Real Life has interfered with Flying Life for far too long. When there has been good flying weather, there's been more work than you can imagine. When work has been slack, the weather has been unacceptable. And on at least one occasion, when both items aligned, the IFR Pilot couldn't get the engine started, flooded it, and then ran the battery down. Due in Columbus shortly thereafter, Mike Hotel had to be return to the hangar pronto and the A4 was flown to the meeting.
Translation: Not a lot of hours in the logbook so far.
This morning, however, everything aligned. Weather was just about CAVU with the exception of some morning ground fog/mist in low lying areas. With the boss out of town, work could wait.
I met with CFI DC, and we blasted off for a bit of instrument work. After 1.5 hours, we had knocked out ILS 1 @ CAK twice, LOC 25 @ AKR (runways closed!), and the GPS 2 @ 3G3 (love that LNAV+V on the Garmin 430W) with a procedure turn/hold at DALTS.
Notable deficiencies:
1. Late turn onto the localizer the first time at CAK.
2. Failure to retract gear following low approach at AKR. Which explains why it took forever to get to DALTS for the procedure turn.
3. Neglected to add the last notch of flaps when landing at The Home Base.
Things done well:
1. Kept all altitudes within tolerances.
2. Accurately anticipated parallel entry to the hold.
3. Checked the identifier on the localizers.
With that, the Mrs. and I are off to Connecticut this weekend to visit with mi familia.
1 comment:
This is an eBook short story about a teenaged pilot’s harrowing experience flying a small airplane as a swordfish spotter over shark-infested waters off the La Jolla, San Diego, CA coast in the 1970’s.
Here is the first installment, with a few paragraphs to follow about every day…
IN THE EVENT OF A WATER LANDING
A short story by Paul Mac Copright 2009 twitter.com/PaulThePilot
www.PaulThePilot.com
CHAPTER 1 - IF IT'S A GLIDER MEET, IT MUST BE SATURDAY
The engine sputtered and almost quit. I was still a mile high, over open ocean, and there were sharks everywhere. I knew about the sharks because it was my job to differentiate them from the swordfish I spotted for fishing boats. I saw sharks every day - hundreds of them - and many close to shore. I tried to keep them out of my mind when I was surfing.
The tall Torrey Pines sped past my cockpit window at maybe 70 mph when I should have been going 55 maximum. I was way too high and fast. The postage-stamp-sized strip of dirt was about two football fields long. It was about one ball field wide, and lined with cars and spectators on both edges. I could see the gliders and people near the cliff's edge blocking the runway end. Were I to overshoot the far end, and somehow bounce over the obstacles, there were still 400 foot shear cliffs plummeting to the famous nude beach below.
read the whole story to date here
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