A whisper from the past

I walked away from aviation when we moved onto Kintala. Something that, for most of my life as a pilot, I could never have imagined doing. (Aviation was, at least for my generation, more of an affliction than a career choice.) For the first several months I looked up whenever I heard a motor of some kind overhead, usually able to name the class of aircraft, and often the exact model, just from the sound. As the years of cruising passed, those looks up grew ever less frequent. Being a pilot was something I was once, a period of my life that had ended.

Life unfolded as it will, and we ended up back in St. Louis, me collecting shillings by working in a full flight simulator for one of the world's most sophisticated civilian jet—a simulator bolted solidly to Mother Earth. No medical was required and all the associated paperwork needed to gain permission to teach aviation once again was handled by the company. After a couple of years the idea of doing a little contract flying in the jet came up. With a First Class medical in my pocket, once again I did a couple of flights. It felt good to be back up in the Flight Levels, but it was also just part of the job. I am a better instructor for having flown the actual aircraft in its designed environment and, at the same time, a few more shillings got added to the bank account. But that is as far as it went. First Light had been acquired and real plans had started coming together for getting back on the water. Indeed, less than a month remains before I hand my flying "stuff" back to the company and head east for big water once again. Flying, simulated or actual, will not be a part of that life. Something that is of little consequence. I am far more concerned with the idea of being away from grand kids than I am with being away from the Sim and a little contract flying. 

But then one of the grand sons started talking about, maybe, getting a pilot's license to go along with his anticipated Coast Guard Captain's license. Grampy T is a pilot and a flight instructor; any chance an introduction ride in a light airplane could be arranged before we headed off again? 

And so it came to pass that I found myself sitting in the left seat of a two-seat Cessna 152 belonging to a local flight school. Next to me was one of their instructors who, I suspect, was not particularly pleased to find himself sharing a cockpit with a dinosaur lugging log books showing 12,000+ hours of flying time and holding a couple of  licenses festooned with multiple ratings. Old pilots have a well-earned reputation of being a bit cranky when it comes to taking flying advice from those half their age. There is no doubt I now fit that description. 

But I wasn't convinced all that time and all those ratings would matter much to the little Cessna. One thing this old pilot has learned is that no one is the ultimate expert in anything. Everyone has something to teach and, more importantly, everyone still has something to learn. More then a decade has passed since the last time I taxied a light, single-engine piston banger toward a runway with the intent of taking flight. Worse, I had not really thought about actually going flying this day. We were just out checking options. Absolutely none of the prep work involved in any kind of flying, even just a short hop for fun, had been done. I had nary a chart with me and I had to ask for the proper radio channels to get the current weather as well as taxi and tower clearances. As we went through the pre-flight procedures I was as clear as I could be with my instructor.  I was beyond rusty. He could not hurt my feelings or make me mad in any way, and that I expected some honest criticism about my performance as I expected to deserve it. He relaxed a bit after that and off we went.

As we started moving out of the parking spot, it was suggested that I do the run-up on the ramp before calling for taxi clearance to the active runway. Run-up? That's right, magnetos, carb heat, gyro headings, suction, engine oil pressure and temperature; all need to be checked and/or set before attempting flight. We don't do run-ups in the jet. It doesn't have magnetos, carb heat, or suction. The gyros align themselves via GPS satellite signals before the engines are even started. And all of those engine parameters are monitored continuously by a multitude of computers on a continuous basis, said computers sending a visual and/or aural warning message to the pilots if something goes awry. 

I also needed some additional information on proper speeds for lift-off, climb, and cruise. The numbers I got were ridiculously low to my jet-a-fied ears. Lift off at 50 knots, climb at 60? At 50 knots I can't even get the jet's nose wheel off the ground. (If I happen to be following a SouthWest 737 down the taxiway, we are likely going near that fast just getting to the runway.) The jet's auto-brake function for an emergency abort doesn't even arm until 60. Then I asked for the proper flap setting for departure, sparking an odd look from my instructor. The little Cessna doesn't use flaps for departure...something I once knew many, many moons ago, but had forgotten.

I managed to find the end of the runway without being embarrassed, though it was odd to feel the little airplane shudder and sway in the light wind. Once cleared for departure I pushed the tiny (and only!) throttle knob toward the instrument panel and watched the airspeed slowly build. The jet stores a bit more than 7,000 pounds of thrust in each engine. The little Cessna has all of 110 ponies in its single stable. Acceleration in the jet will push you back in the seat and spill any unattended drinks. The Cessna? My grand kids accelerate faster on their scooters. Eventually the airspeed indicator showed the required number and I attempted to leave Mother Earth, finding the control force needed to lift the tiny nose wheel clear of the ground far higher than that needed on the side stick of a full fly-by-wire 38,000 pound jet. I pulled a little harder and...Yee-Haw! Skyward! Just a second or so later I even remembered that the yaw forces involved with levitating little airplanes are controlled with one's feet pushing on the appropriate rudder peddle. A task that remains throughout all regimes of flight. The jet, once airborne? Put your feet on the floor as they will not be needed until landing, unless one needs to walk to the head or to get some fresh coffee. 

