Making a Kiwi Fly

Happy 2012

2012-01-04T18:38:00.000+13:00

Happy 2012 everyone, I want to wish you all the best for the new year.

As per usual, lets look back at 2011:

I said way back last January:

1) Aerobatic flight
2) Get approval to land at Waiheke Island. I think I have enough hours now to handle this challenge.
3) Fly somewhere different (like Whangarei or Gisbourne)
4) Taildragger flight
5) Go for a ride in something cool

1) Well I tried but fate was against me - maybe this year.
2) Done!
3) No.
4) No.
5) Is a Tecnam P2008 cool?

I just want to point out that winning the Clubs Senior Champion award was a highlight of my 2011 flying for me, and as such deserves a special mention in the summary.

Total hours for the year was 16, 32 flights (club and regional competitions helped a lot in this), 3 and a bit hours up on 2010.

OK for 2012:

1) Aerobatic Flight
2) Go on a long Cross Country somewhere different
3) Flight in a twin
4) Flight in a tail dragger
5) Go for a ride in something cool

An early Xmas present

2011-12-23T23:51:00.002+13:00

I had popped out to the Aero Club to get some Arrow time in, and after a rather uneventful flight I had safely hangared DQV and was in the bar with a cold ginger beer when a Tecnam P2008 LSA ZK-JAX rolled up outside the club rooms. Out hopped instructor Mark and called out to me asking if I wanted to go up for a couple of circuits with chief instructor Roger? Not needing a second thought, I reached for my headset and headed out to the plane. Roger gave me a quick tour, pointing out the all flying tail, the free castoring nose gear and the fact that unlike the 172 in which I have 100+ hours in, it flies with a stick rather than a control column of which I am used to.

Roger invited me to jump into the left seat, and we hit the first hurdle. The doors are placed in front of the wing struts so the old Cessna method of approaching from the rear and climbing in was gone. The doors do open quite wide, so you walk inwards along the leading edge of the wing into the space between the door and the wing strut. Then the second hurdle was finding a way of squeezing my 120kg and 1.85m frame into the plane. After some lateral thinking I figured out the best method and got in. Like the Cessna 152, the seats are not very high above the floor of the cockpit, but the seat travels quite a way back, so far I could not reach the rudder pedals even with my legs fully extended.

Once in, the seating was quite comfortable (similar to the 172), and I had reasonable headroom above. The only cramped feeling I had was once the pilots door was closed and latched, I had that funny uncomfortable feeling that something was positioned close to my head on the left side. I also noted that I could not see clearly out along the wing without tilting my neck forwards and down, but as I found out later in the air, it was not a big problem. The vision up, forward and ahead of the wings was far superior to the 172, and I commented as much to Roger.

Roger talked about the avionics layout. The main instrument panel is a large LCD display with a secondary unit on the right hand side. There was a "steam driven" ASI front and centre right in my eye line. If all else failed, I would be able to land it with a reasonable about of confidence. I found the AH and engine gauges quite easy to read, but the altitude and airspeed tapes took a while of staring at them to make sense to me. I liked the fact that the tank switch is mounted in a prominent position, but the switcher was quite fiddly to use and I could see bad things happening in an emergency unless they fix it. For some reason, the flap switch is over on the right hand side of the cockpit, and yet the cabin air switch was close. Someone needs to give some more thought to the layout because it was a real head scratcher as to why an important secondary flight control is operated so far away from the left seat.

Roger wizzed through the start up sequence, hit a couple of switches, check the position of the choke, turn the key and the Rotax 912ULS2 fired up straight away. For someone used to the rumbling of a Lycoming at idle, the more car like whir of the Rotax took some getting used to. Roger got me to apply some power and make my first cautious taxi out to holding point Hotel and runway 07R. Being a free castoring nosewheel, the plane requires careful handling, and when combined with the light weight, a keen awareness of the wind strength and direction is mandatory. Today with the wind at 060 at 4 knots wasn't going to be a problem.

