Short Cross-Country Practice to Salem

The audio for this blog entry is available as a MP3 file, linked here.

I woke up this morning to thick fog and wet weather at my house, which is actually about 45 minutes north of the Portland area, in the middle of the little hump at the northwest corner of Oregon. It was cold, wet and nasty. I couldn't see half way down my driveway. But the weather report I got via the 'net said things were improving south of Portland and that the nice weather down that way was already blowing its way to the north. With my firm faith placed in the National Weather Service and a variety of others who put together the forecasts, I headed out the door for my noontime lesson.

Sure enough, the farther south I drove the more the cloud ceiling lifted. The cloud layer became thinner and higher, and the world a little brighter. I got to Twin Oaks Airpark and the proverbial Murphy (who, they say, was an optimist) stepped back into my life once again, in the form of another flight without the Cherokee 180 we'd reserved. Optimism, yeah right heh. I really want to fly in that airplane, but it just doesn't seem to be in the cards quite yet. It's stuck up somewhere near Seattle in the fog. Apparently the people who rented it have been waiting for safe flying weather for the past couple days. By tomorrow it should be better, it looks like. But for now, they're doing the right thing and waiting to come back until they're confident it's safe to do so.

So we scheduled an available C-150, tail number N16058 (the same one I flew on my last flight). It has a fancy Garmin moving map color GPS that does all sorts of fancy things. But my main goal today was to learn to better use the VOR navigation instruments and navigate visually using ground-based landmarks.

By the way, I was able to hook up an audio recorder to the cockpit intercom before we departed today, so I recorded the entire flight. The MP3 file is located here and is also listed as an enclosure if you're subscribed to the RSS feed. I've edited it down to include some of the more interesting moments (and to cut out some of the less-flattering and dead-air, heh). Even after editing it's still 30+ minutes of audio. You'd be quite bored listening to the whole thing without the edits, although for me it's useful to hear all the questions I asked and to think about the what's and why's, and to refresh a few key points in my mind. Let me know if you like that kind of thing. If people want to hear it, I'll do more. I'll also shoot some video sometime soon - I need to work out a couple technical camera kinks first. Turns out video camera and propellers don't always play well together.

We departed Twin Oaks after a couple helicopters crossed the field on their way to the Portland-Hillsboro airport. There were a zillion geese in the departure area, so we waited an extra 30 seconds or so, then got into the air after opening our VFR flight plan with the flight service station. As we flew east, it got a little darker so we stayed well out of that area and flew at 1200 feet, well under the cloud deck, around the hills and into a much more open area weather-wise. The forecasted weather was about what we saw, and the ceiling was too low to allow us to safely fly directly over most of the ridges.

As Kelly told me, he was acting primarily as my passenger today. He was there to help but I was flying, navigating, figuring things out and doing the work. The GPS was turned off for the flight to Salem, so I had the compass and radio navigation equipment to use, as well as the chart and visual reference to the ground. He wanted me to show him I could plan the flight, find my way to an airport I'd never seen before, land there, and then come home. Safely, of course. He helped me with some radio stuff and kept me honest on a few things as I did the visual pilotage navigation and followed my plan. I discovered there's a lot to pay attention to, and that I had way too many checkpoints in my plan - If I was to keep track of them all and the time between them, I'd have almost no time for anything else. But better to have them and skip a couple here and there than to not have enough. No one wants to get lost.

I used the VOR for the first time formally in flight after making sure I was hearing the correct transmitter via the morse code it transmits. Once I had the correct station, I was able to line up on the correct radial and fly my way to Salem. I discovered the river topography was easy to follow on the chart compared to most other landmarks, since I was over the river here and there along the way. As I flew over the big curves in the river it was easy to find them on the chart and from that determine my location.

In a small airplane like the 150, there's not much room to store stuff if two people are occupying the seats. You have to stuff things between the seat cushions and other creative places. I need to remember to keep a pen handy, since it seems that every time I need to write something down I don't have one. I just picked up a kneeboard I can strap onto my leg and keep stuff easily available, and I'll get that set up better before my next flight. Once I get it figured out I will make a list of how to be all set up with the kneeboard. That should help me have what I need right when I need it.

