Land and Hold Short

I flew my family of four to Gaspé last Monday 24 July, and flew back yesterday (Sunday 30 July). Here are some disjointed notes, since I’m too far buried in work-related e-mail and demands to construct a continuous narrative.

• Flying four adult-sized people plus luggage plus full fuel in a 160 hp Warrior is legal, but it’s a huge challenge. You have to treat every takeoff as a short-field takeoff, and have to be bang on the numbers to make the thing leave the runway and climb at all on a hot day (I’ve posted before about how flight training fails to prepare pilots for heavily-loaded, underpowered planes). Expect to see frequent negative climb rates above 7,000 ft (4,000 ft if there are any mountain waves): just hold Vy and be patient.
• Deviating around thunderstorms in a slow plane is also a huge challenge because of the distances involved. I guessed wrong and deviated south when all the airliners were deviating north, and ended up giving my family a grand tour of the Eastern townships of Quebec (which we couldn’t actually see, but no matter). I’m looking forward to having radar images available for Canada.
• Bilingualism is a good thing, except in a busy circuit at an uncontrolled Quebec airport. I do speak some French, and I managed to understand that an incoming pilot behind me was bound and determined to land on 05 when I was already in the circuit for 23 and Unicom was insisting over and over that 23 was the preferred runway. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand enough French to realize that he was cutting me off after I switched 180 degrees and joined the downwind for 05 to accomodate him. He was behind me, but when I turned base I saw him right in front of me on a straight-in final (which isn’t even legal for VFR in Canada at an uncontrolled airport). Life’s too short to argue with morons, especially in another language, but I have another good reason to prefer controlled airports. The other pilots at the airport were decent, no matter what language they were speaking.
• With fuel prices so high, I’m glad to fly a plane that doesn’t burn too much of it, even if our trips are sometimes a couple of hours longer. I found some good prices in Quebec, though, sometimes in unexpected places.
• I always worry about emergency landing spots when planning a flight over completely deserted areas, such as the interior of the Gaspé peninsula (where the St. Lawrence River meets the Gulf of the St. Lawrence). No need, really. It turns out that the interior is criss-crossed with, literally, hundreds or thousands of wide logging roads. I imagine that the surfaces are rough, and it might take a while for someone to find us, but even though I flew for over an hour out of range of towns, farms, roads, airports, etc., if I had lost an engine I would always have had a choice of literally dozens of easy, straight landing spots right under the plane. They might not have been nice on the landing gear, but they’d be a lot better than trees or plowed fields.
• It’s very hard to resist cheating when you’re IFR in actual IMC, have a VFR-only GPS and ATC offers you a direct routing that will shave 15 or 20 minutes off your trip (and vectoring isn’t possible, because you’re below radar). I won’t say whether I resisted successfully or not, but if I hadn’t, it would have been easy to verify my position periodically using VOR/DME fixes.
• I have a decent amount of actual IMC now, all of it hand-flown, and much of it in rough conditions. In a simple plane like a Warrior, I don’t think there would be any real benefit in having an autopilot, because the plane is draggy and unresponsive, giving me lots of time to fold maps, talk on the radio, etc. without going off course or tilting the wings. I know that things would be very different in a retractable.
• A long, non-stop flight is always tempting, especially when you’re flying back home westbound and might not have serious headwinds. The upper wind forecasts suggested that I could do the return flight (503 nm) in only 4:10, while my Warrior holds enough fuel to fly over 5:30 lean of peak at 75% power (8.5 gph from 48 gallons usable). When the actual winds indicated 4:30-4:40, however, I decided that I didn’t want to be one of those morons who runs out of fuel, even if the GPS said that I would have minimal legal VFR reserves, so I added a fuel stop. It turned out that I did have enough fuel, but family bladders appreciated the stop all the same.
• Flying an underpowered plane over hills makes me appreciate that the air moves in three dimensions: in addition to headwinds, tailwinds, crosswinds, etc., there’s always an updraft or downdraft. I was high enough to avoid the rough stuff, but at 8,500 feet over the mountains (3-4 thousand feet still make a mountain) I was constantly aware of the gentle waves (5-10 minute cycles) that were adding or subtracting about 5-10 knots of airspeed. I notice that flying over the Adirondacks as well. Some people just hold a constant airspeed and ride up and down on the waves, while others hold constant altitude and let the airspeed climb and drop. I chose the latter, since I was in an area of no radar coverage, and didn’t want to crowd the IFR altitudes.
• I had my first experience flying a significant amount of IFR in class G airspace (green on the map), but it wasn’t actually uncontrolled. Because I was going to be crossing a controlled airway, ATC kept talking to me and never said that I was uncontrolled, even though I was flying no-radar. I could legally have flown about an hour of my route IFR without a clearance, though, as long as I could have crossed the airway VFR.
• My family has almost 4 years experience with the airplane now, and they’re all extremely light packers and unfussy travellers. How many teenaged girls can pack enough for a week in a 10 lb suitcase? That alone is probably enough to justify the expense of flying.

