I have done a lot of ruminating about various social issues lately and it was bumming me out because all of those issues are as far from flying as they can be. Important to be sure, but not specifically or even remotely close to the purpose of my blog. Forgive me I just can’t let some things go unchecked. Illegal immigration and incompetence in Washington we will most likely always have but flights of fancy are fleeting so they should always warrant closer attention.
A few weeks ago my brother-in-law did something that 10 years ago was a dream. He bought a car on eBay. The deal he got was amazing and the fact that the vehicle was located only 7 hours away by car did little to deter him. Car buying through eBay is a family tradition and it is a great way to purchase good vehicles with a reasonable certainty that you are not getting a lemon. The only downside is that invariably the vehicles seem to always be 7-10 hours away by car. Not a problem, not in the age of air travel. He called me and asked if I could fly him down to get it from Knoxville.
Like most people who do not fly for a living, finding time to fly is an exercise in conscious conflict resolution. The fact is that even to do an hour of touch and goes requires three hours of time away from home. It is just how it plays out. A long cross-country with return is a full day affair even if the leg lengths are a couple of hours long. I knew that weather was an issue; it always is in Southeastern, Ohio. Notice how I did not qualify that with a time frame. The fact is that aside from a two-week period in the fall, there is no time of the year when you will find pure blue sky in Ohio. It is one reason why midwestern pilots become either very good scud runners or very good IFR pilots.
I fly occasionally in California. Occasionally enough that every time I do I require a check-out to make sure that I fly a 172 on the west coast as well as I do on the east coast. I never balk at this requirement because invariably I learn something or meet a new instructor and fellow operator of the wing. Invariably after a few minutes the instructor looks over at me and says, you are okay. So I usually reply, “Well I have bought an hour of this so give me an hour’s worth.” And so it goes. The next day is usually filled with me taking relatives for flights or just cruising the Sacramento Valley and enjoying weather that I never get in Ohio. The end of this stream of thought is that one can easily fly as much as one wants to in California and never need an IFR ticket.
This is not to say that you can fly freely in California and not know how to operate a radio or feel good talking to Norcal or Oakland. If you are a safe VFR pilot you had bettered be able to use a radio while flitting around the Bay.
But back to weather. I have written about this many times before and as always it comes down to this; Ohio has horrible weather. Even when ‘clear’ we have a phenomenon called ‘haze’. Haze makes the best VFR day a day with visibilities as low as 1 mile. As a young pilot I once found myself departing KPKB in such dense haze that even with my venerable Garmin 95, I elected to abort the short flight to KCRW (Charleston, WV) because I could really only see straight down. I was early enough in the game that it never occurred to me to climb up to about 8000 feet and arrive at that blissful margin that defines ‘clear’ air from the soup that lies underneath. Instead I found myself saying, “This is nuts!” and I turned around, landed and drove to Charleston. So much for the utility of flying.
But this was a blessing because it impressed upon me the need to fly instruments legally and comfortably. So many years later I am here and my ticket (not the new fancy plastic one mind you, I am actually searching for another rating just so I can swap my license for a plastic new one) reads Commercial ASMEL Instrument or thereabouts. I am going off the top of my head to avoid the walk to my logbook.
So the ticket is good enough but what about my brain?
As it turned out during our two weeks of waiting for weather, my schedule and my brother-in-law’s job requirements to align like the planets, I realized that I was going to have to work a 12 hour night shift, another 6 hours during the day and then drive an hour over to the airport. This effectively left me departing with about 24 hours since my last sleep. Departing with every intention of flying on the gauges and in the clouds with my very un-pilot familiar brother-in-law. Not the recipe for a sure thing in terms of safe flight.
Judgment is everything in flying. I returned in VFR conditions because I judged my abilities to be not up to flying in thick haze and being able to effectively see and avoid other traffic. Countless times over the years I have had to make a call. Sometimes it is a go around on a short field approach, other’s it is a deviation around weather; always it is a calculated change of plans in order to maximize safety. Fatigue is perhaps one of the biggest issues in accidents. Foggy brains are not good in situations that require quick action.
I made the call and had one of the young flight instructors agree to go along. He is just starting and married. I am well along in marriage and started a long while ago so the additional cost of his time helped him out and kept me firmly back in the realm of hedging my bets properly. He got the airplane requested, in this case a well equipped Cherokee with a glass panel and I did my part by showing up.
