Wednesday solo and Thursday triumph

On Wednesday our cross-country flight was canceled, again on account of the wind. Sometimes this desert really gets on my nerves. So instead Harold had me solo to Barstow and back. Golly, it was a beautiful, calm day, and I got to fly over the horrendously gorgeous Granite Mountains. I did a few touch-and-gos at Barstow-Daggett Airport, practiced my short field and soft field landings, flew back (stopping over the barrens to try some steep turns), and then came home and landed. The next day was Thanksgiving, a real mother of a blowout. Man, it was good to have turkey and sweet potato soufflé and green bean casserole with Ma and Pa after five years of Thanksgivings away from home. I didn't fly Monday or Tuesday this week due to...that embarrassing thing that happened to me which I can't tell you about. But I managed to schedule a lesson for Thursday, December 3. And on that Thursday, the winds were finally calm enough for us to fly to 29 Palms. Was it ever a grand flight. 'Twas odd to finally be able to see over the San Bernardino Mountains behind my house without actually driving up Highway 18 to Big Bear Lake. They were all dusted with snow, too, and mottled with blue shadows in the low-lying winter sun. That was our southward view. To the north there lay the whole expanse of the Mojave Desert, with its stark mountains, rocky hills, dry lakes, and vast wastes of Joshua trees and tumbleweeds. It was a religious sight. After 20 minutes in the air, heading eastbound, we spotted an enormous gout of dust rising from the flats a few miles ahead. The 29 Palms area is well known for the rather large Marine base nearby; Harold peered at the dust and reckoned it was probably a tank platoon out practicing. If one more awesome thing happens on this flight, my subconscious mind whispered to itself, I'm gonna fire off and explode. The nearly 100 miles between Apple Valley and 29 Palms disappeared almost too quickly. We almost didn't find the airport. Even with the purple line on the GPS pointing right at it, the thing was darn hard to see. We were practically set up to land on a dirt strip before we spotted the actual, paved airport at one o'clock, off our nose. After that it was a piece of cake. We made a slight deviation to the south to avoid flying into the restricted airspace above the Marine base. Neither of us felt like being intercepted by jet fighters. We got back on track, flew over the town of Yucca Valley (it was so weird to see it from the air having been there so many times by car), set up for landing, did a touch-and-go, and were off again. It's a nice little airport they've got there. Small, dinky, and out-of-the-way, but that's how I like my airports. They've got an incredible view, too. The scenery's to die for. Kind of like this picture here, but quite a bit more panoramic (as viewed from higher up). The flight back was just about the same as the flight out, only in reverse. This time, however, since we were flying west, and I was in the left (and southernmost) seat, I got a better view of the mountains. That "something else cool" happened, too. I learned about Flight Watch. Flight Watch is a nationwide flight service, available on the 122.00 frequency, that gives pilots weather reports and advisories whenever they want 'em. Flight Watch can also help you if you're having trouble, or have gotten lost or something. Is that cool or what? It's like an omniscient aviation god, benevolently watching over its bio-mechanical supplicants. Harold called Flight Watch up on the radio. We contacted the Los Angeles branch; we were less than 100 miles away as the crow flies. Harold gave the responder a "pilot report": an up-to-date, eyewitness weather report, from altitude. He reported our position (over Yucca Valley again), the visibility ("unrestricted," better than 10 miles), the outside air temperature (40 degrees Fahrenheit), and the winds ("smooth ride"; no turbulence whatsoever). "It's just a nice day up here," Harold concluded. Harold also concluded, later, that the fellow we talked to at Flight Watch must've been lonely and bored. He didn't want to get off the line with us. He asked us if there was anything else we needed, and reminded us of some turbulence warnings that were slated to take effect later in the day (Zulu time). He finally thanked us for our report and signed off. Harold and I had been looking at each other and grinning all through the conversation, just from the inherent coolness of it all. Now we sat back and chuckled. The plane drew closer to home. Hold it! I'm almost done. I've got one more neat thing to discuss and then I'll let you go. If you've hung on this long uninterrupted (bathroom breaks and sandwiches notwithstanding), congratulations. Glance away from the screen for 20 seconds to rest your peepers. Finished? Okay. I finally got to fly over my house. It's true! I live on the way to 29 Palms from Apple Valley (though obviously closer to Apple Valley). On our return trip, we overflew my house, snuggled up in the San Bernardino foothills. I casually mentioned this to Harold, and he said this: "You want to circle it?" My mind screamed, "HECK YES!" My mouth said, "Can we?" Harold said, "Sure! Let's pull the power back here..." As we got closer, I asked Harold to note the time (so I could tell Mom the exact hour when I'd flown over, so she'd know it was me). Harold held up his cell phone instead. "You know, you can call her," he suggested. "ALRIGHT!" my mind hollered. "Okay, I'll do that," my mouth said. Harold took the controls while I fumbled in my flight bag for my own phone. I took off my headset (exposing my ears to the thunderous roar of wind and 150 horses) and dialed Mom. "Hello?" "Hey Ma, it's me!" "Hi!" "Guess where I am right now." "Are you over the house?!" (She heard the engine noise and knew I was still in the plane.) "Yep! We're coming in from the east, we should be overhead in a few minutes." "Fine! I'll come out." And there she was, just a tiny pinprick against the grayish-white swath of the gravel driveway, bouncing up and down and waving her arms for all she was worth. "Rock your wings," Harold said. I did, and the whole plane waved back. We finished the circle and flew back to Apple Valley Airport. Mom was thrilled. She'd been waiting every day to hear me fly over, but always my flights had been rescheduled or canceled. Finally we got our chance. Nice to know somebody on the ground knows you're in the air, and wants to wave at you. Thanks, Ma. Anyway, that was how we got to 29 Palms (or, as pilots often refer to it, "29 Stumps"). Whoo-ee. That was an ordeal, wasn't it? My life lately seems to consist of nothing but these frustrating-but-somehow-still-fun-cum-enlightening ordeals. Next, I should be soloing out there, and thus add another 1.8 hours of pilot-in-command time to my logbook. After that, Harold says, we just have to work on night flying (yippee, I can't wait!) and a little instrument work, and then I should be... ...finished. Wish us luck, lads.

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!