sean’s place

First Solo

Whoops! I wrote this post on January 25th, 2010 and forgot to post it! Bad Sean!

It’s been some time since I’ve written about flying. The lack of writing is not due to a lack of flying time, but rather to a lack of the fortitude to keep journaling my progress!

I have made my first solo flight!

The first solo is the first major milestone and the first real test of an aspiring aviator. It represents an accomplishment in ground study, in flight study and practice, and a demonstrated proficiency at the basics of flight. It’s not an endorsement that means I’m a qualified pilot, but it does mean that my instructor Craig has faith that within the scope of limited maneuvers, both I and the airplane will come back in one piece.

As I’m back on solid ground writing this, I can rightly certify that I’m still here!

Since the last post, Craig and I’ve practiced a ton of landings, ground reference maneuvers, stalls, steep turns (40 degrees of bank), slips, and the beginnings of crosswind takeoffs and landings. I’ve also beaten (or at least beaten back) my natural predisposition for motion sickness. One of the reasons I’ve struggled with (soft) landings is that I didn’t get to practice them during the early hours of my training. My stomach simply wouldn’t make it through the lesson. I’m happy to say that I’ve more or less overcome that challenge.

Now, we’re back to my first solo.

So, Craig and I were doing touch-and-go’s in N1720Z around runway 34 at GXY. After a few laps around the pattern, Craig let me know (pretty much on the ground, actually) that I should exit on C2 and head back to the FBO. He then said “then you can go shoot the pattern a few times on your own.”

“Say again?” say I.

We exited on C2, and taxied back to Poudre Aviation. I dropped Craig off, ran to the restroom real quick, then anxiously hopped back into N1720Z. Craig said that if I felt at all uncomfortable, I could just taxi on back and we could do the solo later.

My anxiety remained, but I decided that I’d make the final call after the run-up. I taxied out towards runway 34’s runup area, crossed runways 9 and 27, and turned the airplane facing slightly south so I could look for traffic on final approach (I also listened to the radio, but it’s always good to keep your eyes open!)

I worked through the checklist, and as I worked through each item, my own personal level of confidence grew. I started feeling the anxiety being quieted by the confidence of 20 hours or so of training; it wasn’t all the way gone, but by the time I was ready to call for departure, I was in a mental state where I was ready to fly. It’s tough to describe the feeling, but it was something like “cautious optimism.”

Remembering Craig’s axiom: “Take-offs are optional but landings aren’t” I looked deep inside and decided I was ready to do this. I called for departure:

Greeley Traffic, Skyhawk One Seven Two Zero Zulu, departing runway 34, will make left closed traffic, Greeley.

I took one last look up at the final approach leg for the runway, and rolled on out onto 34. I lined up with the center line and took a look at my panel. “Oil pressure: check. Runway alignment: good. Full throttle. Power and pressure: check. Airspeed indicator: alive.” went through my head in that order. I rotated at about 60 knots and was up in the air in no time.

At about 5200 feet ascending (about 500 feet above ground-level), I took a look left and started my crosswind turn. I raised the left wing to take a look down the downwind leg, then shortly made my downwind turn. I like to call my traffic legs during the turn, but in this case, I called my downwind when I reached pattern altitude (5700 feet, about 1000 feet AGL).

One of my tendencies is to want to keep going up, but I kept it fairly true to pattern altitude for these laps. I’m pretty proud of myself for that!

I reduced power and trimmed for the short downwind cruise. At about the 1000 foot marker (which is 1000 feet beyond the start of the runway; if you’re unfamiliar with aviation, a downwind leg means I’m flying parallel but in the opposite direction of the runway), I powered down, applied carburator heat, trimmed for landing, and applied 10 degrees of flaps. This is the descent procedure.

I started descending, and at 5500 feet and maybe a mile or so beyond the runway (I’m not really good with distances over ground, but I was far enough away!), I turned and called my base leg. I applied 20 degrees of flaps and maintained a careful eye on the airspeed indicator. 65 knots is what I want. I flew the base leg with an eye out on the final approach leg looking for traffic, and seeing none, called and turned my final.

I overshot the final a little bit, but nothing that couldn’t be corrected on the descent. I flared the airplane on the runway, but made a bit of a bounce on touchdown. That’s alright, though. I’m a pilot-in-training and there are definitely some areas to work on! I pulled the flaps out, pushed in the carburator heat, checked alignment and the engine instruments, then pushed the throttle in for another go. I was up and down again in a few minutes, then did another pass. I did 3 solo touch-and-go’s that day, and came back in one piece!

I also lucked out to not have a whole lot of traffic in the area to complicate things. There was a blue-and-white tail-dragger doing touch-and-go’s at the same time on runway 9. Luckily, we stayed almost perfectly interleaved. He was nothing more than a nice voice in the radio and visual scan practice. Nothing too stressful.