Once we lined up on 07R, Roger had me ease JAX forward a little until we had the nosewheel straight before opening the taps. We applied full throttle, and I applied full right rudder to counter torque and p factor. Even then, JAX started to slowly swing left until we had enough airflow past the rudder to aerodynamically overpower the turning moment and bring the nose back onto centreline. Roger said that normally you'd tap the right brake to keep it straight but it was an interesting experiment none the less. As the airspeed passed 40 knots I started to ease the stick back and we were airborne at 45. Holding the same nose attitude the speed built up and JAX lifted out of ground effect and up into the afternoon sky.

Take off performance was surprisingly good for such a low powered aircraft. I would estimate we used barely 100m before we unstuck and maybe another 100m before we got out of ground effect. We passed 200 AGL and Roger raised the flap and told me to find a cruise climb speed of 70 knots. It was at this time I announced that this was the first time I had ever flown a stick controlled aircraft. I have never flown the clubs Alpha's because I had no need. Now we were into the business end of flying with a stick, I found to my delight that flying with a stick was not really all that different to a yoke, and by the end of the flight I was totally comfortable with it. I tried a few cautious wiggles of the stick and found that the control forces were quite light and the aircraft at such a low speed was quite responsive. Once we were straight and level downwind the airspeed climbed to settle at about 105kts indicated. Not bad at all. Roger went through the downwind checks, asked for and received a touch and go clearance and asked me to set 4100rpm and maintain our height with nose attitude. The Vfe in this plane is 70 knots (note to Tecnam engineers, make this 80 knots and you won't have Cessna pilots blowing the flaps off your aircraft). Roger talked me down around base onto final, saying airspeed is important because you cannot shed it as easily as in the 172. We had full flap out and I had 60 knots on the tape on final and down we came. The first landing was a little hairy because I had just came from the Arrow and didn't flare enough. I understand the Tecnam will happily fly at 45 knots, a speed that would have the Arrow in big trouble!

By the time we were on final on the second circuit (right hand this time) I landed it fine by myself with no input from Roger, in fact I greased it in nicely. The final landing was almost as good. I made a slight error in that I closed the throttle completely to land and to my shock the engine died as we rolled out. A quick twist of the key fixed that, but Roger said to keep a little power on as we land. Noted for future reference.

Well let me see what I think about this plane:

1) It is easy to fly for a 172 pilot like me. Being able to land it unaided on my second attempt proved that pretty well.
2) It is roomy and comfortable enough for the day trips I do a lot.
3) It costs a LOT less to fly per hour than my current rated GA aircraft. This means stretching my flying dollar further and that can only be good news. I can fly more often and keep those perishable skills current. I wouldn't totally give up my GA ratings because I can take more than one passenger and luggage, something that would be impossible for me to do in the Tecnam (or any other LSA to be fair).

Things that could be better:

1) Work on the control layout. Putting the choke (well, any engine control for that matter) out of sight is a bad thing, and the flap switch needs to be closer to the pilots reach.
2) The radio could be better.
3) The castering nosewheel - this could be a blessing in disguise because I would be forced to pay more attention to taxiing.

I know I have had some discussions in the past with people telling me to fly Microlights to stretch my flying dollar further, I think LSA might be the best compromise for someone of my mass and dimensions, at least in a limited fashion because a LSA cannot do everything a GA aircraft can that I might ask of it. There is a lot more investigation to be done before any concrete decisions are made, but hopefully I have added some useful feedback to the mix that the powers that be might consider.

If the club was to get a LSA (Tecnam or something else), I would fly it, a lot.

Waiheke Island

2011-11-15T15:17:00.001+13:00

Scratch one off my list for 2011. CFI Roger, JGP and I headed up north after the morning fog lifted from Hamilton to have a look at Waiheke Island (NZKE). Waiheke Island was everything I had said in my previous post and more. Situated ontop of a north/south running ridge where the prevailing wind comes from the southwest, it is one of the trickiest places I have ever landed. On the uneventful trip up we skirted the edge of the Firth of Thames, a beautiful part of the North Island. I had my eyes peeled for other traffic but the only aircraft I saw airborne was a Boeing 777 turning finals for Auckland International overhead the Whitford NDB.

View Larger Map

I called up 10 miles out from the strip and closed in from the southeast, flying down the western edge of Ponui Island the crossing over to the middle of the island where the airstrip lies.

