Guess I will need to change the Blog name again

I used to call this blog “Ship’s Log” when I had a boat. Then I sold the boat and renamed it Flight Log. Now I have sold the plane and I guess it will just be old man’s log.

Back Home, and maybe for sale

I flew up to Charlotte yesterday, met with the shop people about my plane’s annual inspection, and spent some time with the broker there discussing the value of my plane. As for the inspection, the plane is perfect at nearly 1,000 hours. Everything checked out well, and I had the prop overhauled and a few other inspections recommended at this time.

As for the broker, as much as I love flying and love this plane, it might make sense to give it up. I flew it more than 150 hours in 2013 but less than 50 hours this year. Much as I love it, I need to look at the cost/benefit analysis and determine whether I am using it enough to make it worthwhile. We shall see.

More DeLorme Tracking

DeLorme inReach

I have a new gadget I have been learning to use when I fly. It is called a DeLorme inReach Satellite Communicator. It does all kinds of cool things. First, it is a GPS that figures out your location and transmits it to a site that displays it on a map on the internet. Second, you can send and receive texts using the Iridium satellite network. And third, it has an SOS button that will transmit your need for help to rescue authorities while also giving them your location.

Today I flew from Hinesville, Georgia up to Rock Hill, SC, just south of Charlotte, to leave my plane to get its annual inspection. I texted the Lovely Laura Lee and a couple of other people when I took off, giving them a link to follow me on the DeLorme map. The trip was uneventful, and I’m spending the night here near Charlotte, where I fly out tomorrow on an airline while my plane remains here to get its inspection. 

Here is the map of my trip today, and a zoomed in look at my location when I landed. I had the gadget set to transmit my location every 10 minutes. Very cool.

Still Flying

So here’s a shout out to my friend David Ovson who claims to be a reader and follower of the plane. I ran into David the other day and he questioned why FlightAware had me flying to Auburn last weekend without showing a return trip. No, I’m not still in Auburn. We flew down to the game VFR with flight following and got put into the system. On the trip home, Air Traffic Control was too busy to enter us fully into the system so FlightAware had no idea we departed. Atlanta Center did give us radar following until we were close enough to call Birmingham Approach to watch us home. While I usually file IFR flight plans to get radar traffic advisories on entire trips, that was not the best idea flying into a game at Auburn as they were all too busy to be much help, and the weather was great.

Tomorrow morning I will fly back to Savannah (to the airport at Wright Field in Hinesville where I keep the plane). I have already filed an IFR flight Plan for traffic advisories, and to keep David happy as he follows me along. I’ll try to do a better job of updating the blog. Let’s have lunch when I’m back in Birmingham David.

Weather

Is it just me, or is anyone else sick of rain? This has been a terrible summer to try to fly anywhere in the Southeast. In the mornings, we have low foggy ceilings. As they begin to burn off near noon, the afternoon thunderstorms begin to build. It’s hard to catch the right moment to launch. And Thursday, it was complicated by a front that had passed through Birmingham and became stationary between Birmingham and Savannah. Having passed on flying because of weather Wednesday, I was trying really hard to get back to Savannah Thursday, and somehow I timed it just right. I left Birmingham around 11:00 am CDT and arrived at my destination at around 2:15 pm EDT. The flight track above shows the weather at some point during my trip but there were actually more openings to fly through than appear here.

It was not an easy flight. I was in IFR conditions most of the day, had to fly south to Eufala before heading east, and then had to dodge thunderstorms and shoot a full GPS approach almost to minimums to get into Wright Field in Hinesville, GA. But it was a confidence builder. At one point, the gaps between storms I had been aiming for began to close up, and I thought about landing somewhere near Macon. But with the help of onboard weather and helpful controllers, I was able to shoot the narrow gaps and dodge the storms.

Then I had to worry about getting into Wright Field. The minimums on a GPS approach to Runway 6L are close to 600 feet above the ground, and the ceiling was at 400 feet most of the day. The last hour of my trip the celiling had risen to 700 feet and just before my arrival were reported at 900 feet, so the approach was a piece of cake, and I made it back safe and sound. Had I left Birmingham any earlier, I couldn’t have gotten into Wright Field and would have had to divert elsewhere. Had I left any later, the stoms would have forced me to land somewhere near Eufala.

Just to complicate things, I got a screen alert during the trip that the engine sensors were not reporting in to the glass cockpit and all engine readouts went away. This presented a few new problems because I no longer had fuel guages, manifold pressure, RPM’s, fuel flow, engine temperatures or oil pressure. I let the air traffic controller know of the problem but I quickly figured out that there was no sense in stopping, as a landing at my destination wasn’t far and would be no more difficult than a landing along the way. Without fuel guages, I stayed on the fuel tank I was using longer than usual so that I coud be sure of having plenty of fuel for the landing in the other tank. I left the RPM where it had been set at 2400 RPM until going to full RPM just before landing. I also left the mixture where it had been set for leaning at 9,000 feet until moving it to full rich for landing. The throttles I simply adjusted for proper airspeed and descent rate throughout the approach. Everything worked out just fine, and I landed without any problems. Since this wasn’t a real emergency, I didn’t want to reset any circuit braekers in the air for fear of screwing up something else. But after landing a resetting of the Data Aquisition Unit (DAU) breaker solved the problem. If it happens again, the DAU may need to be replaced (under warranty).

So here I am back at Ford, until my next attempt to find good weather. 

Flight 214, revisited

Here is the best analysis I have seen yet of this crash, explaining that it is hard to believe that three pilots in the cockpit would not notice the fatal loss of airspeed, and noting how the autothrottle settings may have contributed. From http://leadership.ng/news/260713/b777-accident-automation-paralysis:

B777 Accident: Automation Paralysis?

Airspeed eroded despite six eyes on the Asiana 777 flight deck.

Complications and distractions aside, over-reliance on automation systems appears to have trumped basic flying skills and crew resource management in the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at San Francisco International Airport on July 6.

Adding to the confusion are multiple modes for autothrottle systems that link to complex auto-flight and autopilot systems. Autothrottles provide automatic speed or vertical speed control, including stall prevention in some modes, allowing pilots to focus on the other tasks. According to Boeing documentation, the 777’s autopilot has five operating modes.