I think they’ll make a pilot out of me yet.

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Crosswinds

Another day up nearer to the clouds!

Clocked in another 1.4 hours of time in the log book with Craig. We had a bit of wind aloft (and almost nothing on the ground when we took off), so we used the opportunity to do some turns about a point and S-turns. These are exactly as they sound, you pick a point (e.g; an intersection of two roads) and fly in a circle around it. The same is true for S-turns, you pick a road and then fly hemi-circles on each side.

It sounds easy, and yes, it actually isn’t all that bad if you don’t have to deal with wind! (not saying it’s easy even in that scenario either, but it’s easier). With wind, you have to really feel how the wind is affecting you and bank appropriately. However, that’s not the only challenge: you have to do so smoothly. The challenge is to compensate for the effect of wind by gradually rolling in and out your bank angle in order to stay on your desired flight path. It should be fairly imperceptible (at least in the case of turns about a point, not as much with S-turns). I could definitely use more practice with both of these.

We used the light winds (I think it was up to a whopping 4 knots when we came back to the airport) to practice a few crosswind takeoffs and landings. That’s just, well, weird. Going into a slip to bleed off airspeed and and crabbing into the crosswind on the way down is a strange feeling. I’m honestly not sure what the heck I’m doing with these… oh well!

And to finish off this heavily fragmented post, it occurred to me that I didn’t mention my new LightSPEED 15XLc headset that Santa (thanks Mom and Dad!) brought me for Christmas. I took it up on its inaugural flight this week and used it for every flight thereafter — it’s awesome! The ANR (automatic noise reduction) feature is really amazing; it mellows, but does not eliminate entirely (which is what I wanted), the sound of the engine. The fit and comfort level of it are also deserving of high marks. All in all, it’s made for much more pleasant flight lessons.

With that, it’s bed time for this aspiring aviator. Good night!

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On landing

One of the nice things my new company does for me (and the rest of us!) is give us the week between Christmas and New Years off. So, I’ve been using this time to catch up on some flying lessons.

I’ve been up twice this week – on Monday and on Wednesday with Craig for 2.7 and 2.2 hours respectively. The main focus: landings.

But first, let’s talk about some scary moments. On Monday, Craig and I did some stall practice. I had zero problems correcting out of power-on stalls. Power-off stalls however… well, that was scary. The first and second time (of the exactly two times I tried it on Monday), I vastly over-corrected and nearly turned the airplane into a full nose-down dive. For some reason, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the right action — and after a day or so of analysis — I realized that I was flying with 2 hands on the yoke, and when it came time to correct, I had effectively blocked myself from responding.

Today though, we practiced power-off stalls, and they were flawless. I went back to one-handed yoke-action and all was fine. Craig even said that one of my stall corrections was even smoother than his demonstration. Whew!

Like I said, though, the work over the last 2 days has been pretty much focused around landing. I’m getting very familiar with the pattern around runway 34 and the right pattern around runway 27 at GXY. Landing has always been a scary thing for me; I feared hitting the ground even at 500 feet up in the pattern! After 23 landings over the last few days, I’m much more comfortable. If I were to wake up suddenly flying a Cessna 172 in calm winds, I’m fairly confident I could put the aircraft on the ground (perhaps not smoothly — yet!) in one piece.

So far, I’m up to 13.7 hours. I go up again on Saturday and here’s hoping we have some afternoon winds for some cross-wind training.

Also: no motion sickness over the last few days!

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8.8

Another 2.4 loggable hours today!

All in all, a good day.

On the first flight, we practiced steep banks (45 degrees) in both directions and some turn stalls. I actually screwed up at the beginning of the flight and didn’t raise my seat up to an acceptable level, something I couldn’t correct when we started to taxi. I figured I could live with it (and I could), but I think it contributed heavily to my initial bout of motion sickness.

I had a lot of fun with the steep banks; at first, I thought they were ridiculous. You’re literally turning the airplane half-way towards being on end. Turns out that you can turn around really fast. It’s pretty sweet. I ended up favoring high bank angles for the rest of the day.

I struggled rather mightily (perhaps in part due to motion sickness) maintaining altitude, attitude, and heading. I simply got pushed around by the (relatively calm) air and wasn’t really able to handle it. I could really use practice in this area.

I also got more radio practice and that was excellent.

On this flight, I almost missed the wheels on my pre-flight check. I caught myself and checked them. On run-up, we missed the “knees and knuckles” test; simply put, you test the yoke at its extremes (all the way in left/right, all the way back left/right) for free movement. We caught it the second time around.

Also, a smooth landing (mostly me with direction). I overshot the final and we had to do a “S” approach, but I think if I did this in the real-world, I’d just reject the landing and go around again. I also was so distracted by the quickly approaching ground that I forgot to call final. Oh well. Live and learn

Then we had lunch, and that brings us to flight 2.

