Lot’s of studying required for the knowledge test.  I’ve worked my way through the regulations a couple of times and I think I’ve read the private pilot manual two or three times so far.  I suppose it’s about time to do some practice tests.  I’m thinking of scheduling the knowledge test for the end of this week or beginning of next.  I’ve got to get it done sometime, might as well set a date and work to it.

I completed my night cross country last night along with all of the nighttime work that I need to do for my license.  This was a pretty cool flight involving Class B airspace, busted runway lighting, a large airplane, Seatac airport, crash landings and a firetruck!

First off, I had completed most of the planning prior to going to Paine, but found that we’d have to wait an extra half hour to leave for it to be considered a true night takeoff.  I decided to pull out the POH and check my performance data.  For my previous cross country I had chosen a power setting for the planning that was a bit higher than Mike likes to fly with in a 172.  Pulling back to 2500 RPM, I calculated a true airspeed of about 109-110 knots (about 126 mph) with a groundspeed of about 100 knots due to wind.  We actually managed to average about 100 knots which was sweet, it’s nice when the numbers add up.

I finished that and filed a flight plan down to Olympia and 1 back.  For this cross country, we planned on going into Seattle’s class B airspace.  It was a bit intimidating to think about it before, but wasn’t really a problem.  I’ve got to say, those Seattle controllers can really spew a lot of instructions at you quickly.  I told them we were going direct to Olympia at 4500 ft.  At one point, Mike and I were discussing our route and some of the nearby landmarks and I drifted about 4 degrees off course.  That Seattle controller got on the radio again and started asking what the hell I was doing.  I proceeded to get right back on course so that I didn’t have to hear from him again.  If he wanted us to get out of the class B airspace, that would have required dropping to about 2500 ft where all the turbulence was.

We got out of there and got to my predetermined descent point for Olympia.  We took a nice easy descent at about 300 ft/min and ended up perfectly positioned for a left base onto Olympia’s runway 8.  Turns out that the runway I would have preferred given the winds, 17, had work in progress on both ends of the runway.  In none of the Notams did I hear anything about the runway actually being closed, but the lights didn’t turn on for it.  Oh well, it was only a 5 knot crosswind, no big deal.

Heading back towards Seattle, we stayed below the airspace at 2500.  I looked over parallel to our track and saw what looked like a 777 landing at Seatac airport.  It’s fun to play with the big boys!  We made our way to north Vashon island and called up the Seatac tower to request VFR transition over the airport.  Now when Mike described doing a night VFR transition over Seatac, he mentioned doing so with 7 or 8 airplanes stacked up on approach with planes coming in and out like crazy.  We had nothing.  By the time we were flying over the approach end of the runway, there were no other airplanes in sight in the air at all.  What a rip off!  Oh well, it was still cool to fly 1000 ft over the biggest airport in the area.

We made our way East and out of the airspace so that we could get back North to Everett.  As we made our way back, Mike and I discussed the merits of particular crash landing sites.  Now I’m sure that to some people, the thought of discussing where you might try to crash land an airplane might be a little disconserting…and even moreso while you are flying over an area that has absolutely no-where nearby that we could safely land from our altitude (2500 ft).  Our options, as far as I saw it, were to land in the water (about 55 degrees), to land in some trees, or to attempt a landing on I-405.  As you can see, not very good options.  If we decided to go for a water landing, we could probably have a relatively soft landing since you have all the time in the world to approach and not worry about running out of runway.  However, if you forgot to turn on the emergency locator transmitter, you probably land with enough g force to turn it on automatically.  You might end up freezing in the water if you weren’t close enough to shore.  If you go for a tree landing, you’d get the ELT to activate, but you might also get a tree branch in the face.  If you go for I-405…you are almost guaranteed to crash into cars.  You’ve got to admit, you don’t normally think to look up for additional traffic.  You’d probably hit a power line before you got to the highway in any case.

By the time we finished our discussion, we’d made our way up to Paine field.  After my first stop-and-go, someone came on the runway asking if it was in use.  Turns out that the fire rescue folks like to make runs up and down the runways at night.  I think I’d be all over that if I had to sit around all night on duty.  Those guys have to get bored.  A 9000 ft runway is definitely a good way to cure boredom.

After a couple of greaser landings, I’d completed all of my required night flying.  It’s a nice feeling to be done with a piece of the license.  I really enjoyed the night flights, so I may have to come back up in the air at night when I’ve got my license.  It’s just a cool experience.

