Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Luck Vs. Experience

Howdy. I aborted a takeoff for the first time yesterday. I know. I’m still excited. The magneto check was good on run-up, but the Piper Arrow’s engine just didn’t sound right. Also, we weren’t getting the acceleration that I had expected on a cold day with two people and half tanks. The mechanic met us on the ramp. He had heard the burping engine and seen our aborted takeoff. Having just finished a 100 hour inspection on that plane, he prodded around the engine compartment wondering what he might have missed. He told me later that they had to replace multiple spark plugs. I still haven’t figured out how they got fouled between the inspection and our flight. It was a cold, dense, day; hardly a day where you would expect to foul plugs with the mixture too rich on the ground.


“Someone told me that you start flying with a bag full of luck and an empty bag for experience. The trick is to fill up the bag of experience before you run out of luck,” my student relayed as we walked away from the sick Arrow. He was glad to have experienced an actual aborted takeoff, he said. I was too.

I got some interesting news after working my penultimate desk shift today. It pertained to a newly purchased airplane that I ferried from Mobile, Alabama to Kansas City a couple days before Thanksgiving.

Prior to taking off on the ferry trip, the weather briefer informed me that large embedded thunderstorms made a direct route wildly inadvisable. However, if we proceeded north to St. Louis and then west to Kansas City, we could avoid the storms. The ceilings were in the 2000-3000 foot range over most of the route and the tops were super high (as judged by a bonanza pilot). The freezing level was up around 8000 though, so I figured the trip to be completely doable.

The vintage Bonanza had just come out of annual inspection and instrument certification. Before our departure, the mechanic who signed off on the annual inspection assured the new owner and me that he had no connection to the airplane’s previous owner and that everything looked very solid.

As we took off, I was reminded of why I (and so many others) put Bonanzas in a special category. This bird handled and performed like a dream as we picked our way through a line of precipitation north of Mobile. Once we were clear of the precip, we popped in and out of clouds until making a visual approach and landing near Columbus, Mississippi. At least this guy didn’t want to pee in a bottle.

Checking the weather in Columbus, our “north to St. Louis, then west to KC” plan was still the only option due to storms in Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and even southern Kansas. We might have been able to cut northwest through Missouri, but Saint Louis had an enticing bonus in that my sister lives there. If the storms in southern Kansas moved into KC, we could just camp out with her and still have a decent Thanksgiving dinner. Ceilings at Spirit of St. Louis airport were only 300 feet, but St. Louis Downtown was calling 1200 feet, so we blasted off again. As we tracked direct to St. Louis, watching the lightning off to our west, I noticed that I was having to reset the heading indicator pretty darn often. The vacuum gauge showed a slightly anemic 4.3 inches of Mercury (in. HG). Normally you want it in the 4.8-5.2 range. Everything was still working though.

As we neared St. Louis, we were in the clouds at 6000 feet. I checked the ATIS weather broadcasts for the area and SUS was still calling 300 feet. I leafed through the Missouri approach plates in search of an approach for the downtown airport. It was conspicuously missing. It occurred to me (way too late) that St. Louis is on the state line. The downtown airport fell on the wrong side and I didn’t have the Illinois approach charts. Lesson learned. I figured at that point that we would shoot the ILS at SUS and if we missed, we would ask for ATC to help us get into downtown.

I hand flew a beautiful ILS to minimums at SUS, if I may say so myself. Even the landing was a humdinger. I think my non-instrument-rated passenger thought I was some sort of voodoo doctor for finding the runway through those dark clouds. I really thought he was going to hug me. I was glad he didn’t.

After a lovely microwave dinner from the vending machine and a check of the radar which looked good, we hoisted ourselves back into the old V-Tail and headed west. The vacuum gauge still showed about 4.3 and the heading indicator still precessed at a rate which bore extra attention. The air across Missouri was smooth, though, and I hand flew the whole way, relishing the chance to practice.

Then, as soon as we received our initial descent from Kansas City approach control, the weather took a turn for the worse. It started raining and we experienced what I would call very heavy turbulence. It was all I could do to hold heading and altitude. The time between our handoff to airport advisory frequency and our reaching the final approach fix felt like an eternity. I wonder how being in the clouds in heavy turbulence compares to being on a boat at night in rough seas. About an hour after we landed, Kansas City experienced a strange phenomenon known as “Thunder Snow.”

So what did I find out about this airplane today? Well, for starters, the alternator belt on the airplane was not the right one. During the course of the flight it had flipped so that the flat side (instead of the curved side) was in the pulleys’ grooves. It bore signs of imminent failure. Also, as you have probably guessed, the vacuum system was completely screwed up; hoses attached incorrectly and others left off altogether. The mechanic explained to me that the regulator setting that he found on this plane would give a normal system something like 9 in. HG. It was working that hard to give me less than half of that. Individually, an electrical system or a vacuum system failure in the clouds presents a fairly dire emergency. The combination of the two would most likely be insurmountable.