Mode confusion could have played a role in the Asiana crash -the pilot-in-command of the highly automated 777-200ER expected that the Boeing’s autothrottle system would hold the aircraft’s approach speed to a pre-set value of 137kt. as the aircraft, high on the initial approach, descended to capture a visual or electronic glideslope.

The system did not maintain the speed, leaving the engines at flight idle through the final portions of the approach and placing the aircraft very near an aerodynamic stall less than 200ft. above San Francisco Bay in a high-drag state with landing gear and flaps deployed to 30 degrees before pilots detected the error.

The crew attempted a full-thrust go around, but the call came too late, as the twinjet’s main landing gear and tail clipped a seawall ahead of Runaway 28L 1.5 seconds later. The impact removed the landing gear and the empennage, leaving everything forward of the aft pressure bulkhead to skid and spin uncontrolled on its belly down the runaway. Despite the violent conclusion, the airframe and cabin largely held together, allowing 123 of the 307 passengers and crew on board to walk away unassisted.

While the NTSB’s final analysis will likely take a year or more to complete, preliminary information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders and pilot interviews indicate that distractions and automation surprises appeared to cause the pilots to lose altitude and airspeed awareness.

“I don’t know how the whole crew could take their eyes off the speed,” a 777 fleet captain for a major carrier tells Aviation Week. “One of the basic tenets of a stabilized approach is speed.”

Internationally accepted guidelines call for air speed and thrust to be stable and the aircraft on the proper glide path by 1000ft. above ground level for an instrument approach and 500ft. for a visual approach. The 777 captain’s airline recommends that pilots have the landing gear down by 2000 ft. altitude and final flaps no lower than 1500 ft.  If the approach becomes unstable at any time below the entry altitude, pilots are advised to perform a go-around.

Complicating the arrival for the Asiana crew was an air traffic control request to maintain 180kt. until 5nm from the airport during the final leg of the visual approach, requiring pilots to bleed off 20kt. airspeed before lowering the flaps to 30 degrees. The tower later cleared Flight 214 to land when it was 1.5nm from the runaway. Some carriers allow for pilots to land with 25 degrees flaps, which can be deployed at 185kt. or below.

The left-seat pilot, the “pilot-flying,” was not officially the pilot-in-command as he was roughly midway through the airline’s initial operating experience phase for 777 checkouts. The instructor pilot in the right seat was pilot-in-command, on his first flight as an instructor pilot. He had never flown a 777 into San Francisco. At press time, it was not clear what roles the two front-seat pilots and a relief first officer in the jump seat had set in terms of crew resource management.

Though GPS-based vertical guidance was likely available to replace Runaway 28L’s inoperative instrument landing system glideslope, the Asiana crew may have elected to fly a visual approach using the four-light precision approach path indicator (PAPI) located near the touchdown point on the runway. When centered in the PAPI’s 2.85-deg. glideslope, pilots will see two white and two red lights. All red indicates a position significantly below the glideslope, while all white lights indicates one well above the references glideslope.

The instructor pilot told investigators that at 500 ft. altitude, he realized the aircraft was below the PAPI’s visual glideslope and told the left seat pilot to “pull back” on the control yoke. “He had set the speed at 137kt. and assumed the autothrottles were maintaining the speed,” the NTSB says. Depending on the auto-flight mode selected, autothrottles, if armed and turned on, should automatically control engine thrust to maintain a pre-set speed in  this case 137kt., the reference landing speed for the 777-200ER that day. 

There are caveats, however. In the takeoff/go-around flight-level change (FLCH) auto-flight modes, the autothrottle will not automatically activate to maintain the selected speed. FLCH is pitch mode used to climb or descend at a constant airspeed using the elevator for pitch control. There are also “mode surprises,” certain conditions in which modes will transition without the pilot’s knowledge, potentially putting the automation into a mode like FLCH without the pilot’s knowledge.

By late week, The NTSB had not said whether the pilots had purposefully or mistakenly entered a mode that inhibited the autothrottles, or if the autothrottle system failed. During interviews, the instructor pilot told officials the aircraft was “slightly high” when it descended through 4000ft on the approach and he set the auto-flight system’s vertical speed mode for a 1,500ft./min descent rate. NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said July 10 that during the final 2.5 min. of flight, the flight data recorder shows transition to “multiple autopilot modes and multiple autothrottle modes.” “We need to understand what those modes were, if they were commanded by pilots, commanded inadvertently, and if the pilots understood what the mode was doing,” he says.

Source: AW & ST July 15, 2013

Flight 214

I have a number of people asking me as a pilot what could possibly have gone wrong to cause the crash in San Francisco yesterday. Well, it could have been any number of things. But it is possible to look at what actually happened and speculate on a few things that could cause it.

I have gone back and looked at the track of the flight on a site called FlightRadar24. What set up the problem, if the data is correct, was that the plane was doing a very fast descent to the final approach course and for some reason failed to slow the descent and get into a stabilized approach at the appropriate time. It was descending at 1,536 feet per minute when it was only 1,000 feet above the water which would mean that it was only 40 seconds away from hitting the water. Somewhere during that last minute, the pilot pulled the nose up sharply to stop the descent and try to make it to the runway. However, the sharp pullup without any additional power slowed the plane down to 85 knots while it was still falling at 768 feet per minute 75 feet above the water, and a stall warning went off only four seconds before the tail hit the breakwater. Normal final approach speed should have been around 135 knots with a roughly 600 feet per minute descent.

So what could have caused the rapid descent to go on too long? Any number of things. The altimeter could have malfunctioned or been set incorrectly so that the crew, over water, thought their altitude was higher than it was. The crew could have thought the autopilot was set to level them off at a higher altitude and not paid attention as they descended too low. Alternatively, they could have thought the autopilot would automatically join the ILS glide slope to level their altitude, when the glide slope was not functioning for that runway yesterday.

Any of these situations could have been caused by an equipment malfunction, but that is hard to explain with the redundancy built into these planes, and with at least two and possibly four pilots in the cockpit. What is worse, if the problem was noticed 20 or 30 seconds before impact, there should have been time to apply power, pull the nose up, get the gear up, and go around. However, at seven seconds before impact when someone called for a speed increase or at four seconds when the stall warning went off, there was no time left.