I successfully completed my first cross country!  We went north to Bellingham, over to Orcas Island and Friday Harbor and back to Paine Field.  These were really short hops, just about 30 minutes between the long legs.  I came in a bit too hot at Bellingham and had to slip the airplane to get low enough, but I really greased it at Orcas Island.  It was really nice in the San Juans because the weather was great and there were tons of boats out.

I saw a really cool looking two masted sail boat just before doing a touch and go at Orcas.  At Friday Harbor, we stopped and walked in to town for water and ice cream.  It gets pretty warm when you’re sitting in the airplane for a while.  The whole round trip was 2 hours of flying+taxiing…it takes at least that long to drive and take the ferry to Friday Harbor.  On the way back from Friday Harbor, we transitioned through class C airspace around Whidbey Island which is a military base.  No problems, but we passed within a couple hundred feet of another airplane going in the opposite direction at 3500 ft.  He should have been cruising at 4500 or below 3000 since he was going west, but what are you going to do.

Next up is a night cross country to Olympia.  After we get to Olympia, we are going to transition across Seatac airport right over the approach end of the runways.  That’s going to be sweet at night with all the lights and aircraft going in and out.

We visited the Seattle Aquarium today. It was nice, a little small, but nice. Some pics are in the Washington gallery.

I was supposed to have my cross country this morning, but the clouds were too low.  They only cleared up around 10:30 or so…2 hours too late.   I rescheduled for this Wednesday afternoon…since weather should be better at that time of day.  The night cross country is probably going to be Thursday, so this is going to be a bit of a busy week for me.

I spent a couple of hours last night going over the route. Everett to Bellingham to Friday Harbor and back to Everett. Only one area along the route from Friday Harbor to Everett has a restricted area. I ought to be able to clear that at 5500 ft. I worked through all of the performance data: time/distance/fuel burn for climbs, speed/fuel burn for cruise, expected time en route, checkpoints, important frequencies and so on. I filled out navigation sheets and flight plan sheets.

There was one possible problem, weather. The TAF for Paine field was showing clouds forecast for 2500 ft. That’s at the edge of acceptability for VFR flight. I woke up early this morning to get a weather briefing from 1-800-WXBRIEF. Turns out that the clouds were layered at 300, 500, 900 ft and so on. So that’s it, we couldn’t fly. The first really cloudy day in about a week and a half and it’s on the morning I’m supposed to fly. Oh well, that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

In other news, night flight is sweet! I went up Thursday night 9-11 and we did a few maneuvers and landings. It is a totally different experience and really fun. The tower shuts down at night since there’s much less traffic, so everyone just uses the common traffic advisory frequency to announce their intentions. The small runway is also closed and the traffic pattern is reversed for the big runway so that the pattern takes you over the airport instead of over any residential areas. I didn’t have any hand-held flash lights with red filters…so I ended up using a headband led flashlight. It worked, but it was a bit awkward since I didn’t actually wear it on my head. I picked up a handheld flashlight at Walmart today.

Another cool thing I’ve got is my new David Clark h10-13x noise cancellation headset. I tried some demo headsets that had noise cancellation and loved them. It really cuts down on the noise and makes it easier to hear what’s being said.

I did another solo today. The winds were in my favor, 10 knots at 310 degrees… just 30 degrees off the runway which gives about 5 knots crosswind. I took off and went out west over Whidbey for some maneuvers. I did a couple steep turns, a couple stalls and some slow flight transitions. It’s kind of fun being on the back end of the power curve in slow flight. You need a lot of power to maintain level flight. It’s the same kind of flying you have to do for short field landings. I’m really getting the feel for it, kind of like riding a bike…except with lots of buttons, knobs and you’d be more likely to die if you crash.

I’m doing the planning for my first cross country. It’ll be from Paine field up to Bellingham, over to Friday Harbor and back. I’ve just got to figure out the appropriate headings to use, tower frequencies and VOR frequencies. Not much else I can do until the morning of the flight when I can check wind forecasts. That’s going to be nice to actually apply what I’m learning for some travel.

I’ve also got a night flight coming up. That’s going to be sweet, I can’t wait to see what it looks like to land in the dark.

