Or, “How I Spent a Snowy Thursday Evening”

Last night around rush hour, the snow started coming down, but thankfully it started late enough that my commute home wasn’t too unbearable.  The prudent thing to do on a Thursday evening would probably be to just stay at home where it’s warm, but there was aviating to do.  Well, sort of.

My friend has a 1946 Aeronca Champ that’s currently working its way through an annual inspection, and this year it’s going to take a little longer than normal to complete.  There is an Airworthiness Directive (“AD”) the FAA has issued that requires an inspection of the wing spar on the Champ.  The spars are the backbone of the wing (there’s two in each wing), and on the Champ, they’re made of wood.  An inspection must be made to ensure the wood is not cracked or damaged.  It’s probably a good thing to make sure a spar is not broken and and even better thing to find out on the ground than in the air.  The problem is that there are only two ways to inspect the spars: First, you could cut a series (read “boatload”) of inspection holes in the fabric on the top and bottom of the wing, or you can pull the wings off and strip the fabric completely off.

Wow, talk about being between a rock and a hard place, both choices really stink.  On one hand, you have the expedient choice that will get the plane flying again, but with a bunch of unsightly inspection covers (not to mention the fact that you can’t truly inspect the spars even with all those holes), and the other much more time consuming and expensive option, recovering the wings.  I’m glad it wasn’t my decision to make.

With the course laid out, we got to work.  I’m going to tell this part with pictures.

As with any project, you don’t know what you’ll find until you pull the covers back and get in there.  Along with the old wasp nests and the random dangling wire, there was evidence of some repairs and at least one hail storm sometime in the past 64 years.  The good news is that the spars (on this wing, anyway) look like they’ll pass inspection.

Now the real work will begin.

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything substantial here.  I know I’ve let both of you down.  I’m not sure if it’s writer’s block, busyness, boredom, or what, but I’m trying to bust my way past that.

So, what have I been up to?  Well, with the shortening days and the switch to Standard Time, my flying is now limited solely to the weekends.  That means I’m much more susceptible to cancelations due to weather, scheduling, or what have you.  I recently ended an almost four week gap in flying.  I’m not sure what I’ll do if these gaps continue, which I suspect they will, but I’m toying with the idea of pausing to work on my written test.  I hate the idea of spending time and money knocking the rust off instead of learning.  On a recent lesson focused on intercepting and tracking VOR’s, I performed very well during the lesson, but my landing was ugly.  So ugly, in fact, that my instructor said our next lesson was going to address my landing issues.  I think she was wondering if I had completely forgotten how to land a plane.  Since it was going to be sort of review time, I requested that we also review some emergency situations.  It had been quite awhile since we’ve done anything of the sort, and I felt I wanted build my comfort level.

This past Saturday was a beautiful day to fly.  Cold, but clear.  The cold temps meant we had the airport to ourselves, which was perfect for what we wanted to do.  Since Dacy is a grass strip, I’ve always used a modified Soft Field takeoff technique, but this day I was going to learn the full Soft Field technique (keep the nose way up, and get off the ground as soon as possible).  And at some point in the pattern, Maggie promised she’d pull the power on me.  I also made my second attempt at recording video during the lesson.  So, instead of reading me ramble on, you can watch the interesting stuff here:

I recorded this on my iPhone using the Flyvie app.  For the audio portion of the video, I used the ‘earbud in the headset’ trick, which worked out better than I expected.  Since this was a lesson and my instructor and I tend to jabber too much, I cut most of our audio out, and replaced it with Michael W. Smith.  Generally speaking, I don’t much care for music tracks on flying videos, but sometimes I care to listen to myself even less, so now I know why so many people use music.  At least I didn’t use “Treetop Flyer”…

I was very pleased with the lesson.  I think it restored my confidence handling emergencies, and I’m pretty sure I’ve regained Maggie’s confidence that I won’t break her plane.  My next lesson is scheduled for this weekend (snow predicted, ugh!), and I’m looking forward to more VOR tracking, en route emergencies, and getting signed off for another airport (Burlington, WI, KBUU).  If the weather goes south, we’ll be talking about cross country planning.

In the mean time, I’ve been working on a notebook.  I’m tired of the beat-up copies of the checklist in the plane, and I wanted a more organized place to keep information that’s been collecting in my flight bag, so I found a small 3 ring binder and I’m assembling information.  The checklist is a work in progress.  I’ve got a good start, but I want to run through it a few times in the plane and continue to tweak it.  I built it using a lot of the usual sources (current checklist, POH), but I’ve also been looking at examples on the internet and pulling stuff from there.   Some of the checklists out there really crack me up.  They have procedures written for what to do if the engine fails during the takeoff roll, or spin recovery.  As if anyone would have the time to find and refer to the checklist in those moments!  “Uh oh, I’ve stalled the plane and the spinning Earth is getting so very close to me!  Step One…”  This information is critical, but it needs to be memorized, not written down.