It has been pointed out that it is sometimes difficult to have good depth perception or judge altitude on a visual approach over water. But this plane was on short final, and every pilot knows what the runway should look like in that configuration. I have no idea what happened on the flight, but it is very difficult for me to understand why the problem was not noticed earlier.

Update on Sunday, July 7, 2013 at 10:04PM by John Samford

Here’s some additional tracking information of the flight from FlightAware. Each line shows the time, latitude, longitude, course (West), airspeed in knots and mph, altitude, and vertical speed in feet per minute. 

01:25PM 37.5548 -122.2230 298° West 195 224 3,100 -1,140 

01:25PM 37.5614 -122.2390 297° West 190 219 2,800 -1,500 

01:25PM 37.5669 -122.2520 298° West 187 215 2,400 -1,320 

01:25PM 37.5730 -122.2660 299° West 187 215 2,200 -1,080 

01:26PM 37.5785 -122.2790 298° West 186 214 1,900 -1,020 

01:26PM 37.5847 -122.2940 298° West 178 205 1,700 -1,020 

01:26PM 37.5900 -122.3070 297° West 169 194 1,400 -1,380 

01:27PM 37.5988 -122.3270 299° West 145 167 800 -1,380 

01:27PM 37.6016 -122.3340 297° West 141 162 600 -1,320 

01:27PM 37.6045 -122.3410 298° West 134 154 400 -900 

01:27PM 37.6073 -122.3480 297° West 123 142 300 -840 

01:27PM 37.6103 -122.3550 298° West 109 125 100 -120 

01:28PM 37.6170 -122.3740 294° West 85 98 200 120 

So you can see at 1:27 that the plane got down to 800 and then 600 feet above sea level while still descending at over 1,300 feet per minute. The descent rate alone is not alarming in a jet, but the descent would need to be arrested at the appropriate altitude. At 600 feet he was close to normal approach speed of 136 but needed power to slow or stop the descent. I don’t understand why a pilot would be pulling the nose up during this final minute without applying power, unless something wasn’t working or he somehow wasn’t aware of his altitude and distance to the runway. It seems to violate the very first principles you learn when you go out in a little Cessna and do stalls.

Update on Tuesday, July 9, 2013 at 10:32AM by John Samford

Some of the data we are getting now from the NTSB shows that the speeds I got from FlightAware and FlightRadar24 were incorrect. Still, it is clear that power should have been applied much earlier to maintain both descent rate and airspeed during the approach. It is unclear whether the “auto throttle” was disengaged, but it has been stated that the autopilot was disengaged at 1,600 feet.

Much has been made about the ILS glide slope being off for this runway. But that had been widely published in Notices to Airman, and it would have been included in the weather briefing the pilots would have listened to before contacting San Francisco Approach Control.

Much has also been made about the pilot’s lack of experience in this particular plane, but little of the training to get rated in a new jet would cover the basics of a visual approach. When the runway is in sight, every pilot knows what it should look like if you are descending on a proper glide slope. And every pilot knows from their second flying lesson how to use pitch and power to maintain the required airspeed and descent rate for the particular plane. If there wasn’t any clear aircraft or instrument malfunction, it’s looking increasingly likely that the Crew’s situational awareness and resource management failed miserably.

(From Wikipedia: “Crew resource management or cockpit resource management (CRM) is a procedure and training system in systems where human error can have devastating effects. Used primarily for improving air safety, CRM focuses on interpersonal communication, leadership, and decision making in the cockpit. The training originated from a NASA workshop in 1979, which found that the primary cause of most aviation accidents was human error, citing the Tenerife airport disaster in 1977. CRM has since been adopted in different industries and organizations including fire services (to improve situational awareness on the fireground) and the maritime industry, where CRM is referred to as BRM (Bridge Resource Management) or MRM (Maritime Resource Management).”)

Update on Tuesday, July 9, 2013 at 08:37PM by John Samford

Tonight it is coming out that the crew was relying on the “auto throttle” to maintain the correct approach speed. I don’t have any familiarity with these systems, so I won’t venture any guesses. Apparently, the crew felt they could pull the nose up and the auto throttle would keep speed at the targeted 137 knots. Whether this system failed or was in some kind of manual override position will remain to be determined. 

One online news story stated the issue as follows: 

National Transportation Safety Board chairman Deborah Hersman said the training captain who was instructing the pilot flying the Boeing 777 has told investigators he thought the auto throttle was programmed for a speed of 137 knots - the target speed the pilots had selected for how fast they wanted the plane to be flying when it crossed the runway threshold.

Instead, investigators said the plane reached speeds as low as 103 knots and was in danger of stalling because it was losing lift before it hit the seawall.

The pilot told investigators he realised the auto throttle, similar to a cruise control, was not engaged just seconds before they hit. Their last-second efforts to rev the plane back up and abort the landing failed, although numerous survivors report hearing the engines roar just before impact.

Asked if the auto throttle was malfunctioning, Hersman said that is something investigators are looking into as they examine hundreds of parameters of data downloaded from the plane’s flight data recorders.

An overreliance on automated cockpit systems has figured in dozens of air crashes and incidents in recent years.

“Some people, if they believe the auto throttles are engaged and if they are used to flying with the auto throttle engaged, will not realize that the auto throttles are not engaged and will let the plane get pretty slow. That has come up before,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consult and former Air Line Pilots Association accident investigator.

National Transportation Safety Board chairman Deborah Hersman said the training captain who was instructing the pilot flying the Boeing 777 has told investigators he thought the auto throttle was programmed for a speed of 137 knots - the target speed the pilots had selected for how fast they wanted the plane to be flying when it crossed the runway threshold.
Instead, investigators said the plane reached speeds as low as 103 knots and was in danger of stalling because it was losing lift before it hit the seawall.
The pilot told investigators he realised the auto throttle, similar to a cruise control, was not engaged just seconds before they hit. Their last-second efforts to rev the plane back up and abort the landing failed, although numerous survivors report hearing the engines roar just before impact.
Asked if the auto throttle was malfunctioning, Hersman said that is something investigators are looking into as they examine hundreds of parameters of data downloaded from the plane’s flight data recorders.
An overreliance on automated cockpit systems has figured in dozens of air crashes and incidents in recent years.
“Some people, if they believe the auto throttles are engaged and if they are used to flying with the auto throttle engaged, will not realize that the auto throttles are not engaged and will let the plane get pretty slow. That has come up before,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consult and former Air Line Pilots Association accident investigator.

