adjusting for refraction, part II

This is what I'd secretly hoped would happen all along, you know?

I'd be flying out of a quiet, run-down, pleasant sort of backwater airport filled with interesting people: savants, a few young guns like myself, wise old sages, colorful internationals, jokesters, ace pilots, acrobats, war veterans, lots of beat-up airplanes, and maybe a lethargic dog or cat.

And that's exactly what I'm doing.

Let me tell you a bit about M_____ Aviation, where my bosses rent their spare Mooney (known as 95W, or Nine-Five Whiskey). The building is a hangar, to which a couple of carpeted, fluorescently-lit rooms have been tacked on. It's just west of 18, right on the taxiway, and in the exact center of the runway; what's known as "midfield" in aviation lingo. There are about thirty or so airplanes of every description parked nearby, tied down against the omnipresent desert breeze.

Inside the hangar, three small aircraft sit in various states of dissection. The radio is always on, and the booming voices of talk show hosts carom off the metal walls and rebound through the empty space. Workbenches, carts, trolleys, and shelves, all packed with oilcans and all kinds of tools, are scattered throughout. The extra rooms comprise the office, bathrooms, and classroom of M_____ Aviation. The classroom is about the size of a dining room, and has a couple of long tables and a mismatched selection of rickety chairs. There's a whiteboard, which almost always has some basic principle of aviation demonstrated upon it in fading marker: the different kinds of airspace, accepted methods for stall recovery. The walls of the classroom are plastered with old white T-shirts and assorted bits of cloth; upon these, also in marker, have been scrawled the names of students, the dates of their first solo flights, and some encouraging remarks like "It was a piece of cake!" or "Three Perfect Landings!" Some artistic souls have also drawn pictures of their airplane coming in on Runway 18.

Light shines feebly in through the opaque glass of the windows. There's a microwave in one corner of the classroom, with an ancient Cup o' Noodles sitting on it. The tables are covered with piles of aviation magazines, textbooks, and instructional pamphlets. The computer in the opposite corner sits and whirs idly.

The main office is a long room, about thirty feet. It smells heavily of secondhand smoke. The southernmost end has a couple of soft, sagging couches, more aviation magazines, toys, mugs, headsets, and all manner of bumper stickers and license plate holders, all for sale. Aviation comics from the 1930s and photographs of F-86s and B-25s are tacked up on the stained, yellowing walls. The coffee machine next to the bathroom door is well-supplied with creamer, sugar, and Styrofoam cups—even little brown straws. On the north side of the room, toward the classroom, is the reception desk. It is impossible to discern what kind of wood it's made of, or even if it's made of wood at all. There is such an amazing pile of textbooks, documents, newspapers, paperweights, cigarette lighters and coffee cups on it that its surface is utterly obscured. The desk faces the two big glass doors and the two floor-length plate-glass windows on either side of them; but for the eucalyptus tree out in front of the office, there'd be a rather good view of Runway 18. (There are also some shrubs and a metal barbecue, filled with cigarette butts, outside.)

Just inside the glass door is another sagging couch...absurdly comfortable, conforming immediately to one's backside. To the right of the desk, as you walk in, is the classroom; to the left, there's a long, low glass counter, filled with textbooks and merchandise (and further down, bumper stickers). Payments are transacted here. Up against the east wall, where the doors are, there's a sort of shelving unit which separates the north and south sides of the room. On this shelf are tiny flight jackets (for those toddlers aspiring to be aviators) and other aviation apparel. There is also a large, smooth, two-bladed wooden propeller leaning up against this shelf, all of a piece. Pete says the propeller was carved out of a single block of wood by a local woman with a chainsaw. I don't know if that's true, but Pete has no cause to lie about it.

Ah-ha!

Now that I've finished populating this flight school with inanimate objects, I must relate to you something of its organic denizens. Enter Anna, the Dutch matron who runs the place, and Pete, the soft-spoken genius mechanic. Anna is short, thickset, and brown-haired, with twinkling brown eyes that shine out of a weather-beaten face. She smokes unashamedly and plays solitaire on the computer at light-speed. I took a liking to her almost immediately. She always has some incisive observation to make, and she knows aviation through and through. I'll bet she's forgotten more about flying than I'll ever learn.

Anna has aviation in her blood. She learned to fly in her native Holland, oh-so-many years ago, as she says. She flew in Holland, in Belgium, in Germany, and then finally came over here and started up this flight school in 1978. She's a fun person, always giving you a big hello. She pronounces her R's like W's, and her Th's like D's, but dat's all wight with me. Anna always arrives first, about ten minutes before seven, unlocking and opening the gate and starting the coffee. She makes good coffee. That's quite something, coming from me. I don't even like coffee. But hers is quite palatable.
"In Holland," she told me when I complimented her, "dey make it twice as stwong."
Oh goodie. Now I have another entry for my already monumental list of places to visit and things to do.