So as for the future, I plan on finishing mid-Sept. I’m going to try to take the written exam the first week of September. That means I really need to get on with the studying. I’m on the last chapter or so of the pilot manual, so I need to just start reviewing material and taking the practice tests. I really should go over all the weather briefings. I kind of zoned out while reading that stuff because it’s kind of hard to read about type after type of weather report without falling asleep. I’m not really sure how many different types of graphical weather reporting programs I need to know. Anyway, it is really coming along. I’ve got about 22 hours or so and should be able to get the last hours fairly quickly. Now that I can do solo flights, I’m not restricted by Mike’s schedule….I suppose that doesn’t help much when I’m doing a lot of overtime…but it makes it a little easier. I’ll get 3 hours or so on the cross country and I’ll have to do my own cross country. I should be able to stretch it out a bit if I want to. I’m quite alright just flying around looking at the scenery.

I flew my second solo yesterday. I reserved 3 hours of time with instructor and airplane. We took off together first and went west over the clouds to do a bit of instrument work. The cloud layer went up to about 4000 ft, so we went up to about 5000 since the VFR reqt is 1000 ft above any clouds. First thing to do was perform a stall with the foggles on…piece of cake. We did a few maneuvers before Mike decided to put me into unusual conditions so that I could recover. I closed my eyes and he went through a series of turns, climbs, descents and more turns. I could generally tell which direction we were rotating towards, but I couldn’t tell at all the magnitude of the bank angle. He had me recover from a banked dive. Speed was about 110 knots (about 126 mph) and bank angle was about 20 degrees left. Level the wings, pull the throttle back and recover without putting too much load on the A/C.

We went back to the airport and performed a couple of landings. The first landing was a soft field landing. For the soft field landing, the approach is normal, but you carry a little power into the flare to ensure you can set down softly. It wasn’t that soft…not too bad…but not a landing you’d want to do on a grass runway. The second landing was short field. This was the fun one. The final approach is done slow. You actually control the speed directly with pitch attitude and descent rate with power. You want to keep about 500 ft/min descent rate throughout the base and final which ends up taking quite a bit of power at the slow speed. Mike told me to land at the 1000 ft point beyond the runway threshold and get off at the first taxiway about 200 – 300 ft beyond the markers. I landed exactly between the 1000 ft markers and had the airplane down to taxi speed within 200 ft in an awesome landing.

So we taxied back to Regal and listened to the ATIS report again to determine the winds. If the winds were over 7 knots I wouldn’t be able to go since that’s the limit for students. Winds were given at exactly 7 knots about 30 degrees off the runway. We went back into the office to re-dispatch the airplane and I went off to do 6 landings solo! I greased a couple of the landings and had a blast. Next up is doing some ground work on cross countries and some night flights. I can’t wait to do a cross country and actually use some pilotage and dead reckoning to get me somewhere. It’s a lot of calculations…but I’ve got a bachelors and masters in engineering, so I think I can handle it. Plus I get to use an E6B flight computer which is a nifty mechanical calculator that has a circular slide rule on it. Too fun.

I went to the airport today after work, showed up about 20 minutes early so that I could prep the airplane.  The weather was pretty good when I showed up.  Mike told me that the winds had been a bit strong and across the runway, but they had died down to about 8 knots out of the north.

We were using a new airplane today since my usual one was in for a maintenance squawk.  This airplane had a GPS radio combo which has a nice feature, ground track.  I’ve had a tendency to nose in towards the runway on the downwind, but the GPS groundtrack allowed me to get a better read on the actual heading and hold it correctly.  It’s a nice crutch that I wont likely be playing with all that much.  Another nice thing I used today is a demo lightspeed headset that had noise cancellation.  It made the ride a lot nicer since I could hear everyone that much better.

Mike got in the airplane and told me that he was just going to be a passenger today.  I said, “well in that case, do you need me to show you how to put on your seatbelt?”  He laughed and told me to consider him a knowledgable passenger.   I made him close his door.

I called ground and asked for a close pattern on 34R and off we were.   I did all of the preflight checks and engine runnup just off the hold line.  Everything looked good, although the RPM needle was a bit more unsteady than I’m used to.  No problem though, it just seemed like an instrumentation anomaly rather than an engine problem.

I called the tower and got clearance for takeoff.  We took off and proceeded with several landings.  The first two were a little rough since I ballooned a bit in the flare, but they weren’t too bad.  Finally on the third landing, everything clicked again.  I was able to get the airplane to just settle very nicely on the ground just as the stall warning was starting to buzz.  I probably floated the flare longer than necessary, but who cares…it was smooth as butter.  Mike said that if I could do that two more times that he’d let me off on my own.

The next two touch and goes were just as smooth, so I asked for a close approach with a full stop.  For the close approach, I pulled the throttle all the way to idle as soon as we were abeam the numbers.  I flew a rounded off base and final landing with just 10 degrees of flap.  We pulled off the runway, ran through the post-landing checklist and got clearance to taxi over to a wash rack just off the runway.  I shut the airplane down and Mike proceeded to mark down my time in my logbook.  He gave me a solo endorsement and wished me good luck.