Operation Munchkin

Yesterday the lovely Laura Lee and I had the privilege of carrying out what we called Operation Munchkin, to get two cute grandchildren from Birmingham over to The Ford Plantation in Georgia. We have a family reunion coming up this weekend so we wanted the two oldest munchkins, Stella and Pierce, here early to spend a little time with “Pops” and “WuWu” without their parents in the way. As I’ve always said, children and grandparents get along so well because they have a common enemy.

We took off from the airport in Hinesville at around 10 am Eastern time and arrived Birmingham just after 11 am Central. The skies were fairly clear early in the morning, but typical summer clouds and showers were already starting to build on the trip west. I knew it was likely to be a bumpy ride back with the girls, but the real storms were scattered out enough to dodge everything serious.

Stella will be five years old in August and Pierce will be four in November. Stella has only flown once in her life on an airline when she was an infant (although the claims to remember it). Pierce has never flown before. So we wanted the experience to be fun, and it was. You can see from the giggling in the picture above that they seemed to enjoy themselves. Laura Lee sat with them in the back and they all giggled whenever we hit bumpy air. They are convinced that the clouds had the hiccups, and said their favorite part of the flight was the bumps. There were buildups on the return trip, but we dodged the worst of it and laughed our way through the clouds.

I’m convinced that people’s attitudes about flying can be formed early by conveying confidence and humor to them. If children spend time with adults who are afraid of flying, they will end up afraid of flying. If they grow up giggling at every bump in the clouds, you might spot them giggling on a business trip 30 years from now.

Pilots often claim that flying is safer than driving even though this has largely been disproved by statistics. However, what is true for a pilot is that safety is much more in your own hands flying than it is driving. There is no question that most flying accidents begin with pilot error or pilot misjudgement. If there is an accident, it is much more likely to be your own fault flying, as opposed to being blindsided by a drunk driver. So for me, I feel much safer flying than I do driving, and I’m happy to play a part in conveying my confidence to a new generation of passengers. 

Operation Munchkin was a great success, and we’re having fun with Stella and Pierce visiting us.

Zig-Zag Approved

I flew today with my friends Chick Preston and his wife Tricia, giving them a ride from the Savannah area back to Birmingham after they borrowed the plane for the weekend. It’s a fair trade. Chick is the most experienced and capable professional pilot I’ve ever known. He needed a ride and I needed some time with him in the right seat looking over my shoulder. A large part of what I still need at this point is simply confidence, and I got a kick out of Chick’s take on today’s weather compared to mine. I woke up this morning concerned about low ceilings and IFR conditions, with forecasts for thunderstorms building all day. I called Chick for his thoughts on the weather and he said “It looks great!”

We left the Midcoast Regional Airport in Hinesville around 1 pm for a 2 1/2 hour trip to Birmingham against a strong headwind, dodging bumpy cumulus buildups and going around more serious thunderstorms. It is expected that you will ask the air traffic controller to deviate around weather and a typical exchange would request permission to turn 10 or 20 degrees one way or the other to avoid weather. The controller will almost always approve the deviation and ask you to let him know when you are back on course. Today Chick handled it in a more casual way and told the controller we were going to need to zig and zag a little around some weather. He responded “N881RJ zig and zag approved.”

After dropping Tricia and Chick in Birmingham, I was looking forward to a strong tailwind to give me a quick flight back. However, that was not to be. As you can see from the FlightAware track, some lofty cloud buildups and a group of thunderstorms forced me to deviate south almost to Eufala, Alabama before finally turning due east towards home. While the tailwind helped after I turned east, I had gone so far out of the way that the return trip took 2 1/2 hours as well.

But it was a good day of flying, and just the thing I needed to get ready for typical summer flying in the south. Thanks for the help Chick. Zig and zag approved.

Out of the shop

I flew back from Birmingham to Charlotte last night and picked up the plane this morning from Skytech, the Piper repair facility in Rock Hill, SC. After a quick 1 hour 20 minute flight, I am back in Savannah.

The plane is flying great. I got 12 all new “fine wire” spark plugs, whatever that means. (The engine is a six-cylinder, but airplanes have two spark plugs per cylinder for redundancy.) The engine had been running rough and the plugs were fouling easily when idling on the ground at full rich. Since I had been told to change out the plugs soon anyway, we hoped this higher quality plug might solve some of the problems, and it appears to have worked as the engine is running very nicely right now.  I also replaced a few of the exhaust gas temperature sensors which were an old type, so that I am now using the recommended sensors on all cylinders. I hope this will solve some of the “gremlins” with the EGT readouts, and so far it is working well. A few other things were checked and fixed including a magneto inspection and adjusting the idle fuel mixture.

Skytech is a great facility and very knowledgeable about this plane and its required maintenance. I had discovered a few things in the engine log that should have been done earlier and these have all now been completed. Everything worked perfectly on the flight back to Georgia, and I will be returning to Skytech for my annual inspection due in November.

The flight back was uneventful. It was  beautiful and fairly smooth, with scattered clouds, but no storms.

CloudAhoy

I’ve been using an iPad app called CloudAhoy which allows me to record the GPS information throughout a flight and play it all back on a computer. The most fun is to choose the “cockpit view” which uses Google Earth to re-create what I would have seen out the window (without clouds or darkness). I then play back the entire flight at 10X real speed so that a 90 minute flight can be watced in nine minutes. Click here for a link to replay today’s flight from Hinesville, GA up to the Piper repair station in Rock Hill, SC. Try playing with the different views and speeds. It’s fun!

Gremlins

We are back to the Savannah area after a trip to Destin, Florida for a wedding this past weekend. The lovely Laura Lee flew with me for her first trip in the new plane. As when we flew together often in the past, she is an excellent co-pilot, and I am considering ordering the uniform at left for her that I found online.