Update: Alas, no longer — by August 2006, my cell phone was not working with U.S. flight services again, and a reader left a comment to the same effect. It was nice while it lasted.

A bit over a year ago, I wrote a posting linking to a PDF list of local U.S. flight service numbers. At the time, the U.S. 1-800-WXBRIEF number did not work with Canadian land lines or even Canadian cell phones roaming in the U.S., so without a list of local numbers, there was no way to get a briefing or even to close a VFR flight plan in the U.S. using your cell phone — as a result, I always carried a printout of the list in my flight bag.

Recently, the U.S. privatized its flight services, outsourcing them to Lockheed-Martin (though ATC is still public). I decided to try the 1-800 number again, just in case things changed with the privatization. BINGO! The call goes through from my Canadian land line or my cell phone with no problem (and the specialist knew what he was talking about — I take that for granted in Canada, but have not always been able to do so in the U.S.).

This happened two days ago, but I only just saw the news on Wikipedia: the venerable ornithopter at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies sustained flight for 14 seconds (2 seconds longer than the Wright brothers) after taking off under its own power (flapping its wings) with a pilot on board at Toronto/Downsview airport. Here’s the Toronto Star story, at least until the link migrates to the archives.

In the past, ornithopters with a crew have flown after being tow-launched, but this is the first confirmed flight of an ornithopter, with crew, taking off under its own power, analogous to the Wright brothers’ achievement with fixed-wing powered aircraft (though probably much less historically important). It looks like Prof. DeLaurier is ready to retire C-GPTR to a museum now, and to let others experiment with bigger wings and better engines.

Transport Canada created a special ornithopter category just to accomodate C-GPTR, though it looks like the Certificate of Registration was cancelled in 1997.

If you fly much in the summer, thunderstorms are a huge concern. You might want to take a look at the new Lightning detector article on Wikipedia — I started the article, but then “Pierre cb” (a meterologist from Environment Canada) came in and not only corrected some of my errors, but added his own custom-drawn diagrams showing how a developing thunderstorm shows up on weather radar during each of its stages, and why lightning often appears outside of radar returns. Consider this required reading, especially if you fly IFR in the middle latitudes during the summer and routinely bet your life on your weather radar or lightning detector.

I’m writing this posting from the courtesy computer at the Esso FBO in Toronto City Centre airport (CYTZ). I just finished a Hope Air flight from Sault Ste. Marie (CYAM), my fourth consecutive day of flying. Fortunately, I was able to fly in along and through today’s cold front before much CB developed, and what there was, I dodged with the assistance of my eyeballs, ATC, and my StormScope.

Coming into City Centre from the north, in and out of scud at the cloud bases, I had a chance to pull out and dust off a rarely-used tool: the contact approach. I flew a contact approach in anger two years ago, after blundering into and escaping a small storm cloud — I had no desire for any further IMC that day, so I dropped low and followed the St. Mary’s River into Sault Ste. Marie. This time was much more benign: after turning over the lakeshore heading towards City Centre, I was still unable to accept a visual approach due to restricted visibility (I got out of the scud by descending to 2,000). To make both my life and the busy controller’s easier, I offered to fly a contact approach. I could see the Scarborough bluffs clearly below me, so I simply followed the shoreline in until I saw the runway about 3-4 miles back.

This is exactly the situation that a contact approach is designed for. The arrival controller was able to hand me off earlier to City tower, easing his workload. Visibility underneath was adequate (>3 SM), and the landing was a complete non-event. I knew the shoreline (and the two big smokestacks) well. In marginal river, a full approach would have been much more hairy, since I would have had to fly about 5-10nm out over the lake.

Controllers aren’t allowed to offer a contact approach, but it’s a useful thing to ask for sometimes. This afternoon, unfortunately, there’s a line of severe thunderstorms conveniently extending from here to my home base in Ottawa (CYOW), so I guess I’ll spend a couple more hours checking e-mail and refreshing the radar page.

[Update: I made it home late in the afternoon, by picking my way along a wide corridor that opened up between two storm lines.]