Last night I watched a video by Jason Schappert from m0a.com on weight & balance calculations.  He had a pretty decent form that made sense to me, so I’ve tweaked that a bit and added it to the notebook.  Here’s my take on it.

If anyone has suggestions for what they find handy to have, I’d love to hear it.  Post a comment below.

For lack of a better title, I’ve developed in my head The Bucket List, a wish list of aviation ‘To Do’s’:  Milestones I’d like to accomplish and airplanes I’d like to fly in.  On Saturday, I was extremely fortunate to cross one of those items off my list: “Fly in a Stearman”.  In the 1930’s and 40’s the Stearman Aircraft Company manufactured open-cockpit biplanes, the most common of which was the military trainer Model 75, the Kaydet.

I had just finished a solo flight down to Dekalb to practice some landings (yes, they still need work).  I had some extra time, and wasn’t in a hurry to leave the airport yet, so I wandered a bit.  I ran into a guy named Mike pulling out his very perfect 1942 N2S-3 Navy Stearman (The yellow one in the middle of the picture).  We talked a bit, and to my surprise, he offered me a ride.  I could NOT pass this up!

Mike preflighted his plane and his passenger (donning one of those cool aviation helmet you see in the old movies) and then I climbed in.  During his passenger briefing, Mike went over all the controls, because he assumed I’d want to fly it.  Wow!  We took off for an incredible ride.  A positive transfer of control in an open cockpit with no intercom is accomplished with a shake of the stick, a glance in the mirror, and some hand signals.  With that, I was flying.  I didn’t do too much, just some shallow and medium turns, and a couple attempts at Turns About a Point.  I just loved how that plane handled.  Thankfully Mike couldn’t hear me laughing and grinning like a little kid.  It was awesome.

We flew a lot longer than I was expecting, and I was loving every second of it.  Mike’s dad showed up in his Champ, and we did some formation flying around the airport.  It was so cool to have that open air perspective to a close formation flight like that.  I’m pretty sure Mike’s dad saw my goofy grin.

After we landed, I was in for another surprise: Mike offered to enter the flight in my logbook.  So this fortunate student pilot now has 1.1 hours of dual instruction in a Stearman permanently recorded in my log.

As quickly as one item is scratched off my list, it is immediately replaced by a new item: “Fly in a Stearman Again!”

This ‘runway’ is closed.

Our lives changed forever 19 years ago today, and I couldn’t be happier as a result.

Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart!

I’ve been meaning to write for days now, but the ideas and words are not there yet.  In the mean time, I wanted to share this photo with you.  I grabbed my camera and just snapped this without looking (I was kind of busy at the time).  Sure, the maze is upside down, but I still like the picture.  Hope you do to.

I learned to drive in my dad’s blue 1977 Chevy Impala.  My first ‘solo’ trip in that car was a 3 mile jaunt down to the grocery store to buy some Pepsi after church one Sunday evening.  While the memory endures, I’m sure that car has become a Pepsi can itself, or perhaps a refrigerator.  Cars just do not last the way airplanes do.  Airplanes can last for generations.  I recently read a news story about a 93 year old man who hopes that someday his 4 year old great-grandson will someday fly his Cessna 182.  A very realistic hope.

My Uncle Harold loved to fly.  A passion that he shared with his two younger brothers, Herman and Wayne.  Uncle Harold also liked to buy airplanes.  I’m not yet sure how many he owned over the years, but it seemed like if Piper made it, Harold Baker would buy it.  The photo to the right shows just the Cubs all lined up at Lobmaster Field back in the early 60’s.  Herman and Wayne soloed in 4600M, a PA-11 Cub Special (third from the left in the photo) that Uncle Wayne still has today.

One of my favorite pastimes is searching the internet for traces of these old airplanes.  Unless they’ve crashed (or in one case, burned), most of these planes from the 40’s and 50’s are still out there flying.  I recently located one Uncle Harold’s old Tripacers in Decatur, IL, and on a recent tour of some of Illinois’ finest cornfields, I made arrangements to see the plane. 

She doesn’t look the way she did in 1959, but she still has a lot of character, and I felt a neat connection to the past as I sat in that plane and as I saw Harold’s signature in the engine log book.  I never met Uncle Harold or Uncle Herman.  They were both killed in a crash before I was born, about a month after Harold signed off on an engine overhaul in this Tripacer.  They may be gone, but their love for aviation inspires me as I pursue my own pilot certificate.

Oh, and the Tripacer is for sale…

Ever notice how we’re always tempted to not do the right thing?  It’s our nature.