We had a good flight down but the return Sunday was a little challenging due to low ceilings and fog in Destin Sunday morning, and a stationary front bringing low ceilings and rain showers to Georgia all day. But we made it home OK flying through bumpy clouds all the way back. Flying in the clouds and bumps is not always fun, but is good experience for me as I regain the confidence needed to fly in weather.

So I am making good progress with flying skills, but there are what my friend Sean (who bought Steel Magnolia) calls “gremlins” with the plane at the moment that need to be resolved. Wikipedia defines “gremlins” as follows: ”A gremlin is an imaginary creature commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented, with a specific interest in aircraft. Gremlins’ mischievous natures are similar to those of English folkloric imps, while their inclination to damage or dismantle machinery is more modern.”  The good luck gremlin mascot at right flew with 482nd Bomb Group (Heavy) from 1942 to 1945.

First, I have written about how leaning is done using exhaust gas temperature readings for each cylinder. I have had a repeating issue with the sensor for Cylinder 4 EGT. A few weeks ago, I suddenly had no reading from that sensor and a local mechanic here in Hinesville, GA replaced the EGT probe for me. It worked fine for about 30 hours of flying and then failed again so last Wednesday, the EGT probe for cylinder #4 was replaced again. Sunday, I looked over during the flight and again had no reading for cylinder #4 EGT, the third failure for this probe in about six weeks. A few minutes later, I suddenly had no readout from any of the EGT sensors. This is a very strange failure from a bunch of basic temperature sensors, but I have discovered we were supposed to use a specific sensor made by Piper, and that is no doubt part of the problem.

The other issue is that after installing GAMI injectors for all of my cylinders, my engine has begun to run a little rough. I can’t necessarly blame the GAMI injectors as they are supposed to make the engine run more smoothly, but no other work has been done on the engine, and we cannot figure out why it is running rough. With all of this going on, I have spoken to Avidyne which makes the display showing engine readings to figure out the best all-around place to take the plane for diagnosis and repair. It was recommended that I take it up to the Piper Service Center near Charlotte, and I have an appointment there next week. I am hopeful they can sort out the issues and get things running smoothly and displaying properly for me.

Conveniently, I need to be in Birmingham late next week for about a week, and Charlotte is a great place to leave the plane and catch a US Air flight to Birmingham. A week later, I can reverse the process and pick the plane up to return to Savannah. As with boats, much of private plane flying involves travelling to new places to work on the plane.

Crosswind Landings

One of the things you learn when getting a pilot’s license is the technique for doing a “crosswind landing”. Obviously, the best way to land a plane is into the wind. It allows you to maintain an appropriate airspeed while having the slowest possible speed over the ground. So you keep the airplane under control without using up too much runway, and you touch down at a ground speed that allows you to stop quickly before running out of runway. When picking a runway, a pilot always seeks to land, and take off, as close to into the wind as possible.

The problem comes when an airport only has one runway available for your use and the wind happens to be blowing accross rather than down the runway. Every airplane has a “demonstrated crosswind velocity” which simply means it has been landed by a professional pilot in that amount of crosswind in test flights. It is not a limitation, but simply a crosswind speed the manufacturer could certify as safe to land with. Nearly every pilot has landed with crosswinds higher than the demonstrated crosswind speed for his or her plane. I would personally not be alarmed at crosswinds in the 20 knot range, but my skills would be tested.

So let us say you are landing to the north using Runway 36, which means it has a heading close to 360 degrees or due north, and assume the winds are from the west 270 degrees at 20 knots. As you make the approach (at 90 knots in my plane), you would be “crabbing” into the wind and the plane would be aimed at about 347 degrees to maintain your course of 360 toward the runway. You can actually calculate the wind by using something called the Rule of 60. Divide your speed of 90 knots by 60 to get 1.5. Multiply this times your crab angle of 13 degrees and you get roughly a 20 knot crosswind.

The trick on a crosswind landing is to keep this crab angle until right above the runway, at which time you use cross controls to line up with the runway. In our example of a crosswind from the left, you would do this by using right rudder to line up  the plane with the runway while maintaining your course by banking to the left. You land with the left wing low and on the left wheel first, but keep the plane straight with right rudder. The final trick, since my rudder also controls my nose wheel as well as the rudder, is to let off the rudder pressure just before the nose wheel touches the ground, but to keep the left wing low with left aileron throughout the landing roll so the wind doesn’t pick up your left wing and blow you to the right or worst case flip you over.

A perfect crosswind landing in this situation would be on the left main wheel first, then the right wheel, and then on the nose wheel just as you release pressure on the right rudder. The yoke (steering wheel) would be to the left and would stay hard left during the landing roll. It sounds tricky, and it is the first few times you try it, but with practice it becomes almost second nature to a pilot.

So the next time you land with someone, or on an airline flight, don’t be too quick to criticize a landing one wheel at a time. The pilot might be executing a perfect crosswind landing with grace and style.

The Lean Machine

I promised awhile back to bore you with a description of engine leaning procedures in airplanes. This is a good time for those yawning to move on to another topic. But if you are interested, stick with me.

The concept is pretty simple. In an engine, the mixture of fuel and air is just as important as it is in your fireplace. The engine leaning control adjusts the mixture, or the ratio of fuel to air going into the cylinders, and it is particularly important in airplanes because as you increase altitude, there is less barometric pressure to push air into the engine, and the air is less dense (or thinner) so it has less oxygen to burn. So as you increase in altitude, leaning is needed to adjust the amount of fuel in the mixture to match the reduced air pressure and oxygen to give you the desired mixture.

The point is to lower the ratio of fuel to air in the mixture to get to the best setting for your engine at the density altitude and temperature at which you are flying. Pulling the mixture back to full lean will cut off all fuel and stop the engine. As a matter of fact this is exactly how you shut down your engine after you have landed. Pushing the mixture lever to full rich typically gives it a mixture of something like six parts air to one part fuel, and this is set for the particular engine to give a mixture as rich as possible without much loss of power, and to provide enough fuel to cool the engine the most when it is at full takeoff power.

If you climb up to altitude in a plane, level off, and begin to pull the mixture lever back from full rich toward lean, the temperature of the exhaust gas coming out of each cylinder will begin to increase as the fire gets hotter. If you continue leaning, the exhaust gas temperature (EGT) will peak, and then will begin to decline as the mixture moves toward being too lean. Modern planes often have guages that allow you to see the EGT for each cylinder and watch this process unfold, and without specially tuned fuel injectors, the point where each cylinder will hit peak EGT will be different.