We flew south for a little while and did all of those things pilots do in a new-to-them (or long forgotten) airplane. The rust started to flake away as the little airplane showed me steep turns, aerodynamic stalls both power on and power off, and a simulated engine failure / power off approach to a suitable farmer's field. This is not something we practice at the job. If both engines fail in the jet, one is having a very bad day. Setting it down in some farmer's field without doing considerable damage to both the jet and the farmer's crops is unlikely. We do fail both engines in the simulator at 5,000 feet or so after takeoff, simulating a massive bird strike reminiscent of Captain Sully and First Officer Skiles' splash down in the Hudson River. In the Sim, gliding back to a runway is the challenge. Landing in a corn field? Not. All of those maneuvers seemed to go well and I am pretty sure the grin on my face gave away how much fun I was having. Ah, but then it was time to return to the airport and put this little soap-box derby of an airplane back on the ground.

Approach and landing speed were as ridiculously low as those for departure and flight. The visual picture in the traffic pattern was odd. Not only has it been more than a decade since I flew a single engine airplane, this one has the wing on the top, and I was not sitting in the pointy end. Every way I looked had airplane parts in the picture. Check list complete, we turned final and I started searching for the ground.

The first landing was nothing to write home about. I am not used to sitting that close to the tarmac and misjudged the height in the flare by a fair amount. Not enough to have the instructor next to me grab the yoke, but I saw his hand twitch. The second landing went better. And the third? That was the one I was looking for. The little airplane rewarded my efforts with the stall warning horn whispering in my ear just as the mains rolled onto the tarmac. (Stall warning horn? The jet says "LOW SPEED - LOW SPEED" in a scolding female voice and, if one doesn't reduce the pitch attitude, the jet will do it for you regardless of what you do with the stick.)

With two "Okay" landings and one squeaker under my belt, we called it good and taxied back to the ramp. My young instructor allowed as I could take grand kids for a flight without putting them at risk. Back home I logged a "Single Engine" flight for the first time in more than ten years. It is hours later and I am still smiling at flying that little Cessna. I guess there is still some "pilot" lurking in me after all.

Legacy 550 from Embraer, the plane Tj instructs in

Things I used to do

We are back to the “living in a mooring field” routine. We have just about decided, whenever Kintala runs out of water, to drop the mooring lines and head to the dock. It doesn’t take any more time than repeated runs in the Ding hauling water jugs, is easier on the back, warms up the oil in the Beast, and wakes all the accessory gear out of its slumber to make sure it all still works. It is also some practice for one part of running a boat where I could use some practice, getting on and off a dock. Not serious practice since the fuel dock here is really easy, an open face dock that sits parallel to the current flow. The only trick is to wait for something other than peak for that current, and not go in on a weekend. I’m pretty shy about the current, it can peak out at near two knots here, and I don’t want to push my luck.

It didn’t used to be that way.

Once upon a long, long time ago Deb and I owned a little Cessna 150 airplane. It was equipped with an engine having 50% more horsepower than the original, and modified wings. All which added up to impressive short take off and landing capabilities. (STOL in pilot speak.) It could also fly at very low indicated airspeeds. (And do a pretty decent loop and barrel roll, though don’t tell anyone I told you that.) One day I didn’t have much to do and the wind at the airport where we based was howling directly down the runway at something like 40 knots. So I went out to fly, doing repeated take offs and landings just for fun. (Touch and goes in pilot speak.)

Normally one flies a rectangle pattern around an airport. But that day launching into that wind was almost a vertical take off. Accelerating to near cruise speed while in a slight climb would bring the far end of the runway underneath.  Then the 150 could be slowed and flown at a low enough airspeed for it to drift backward down the runway at about 20 knots, still nose into the wind and under full control. When the approach end of the runway passed below, putting the nose down and accelerating would get the wheels over the runway, then, if the power was played just right, they would touch down and barely spin. I don’t recall having managed a perfect hover landing, but I got pretty close. It was a hoot. But now I can’t imagine what I was thinking or why I would try such a thing. And yes (for those who know a bit about little airplanes and big winds) taxiing to the runway and then back to the hanger was, by far, the most difficult part of the flight. Forty knots worth of wind is enough to put a 150 on its back if one taxis without paying attention.

These days I would not even try to bring Kintala to a dock in a 3 knot current, even with a clear approach path. It should work. Drive up close at a shallow angle, use the Beast just enough to equal the boat speed to the current, and hand a line over without comment. But back in my Cessna 150 days I was too young to know better, too sure of myself to think of all the things that could have gone wrong, and was a far better airplane driver (then) than I am boat pilot (now).

We’ll wait to near slack current to go fill the water tanks.

A visit unexpected …

The fully loaded Boeing 737-300 rumbled far down the runway before the nose wheel floated free of the concrete. Seconds later the rest of the gear cleared Mother Earth and was tucked away for the short flight to Pittsburgh. The haze thickened, turned into a cloud layer, and then fell away as we climbed into the low flight levels.