Mostly recovered from my motion sickness, we went back up. I taxied us back out to runway 9, radioed for both taxi and for departure, and got us back in the air. I ended up sliding way north, and when I looked back at the runway in the air, we were quite an angle from it.

On this flight, we practiced flying around a point. Craig made it look really easy, but I found it fairly challenging. I think though that there’s hope for me, I didn’t feel like I was too far off, I think I just lacked the “feel” for the airplane and the concomitant situational awareness. In time. We also did some S-turn maneuvers, which was fun.

The landing this time involved a bounce. Oops.

Can’t wait until next week.

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One Two Two Point Eight

I now have 6.4 hours in my log book.

Craig and I went up for a double lesson yesterday, where we practiced a few more power-off stalls and a few power-on stalls. We took a break for lunch, and went back up to practice emergency procedures.

I have to say, power-off stalls are serious bad-mojo my stomach and my sanity. My inclination is to want to undo what caused the stall, and that often leads right into a full-power 20 degree descent. The result is a ride not unlike that of a roller coaster. I’m getting better, but I need to work on not over-correcting the problem. For some reason, power-on stalls are not a problem.

The emergency procedures practice scared me a bit. We came within spitting distance of landing on a random field out in the middle of nowhere. We’ll be doing more of that next lesson, including a high-speed descent and approach. The thought of having the controls for that is… unsettling.

Though, despite my own self-criticism and lack of confidence, I think I’m doing rather well overall. I can feel my skills at performing coordinated turns and straight-and-level flying increasing. I’m looking forward to the cross-country part of training to further develop those skills.

The really cool thing about this last lesson is that I got to announce on the radio. If you were tuned into 122.8 (KGXY’s CTAF) yesterday afternoon, you would have heard my sultry voice saying cool things like:

Greeley Traffic, Skyhawk One Seven Two Zero Zulu, crossing runway niner on delta for runway three four, Greeley.

and

Greeley Traffic, Skyhawk One Seven Two Zero Zulu, departing runway three four to the north, Greeley.

Apparently my listening to ATC has paid off. Craig said I did very well on the radio. Tune in next week for more.

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On Coffee

It’s no secret that I love coffee.

I love it dripped, pressed, espressed, and pretty much in any form except percolated.

Yet, I’ve stopped drinking it regularly.

It’s for a simple reason: I want to be able to function in the absence of coffee. I recently went on a hike with Myles and couldn’t go further than half a mile. Part of it was poor physical conditioning (up until then, I’d been pretty bad about going to the gym), part of it was the coffee I had on the way up to the trailhead.

I haven’t given up coffee entirely, for I had some at breakfast (at the Breakfast Club with Woof). I’ve just given up the regular dosing of it.

So, new rule: drink coffee to enjoy coffee, not because you need coffee.

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Climb and Maintain Seven Thousand

“Greeley Traffic, Skyhawk One Seven Two Zero Zulu, departing runway three four, Greeley.”

It all started with what would seem like an ordinary burger run.

Several weeks ago, a few of us from work (actually, my old work, for a certain video security company), decided to go grab some burgers at the new Smash Burger in Colorado Springs. Owing to the sheer distance (2 hour drive) between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs, we opted to fly — in a lovely single-engine Piper Saratoga. KFNL to KCOS was about a 40 minute flight, but more importantly, it was a flight.

That started it. That it? Flight school.

The owner (and pilot) of the aforementioned Saratoga is now my flight instructor. He’s teaching me out of a Cessna 172 based from Poudre Aviation, out at Greeley-Weld County Airport (KGXY). So far, I have just under 4 hours in my log book and a student pilot certificate, and I’m having a blast.

I hope to keep this blog updated with my progress.

So far, in those 4 hours, Craig has had me practice taxiing, takeoffs, landings (just 2 so far, I could really use more practice!), straight-and-level flight (could use some practice on the trim wheel), coordinated turns (steep, shallow, medium banks), slow flight maneuvers, basic instrument flying, and stall recovery (this made me sick today).

It’s actually pretty amazing what you can learn in 4 hours of flight and untold more reading the flight manual and the flight maneuvers guide.

I think, especially at this point, I could use a lot more practice. I’m struggling to keep up with all the new inputs while piloting an aircraft. Trying to manage a checklist, listen to radio calls, monitor traffic (which I do poorly), keep up with the 6-pack (airspeed indicator, attitude indicator, altimeter, turn coordinator, heading indicator, vertical speed indicator), not to mention throttle, mixture, oil pressure, oil temperature, and the myriad of other doodads — (trying to manage…) is a real challenge.

As I noticed on my way home from the airport a week or two ago, I found the driving to be nearly automatic. I’m hoping I can get flying to a point like this, where I know where I am, where I’m going, and how I’m pointed, without having to inspect each gauge.