Everything I’ve told you so far is factually correct, I think, but when you move on to the question of how to lean an engine at altitude, you enter the realm of superstition and strongly held beliefs among pilots and mechanics, and it is very hard to sort out what is the best setting, and the best method of achieving it. I’m going to start by telling you about the three methods of leaning in order of age, from oldest to newest, and then delve a little into the arguments about exactly how to lean using the newest methods, which are based on instruments not available until late in the 20th century.

The oldest method of leaning is based on the simple proposition that when the mixture gets too lean, it will start to run rough. So the pilot would level off at altitude and then pull back the mixture lever until the engine started running rough. When that occurred, he would push the lever back toward rich until it was smooth again, and that was it. For a long, long time in aviation, this was how engines were leaned, and there are certainly still advocates of this method flying today. It was simple, and it seemed to work, although I find it a little harrowing up there in the sky to be intentionally making my engine run rough.

The second method of leaning came about when instruments were developed which could measure fuel flow. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook for my plane has a guide for such a leaning method, and it amounts to this: If you set the throttle and RPM by the book for 75% power at a certain density altitude, and lean correctly, your fuel flow should be 18.5 gallons Per hour; at 65& power, 16.5 gallons per hour; and at 55% power, 14.5 gallons per hour. Using this method, if you were at 65% power, you would simply lean until you had a fuel flow of 16.5 gallons per hour, and be done with it.

And finally, with probes to measure exhaust gas temperature and cylinder head temperature, first for just one cylinder and now for every cylinder, leaning has truly become an art. We can see the effect on exhaust gas temperatures (EGT’s) within each cylinder and fuel consumption, giving us information that was never available in the past. Oddly, as instruments and measurements have become more precise, there are more arguments today than ever before about how to lean an engine.

When an exhaust gas temperature readout became available, based on one cylinder, the standard leaning method became leaning the mixture until the exhaust gas temperature peaked, and then moving the lever back in the rich direction to somewhere like 100 degrees rich of peak. Later, these guages were replaced by readouts giving the exhaust gas temperatures for every cylinder and the same thing was done with the first cylinder to peak in exhaust gas temperature.

So, what’s the problem? Well, a Company named General Aviation Modifications, Inc., or GAMI, figured out from these modern instruments that cylinders in an aircraft engine, because of how they are placed, get different amounts of air flow. So they invented something called GAMI Injectors which vary the fuel injected into each cylinder to match the air available to the cylinder. The result is that cylinders in one engine behave much more closely alike, and reach peak EGT’s at roughly the same time. With GAMI injectors installed, leaning done the traditional way results in all of the cylinders running pretty much alike.

As the Company says on its website: 

GAMIjector® fuel injectors and TurboGAMIjector® fuel injectors are fuel injection nozzles designed to deliver specific amounts of fuel to each individual cylinder that will compensate for the fuel/air imbalance inherent in the fundamental design of the engine fuel/air systems.

Each GAMIjector® fuel injector is carefully calibrated to much tighter tolerances than standard fuel injectors available for your engine. Our award winning GAMIjector® fuel injectors alter the fuel/air ratio in each cylinder so that each cylinder operates with a much more nearly uniform fuel/air ratio than occurs with any standard factory set of injectors. 

But GAMI went much further than simply making it possible to get the cylinders all working alike, and began to advocate running engines “lean of peak”, to get better efficiency and cooler cylinder temperatures. A lot of long-time pilots and mechanics scoff at this notion, but over time GAMI has pretty much won the war of convincing everyone that there is a better way to run their aircraft engine. It is now widely accepted that, unless you are operating at very high power settings (higher than 60% to 65% power), it will not hurt an engine to run it at any reasonable leaning position. With GAMI injectors, engines should no longer run rough when somewhere like 50 degrees lean of peak, because all of the cylinders will be behaving close to alike. If you can find a method that keeps the engine cooler and provides best efficiency, that’s what you should use if efficiency and cool cylinders are your goal. 

So now I have installed these GAMI’s on my engine, but I have been a little to rattled to go all the way lean of peak so far. The engine is running smoothly, but when I lean back to where most of the cylinders have peaked in exhaust gas temperature, the leaning knob is alarmingly close to the idle shut-off position, and I have been too nervous to pull it back any further. I have been running it about 100 degrees rich of peak at 65% power and burning about 16.5 gallons per hour. I believe my next step will be to try this with an airport below, and an experienced instructor on board, just to make sure I do not kill the engine with nowhere to land while screwing around with the mixture. I’ll keep you posted next time I get a chance to try this out.

The curious thing is that I have had these GAMI injectors in my last two airplanes, and have flown many hours lean of peak. I suppose I am just still getting used to this plane and still a little nervous about trying out new things in it. Meanwhile, I’m probably burning a couple of gallons an hour more than I need to be. I’ll get there though, and I’ll have myself a lean machine soon. 

Safe Pilot/Ace Pilot

I knew a guy in college who was an “ace pilot”. He got his pilot’s license about when I did and had every skill needed. I wouldn’t go up in a plane with him though, because he thought it was really cool to smoke marijuana while he flew. I didn’t really think that was the best idea. He ended up flying helicopters in Viet Nam. After the war, he flew helicopters for banks, zooming around the southeast at night picking up cancelled checks. He could land on a dime or swoop down over the roof of a bank and grab the bag of checks off a pole. He loved nothing more than to get up in a helicopter and enjoy smoking a joint as he darted around the southeast on his appointed rounds. As far as I know, he survived it all.

So here is the thing that you need to understand if you fly with a friend who is a pilot. Being a safe pilot requires some good skills, good judgement, and an awareness of one’s own limitations. Being an ace pilot means flawless execution of things like landings and instrument approaches, or even flying aerobatics or Top Gun fighter jets. My own thought is that you can be either, neither, or both of these. If you are both, I would call you a great pilot.

