Art Newman and a Real Plane
It was time for another visit to the Castle site, so I scheduled another milk run for Thursday. My friend Art was available, and since he is training for his IFR it was a good opportunity to spend some time under the hood and some time as pilot-in-command for a cross-country flight. (You need fifty hours of PIC time to get the IFR ticket. I no longer need time for anything in particular, so there’s no reason Art couldn’t be pilot-in-command.)
I’ve been watching my logbook total hours for the past couple weeks, just waiting for this to happen. I finally passed the three hundred fifty hour mark. That’s critical. There’s a book called “The Killing Zone” which is an examination of private pilot accident statistics. The hours between forty and three hundred fifty are markedly different than those to either side. I am now one fifth as likely to have an accident as I was prior to yesterday’s flight. That’s excellent.
On top of that, now that I have an instrument rating and no hesitation to file an instrument flight plan, I am out of the largest group of accidents, which is continued VFR flight into IMC conditions. (That’s usually a VFR pilot (like Corey Lidel) who flies into hazy or marginal conditions and tries to keep pressing on without an instrument rating or instrument flight plan.)
Just having an instrument rating has cut my chances for having an accident to a third of what it would have been without one. My insurance rates dropped accordingly.
All of this makes m feel better about having the entire family in the plane for weekend jaunts.
Left knee
That’s my lap as I fly from Oxnard (OXR) back to Santa Monica (SMO). I took off through a thin layer of clouds. On my right knee is my miniZ kneeboard (from ZuluWorks), where I have copied my clearance and I have the Hobbs time and ATIS written down. Little pilot notes. On my left knee is the book of approaches into various airports, open to the VOR-A (alpha) approach into Santa Monica. I am nearing the Van Nuys VOR, and soon I will turn toward DARTS, my initial fix on the instrument approach. Continue reading
Look closely…
If you click on that it should get larger. That’s me in the plane at Paso Robles, about to fire up the engine to go out for my instrument check ride. The designated examiner is sitting next to me. My heart is pounding and my blood pressure is probably in the unsafe zone.
The war bird looks amazing. That’s a trainer for WW2 fighter pilots. It made a great noise as it taxied in.
It is less than a week since I got the instrument rating. I have already filed IFR on a return flight from Las Vegas. Los Angeles Center was not doing flight following or VFR advisories, so I filed IFR and they put me in the system. It was a comfort, since I had the whole family in the plane. Then the visibility over the basin wasn’t great, since the sun was setting and lighting up the haze (hello, JFK Jr), so it was doubly nice to be on an instrument approach back to the airport.
I wasn’t sure if it was worth paying my CFII to accompany me up to the check ride. I went back and forth about it. The check ride was schedule for Tuesday, October 24 at 11am. It was going to be up at Paso Robles, about an hour and a half flight from Santa Monica. I watched the weather for a week before. I couldn’t go flying, since the plane was in the shop for its annual, so it gave me something to do. I first started worrying about it on my IFR cross country when we arrived at KPRB, also at 11am. The airport was covered with a blanket of nice, soft clouds. If I was VFR I would not have been able to land. So I booked Liz’s time, and then worried about whether it was necessary.
It turned out to be a great decision.
On the eve of my instrument check ride, I will write about yet another VFR rated pilot flying in marginal weather conditions. With a little luck (and all my hard work since April) tomorrow evening I will no longer be a VFR rated pilot.
Why did (another) Yankee baseball player die in a plane crash? What happened?
There’s a lot of speculation out on the Internet about the accident. The National Traffic and Safety Board (NTSB) is examining the crash and will, in several months, issue a statement of probably cause. Before that, I’ll toss in my two cents.
Previously, the most exciting thing that happened during a lesson is when the wind picked up the tail of the Cherokee while I was starting my flare for landing. If my instructor had not been in the right seat, I might have bent the nose gear. (Now I am alert for this sort of gust as I am landing. At the time it was a surprise that the wind could switch from headwind to tailwind in an instant and shove the plane around like that. I froze for a moment.)
There are just a couple things left to do to get my instrument rating. Today I completed my IFR cross country flight. It had to be at least two hundred fifty nautical miles, have three different kinds of approaches, and I had to visit three airports. Continue reading
It isn’t really the surly bonds of earth that bother me anymore, it’s the damn clouds. More specifically, the clouds which cover airports and keep the airplanes on the ground. It doesn’t keep all the airplanes on the ground, just those flown by pilots do not yet have instrument ratings.
I want an instrument rating. To be a better pilot, to learn more, to press myself further in a chosen endeavor, but also for the freedom. Here on the west coast there is very little bad weather. Oh, we get some rain and a few wind storms, and the occasional real storm off of the Pacific, but we live in a desert and we just don’t have the sort of constant thunderstorms the east coast sees. I have learned a lot about icing levels and freezing rain, but in general it doesn’t apply to the sort of flying I do.
Ellie with Uncle
Adam hasn’t written into the blog in a while, but he has good reason. This is Eleanor Elektra Lehman, his daughter. She already has a headset (well, earmuffs), and has already flown across the continent. In a couple weeks she’s going to fly to Hawaii. She’s only been around a month, but she’s awesome. (Rudy and Dexter adore their new cousin.)
Flying Summers Brothers 