The above photo is taken on a rather high approach for runway 35. After we joined overhead we chose 35 as the into wind runway (although it only had 1 functioning wind sock) and descended non traffic to join right hand downwind for 35. The sight picture for all aspects of the circuit is all screwy because the runway is ontop a ridge. You get the feeling you are much higher than you need to be but it is all an illusion, as the closer you get to the threshold the ground comes up steeply to meet you. We came in quite low over the vinyard you see in the foreground, and Roger had me chop the throttle completely as we hit a patch of rising air that ballooned us over our touchdown spot. I probably should have gone around because I didn't have my wits about me, but Roger let me continue with the landing. We came in quite hot (it seems 65 knots is too fast for strip flying) and floated down the runway, then we hit the upslope so I had to flare a lot more and we touched down about halfway up the strip and quickly rolled to a stop thanks to the quite marked upslope.

Here's a photo I took at the threshold of 35. It shows the upslope better.

But even the photo doesn't quite do it justice.

We were blessed because the winds were quite fickle and light so we were able to operate from both ends of the strip. We took off from 35 and had another go at the 35 approach. Even in light air we were hitting bumps as the air currents flowing around the terrain interrupted air flow over the wings. I was a little too heavy handed on the power again and we floated past our touchdown point. Had we been at max weight it might have been touch and go to stop on the runway remaining even with the slope. Stable approaches at a stable airspeed is vital and adding too much power equals more unwanted airspeed which you have to wash off later in ground effect.

Then we taxied to the top of the strip and swung around. We spend a few seconds examining the wind sock. It was showing a quartering tailwind of about 2-4 knots. Looking down the slope, I ran through the max performance checklist in my head and selected my target points aloud. I also said that if we rejected the takeoff and insufficient runway was remaining I would try to steer JGP down the taxiway which would give us another 150m to stop in.

So, feet on the brakes hard. Throttle fully open. Check static RPM, ensure max thrust is being produced before feet come off the brakes. Eyes flick to first landmark, the shed to the left of the plane. It comes up to the A pillar and disappears, eyes flick to the ASI, which is live. Good we have leapt the first hurdle. Back on the controls to take the weight off the nosewheel. Eye's scan instruments quickly, temps and pressures OK, eyes out to make sure we are tracking straight. We are, so look for the next landmark, the car parked over the fence on the right. It is coming up, so bring the controls back a touch and up comes the nosewheel followed by the main gear. We are flying, and in a shorter distance than I had anticipated, so use the ground effect to build airspeed, and then bring the nose up slowly to climb attitude. I would never have thought that slope could trump wind direction, but when the wind is below a certain strength, it does. JGP climbs away and I start running through the upcoming angled approach for runway 17 in my mind.

Waiheke has a number of houses on the extended centreline of runway 17, so for noise abatement, a 45 degree angled base/final leg is flown followed by a very short final approach of about 150m or so. What was great was there are a couple of landmarks you can line up and fly quite a good approach. Again, Waiheke's uniqueness means you need to throw out the guidebook somewhat and fly an oblique downwind leg to get you set up right for the final approach. If you are too close in you'll never get the plane sorted out in time to land safely.

I turn in and line up my two landmarks, and concentrate on flying a nice stable approach. There are a few bumps around but I had worse last week so I ignore it and think about where I need to turn final. The touch down spot is obscured by the sloping land and the trees to one side, but I keep a mental picture of where I need to be. This time I judged the turn well and although we are a touch high I close the throttle and down we come. We touch down slightly further down the runway that Roger would have liked, but it was OK because we had the mains down before the downslope. I brake to a stop and we turn around to backtrack for another go.

Off we go, this time I swing even further out on downwind before starting my turn in. This time things don't go to plan as well as they might have. I had the approach speed nailed, the approach was generally stable but I fixated on what I thought was the threshold but in fact was a paddock to the west of the actual runway. This meant I had to take corrective action to save the approach and we drift right of where we need to be. In hindsight, and indeed at the time I did entertain going around but I chose to continue with the approach. I recall the airspeed dropping below 50 knots which probably saved the day because we bounced, got airborne again, and we eventually settled and I brought JGP to a stand still with about 80m of runway left. I distinctly remember thinking about going around and mentally flying the departure. When Roger said I probably should have gone around I said I had thought about it at what was probably the most appropriate time to do so and had I been alone I would have abandoned the approach then and there.