And then there's Pete. Pete rolls up about five minutes after Anna, in a gray Toyota stained black with tar. It looks as though a tarry monster slimed and oozed its way out of his truck bed, down the side panel and onto the ground. Anna told us it was from the work they'd done earlier re-tarring the ramp area. They'd done it themselves. It's not surprising. Pete is handy guy. He's the resident aviation mechanic, and rather proficient by all appearances.

What appearances, you ask? Well, I'll tell you.

Maybe I'm a sentimentalist, or set too much store by appearances. But regardless, there are certain visual criteria I use to determine if somebody is a quote-unquote "good" mechanic. The first thing I really noticed about Pete was his hands. For a man as short and skinny as he is, his hands are disproportionate. The fingers are large, thick, and stubby, covered with nicks and coated with the grayish vestiges of yesterday's engine oil. It's under his nails, down his cuticles, embedded in the creases of his knuckles. That spells "good mechanic" to me. I figure his fingers didn't start out thick and stubby like that. They got that way from years of poking around inside aircraft engines, nicking them on sharp metal corners, scraping them on unforgiving cylinder heads and cowlings, fumbling with nuts and rivets, tweaking, tuning and tinkering, often in freezing temperatures or other harsh conditions. The oil tells me he's not afraid to get his hands dirty, nor leave them that way for a while. Pete's all fix and no fuss, in other words. I admire men like that. I don't mind getting coated with engine oil or working on anything mechanical, but I have a set of beater clothes for that. Pete just dives right in.

The rest of him bears out that impression. The only part of Pete that ever changes is the color of his button-down shirt. The rest of him stays the same. Bespectacled, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and sideburns, flyaway brown hair poking out from beneath his cap, Pete just looks like a stereotypical aviation mechanic. He smokes as much as Anna, if not more. He's soft-spoken, and quietly whistles his consonants. He never opens his mouth wide when he's talking; and his mustache acts like a shield for his teeth and gums. But eventually I was able to determine that Pete is missing one of his front teeth. Whenever he's investigating an engine, peering under the cowling with a flashlight in his hand, Pete whistles breezily through this gap in his dentition. The knees of his jeans are eternally oil-stained. His feet fit snugly into comfortably beaten tennis shoes. He wears a plain black jacket with a pocket on the sleeve, and reaches unhesitatingly into whatever aperture or opening on an engine he can find.

That's his first and most trusted diagnostic: reach in and feel around for the trouble. As we attempted to remedy the inoperative governor yesterday, I saw Pete employ this method to great effect. He reached in and fumbled around a while, whistling airily, his arm embedded in the engine up to the shoulder. Then he pulled his hand back out. An incriminating drop of oil slid down his index finger like blood. Pete's got some funny stories to tell, too. And it's a delight to hear somebody tell him their mechanical problems. You can just see the wheels turning in Pete's head. He'll muse for a bit, and then ask a few salient questions: "What was the oil pressure doing?" or "Was it sustained at 2200 RPM?" Then he'll grab his screwdriver and head out to the hangar to do battle with the Gods of Disrepair.

Like I said, he seems to be a good mechanic.

Pete doesn't commute to the airport alone. He carpools. Zeke always comes with him. Zeke has four legs, a wet snout, amber eyes, and fur as soft and abundant as a chinchilla. He's a German shepherd cross, and Pete's constant companion. After relieving himself outside on the taxiway somewhere, Zeke comes inside and lays down in the middle of the floor, right in front of the reception desk. He barked at Mr. Mooney and me a few times, but got used to us eventually. Indeed, once he figured out I was good for free pets, I became his new best friend. Airplanes don't faze him; firing engines don't bother him in the slightest. He's a shockproof, biscuit-mad, pet-crazy old airport dog, that's all.

Scan is the name I give to M_____ Aviation's last noteworthy resident. Mr. Mooney and I were rolling 95 Whiskey back into place when I spotted a cat sitting on the asphalt just ten feet away. He was dark gray, with a black back and stripes. Pete noticed my surprise.

"Want a Cat Scan?" he asked.

"I'm sorry?" I answered shakily, not sure I'd heard him right.

"He gives Cat Scans," Pete answered, nodding at the cat, an undercut smile on his face. "He'll climb inside your engine and tell you what's wrong with it."

I, in my usual blockhead mode, still didn't understand.

"He charges 75 bucks, though," Pete went on, still smiling. "And he doesn't diagnose much apart from mice."

Finally, I caught on.

"Yeah," I grinned back. " 'Everything's good in there, man, but you've got some birds in the air intakes!' "

Both of us chuckled.

Scan doesn't really have a name so far as I'm aware. If he does, I've never heard anyone call him by it. Scan seems to suit perfectly well.