That’s what next weekend is for.

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DIY Time Machine Server

The fine netatalk folks have done it again: added Time Machine support to their software! It even works!

If you’re looking to roll your own Time Machine server, and don’t want to shell out for one of Apple’s Time Capsules (say, if you want to integrate Time Machine into your existing storage array), this is how you do it:

What you need:

1. A FreeBSD or Linux server with some spare disk space.
2. A network of some sort.

The how:

Note, the installation and activation (1 and 2) steps are for FreeBSD. If you’re using Linux, your vendor/distribution most likely has a package pre-made for you. Try “apt-get install netatalk”, “yum install netatalk”, or consult your distribution’s documentation. Alternatively, you can install directly from source!

1. Install netatalk

   # cd /usr/ports/net/netatalk
   # make all install
   

2. Activate it on boot, by adding these lines to /etc/rc.conf

   netatalk_enable="YES"
   afpd_enable="YES"
   cnid_metad_enable="YES"
   

3. Configure a Time Machine volume, by editing /usr/local/etc/AppleVolumes.default:

   # first is the path, second is the display name, remaining are the options
   /data/tm "Time Machine" options:nostat,tm cnidscheme:dbd
   

4. Start it up:

   # /usr/local/etc/rc.d/netatalk start
   

   On Linux, try:

   # /etc/init.d/netatalk start
   

5. You’re set. On your Mac, just connect to your server (Finder, Go -> Connect to Server, then enter afp://yourserverip), log in, and mount the Time Machine volume. Then just hit the Time Machine prefpane (Apple -> System Preferences -> Time Machine) and turn it on!

For auto-discovery of your file server, you might install avahi and add an _afpovertcp._tcp service, see this link for more info.

Caveats:

Time Machine will consume all the space on the partition /data/tm lives on. It’s a good idea to create a storage-capped volume specifically for Time Machine, so you don’t accidentally fill up your disk with constant backups!

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Hello Blog

Hello oh underused blog. How you doin’?

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I don’t understand people who comment on newspapers.

So, the The Coloradoan is running an article about proposed rate increases for our city utility to pay for higher energy costs and “smart” metering. I read this article this morning and thought “hey, that’s a good idea.”

Then, I read some of the comments attached to the article. I’ve chosen to share some of the more “intellectually deficient” (these are 5 of the 8 comments on the article when I read it, I kid you not) ones:

They’re going to raise utility rates so high, a person will need to monitor them on a daily basis. Thanks to Salazar and Ritter!

I’d like to be there when they tell these meter readers they’re spending 21 million dollars to eliminate their jobs. Way to go Fort Collins.

Alas, government marches on with its never ending increase in taxes, fees or however you want to label it, totally unconcerned that peopole are struggling as it is. Why did the people of Fort Collins re-elect every incumbent last fall? I did not vote for one incumbent, and certainly won’t next time either. If memory serves me, every incombent got put back into office.

Big Brother is watching, sucking away your liberty and making you pay for the process of doing so. Americans, you are idiots for allowing this to happen.

I wish my small business was “government…” Instead of taking it like the rest of us are in this economy all you have to do is raise “fees” (taxes). It’s SO easy!

It’s almost as if each and every one of these people failed to read the article. Sure, a 9.5% increase in utility rates sounds like a lot, but lets look at some facts:

• The city of Fort Collins charges $0.067 cents per kilowatt hour. Xcel Energy (which powers other parts of Colorado) charges $0.109¹ per kilowatt hour; that’s getting close to twice the cost.
• Power outages are very rare in Fort Collins. The city actually does a good job.
• Advanced Metering accounts for 2.08% of the proposed rate increase, the rest comes from power costs and other needs (at least most of which we have to pay for anyway!)

So, in essence, the City Utility wants to raise our rates by an amount that will cover their (really, our) electric bill and simultaneously upgrade our electric system. As part of the bargain, we get a smarter system that will allow us to monitor our power usage in real time. That means we can make smarter choices about how we use electricity. As we gain more knowledge about how we use electricity, the utility gets better intelligence about how power is distributed around the city; knowledge they can use better and more efficiently manage our system. All of this, and we’ll still pay less than Xcel customers.

Yes. It will cost more. No, it’s not a special fee or a tax. It’s the cost of us maintaining our own electric grid instead of a private entity. And we get a pretty smoking deal from it, too.

Oh, did I mention that the 2.08% bump is temporary? Just to pay for the upgrade²? Did I also mention that the 10-15 meter readers would be retrained and have opportunities at other jobs in the utilities department?

Yes. I realize the irony of me commenting about a news article to complain about the commenters on a news article. I think it’s funny too.

1 – quoted from Astralux Power Systems – probably not a great source.
2 – I’m under no illusion that the 2.08% will just be diverted at the end of the 3 year period to pay for other programs or utility-borne cost increases.

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