When we swung around, Roger directed my attention to the windsock, which was now indicating about 4 knots directly down 35, so we taxied to the end, turned around and departed off 35 and headed back to Hamilton.

It was a great trip, I learned heaps about strip flying, reading conditions, and some of the things that can catch you out. I still have so much to learn, and we both agreed that there shall be a wind limit of 10 knots over which I will not attempt a landing if I am PIC. I can only guess at how vicious the winds would be at that strength.

So a great days flying, plenty of lessons learned and things to think about, and 2.0 in the logbook. A good day all round.

The Regionals

2011-11-07T19:51:00.000+13:00

The 2011 Central Area rally was held in Tokoroa this time around. I was going to compete in the Wigram Cup Senior Landings and the GM Spence Senior Forced Landings. I had not flown into Tokoroa since my PPL cross country way back in 2006. As the club had graciously allowed us some low cost practise hours I took WAM down with an instructor to get the lay of the land a week prior.

Since then, the wind had swung 180 degrees and had intensified. We were looking at a surface wind of approximately 220 degrees at 15 knots gusting to 20. There was also a lot of mechanical turbulence from buildings and trees adjacent to the approach on Runway 31 (the runway in use) which made things lively in addition to the right hand circuit direction.

I had chosen to drive to Tokoroa although I had considered flying the Arrow down as it's only about 20 minutes flight time from Hamilton. The trip by car would take around 1hr. The main reason I had baulked at flying the Arrow was that a front was supposed to have blown through at the time I was going to be flying down. On the day there was no sign of the front but as it was I only just made it with about 10 minutes to spare before the competitor briefing began at 0830.

My first flight wasn't scheduled until 0930 so I took the opportunity to watch the other competitors struggle to cope with the conditions. Things didn't look too bad until short final when the fickle turbulent winds around the hills and trees wrecked havoc with peoples approaches.

I was rueing my decision not to fly the Arrow down when I saw the high winged Cessna 172's and 152 get blown around like kites whereas the Cherokee's and Alpha's looked much more stable on approach. I am not sure the powers that be would have let me change planes anyway. Up I went in JGP with air judge Sam, a nice bloke formerly from Christchurch up here doing commercial GA ops but helping out judging because they were short. My first go I got a little high, well, OK really high because I cut in on the base leg too much. Having only an imperceptable headwind meant our ground speed on finals was a lot higher than most of us realized. I had chosen 70 knots for finals with 2 stages of flap to maintain some semblance of controlability but found it really difficult to wash off that ground speed once we were over the fence. Add to that the fact that I had flown the entire approach from the base turn on with a totally closed throttle. Had I flown into a patch of rising air there would be very little I could do. I was not totally comfortable with side slipping a 172 in turbulent air that close to the ground with 20 degrees of flap hanging out, and while S turns might have been a better idea, the crosswind would quickly blow you off centreline if you were not paying enough attention. I chose to go around rather than push a bad approach. My sole aim of the day was to walk away from the day without bending the plane, and it became quite apparent to me I lacked the skill level and currency to really try to do anything other than safely land the plane.

The second pass I felt was much better, they say a good landing starts from the downwind leg, and I just proved it to myself. I hit all my turns and heights, and my airspeed was right where I wanted it. Coming down finals I thought to myself I was comfortable enough to go for the grid when we hit a patch of sink, by the time I had enough power on to arrest the sink my airspeed was passing 80 knots and climbing, and I chose to forgo the grid for a safe touchdown. Not a great start.

After lunch I was to go up again in JGP for the Senior Forced Landings. This would reunite me with Wayne Harrison from New Plymouth, the examiner who had in his words, "only come along for the ride" during my PPL checkride in 2006. The brief was to climb in the right hand circuit to 2500 AGL and then cut the power, and conduct a forced landing on Runway 31, followed by another climb this time to 2000 AGL and a second forced landing from a lower altitude.