I have always been a safe pilot. I do not fly in weather or circumstances beyond my capabilities. I don’t drink much the night before a flight. I don’t run risks like overloading a plane, landing on too short a runway, or buzzing my friends on the beach. I don’t take needless risks to make a planned trip. If the weather turns bad or there is a problem with the plane, we don’t go, or we rent a car. The rules are absolute, and I never make what I call “the first bad decision”. I also used to be perhaps a near-great pilot, at least for the planes I flew and the type of flying I did. I was no fighter jet Top Gun, but I could make perfect landings and execute instrument approaches in daunting situations where engines had quit or electrical power had failed (in a simulator).

Today, I’m still a safe pilot. My approaches are a little rusty, but getting better every day. My landings are a little bumpy. But the flight is safe. I will become a near-great pilot again, but I’m still practicing to get those skills back. This week I went out Wednesday and practiced landings with an old friend and very experienced corporate pilot. Today, I flew again with an instructor and did practice instrument approaches in Montgomery, Auburn, Sylacauga, and Birmingham. The instructor is ready to sign me off for my Instrument Proficiency Check after we complete a couple of more procedures tomorrow. So I will be legal to file Instrument flight plans again, and to fly in some instrument weather within my own limitations. I’m getting all of this back, one step at a time.

So what you need to understand is this. Don’t make a decision about flying with someone based on how smooth their landings are or some other ace-pilot abilities they have. That would be like choosing a spouse based solely on how good they look. Go with a pilot who has good judgement and an awareness of his or her own limitations. The pilot may cancel a trip because of weather, or the landing may not be perfect, but you will arrive safely, and you will be in good hands.

Here’s a view of my instrument approach into Montgomery today, done while I was wearing “Foggles” so I could only see the instruments, and recorded using the “CloudAhoy” Ipad App. It is shown at 4X actual speed with a Google Earth simulated cockpit view. We didn’t land, but flew down to 200 feet above the runway and executed a “missed approach” as you would do if the weather was so bad you never spotted the runway. The 4X speed makes things look a little more abrupt than they really were. We ended up right where we were supposed to be.

A Perfect Day of Flying

My son Daniel was in Savannah for the weekend with a crowd of golf buddies. He wanted to get from Savannah to Augusta today without making his whole crowd divert there on their drive back to Birmingham. A perfect opportunity for Sky King to fly to the rescue.

Because I need some more instruction in this plane, I arranged for an instructor to do the flight with me beginning at about 8:45 this morning. The plan was two hours to Savannah, about 45 minutes to Augusta, a quick lunch, and then about two hours back to Birmingham. And that’s pretty much what it turned out to be. A fabulous day of flying.

It was a beautiful morning when we departed Birmngham. We flew part of the trp at 7,000 feet and went up to 9,000 about half way there to get over some clouds and above the bumpy air. Daniel was waiting for us and we bounced our way at 4,000 feet on the short trip to Augusta. After looking for some lunch and finding only crackers and candy, we departed Augusta and arrived back in Birmingham around 4 pm.

My engine seemed to run a little rough right after takeoff. I just had an oil change and had new GAMI Injuectors installed to even out fuel flow among the cylinders. I have no idea why any of this would cause roughness, but the plane seemed to be vibrating a little more than usual on the climbout. However, it seemed to get better as the day wore on and, truthfully, it’s hard to tell how much of this is real and how much imagined. I’ll keep an eye on it.

 ACTIVITY LOG FROM FLIGHTAWARE.COM

07-Apr-2013 N881RJ Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Intl (KBHM) to Savannah/Hilton Head Intl (KSAV) 08:50AM CDT to 12:01PM EDT, 2:11

07-Apr-2013 N881RJ Savannah/Hilton Head Intl (KSAV) to Augusta Regional (KAGS) 12:34PM EDT to 01:18PM EDT,  0:44

07-Apr-2013 N881RJ Augusta Regional (KAGS) to Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Intl (KBHM) 02:39PM EDT to 03:50PM CDT, 2:11

My instructor was a young man named Steven Bromberg, who is a full-time corporate pilot in Birmingham. We did exactly what I needed. We spent a good bit of time at first just flying VFR (visually) and going over how to work the avionics on my plane. For part of the trip over to Savannah, I donned the “Foggles”, which are glasses that only allow you to see the instruments so that I was flying “Simulated Instrument”. Then, when we arrived at Savannah, we executed an ILS (Instrument Landing System) approach using the autopilot and without the Foggles. Heading up to Augusta, I spent a little more time with the Foggles and did another approach flying by hand with the Foggles on. When we returned to Birmingham, I did a GPS instrument approach, again flying by hand with the Foggles. Steven turned out to be an excellent instructor, pointing out things to watch and keeping me pretty much on track. I’m not really there yet but this was excellent practice, and things are coming back to me with good instruction.

My experience in Orlando was not a good one, but at least it showed me where I need work. A great instructor as I had today and a leisurely cross-country flight can make all the difference. Things need to start out in a methodical way without jumping into too much excitement at once. My instrument scan is coming back, slowly, and I believe with a little practice, I’ll get my instrument proficiency back pretty quickly.

Onward and Upward!

Safely Home

Safely returned from Orlando to Birmingham today, arriving just on the edge of some rain to the Northwest. It was an uneventful trip, but scattered to broken clouds from 4,000 to 6,000 feet along the way forced me to fly lower than I would prefer, and in the bumpy air caused by heat rising off the earth. So after bouncing around for about three hours, I’m back on the ground. 

For any of you who might have clicked the “Track the Plane” link at the top of this page, the reports are not always accurate. If I was able to file an instrument flight plan, the whole trip would be “in the system” of the FAA and the results would be better. As it is, I always request “flight following” which means you are asking to be watched on radar, but sometimes the entire trip is not really in the computer correctly. A good example is today, where the Flight Aware report shows the following:

Executive (KORL – info) Orlando, FL	Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Intl (KBHM – info) Birmingham, AL
12:58PM EDT	01:22PM CDT
Scheduled: 12:58PM EDT	Scheduled: 04:28PM CDT

Other flights between these airports

Duration: 1 hour 24 minutes

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Status	Landed over an hour ago. (track log & graph)
Aircraft	Piper Saratoga (piston-single) (PA32/T – photos)
Speed	Filed: 91 kts (graph)
Altitude	(graph)
Distance	Direct: 411 nm    Planned: 411 nm    Flown: 702 nm
Route	n/a

First off you will notice that it says I took off at 12:58 EDT and arrived at 1:22 CDT and the flight time was ! hour 24 minutes. I wish that were true, but I would have had to be going around 290 knots to acomplish that. I actually took off two hours earlier at 10:58 EDT and arrived at 1:22 CDT, so it was actually 3 hours 24 minutes rather than 1:24. It says that I filed for a speed of 91 knots. I actually told them 145 knots air speed, but the headwinds slowed me down and my actual ground speed was only 120 knots. Finally, they show the direct route as 411 nautical miles which is roughly correct, but they say that I actually flew 702 nautical miles. That’s very strange and I have no idea where that came from. I must have flown around in a lot of circles along the way.