Arriving early I had already pulled the proper sectionals, low altitude charts and approach plates for Ohio through Tennessee. It is my habit to outline my flight plan on a plain sheet of paper. This usually takes the form of my fixes along a straight line. Next to those fixes I write the tower or Unicom frequencies, the major runway alignments and any phone numbers for FBOs. I put the MEAs (minimum enroute altitudes) along the lines and also prospective alternates in their rough position referencing the line. I suppose that there is a computer program that does this automatically but I haven’t found one yet for the Mac and after many years I can whip one of these out pretty quickly. Winds, current weather etc also go into the mix. In the end I have a single sheet of paper to reference, jot down clearances and just keep handy and I don’t have to keep a massive enroute chart in my lap.
My brother-in-law and the CFI showed up. I went ahead and filed. Being old school and seldom having flown /G aircraft I of course filed KUNI -ECB-V331 -AZQ-V115-VXV-KTYS. A perfectly good /U flight plan. The CFI politely reminded me that in this airplane KUNI-dir-KTYS would work very nicely as well. Along with the piles of gray hair that fall in my lap every time I get a haircut, such things remind me of my age.
Glass does not get up and going like the old school does. The systems need time to align and time will probably tell us that our engines will appreciate this in the long term. You cannot take an Avidyne Entegra system and start rolling after turning it on. You wait with a big warning on the screen until the system is just darn good and ready for you to leave. The system will tell you when it has figured out where it is and then and only then can you be assured that all those little pixels in front of you are going to reliably inform you of where and how you are. Again, I am certain that this time spent at low idle is probably a healthy way for the engine to get going.
Much like a larger airplane with an FMS, this little glass Cherokee also wants to be programmed correctly. I spent some time on the FPL page entering in KTYS and then cross filling the second 430. Once completed the PFD in front of me showed its little magenta line pointed toward Knoxville. Finally, after all of the programming, we were able to do real airplane stuff and taxi to run-up and in time departure.
I had for some reason forgotten that this little Cherokee actually only had 160 horsepower. The three of us were all of the bigger person persuasion and I had specifically done a weight and balance calculation before departure. The numbers showed us parked at the very top right corner of the envelope, inside the envelope, but very corner nevertheless. I had this in mind as I briefed the departure. During climb out we showed a 300-500 foot per minute climb while trimmed at 80 knots. After some time I glanced at the CFI and mentioned that we had a pretty anemic 180-horse power. He corrected me and it suddenly made sense, our performance ‘deficiency’.
It turns out that the Lycoming O-320 is now one of the company’s most popular engines. It is quickly replacing the O-360 in airplanes like the RVs and other smooth and clean two place machines. It is a pretty efficient engine and certainly reliable. It is not however a very good engine to put on a four place airplane and with a fuel burn of 9.9 gph at 8000 feet I would have preferred whatever penalty I would have incurred in fuel burn to be turning the 180 hp O-360. It is amazing to me that someone would go to the trouble of putting all those thousands of dollars of avionics into a Cherokee that has marginally less power than my old 172.
Our climb was good from the perspective that we were showing a good 90 knots groundspeed and taking our merry sweet time getting through about 4000 feet of clouds. It never hurts to have actual IFR time logged and the world of white provided that. Unbeknownst to me, in the back, my brother-in-law was fighting to keep his lunch down. He never said a word but after we returned he admitted to my wife that he had felt sick but didn’t want to say anything because he was having such a good time.
The real advantage of glass is the attitude information that it displays. It is very easy to hold level flight with a glass system. Principally because very minor bank or attitude deviations are very obvious. With an airspeed tape and a VSI bug you can really peg your attitude and demonstrate a degree of precision that is much harder to achieve with the old steam gauges.
After about 15 minutes of climbing, and some bumps, we started to break out. I had planned for an 8000-foot final and this put us squarely in the realm of being on top of the clouds but dragging the bottom half of the airplane through them at times. Nothing better. There is a unique feeling to ‘skimming’ clouds and one that demonstrates both the beauty of instrument flying and the incredible experience that flying in general gives to pilots. For about an hour we tooled along like this, taking it all in, while watching the GPS update our position.
My other brother-in-law is amazed that you can turn a 7-hour drive into a two-hour flight. I am not because to look at a map, Knoxville would seem to be pretty close. Unfortunately Appalachia has never been blessed with the sort of super-freeway infrastructure that say Los Angeles is. You just cannot get there from here as we like to say.
