SF/SFO

Flying's going well, if you're still interested. Today Harold and I practiced SF/SFO, or what everybody else calls Short Field and Soft Field Operations. This is just what it sounds like: landing and taking off on a short runway or a patch of soft ground. See, as shocking as it sounds, you will not always be landing on a nice, long, paved runway. Sometimes you may be landing on a short dirt strip. Or a grass field. Or a sandy beach. (Bush pilots have to deal with these conditions all the time, so I'd better get good at it.) There's a certain special trick to pulling off these sorts of unusual landings and takeoffs. Normally, on a paved runway, all you have to do is let down some flaps, and— I've been told I should really itemize things if I want to explain flying more clearly. So here goes a very basic explanation of what you need to do to land on a PAVED runway:

• reduce throttle
• lower flaps incrementally
• use pitch to control speed, and throttle to control altitude
• flare about ten feet from the ground
• touch down smoothly, apply brakes

To clarify, flaps are those big flat things that stick out from the trailing edges of the wings, which are lowered right before the airplane lands. They're different from the ailerons, the control surfaces which dictate the airplane's rate of roll. The flaps act like air brakes. They slow you down as you come in to land. They also increase the surface area of the wing, enabling a plane to stay aloft even at very slow speeds—just the ticket for a slow descent onto a runway. Generally, you lower them in increments: a little bit when you're on the downwind leg of the landing pattern; a little bit more when you turn your base leg; a little bit more when you turn to make your final approach. "Flaring" is what you do just a second before landing. It's something that airplanes borrowed from birds. You see it on National Geographic TV commercials all the time: some big lolloping bird comes in for a landing, and right before it hits the water or ground or tree branch or whatever, it sort of turns its body up on end and tilts its wings back to slow itself down. Flaring in an airplane is the same kettle of fish. Just a few feet above the runway, you pull back on the controls to tilt the nose of the plane up. This slows you down even more, just enough to land. That's why you want to make sure not to do it too high, like I do, because you'll bounce down onto the tarmac very hard. Now, with short field operations, you do the same thing, except you have to be a lot more precise. If your field is only a few hundred feet long, you don't have much room for error, so you have to pretty much touch down RIGHT at the VERY END of the runway to ensure that you have plenty of room to roll to a stop. To practice this, Harold told me to pick a point on our nice big paved runway at Apple Valley Airport. Once I did, he told me to land there, or within 200 feet of it. (Two hundred feet may sound like a lot, but in terms of airplanes coming to a halt, it really isn't; our runway is about 6,000 feet long, and ours is a small airport.) Once I'd done that, he said, I was to immediately put the flaps up and apply the brakes, to stop as soon as practically possible. And guess what, sports fans? I got it on my first try. Nailed it. Touched down right where I'd wanted to, snapped the flaps back up, jammed on the brakes (not too hard), and came right to a dead stop. Bingo. ...which meant that we now got to practice a short field takeoff. This would be just like a regular takeoff, except instead of mundanely powering up and rolling down the runway, I would keep the brakes on while I poured on full throttle, suddenly release them, and go. And that's exactly how it happened. I stood on those brakes for all I was worth as the little plane roared and bellowed and shook, straining forward like an attack dog on a chain. Then, at Harold's command, I let go the brakes. I was promptly knocked back into my seat as we jumped down the runway and leaped into the air. Yeah, I reckon we'd have made it A-OK if the field had been short. Soft field landings are a good deal trickier. To land, you have to keep a little power on until the last second, then touch down only on the back wheels. See, the landing gear on a Cessna 172 is set up like a tricycle. You have the two rear (or "main") wheels, and the nose wheel. During a soft field landing, you want to touch down ONLY on those two main wheels. This is because, when you touch down in a Cessna 172, you're still going rather fast by human standards: about 50 miles per hour or so. If you do a three-point landing and the nose wheel gets bogged down in the sand or wet grass or gravel or whatever, you run the risk of flipping the plane over. So the solution is to do a wheelie. Yes, I'm serious. You touch down only on the back wheels, holding the control yoke back (but not too far back; you don't want to bang the tail on the ground). You hold the plane in that configuration for as long as you can. In a few seconds, the plane will slow down enough on its own (and lose enough lift from under those upturned wings) that the nose wheel will gently... ...come... ...down... ...by itself. Bang, you're on the ground, right-side up. Soft field takeoffs are even trickier. Remember how I said that flaps are normally used for landings? Well, you actually use flaps for soft field takeoffs, too. Just a little, though. What you do is lower the flaps about ten degrees, start your takeoff roll, then raise the nose as soon as you can. (Same reason as before: you don't want to get that dang nose wheel stuck or bogged down when you're going that fast.) So you're doing a wheelie down the runway. At 60 miles per hour, the plane will start to lift off, but you don't want to climb yet. You want to keep the plane low, just over the runway. When the plane reaches 80 miles per hour (the best speed for climbing), THEN you can start climbing. If you start climbing before the plane reaches 80, you'll leave ground effect and the plane could settle back down onto the ground. ("Ground effect" is what happens when you fly an airplane really close to Mother Earth, like right after takeoff. The plane isn't actually flying, per se, even though it's off the ground: the air getting pushed down by the wings is bouncing off the ground and hitting the plane again, pushing it up. Only when the plane reaches a certain speed is the necessary pressure differential created between the top and the bottom of the wings; that is what actually keeps the plane in the air without ground effect.) If you're on a paved runway, lifting off at 60 and climbing out is no problem. If you lose ground effect (which usually doesn't happen) then you'll just bounce back down onto the nice hard runway. However, on a soft field...well, we've already discussed this. This is why you use flaps (for the extra lift) and hug the ground until your airspeed is 80 (so you know you can stay up). In case my lengthy explanation hasn't made it clear, soft field takeoffs are flippin' hard. You have to really hold that yoke back to keep the nose wheel off the ground. (Good thing I've been doing all those lateral pull-downs on the weight machine, eh?) Then, after you take off, instead of keeping the nose pointed at the sky (like you do with every other type of takeoff), you actually sort of level out, pitching the plane back down again, riding ground effect until you reach 80, then climb. It's very, very counterintuitive. Needless to say, Harold had to help me with it the first couple of times until I could get a feel for it. My job was made harder (ironically) by how smooth the air was today. There was no wind at all. We didn't have a headwind to land into and slow us down (and make it easier to do wheelies). But I did my best. I was grinning inside as we pulled up to the gate, shut down, and climbed out. I had just gotten a little taste of what I could expect out of a bush piloting career. Moreover, those kind of landings are just plain cool. They demand all of your attention and a great deal of manual dexterity (not to mention some biceps). And come on, I mean, wheelies? In an airplane?! Hot diggity!