Earlier this week I was supposed to have a flight at 7AM with my CFI. As I was preflighting the plane, the sky grew dark and lightning streaked across in front of me. Well, looks like Wx canceled this flight. Since I was at the airport (KANP) so early (which is really the only reason I get up at 5:30AM) I just hung out for an hour with my instructor. We were talking about a bunch of things and I said “Well, I guess I will see you Friday morning”. He said he forgot that he had to fly a friend’s Piper Arrow down to Shelby, NC (KEHO) to pick up his son and bring him back. He then asked if I wanted to go! He showed me the Piper and I realized it had a constant speed propeller and retractable gear. He said that he was going no matter what so it wasn’t like I had to rent an aircraft for this trip. It wasn’t a hard decision to take a day of work off to have 5+ Hobbs hours and 656 nm of experience in a “complex” plane. He also said to bring Aiden along and the boys could play since his son was only 2 years older than Aiden. If you read my last blog post, you know we fulfilled Aiden’s lifelong dream of flying in a low wing aircraft. Now, we’ll fulfill another with retractable gear and going to a new state he’s never been in. It’s a flight of many firsts for Aiden and I, so I thought I would blog about it.
When I told Aiden about the trip he was pretty excited. I also told him that he would be meeting a new flying buddy and he also likes planes. Aiden knows my CFI pretty well, but not his son. Aiden got real serious with me and said “Does he like fighter jets?” I laughed and said “Yes, he likes fighter jets too”. In fact I declared that everyone travelling with us that day must like fighter jets in order to go on that trip. Aiden said “Cool” and that was all he needed to say. I understood.
Aiden and I arrived at the airport at 6:45AM for our flight. We planned to go from KANP to the OTT VOR inside Washington DC’s SFRA straight to KEHO. I filed our SFRA flight plan, called Potomac approach to get our frequency and squawk code, and we thought we were on our way. We had one glitch, my new Lightspeed Zulu headset would cause the radio to continuously transmit in this particular plane! We figured out it was just the jack where I was sitting so I swapped my headset with Aiden’s headset. The Professor was going to travel in style today.
I gave way to my CFI so he could climb into the left seat (where the pilot in command usually sits) because I thought I was just an observer that would be riding along. He laughed and said “I haven’t flown in that seat in the past 2,000+ hours that I’ve flown. You’re sitting there.” Sweet! We quickly took off with my CFI on the controls and I noticed a difference in takeoff speed, the use of manual flaps, retractable gear, and a constant speed prop. It was very different, but yet somewhat familiar from when I read about it in theory. After we moved up above the small cloud layer he had me take the controls. I was on the controls for the entire smooth flight down to KEHO at about 4,500 ft. For what was predicted to be an IFR day, it was a nice flight with even nicer skies.
One thing I noticed right away after leaving the Washington D.C. area was that there were no other planes around. Where I live, there is a microcosm of special flight rules, security zones, prohibited areas, restricted areas, and class B air space from three major airports (DCA, IAD, and BWI). Outside this area felt like leaving home and being out on your own in the real world where you had much more freedom at your fingertips.
We landed at KEHO and met the airport manager. My CFI asked if they still had the loaner car and he said they didn’t. He then scratched his head and said “I’ll let you take my personal car if you’re careful.” Are you kidding me? How nice of a guy is that? I meant what I said in my last post when I said “Flying is the only thing that I’ve found that gives an almost instantaneous bond to two strangers.” We went to lunch at a local restaurant and since his car was nearly on empty, we filled it to the top as a thank you gesture. Upon returning to the airport, we met my CFI’s son, filled up the plane (so I got to learn how a self serve airport pump works), and took off. Here’s a picture of the happy crew:
Once we took off we hit a series of building storm clouds.
Those horizontal lines were caused by the propeller. My cell phone camera did not like taking pictures through the moving propeller.