At any rate, they show the plane on the ground in Birmingham, and it is. Glad to be home.

Not Exactly Top Gun

After all the miscues of avionics issues and bad weather, I finally returned to Orlando Wednesday to begin again my training school at SimCom. The airplane was in Sarasota having had the GPS units upgraded, so SimCom and my instructor were kind enough to let me fly in to Orlando commercial, pick up a one-way rental car, and drive the instructor and myself 2 1/2 hours to Sarasota to pick up the plane. We successfully pulled this off and were in the air at around 4 pm for our short flight back to Orlando during which some of the training began.

Incidentally, this was the first time I have ever driven three different rental cars in one day. Enterprise, with their laid back drop arrangements, had allowed me to rent a car in Orlando which I turned in Wednesday morning when leaving Birmingham. Then I arrived Orlando and rented a car for about three hours to drive over to Sarasota to get the plane. When we got the plane back to Orlando, I rented a third car to use while I was here in Orlando.

Yesterday morning, Thursday, the training got back going in earnest. I met my instructor at SimCom and we spent a couple of hours going through things in the classroom. We then had an early lunch and headed out for what turned into four full hours of flying with a couple of short stops at different airports. We did five instrument approaches at Leesburg, Gainsville and Palatka and returned to Orlando to close out an 11-hour day.

My instrument flying was, to say the least, sloppy. I couldn’t believe that after 12 years of not flying a plane I couldn’t simply nail the approaches, but I was “behind the plane” all day. I had nowhere near the performance necessary for an instructor to certify that I have completed an Instrument Profeciancy Check.

This morning, I awoke determined to do a better job, and initially I did, flying a straightforward trip to Palatka and executing a decent, but not perfect, instrument approach. After that, the day fell apart and I executed sloppy approaches at Gainsville and Orlando Executive to complete the training course with no demonstration of instrument “proficiency”. We finished up at around 6 pm after a 10-hour day and I am, to say the least, exhausted.

My instructor was excellent and I learned a lot and made serious progress, but I had to completely agree with him that I am not quite yet ready for prime time in the instrument flying world. I have a ways to go. He did a good job, and I agreed with the conclusion, but I was certainly disappointed that I was performing so poorly. I didn’t come to this school specifically to get the instrument check, but I fully expected to easily do so while I was here.

Now, let me explain the differences between this kind of flying, which I need to be able to do, and normal flying, which requires nowhere near these skill levels. First, on a normal trip, pilots do a lot of planning ahead during the long boring enroute portion of the trip. They normally turn on the autopilot and relax, look up all the information on the arrival airport, preset the communication frequencies, check the weather at the arrival airport, set up the GPS or other navigation to execute an approach, and arrive at their destination fully knowing what to expect and having all the gadgets set up to do their thing.

Flying in training is something else again. You wear something called “Foggles” which blank out the upper half of the glasses so you can only see inside the plane. Down here in central Florida, you are in very high traffic areas where approach controls for Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville all run together. There is an enormous amount of radio chatter, making it difficult to hear a call and also talk with your instructor. Additionally, because of the heavy traffic, there are always sudden unexpected changes from the controllers, as if your instructor’s surprises are not enough. You are normally asked to make minimum use of the autopilot, because they want to be able to judge your hand-flying skills. Worst of all, there is no long enroute time to get set up, and often you are asked when you are completing one approach to circle around and do a different one at the same airport, with little time to think it through and get set up.

All of this is hard enough when you are flying a plane which is very familiar, where you can quickly set up an approach on the instruments or shift frequencies as one controller hands you off to another. In my case, I’m trying to learn how to operate new GPS/radios, a new “glass cockpit” of instruments and other needed information, and a new autopilot/flight director. The result is often like texting while driving, as my attention is diverted by the avionics, I tend to run off the road.

While I am disappointed at how hard this has been for me, it’s all good training, and I will get back to the competency levels I had a decade ago. Meanwhile, I am restricted to flying in good weather, and I need a lot more time with good flight instructors to get me up to speed. I’m not exactly Top Gun yet, but I will get there.

Now, if the weather will only cooperate to let me fly home tomorrow.

Saratoga in Sarasota

My plane is technically a Piper 6X, but it is part of the Saratoga series of planes and most people know it as a version of a Piper Saratoga. I now have a Saratoga in Sarasota. I kept getting confused today flying telling controllers my plane was a Sarasota and I was flying VFR to Saratoga.

Well, nothing more has been heard from Avidyne, and I don’t really expect to hear more. My friend Sean who bought my boat is an expert on Windows software used in embedded systems, and I flagrantly plagiarized his email to me in my last post on the Avidyne forums (his explanation was just perfectly clear), but I have yet to hear the kind of technical response I have been requesting. I will just have to hope they are right that this kind of failure is rare, and that there is nothing I can do differently to avoid it.

I finally got a clear day in central Florida and flew the plane over to Sarasota to have Sarasota Avionics replace my two Garmin GPS’s with more modern ones that utilize the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). It should be ready to pick up when I head back down there next Wednesday to try to complete my flight training.

This has become an obsessive effort to overcome electronic failures and bad weather, along with my crazy meeting schedule, to get both the plane and me up to speed and ready to fly. I’m back in Georgia in a different rental car which I will turn in in Birmingham early next week. I will fly back to Orlando on Southwest and try to pick up the plane and complete my training by the end of next week. I still have cars and planes and keys all over the place, but I am making progress. 

Sarasota Saratoga 881 Romeo Juliet out.