Looking down we began to see some breaks in the clouds and the hills and valleys of Eastern Kentucky passed below us. I was reminded of just how hilly it is down there when I flew in a King Air down to 1A6 or Middlesboro, KY to go see what was then a ‘Glacier Girl’ in the process of re-becoming. 1A6 lies in the middle of a bowl and one needs to be on airspeed and on altitude when you take a twin t-prop into that field. From 8000 feet up, this fact of life of Kentucky geography is just not quite as dramatic.
About 30.3 miles out (again, a beautiful feature of moving map GPS systems) Knoxville Approach started us on our descent. We were set up for 23R but after a few minutes we were re-directed to 23L. I could hear the RJ ground traffic before I could see them lined up. We lumbered along at an anemic 90 knots for a few minutes before my concern over the prodigious amounts of jet fuel prompted me to push the throttle forward and fly it at 125 knots to the threshold.
Fast approaches in Cherokees to 9000-foot runways do not concern me. For the 350 hour CFI next to me it seemed a little odd. I casually mentioned that pull the throttles over the threshold would slow us down fine and we could save those poor Canadair drivers a few pounds of jet-A by getting there faster. In fact, a 10 nm final at 90 knots is 2 minutes slower to the line than 125 knots over 10 nm. The two General Electric CF34-3B1 engines on the -200 burn about 325 gallons per hour. For the sake of argument, let’s say at idle you reduce that to 100 gallons per hour or 1.667 per minute. Well I saved them 3 gallons of fuel. Not to further lose the point of this but 3 gallons represented 20 minutes in the air for me in the Cherokee.
We touched down at 1000 feet and rolled off the runway and onto the taxiway at the midpoint of the field. Ground got us to TAC Air and it became quickly apparent from all of the pristine King Airs, Falcons, Citations and other expensive members of the Part 91 community that Knoxville must have some serious financial capital powering its economy. You know the FBO takes care of some big customers when they have an overhang that can accommodate a GV under cover just so everyone can get out of the plane and into the FBO without getting a drop of rain or a ray of sunshine on them.
We dropped off my brother-in-law and he got his ‘new’ car. A very nice new truck. The CFI and I headed for Wendy’s because by this time, now some 28 hours since sleep, I was not so much tired as hungry. The TAC Air people had given us the keys to a nice Taurus Courtesy Car and we made good use of it, dropping off and picking up the required items. In a matter of 20 minutes we were back, paid for our fuel and heading for the airplane.
The flight back saw lower ceilings as most of the afternoon clouds had dissipated. Our departure took us over some enormous homes and what looked to be wealthy areas of Tennessee. I sat back in the seat and enjoyed the smooth air and the setting sun. A few pictures just to make this all more interesting and after Atlanta and Indianapolis had been spoken too we ended up back with Huntington. For the sake of the experience I requested the GPS 7 approach into UNI. We flew it to the final approach fix and finding traffic in the pattern doing night work I elected to break off and fly the left downwind to 25. The CFI asked if I was going to fly it at 125 knots and smiled. I laughed and replied that just for his sake I would show him that I actually could fly a controlled slow approach.
I was down and turning off the runway onto the taxiway in 1000 feet. I looked at him and told him that the “entire runway was available for landing” so long or short as long as on the runway only is perfectly acceptable. I think he would really enjoy flying to Oshkosh and being the third airplane in the stick landing on the last third of the runway with two behind. We might just do that next year.
By the time I arrived home I had not had sleep for some 30 hours. One of the things my profession has taught me is how to go without sleep and still function at some reasonable level. I do not recommend it. It has taken its toll in other ways but the sheer enjoyment of doing what I love to help out someone else is more than worth the effort. The price of this endeavor came to just about what I used to spend for hangar rent and my monthly airplane loan payment and in the end I handed the keys to someone else who had the responsibility to care for all the other issues. Not a bad exchange. Had I been rested it would have cost me $120 less for the CFI’s share. Not a problem it was worth it.
When I walked in the door my other brother-in-law was there. I could see his wheels turning, “Wow! Knoxville in 2 hours! That is amazing.”
“Nope,” I replied, “just time and distance and no mountains to cross. “
“ How long would it take to get to Chicago?”
I sat there and quickly did some mental math, “Oh about 3 and a half hours.” I could see that this was an appealing idea since it meant about 7 less hours enroute than it would if you drove the trip.
“Man, that would be great.”
I looked up and told him, “Just say the word and I can make it happen. We can split the costs.”
I am up for it any time.
Fly Safe.