It was like flying in and around caverns much taller than NYC skyscrapers. In the last picture we were at nearly 8,000ft trying to find a hole to climb over them. We failed. Instead of flying over them we did a spiral down to about 3,500 ft and flew under them. Aiden said “Whoaaaaaaa!” all the way down. I laughed and told him he’s pulling G’s like the Blue Angels. He gave me a thumbs up. Go figure. At this time my CFI turned the controls back over to me and I flew most of the way back to home (KANP).
I learned a lot on the trip back because it was pretty turbulent due to all the big clouds building above us. There was one point when we were flying (the airplane was trimmed out perfectly) that I thought my CFI bumped the yoke with his knee because we began a 1,000 ft/min climb. I pushed the yoke down and said “Did you do that?”. He said “No. That’s an updraft going into that cloud we just flew under.” He said that I would probably feel it when I flew under the other clouds we saw, and I did. We were on a constant roller coaster. Updraft under the cloud, a correction for the downward push on the yoke on the other side of the cloud. The clouds felt like little magnets hanging over us pulling our plane into them. One of the clouds we passed by started to shower. It wasn’t a big rain cloud, but it was neat to see from the air and our right wing might have gotten a little wet.
I am a very “hands on” pilot and I’m trying to fix that. My CFI says I grip the yoke like it owes me money. Well, it does. Aircraft rental isn’t cheap. I try to correct from turbulence all of the time. I learned on this trip that you can let the plane correct itself from its inherent stability unless it gets too far out of shape. The airplane flies better than I do. One of my more memorable points of the trip was when the plane hit a really big bump. It was big enough that 3 out of 4 of us said “Woah” out loud. The 4th person was Aiden. He was sleeping and his head was bouncing all over like a bobble head. The bump was big enough to make his headset fall off so he woke up to see what was going on.
While cruising over northern North Carolina/Southern Virginia near KMTV, we saw what looked to be as Nascar race track. We did a circle over it for a picture. I believe it was Martinsville Speedway.
I’ve flown almost 40 hours in a Cessna 172S and one thing I’m starting to get good at is hearing the sound (RPM) of the engine and being able to inherently know if we are climbing, descending, stalling, or just generally changing something. The constant speed prop really threw me for a loop. We would climb or descend and the engine always sounded the same. I found myself looking at the airspeed indicator and vertical speed indicator a lot more to figure out what it was the plane was doing. I wasn’t expecting this difference.
I flew almost all the way back to Washington DC’s SFRA and we hit a decent storm just East of the Brooke VOR. The storm had us between it and the restricted airspace over the Potomac river. Even though I was pushing the yoke to the floor, the airplane kept going up. It was a very neat thing to experience and I’m glad I got to experience it with my CFI next to me.
We called Potomac Approach for our SFRA clearance (that we filed back at KEHO) and they said it wasn’t in the system. Wonderful. We spent some time circling the Brooke VOR once we got around the northern point of the storm filing the SFRA flight plan from the air with a FSS on 122.2 MHz.
The crew was tired.
We were granted enterance into the SFRA and we were minutes from home. After an uneventful landing, we put the plane to bed and parted ways. It was a long day full of many firsts that I will not soon forget. I am glad I got to have that experience yesterday. I added 2 takeoffs and landings with 5.7 Hobbs hours to my logbook.
I’ve always noticed that thing with the constant speed prop. You tend to use the prop sound as a rough how-goes-it with a fixed pitch – it’s eerie when it goes away with the CS prop.
Another thing you’ll notice as you move from plane to plane is that the sight picture over the cowl changes. My Mooney flew nose low but when I moved into the Tampico which flew nose high, I had trouble holding altitude because I kept wanting to push the nose down. I had the opposite problem when I went from the Tampico to the RV-6: I kept holding the nose too high and therefore kept climbing.
Dear Keith;
You are a very energetic student. Your enthusiasm is what it takes to make a good pilot. I think my free website http://aviationelevated.com will be of value to you. I am a CFI and Pilot Examiner with over 40 years experience. You can use the website to learn both the fundamentals from the textbooks and the techniques to learn and apply the skills to get it right every time.
Good Luck with your training.
Regards, Dan Smith