The plane’s new owner has apparently sent letters to the previous owner, the incompetent, if allegedly unaffiliated mechanic, and the FAA. I’m sure a lawsuit will ensue. Yeehaw.

Thinking about the whole situation makes me extremely appreciative of the fact that I’ll soon be starting a position where I’ll be flying one airplane, the maintenance history of which I will be quite familiar. Flying a bunch of random airplanes all the time is exciting, but it requires more faith than I have anymore… I just made a big withdrawal from my bag o' luck.




Friday, December 17, 2004

12-15-04

Howdy. I know. I’ve missed you too. I flew up to Pella, Iowa this morning with one of my students and a couple of his colleagues. They’re setting up a giant sales meeting for the Pella Window people. Our first stop, after arriving in this contender for “America’s Most Perfect Little Town” was at the bed and breakfast where the two event planner ladies are staying. I’d had a premonition en-route that this was going to be the sort of town where home-baked pie could be considered an eventuality. My intuition was confirmed as soon as we opened the unlocked door to the B&B. The unmistakable aroma of fresh baked apple pie spilled out of the kitchen and filled the picturesque little house. I munched off of the cheese and sausage tray as the girls gave us a tour. Most homes aren’t as homey as this place was.

Ashley would have loved it.

I’m at the “Smokey Row” cafĂ© listening to Dolly Parton singing “Jingle Bells” and looking out the big windows at a town square reminiscent of “Groundhog’s Day” with Bill Murray. Actually, this whole town is a perfect cross between that movie and “Gross Point Blank” with John Cusack. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be today again except I’ll be an assassin who is back in town for my high school reunion. Looking out the window, it seems entirely possible. Pella is a hyperbole of the small, conservative, town in the Midwest.
“Last time I was here, they were playing church music at the tanning salon…on Saturday!” Tina said. She’s one of the event planner ladies. This comment echoed in my head as I checked out the magazine rack at the Downtown Bookshop. I couldn’t help but noticing the interesting juxtaposition of “Out” magazine just above “Home-Schooling Digest” on the rack. One stop shopping for the latently homosexual isolationist who wants to stay up to date on notable gays and how to “protect” their kids from them.

I walked here from the Royal Amsterdam Hotel, where Jeremy and I are staying. You might guess that calling it “The Royal Amsterdam” is a creative way for the owners to make a shitty hotel seem glamorous in travel brochures, but it really is as elegant as it sounds. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed in a room with pillars before. I’ll be staying in a lot of motels in the near future, but I’m guessing that none of them will have pillars in the room or marble window sills. How do I know? I got a new job!

I found out last Friday that I will be leaving in a few weeks to fly a Cessna 172 for an aerial imaging company. I’ll be making aerial maps of different counties; staying in one place for a couple of weeks and then moving on. I’m told that I’ll start in Florida or Texas. When I saw the ad on www.climbto350.com , I knew it was just the sort of nomadic adventure I’ve been longing for since, well, since I was about twelve. I can’t wait. The pay is decent and I’ll be receiving a per diem to cover the motel and rental car. The plan is to save up money while building total time so that by 1200 hours, I’ll be able to buy enough multi-engine time to get on with an airline or cargo operation.

On the down side, I’ll have no scheduled days off which means that I’ll not be able to come home at all. My days off will be brought to me by poor weather. This being the case, and taking into consideration the erratic schedules of pilots in general, Ashley and I have decided to go our separate ways. I’ll always have special memories of our ten and a half months together and hold her in the highest regard, but it became apparent that we weren’t going to make each other happy in the long term. So it goes.

I just had a long conversation with a stranger at the next table. He was on a soda date with his son. The Smokey Row actually has an old style soda fountain. I commented on how Norman Rockwell this town appears to be. I was literally weirded out by his response because it echoed so many of the things I had just written.

“One of the reasons we moved here is because it is such a religious community. Family is very important to us and we’re very close to Christ.”

“We home-school."

“ There is a Tulip Festival here every May where everyone dresses up in Dutch costumes and there are parades and music and…” and Phil the groundhog, I thought.

I told him I was a pilot and just in town for the night. He perked up and told me he was a pilot too.
“What do you fly?” I asked
“Oh, I don’t anymore,” he admitted. “I take pictures for online virtual home tours for real estate agents. I went to flight school but then there were no jobs and I was starting a family…”

Aside from the Jesus sales pitch and the home-schooling mumbo jumbo, I feel like I just met the version of me from an alternate universe where I didn’t take this job, got married, got a normal job, and manufactured a couple kids.

Ashley would have loved this place.