Pug’s Place

I went flying again Saturday, this time with a full plane: my instructor, another instructor (Dan), my brother and myself. The title of this post comes from our return landing at Stellar Airpark where we followed an authentic WWII Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber which was on a “simulated bombing run” over our airfield. It was mighty strange to hear over the radio “bomb bay doors open!” and “bombs away!” right before we landed on the same runway that was just hit by 4,000 lbs of imaginary ordinance.

So, back on track, flying today:

My brother waffled about wanting to come along and see what it’s like to be in a private plane (as he had never been up in anything smaller than an airliner) and finally last night decided to come along. It’s a cloudy morning after some rain overnight but my weather briefing showed conditions to be improving rapidly and never being all that bad - it was a nicer day today than it was in July when Katie and I went flying with Barry, actually, but these Arizona folks are a little skittish about clouds and rain and such, it seems. (Don’t worry, I have a healthy fear of clouds). So after I convinced myself that it was still flying weather, Chris and I went out to the airfield where most of the aircraft available for rent should have been airborne according to the schedule… and not only were all but one aircraft there, but all the instructors (including mine who was supposed to be still flying with another student) were chatting in the lobby. Apparently most people canceled/didn’t show for their flights or training today. My instructor, Jason, had already been stood up but he was confident that I’d be there.
Since Dan, another instructor, had also been stood up and had nothing to do for a while, he asked if he could tag along with us today. Well, that makes for a full Cessna 172! So we had to change my aircraft reservation to one without full fuel tanks to make sure we met the proper weight requirements (no danger in this - still about 4 hours of fuel in the plane for a 1.5 hour flight). So it was back in the ol’ favorite, sierra-papa. Anyway, I did my preflight in an ever-decreasing amount of time as I memorize an increasingly efficient ‘flow’ around the plane. I should say I’m not spending less time checking each thing, I’m just spending less time saying, “what do I do now?” or “where is that valve?”. After the preflight we all four piled into the plane, Chris and I plugging in my new (used) aviation headsets I received this week after purchasing them (and other cool stuff) on eBay last week. I had a little trouble getting the engine to turn over in the cold, but everything went well including the “safety briefing” I gave to our passengers:

This aircraft has two exits, one under each wing. [everybody laughs] To open the doors, lift up on the handle and push on the door; to close the door, pull it shut and then push down on the handle until it latches. In the event of a door malfunction, all windows in this aircraft can be kicked out and used as emergency exits. [Dan says, "good to know"] Each seat in this aircraft has a seat belt which works like the one in your car. Keep your seat belt fastened at all times. This aircraft is equipped with a fire extinguisher located between the front seats. In the event of an in-cabin fire, remove the extinguisher from its clamps, pull the ring, point the nozzle at the base of the fire and squeeze the trigger. Only once the fire is out will we open the windows to ventilate the aircraft. In the event of an off-airfield landing, we will exit the aircraft and walk to the wing tips, then circle the craft to meet in front of the nose staying well clear of the prop as it may still be spinning.

Takeoff was weird. At 55 knots the aircraft usually starts lifting off on its own, 60 knots at the latest. Today as I hit 55 knots I said, “airspeed is coming alive… rotating” and pulled back on the yoke, nothing happened. I pulled harder. The airspeed indicator read 60-ish knots. I pulled harder, no go. Jason said, “get it off the ground, James.” I said, “I’m trying!” 65 knots and the nose-wheel comes up. I pull even harder and whoosh, suddenly we’re at 70 knots, in ground effect and have used about a third more runway than I’ve ever used before to take off. More than doubling the weight of the passengers has quite an effect! Of course, Jason knew that and just wanted me to realize what was happening since I’ll certainly fly with a full aircraft sometime!

I told Chris before we left that we’d probably be doing steep turns and stalls, so he should be forewarned that at times (with lots of prior warning) I would be making the airplane fall like a rock for very short periods of time. However, Jason, being a nice and accommodating sort of guy, said that since we had Chris along we’d skip forward a bit and come back to stalls - so we did some constant rate climbs, descents, climbing turns and descending turns to take us out over a massive strip mine near Casa Grande, AZ and then headed for Chandler Municipal Airport so that I could do some touch-and-goes at a towered, controlled airfield. En route to Chandler Municipal Airport I got to fly around clouds for the first time. Theyr’e so big and fluffy and scary. Eep. (Scary because when you’re in a cloud you can’t see anything.)

These touch-and-goes at Chandler Municipal were my first experience interacting with an air traffic control tower. Luckily, Jason handled all of the radio communication so all I had to do was try to land the plane a few times, which I did. 3 times, to be exact. Air traffic controllers speak very quickly. Apparently if you tell them “student pilot” they slow down, but Jason didn’t specify that and so I couldn’t catch parts of their exchanges. I should have asked him to specify “student pilot” when he was doing the calls but I didn’t think about it until later. Ah well. It was still interesting to be vectored around by someone on the ground.

It was after we departed the traffic pattern of Chandler and were halfway to our home airfield, Stellar Airpark, when we heard a transmission saying “Stellar Traffic, Boeing (something) is 10 miles north of the airfield, inbound for simulated bombing run at 2,000 straight down the runway, Stellar.” I ask Jason, “a Boeing what? Bombing run? what does that actually mean?” He hops on the radio and asks, “Stellar traffic, Cessna niner-sierra-papa is 2,000, entering at a 45 a left downwind for runway one-seven. Boeing, how far out are you?”

About this time Dan says from the back, “traffic, 11-o-clock level.” Jason and I see it and he says, “it’s too close” ’cause, well, it looks pretty big. But it’s pointed nearly right at us. We then hear, “Boeing (something) is a B-17 bomber, we’ll be there in two minutes. You should have time to land before we arrive.” On the intercom Jason says, “ah, it’s not that it’s really close, it’s that it’s really big. And I don’t think we’ll be on the ground before he gets here, so…” and keys his microphone: “Stellar traffic, Cessna niner-sierra-papa is extending its downwind to allow B-17 plenty of room for his maneuver. Cessna extended downwind, runway one-seven, Stellar.”

By now we can see the giant vertical stabilizer of the bomber and, yeah, it was closing far too quickly for us to have landed before it got there. So we just turned and followed it to the airfield on a very, very long final approach. While we were putting in the last notch of flaps it was fun to see movement on the bottom of the bomber and hear someone call over the radio, “Bomb bay doors open” followed shortly by “bombs away!”

As you can probably tell, Chris took tons of pictures on this flight. So unlike the previous post, this one has pictures of me with the actual aircraft I fly, my actual instructor and so forth.