And now, before I let you go, I will tell you about refraction. As we discussed yesterday, refraction is chiefly the change in direction of a ray of light, sound, or heat, in passing obliquely from one medium to another.

I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a ray of light, but I have passed obliquely from one medium to another: unemployment to employment, stagnation to participation, earth to air. And I think I feel a change in the wind. This new job is not the paltry part-time noncommittal thing I imagined it would be. It's the real deal. There's some potential for advancement within this company. They're expanding, growing, pushing out, taking on new contracts. I'm getting some flight time in the right seat and also furthering my writing career in my off-hours. The pay is good, and there's the possibility that it may increase.

But more importantly, I'm enjoying the work. I stand to both (a) save up a lot of money, and (b) "grow as an aviator," as Mr. Mooney put it. Long story short...this might turn out to be a lengthier gig than I imagined. I think I might stick around for a year or three and see how things turn out. Who knows what'll happen? I might make great strides in obtaining my commercial pilot's license, at the very least. At most...well, I'm not given to wild speculation.

Tentatively, it's safe to say that I have been refracted. My direction has changed. I have passed from one medium to another, and ricocheted off in a new and exciting direction. I'm content to settle in for a spell and see where it takes me. If I don't to Australia or Japan this year or the next...so be it. They're not going anywhere.

But I am.

adjusting for refraction, part I

re·frac·tion [rɪˈfrækʃən]. n.

1. Physics.

the change of direction of a ray of light, sound, heat, or the like, in passing obliquely from one medium into another in which its wave velocity is different.

2. Ophthalmology.

a. the ability of the eye to refract light that enters it so as to form an image on the retina. b. the determining of the refractive condition of the eye.

3. Astronomy.

a. Also called astronomical refraction. the amount, in angular measure, by which the altitude of a celestial body is increased by the refraction of its light in the earth's atmosphere, being zero at the zenith and a maximum at the horizon. b. the observed altered location, as seen from the earth, of another planet or the like due to diffraction by the atmosphere.

Here are some more tidbits about the job:

I have three bosses. They work and fly out of Apple Valley, but they all live elsewhere, like Nevada and southern Oregon. So they commute down here one week out of the month and fly with me, and rotate.

I'll call my first boss (the one I worked with last week) Mr. Mooney. That's not his real name, of course. It's the name of the plane we fly. His plane. It's a 1961 Mooney M20B. Doesn't look much different from any other small single-engine plane. Low wings, four seats, two-bladed propeller, and so on. It's radically different from the Cessna 172M I've been flying, though. There aren't any self-esteem issues among flying machines. Some airplanes are just better than others, period. And when they are, they say so, loudly. The Mooney M20 is what's known as a complex, high-performance airplane. In aviation parlance, "complex" equates with "bells 'n' whistles." Complex airplanes have extra goodies like retractable landing gear, specialized flaps, and variable-pitch propellers. If you want to know what a variable-pitch propeller is, you'll have to ask somebody else. I'm not really sure. I spent about 20 minutes this morning quizzing my second boss, Spud, what exactly the hell a variable-pitch propeller does. He explained it to me as best he could, he being a former Air Force jet pilot and me a dribbling halfwit student with only 40 flight-hours. I'm afraid I didn't understand most of it. The propeller hub is filled with oil, and has counterweights in it, which can be adjusted to tilt the blades about 30 degrees or so, to increase their efficiency in flight, which reduces unnecessary drag and saves fuel. That part I was okay with. But then we got into a big hairy discussion about mixture controls, and the vacuum pump, and manifold pressure...and visions of tiny dancing daisies began to spring unbidden to my mind. My brain, tired of jumping around trying to catch all the stuff that was flying over my head, was attempting to activate the screen saver. I found it most irritating, particularly when I was trying to comprehend how manifold pressure relates to throttle settings, and...

"High-performance" means that you have more than 150 horses under the cowl.

Mr. Mooney's Mooney (hereafter referred to by its model, Mooney, and its call sign, 17) has about 180 horsepower, retractable landing gear, cowl flaps, a variable-pitch propeller, an electric fuel pump, and a whole bunch of add-ons. It's painted white, with gray and aqua stripes. (The previous owner was a dentist. I assumed the aqua was some kind of toothpaste pitch, but I was mistaken. His wife just liked the color. Mr. Mooney hates it. My other two bosses, Spud and Dawg, continuously rib him about how awful it looks.)

Between Mr. Mooney's ready narration and the mere act of sitting in the plane, I have become rather familiar with Mooneys. They have lots of endearing little quirks. They're much more idiosyncratic than my friendly old Cessna, that's for dang sure.

