, then veering north along the Musselshell River to Lake Fort Peck, and then east to Sidney, where we refueled. Some of it was fairly marginal VFR under low ceilings, but with good visibility underneath. After Sidney the ceilings steadily increased to several thousand feel. Initially we were headed towards Jamestown ND but then Jeff's ADS-B alerted us that unforecast snow had started falling in the vicinity and was rapidly reducing visibility. We headed southeast for Aberdeen SD instead.<br />
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We refueled and took off from Aberdeen at sunset, and so I got to test out the Pacer's night-flying capability. It has old-school red flood lighting that actually works quite nicely. There were a few patches of snow in southwestern MN which the ADS-B helped us stay clear of. I was pretty impressed by the system and will likely be getting it in the future (of course there's the ADS-B Out mandate to contend with but that's a rant for another day). We flew over my neighborhood and then down the Minnesota River, landing at Flying Cloud at 7pm - 8.8 flying hours from Helena in 10 hours by the clock, not bad at all with three frigid refueling stops. In all, I reckoned that our <a href="http://skyvector.com/?ll=46.86469816602763,-108.58666991746492&chart=301&zoom=11&plan=A.K1.KGPI:G.48.52218335842474,-113.96923827717958:G.48.24735718802082,-113.56274413652895:G.48.4590804464816,-113.19653319900583:G.48.10119523310115,-112.7070922810062:G.47.02071233372294,-112.04516601143318:A.K1.KHLN:A.K1.KLWT:G.46.995615766503164,-107.90029906781221:G.47.04242819844143,-107.68057250529836:G.47.17515173827342,-107.82614135296379:G.47.55095002975508,-107.79318236858671:G.47.718139089341534,-107.30621337441536:G.48.06559916046564,-106.60125731968336:G.48.0790576163995,-106.15649413606155:A.K1.KSDY:G.47.586159681744334,-103.08032226086742:A.K3.KABR:A.K3.KFCM" target="_blank">weather- and terrain-prompted zig-zagging</a> added about 170nm to the great circle distance from KGPI to KFCM. We made it home early enough for Jeff to drive home to Madison the same night. <br />
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The next day I went back out to the hangar and just putzed around with the airplane for a while. It was pretty hard to believe she was mine. The weather cleared a bit so I called up my brother Steve up to go flying, and we took my pup Piper along on his first airplane ride. The pooch got a bit excited but didn't do anything too disastrous until after the flight; then he puked all over the front seat of my truck. A few nights later he went up again, this time with Dawn and I as we looked at Christmas lights - just like I'd written about in that month's Flying magazine. And then in January, we took the Pacer out to western MN for a family gathering, in which I took several of Dawn's cousins and their kids for plane rides. All told, I have just over 20 hours on the Pacer so far, and I've really enjoyed getting to know her (my landings are much improved). It's been a wonderful first month with an airplane of our own.<br />
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Sam Weigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332414897030323612noreply@blogger.com4