This was it, I’m the only one in the airplane and the only one who would be able to get the airplane down if there was a problem…sweet.  I went back through the startup checklist and when I turned the ignition the engine wouldn’t start!  The propeller would turn over and it would try to go, but nothing.  I pumped the throttle like Mike had shown me, but it just wouldn’t start.  Well, the learning never stops.  I waved Mike back over to ask for advise since I hadn’t run into that particular issue before.  This time when I turned the key, Mike pulled the mixture all the way out for a moment and back in, pumping the throttle brought the engine to life right away.  That is part of the procedure you can use for clearing an engine that has too much fuel.  I guess I don’t know all the quirks of this particular airplane.

I had no trouble after that and went over to the runway to perform another runup and pre-flight checks.  I pulled the airplane onto the runway, pushed the throttle all the way in and accelerated on down.  I was committed now.  Along with being committed, I was smiling and laughing to myself.  I probably would have sounded like a crazy person, but I was having way too much fun…and I didn’t even leave the pattern.  I came onto the final approach and got on the glide slope easily.  I pulled the throttle to idle as I got to flare height and brought it down.  I bounced my first landing!  Darn it!  It wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had, but it definitely wasn’t the best.  I’m going to have to blame it on not having Mike’s weight in the right seat.

I retracted the flaps, pushed the throttle and removed the carb heat.  Up and away again.  This time I concentrated on having a lighter touch on final approach.  Mike had noticed that I often tried to force the airplane to do what I wanted it to do without using enough finesse.  Enough finesse?  I’m learning here!  After a rough landing he gave me a pen to thread through my left hand as I grip the wheel.  I quickly found that it was harder to force the airplane around.  Of course, I was stubborn enough that I’d just grip even harder.  My knuckles hurt after that.  After two landings like that, I conceeded to Mike that I should just concentrate on using a lighter touch.  Back to the airplane today, I used a lighter touch on the second approach and felt a lot more confident about it.  This time I just greased it in.  Like a doofus, I gave Mike a thumbs up as I passed by.

The third landing went much like the second.   It was smooth and ended with me grinning ear to ear.  Pulling off the runway, I went through the post-flight checks and pulled over to Mike.  I soloed after 14.4 hours instruction.  The 0.4 hours in the air puts me in at 14.8 hours after today.  I’d say that is pretty good.  We pulled up in front of the parking spot and I pushed the airplane back into position as Mike went inside to get the polaroid.  My picture in front of the airplane is now on the wall at Regal Air.

Coming up: cross country flight (flying over a certain distance from the home airport), night flight, night cross country and more solo flight

I woke up this morning looking forward to getting up and on with the day, because I was going flying.  All we did today was landings, but man were they good.  Some of them were so smooth that we didn’t even feel the wheels touch the ground!  It was awesome!  We had about 14 knots out of the south which was ok to deal with since the runway was facing almost directly into the wind.  I got a bit high a couple of times, but those flaps can really slow you down so it really wasn’t a problem.  The last landing we just decided to do an engine out landing.  We pulled the throttle out all the way just as we were coming abeam the numbers.  I just greased it in!  I just can’t wait to get up and fly again…tomorrow.  As long as my landings are looking good tomorrow, I’ll be able to solo around the pattern a few times.  It seems quick, but I’m confident that not only can I put the airplane up in the air, I can actually put the airplane back on the ground in a safe controlled manner.  Too cool.

I put some pics into the flying gallery:

I finished my pre-solo written exam Thursday evening.  It took about an hour and a half…although I was working on it off and on through the evening.  Flying on Friday after work, Mike said that if I could get some consistent landings on Sunday, I’d likely be able to solo on Monday!  That’s awesome!  I’ve gotten a lot more confident with the landings and a lot more comfortable with the way the runway should look out the window at the various points in the pattern.  I tend to come in a little higher than the desired glide slope, I guess I want to make sure I’ll make it to the runway.

I’ve also gotten the flare down fairly well.  I can round out nicely each time, it’s just the height above the runway I have to work on.  A couple of the landings on Friday ended with a bit more sink rate than I expected, and we touched down with a bit more force than desired, but a couple were pretty darn smooth.   This is pretty awesome.  Every once in a while in the middle of some maneuver, I think “Hey!  I’m flying!”  It sounds stupid, but it’s the truth.