At any rate, after listening to the terminal info recording for Salem on the radio, we dialed in the Salem tower frequency and let them know we were about 10 miles to the north and inbound to land. We were cleared for a straight-in approach, which I actually have never done, so that was cool. That means I didn't have to fly a pattern, I was already heading toward the runway so all I had to do was slide to the left a little bit and descend.

I was told to contact the tower and report when I was at about 2 miles out. That's hard to determine when you're just learning to judge distance. I actually told him I was two miles out when I was probably closer to three miles or so away, and there was another airplane closer wanting to land, so Kelly jumped in and updated the controller. I flew the direct approach behind the faster airplane and floated it in to a pretty darned nice landing (if I do say so myself).

Kelly and I had lunch at the restaurant located right there at the airport (great place to eat, by the way) and went over my flight plan for the next trip, which will be to Corvallis. We also talked about airplanes and other stuff. Then it was back out to the airplane on the ramp, we checked the plane and got back inside. Once we got started and contacted the ground controller, we started taxiing to the departure runway. Most of my flying time has been at uncontrolled airports, so it was different to have someone directing my taxi path. We did the run-up check, got into the air and made a couple left turns to head back toward Twin Oaks.

On the way back Kelly tried to get the Garmin 296 GPS to work but it was having a hard time getting itself all figured out, like it had not been used in a long time. Part way though the return trip it gathered enough info to work properly and started updating properly. We had a few minutes, so Kelly briefly showed me all the cool things it can do. In short, it's amazingly useful technology. Of course it will let you know where you are and where to fly to get somewhere else, but it does much more. It has complete airport information including runways and frequencies, will show you about how close you are to terrain as you fly over it, displays detailed airspace info, and a lot more. It's very cool.

Also on the return trip, Kelly pulled a couple brief emergency drills on me. The first one was in a rural area, and he pulled the throttle to idle. I set the glide speed and then found the wind direction, and from there a whole bunch of fields that would be good to land in.

After returning to normal flight we flew a little while longer, and then while near a small airport called Sportsman, he again pulled power on the engine to idle and got on the radio and declared to the area traffic that we were simulating an engine out landing at that airport. Looks like a real drill, I thought. So, I immediately turned to the airport and got the airplane's speed under control, dialed in some flaps since we were pretty darned high, and flew toward the runway. After dumping in some more flaps after the runway was assured, we headed toward the surface. I started to get prepped to touch down, and about 30 feet off the ground Kelly directed me to go-around. I pushed in the throttle and carb heat, then leveled out and got airspeed up while starting a climb. I had to reduce flaps to be able to climb much at all, and I got out of there just fine.

I climbed back up to our low cruising altitude at about 1400 feet and Kelly turned off the GPS again, and told me to find Twin Oaks by ground reference and land. I flew over a valley and around a ridge I am familiar with and then spotted the airport in the distance. The trees have lost all their leaves and everything looks different, but as I got closer I became more and more confident I was looking at the airport and not a nursery or some other location.

I flew the left traffic pattern for Runway 02 and landed the airplane as smoothly as I have ever landed it, maybe even more so. I barely felt it touch down. Wow, my landings are so much better now, it's really amazing.

And that was it. My next flight is tomorrow, and we're flying a longer dual cross-country flight to Corvallis that I planned before. I'll just get a fresh weather briefing in the morning and update my flight plan.

After that, Kelly tells me I'll be flying some solo flights to airports around the area that I'm familiar with (such as Aurora, Mulino, McMinnville, Hillsboro, and several others nearby), and that now is the time for me to pick where I want to fly to for my solo cross country and start planning that. I'm thinking maybe someplace on the coast, that would be fun. Or somewhere in Washington maybe. Kelly says he figures I will probably be done with this before the Christmas break. Wow, really? That would be a great Christmas present to myself, heh.

I'll post some of the audio from today's flight once I have it edited.