Flight levels start somewhere around 18,000 feet above my normal living altitude, (sea level). A good portion of my career was spent in that realm, at the helm of various kinds of exotic machinery built for those extreme conditions. That last two machines I captained blew happily along in the mid flight levels, 35 to 45,000, at speeds around 500 mph. Like most pilots I kept a careful log of each hour spent in the sky. It was like being airborne was the only part of life worth a special mention, home in a way only pilots understand. For most of the best pilots I have known, such an assessment is far closer to the truth than any of us would openly admit.

Those days came to an abrupt end, my career terminated in about as ugly a way as can be imagined. (Short of digging a big, smoking hole.) Log books got stashed away in a safe deposit box while headsets and other cockpit paraphernalia were gifted to friends still in the game. Ipads, once used for approach plates, were eventually loaded with Navionics and Garmin Blue Charts. I walked away from my last flight without looking back. Heading for a new kind of living, the part of my life worth special mention would lay on the surface of the sea and at the helm of a different kind of machine. Life is short enough. Spending time in the past only makes it shorter.

But modern life, at least in the US, is spread out. Kids and grand kids are scattered across a good part of a very big country, other family scattered even further. Flying is the only option, though I would consider sailing Kintala down interstate 70 if it could be done. Drivers think I go slow in a car? Ha!

Now, for only the fifth time since we set out on the boat, the ground fell away outside the window. I don't care so much about seeing out, but they are about the only seats where I can lean to the side and get some sleep. The four flights before this one passed mostly that way. Once in the sky thoughts tuned briefly to an old life that held little allure but the sky held no special interest.  What I wanted most was for the crush of lines, security, and noise, to be over.  Flights were endured.

This time I found myself gazing out at the passing clouds. BWI to PIT is only 40 minutes at jet speeds. Soon we were letting down into a gray and bumpy overcast. The auto-flight system in jets work extremely well. I doubt many of the other passengers noted the subtle sashays of pitch and yaw, and few would realize that the contrail flowing off the corner of the deployed flap indicated how humid the sky was. I felt the turn onto the approach though we were still a thousand feet or so above the ground when the tree covered hills of PA hove into few. The pilot flying missed a perfect landing by scant inches, recovered well, and set his machine down on RW10R with a satisfying thump. Boards levered up from the wings, TRs slid open, brakes rumbled, and the first flight I have enjoyed in a couple of years turned toward the gate.

It is highly unlikely I will ever command the cockpit of a jet in the flight levels again but, no matter. It is no longer home. My world view has shifted, the need for the mad rush not part of my DNA. A world without boarders, laced together with trains, ships, and pretty roads filled with efficient cars and bicycles – without a single billboard - is closer to my ideal now. And airships, how cool would that be? Ideas and thoughts, the very things that make us human, flow around the world at near the speed of light. There is really no need for the rest of the human body to try so hard for a speed that is a paltry 0.0000747% of light's velocity. (Unless my math failed me this morning, 0.0000747% of the speed of light works out to about 500mph.)

Still, it was good to visit my old life and, for all of my change in view, remember it fondly.

Note: blog time is now several days behind real time. After visits in PA and IN, we are now safely in MO.

Musings of a "perfect" day

The rain hitting the windshield at 220 KIAS was making an amazing amount of noise. A rogue early winter front had stirred up thunderstorms and tornado watch boxes that slashed across every place we were supposed to go this day. One storm had settled over the Memphis airport closing it to inbound traffic. This was a bit of a concern since Memphis was our stated alternate should the clouds at Tunica be closer to the ground than we were allowed to get on the GPS approach. Normally we would carry enough gas to have an alternate to the alternate but the first stop of the day had been in Caruthersville. That airport is only 4000 feet long. Hauling a bunch of extra Jet A in and out of there, along with 6 passengers, was really not an option. Our little jet's RADAR was painting a solid bit of red just ahead so I turned to ensure that the passengers all had their seat belts tight and had stowed the normal stuff corporate people have out in the back of an airplane, charts, books, computers, etc. It looked like the rest of the ride into Tunica was going to be a bit bumpy. By day's end we would do two GPS approaches in rain and thick clouds, dodge a couple of thunderstorms, shed a little ice, and finish a night ILS approach with a landing on a rain soaked runway in a 15 knot direct cross-wind.

It was a perfect day of flying. I suspect the folks in the back of the airplane had a different opinion of how good a day it was. For them it was a bouncy, loud, somewhat uncomfortable day spent going from place to place in a narrow little tube; a part of their job they simply had to endure. Like most of the people I have worked for, (even one who fired me) they were really glad to have me up front on days when the sun wasn't shining, the wind wasn't calm and the runways weren't very long. They would rather have stayed home but there were people to meet and places to go... Had we taken Nomad instead (and if the route was over water instead of land) it would have taken about 3 days and 16 hours to cover the 491 nautical miles flown that day. (Which is slightly longer than it took the Apollo astronauts to get to the moon. Weird.) A journey that long in Nomad would seem like a major adventure to me. Add in the same kind of rain and wind and I'll bet I would be wondering just what the heck I thought I was doing, going out in such stuff. And yet I know there are sailors in our little marina who would consider such a trip nearly perfect. Some day I hope to be one of them.