My workday starts when I drive into the airport and up to Hangar Five. We go in through the little door, unlatch the big door, and open it. Mr. Mooney attaches a towbar to the front wheel, and I get behind the right wing. He pulls and I push. We roll the plane out of the hangar. It's usually nippy in the mornings this time of year. Mr. Mooney manually rotates the propeller a few times, just to loosen up the engine's innards. He makes sure that the master switch in the cockpit is off, though, before he does this. Otherwise the plane could start up unexpectedly, and he could "wind up" without arms.

After we preflight M17, we climb in. We have to actually climb up on the wing to get inside. Mooneys, oddly, have only one door, on the right side. So Mr. Mooney gets in first, slides himself over into the left seat, and then I get in. It's a tight fit. Both of us are about six feet tall, and broad-shouldered. Mr. Mooney scoots up close to the controls, and I sit back. I close and latch the door. It's strange. Forward visibility is more restricted, thanks to the two-part windscreen. The Mooney is a low-wing aircraft, meaning I can't look out the side window and see the ground anymore. There are a few more knobs and switches in the Mooney than I'm used to: controls for the variable-pitch propeller, for example. There's also an enormous gray lever extending up from the middle of the floor, just underneath the control panel. It looks like a thick gearshift. It's called a Johnson bar, and it operates the landing gear. Instead of flipping a tiny switch, Mr. Mooney grasps this bar with his right hand and wrenches it backward and down, latching it to the floor between the seats. I have learned to scrunch myself against the door and keep my elbows and shoulders out of the way, or else. Then the gear goes up. To put it back down, Mr. Mooney reaches down, grabs the bar, and yanks it back up, locking it into place under the control panel. Gear down.

Needless to say, I was rather impressed with this mechanism. I've heard of hand-cranked landing gear, requiring 33 turns of a little metal wheel, but this Johnson bar takes the biscuit. Mr. Mooney tells me it's far more reliable than any switch or button. That's true, I reckon, but neither switches nor buttons require biceps to operate.

The Mooney is a zippy little plane, though, and has enough horsepower to stay well abreast of the UAV. In fact, the UAV doesn't go that fast. In the air, we have to weave behind it to keep ourselves from shooting past. Mr. Mooney starts the engines while I hook up the GPS and the TKAS systems. The GPS is a Garmin 396, a good basic mid-range navigational aid. "TKAS" stands for...um, stands for...uh...

It's a collision avoidance system. It's a squat gray box with a low-bit screen on the front. It's attached with Velcro to a little platform we've rigged up for it, and hooks up to the GPS with a cord. The data from the TKAS is displayed on the GPS as a small black screen, inset over the main display. It has two little concentric circles on it, representing one-mile and three-mile radii from the plane. As we fly, I keep my eyes glued to the GPS, the TKAS, the UAV and the skies nearby, to make sure nothing out there smacks into anything else. I'm an extra set of eyes. In fact, that is my technical job description. I am the observer.

Mr. Mooney and I take off from the Apple Valley airfield and swing west to head to Victorville, about ten miles away. Barely a minute in the air, and we're inside their airspace. Mr. Mooney swings north so we can get behind the UAV—a gray speck on taxiway B—as it takes off to the south.

On the first day, takeoff went perfectly. We followed the UAV out to the test site, a 20-minute flight or so. It was tough to see the little spindly-winged bird until it climbed above the horizon and was silhouetted against the bright sky. Mr. Mooney and I came back to Apple Valley and twiddled our thumbs for six hours until the afternoon flight, when we jumped back into M17, took off for the test site, and caught the UAV as it flew out. (I actually spotted it first; Mr. Mooney congratulated me heartily, saying "I'd earned my pay.") We escorted it back, handed it off to the ground controllers, landed at Apple Valley, and went home.

The second day was a bit weird. It was windy, which meant things were quite bumpy aloft. There were a few minor technical difficulties to sort out, which meant that Mr. Mooney and I had to land at Victorville and spend twenty minutes chilling in the FBO. (Fortunately, they had free popcorn and bottled water.) We flew a quick local mission and then went home.

This week I'm flying with Boss #2, Spud. Spud barely made it down from Nevada in the company Mooney, Sierra Hotel (a 1964 M20E, named for the last two letters of its call sign). There's a high-pressure system down the hill in the L.A. Basin. Conditions up here, then, are ridiculously blustery: 25-30 miles an hour sustained, gusting to 50. It's been that way for the last couple of days. Spud was getting severely tossed around, coming down through the Owens Valley. On top of that, the governor on the variable-pitch propeller was acting up, too. But he made it.

It's so windy, however, that flights have been canceled today and tomorrow. Spud and I spent the morning helping the mechanic down at the airport investigate that misbehaving governor. I'll tell you some more about that next time, I reckon. Let me fly an actual mission with Spud and then I'll get back to you. I can't wait until this spring weather clears up and we can start flying...

Oh yeah...and I'll tell you, in my usual roundabout way, why the word "refraction" is so important to what I'm writing about.