Last night on the golf course my friend’s tee shot hooked left toward the houses.  Owning a house on a beautiful country club golf course is one thing.  Owning a house on a public Park District course is quite another thing.  After all, those courses attract golfers very much like me.  It’s not a matter of if the house will be hit, but rather when and how often.

<SMACK!>

We heard it hit, and hit hard.  As we wandered toward the opposite side of the fairway (my tee shot went almost as wide to the right, just not as long), we saw the homeowner come out and stand in his yard.  He was waiting for us.  Visions of broken glass and a heated exchange of words quickly came to my mind.  We debated what to do.  Should my friend discretely drop another ball over here and pretend it wasn’t us?  If we ignored him long enough, would the homeowner go back into his house?  After a few moments my friend decided to do the right thing.  He went over to take his lumps.

There was no heated exchange, no demand for reparations.  Just a brief conversation, a handshake, and a returned ball.  In 19 years of periodic and isolated hailstorms, my friend was only the second golfer ever to come over and apologize to the homeowner.

It always pays to Dew the Right Thing, even when you don’t want to.  That’s how character is formed.

After an almost two week hiatus since my first solo, it was finally time to go flying.  The weather was really ‘iffy’ all day with low ceilings.  When I left the office, I had no idea if we would actually fly or not.  Turns out, by the time I got out to my neck of the woods, er, I mean cornfields, the skies turned very favorable.  Our goal for this lesson was to fly the perimeter of what will be my practice area and then a couple solo takeoffs and landings.  As an added bonus, my friend Jamie would be along for the ride (my first unofficial passenger).

My preflight showed we were a little low on gas, and the fuel truck at Dacy was empty, so we’d be starting out with a short trip over to Poplar Grove (C77) to top off the tanks.  This would be my first landing at another airport, and my first on asphalt.  The takeoff role at Dacy was a lot longer than I’m used to because of the added weight of my passenger.  In hindsight, with the winds being as light as they were, I should have used the much longer runway 27 instead of 18.  I got it off the ground but I really noticed the lack of performance during the climb out.  It was hot and we were much heavier than normal.

Finding Poplar Grove was a little challenging with the haze we had, but not for Jamie.  He’s spent a lot of time there when he was more actively teaching.  I entered an upwind leg for runway 30.  My turn to base was way too soon, so as a result on final, I was WAY high.  I considered going around, and even asked my instructor if I should, but she said I’d have enough room to land, so I did.  As the plane slowed, I was introduced first to the centerline, which at this point was anywhere BUT under the center of the plane, and then I met Wheel Shimmy.  Ugh, I didn’t like that at all.  I think Maggie is going to have her shimmy dampener looked at.

We filled up with fuel, and headed out again, ready to define my play, er, practice area.  Pilotage in this area is pretty easy for me, since I’ve driven most of these roads and spent far too much time on Google Earth.  Navigating the perimeter was just a nice relaxing flight, and my GPS was working well, so I got a decent groundtrack too.  I’m still looking for a good way to share these tracks in a more interactive way.  For now, I have to stick with the screen capture method.

Our fuel run to Poplar Grove used up any time available for my second supervised solo, but I was okay with that.  Instead of soloing, I got several new experiences instead.  As an added bonus, I found out at the end of the evening that Jamie had been recording my takeoffs and landings.  What a cool perspective that I normally never have.  Maybe I should have a camera in the back seat more often.

Another 1.3 hours logged.

Ten years ago I was sitting in my office on a hot Thursday afternoon.  Whatever I was thinking of at that moment, (I’m sure I was diligently working), was interrupted by an Instant Message from my wife:

“She wants to see you today.”

I called home immediately to confirm the message.  You see, I wasn’t expecting to see her until the following week.  My mind began to race and my nerves were instantly frazzled.  For some reason, time began to speed up.  Hours flew by as minutes, and before I knew it, she was here.

Our Oldest daughter was born at 5:24 am on a sunny Friday morning, and my life has never been the same since.  Over the years things have entered my life that I never expected: Barbie Dolls, tea sets, “Goodnight, Moon”, diapers, Hanna Montana, and drama.  Especially drama!  As I prepared myself the best I could for fatherhood, the one thing I did not expect was the exponential increase in emotion that comes with being the daddy of a little girl.  There’s a scene in the movie “Analyze This” where the tough-guy mobster is reduced to tears because of the emotions evoked in a long distance commercial.  I can relate.  There are times that I surprise myself at how easily I can be choked up by a song, a picture, or even a hug.  These things never happened to me before I was a father.  I tell friends that every single day for the past 10 years, someone in my house has cried.  Sometimes it was me.

Those who’ve had cataract surgery will often say they had forgotten how vivid colors could be.  These exponential increases of love, joy, happiness, and yes, even frustration, have shown me how vivid life could be.

So, on this, your tenth birthday, I want to tell you My Oldest, how much I love and cherish you, and I want to thank you for changing my life.