The first attempt went like clockwork. Speed was good for the most part, I got all my checks out, I hit my marks perfectly. On final I was a little high but I was expecting a small patch of sink which when it happened I was waiting for it with my hand on the flap lever. The only thing I did which I had not intended to do was lower full flap. We dropped almost below the level of the fence but the flaps ballooned me over it easily. If I had stuck with 20 degrees I thought we would have had a good chance of making the middle of the grid, but I didn't stop the flap switch in time and we got an extra 10 degrees of flap which meant we touched down at the end of the grid. Oh well, that wasn't too bad, lets get back up in the air and try again.

By the time we got to altitude, squally showers were being blown over the runway, and in hindsight I should have been more aware of the small gusts that precede them in various directions. I think it was about this time I was starting to overload myself because basically I made a complete hash of things. The speed was all over the place, the checks were hesitant and I am sure I missed some, I didn't nail my heights properly and was high on almost every mark except the finals turn. I did have the presence of mind to realize I was high and made a plan to widen the base leg slightly and turn finals early to make up for it. I turned finals at 500 AGL and JGP just wouldn't come down. We were higher than previously so were above the mechanical turbulence zone. I lowered all my flap but probably 10-15 seconds too late to make any difference so I finally made a good decision and abandoned the approach and went around. Competition over, but not out of the drama yet.

We flew a standard powered circuit this time and I was much better but the fickle gusts had one last surprise for us. On finals I had 20 degrees of flap deployed and we were coming down at 70 knots to try to cut through the worst of the turbulence. We crossed the fence and I was just about to cut the power when a gust picked up the left wing about 20 degrees (it felt like 30 but was most likely less), when I was slow to respond Wayne grabbed the controls and in one swift jerk righted us. I at least did the right thing in applying full power to arrest any resulting sink. Wayne just as quickly gave me back the plane and we made a somewhat rough landing further down the runway.

Taxiing back I felt a mixture of relief that I had an experienced instructor next to me and a sense of disappointment in myself that I hadn't performed to a standard I would have expected. I knew I had blown my chances and that of the Clubs Wigram Cup aspirations. It was a pretty low place to be in. But I was genuine when I shook Waynes hand and thanked him for the flight. Had I been alone I am not sure what I would have done, most likely JGP would have powered out of it and I would have gone around for another attempt. There are altenative scenarios but I don't really want to think about them.

Driving back to Hamilton later in the day, the days events repeatedly going through my head I realized that I had relearned a valuable lesson, fly the plane, and the lower the airspeed the more assertive you need to be on the controls because down low you don't have a lot of time between safety and disaster. In a couple of weeks I will be going have a dual trip to the airstrip on Waiheke Island to get checked out so I can go in there alone. I think what happened this weekend was a timely reminder because Waiheke has very similar properties to Tokoroa, only the runway is half as long, slopes significantly and is not sealed, giving me even less options.

More pics from Ardmore

2011-10-01T23:28:00.000+13:00

I was clearing out the memory card on my camera and I found a pile of photo's I had promised back in July. Whoops. So without further ado, here we go.

A fellow Arrow getting gas (a turbo Arrow too!)

A Cessna 162 ~~Fly~~Skycatcher belonging to Auckland Aero Club. The future of GA?

A couple of Airtourers and a Birddog. The NZ Warbirds hangar on a nice weekend is always a good place to be.

A Harvard faithfully waiting for the next flight of the day.

The Beaver, sadly I didn't get to see this beauty flying on this occasion.

This one needs no introduction, but for the non propheads out there, it's the one and only P-51D Mustang. Owner and pilot Graham Bethell was doing his preflight walkaround when we wandered past.

In the July post I mentioned the low cloud we flew over on the way to Ardmore, well this was taken at around 4.30pm about 2 miles east of Huntly at 2000 feet. The poor folk living under that cloud had fog ALL day. The hill poking through the cloud in the middle of shot is Taupiri Mountain, a hill sacred to local Maori.

Well I did something right

2011-09-21T21:21:00.001+12:00

The club dinner arrived, the night we would find out who won what and would move up to represent the Club at the Central Region. After a nice meal and an interesting talk from our guest speaker (a former RAF Phantom and Tornado pilot), Club President Phil and Club Captain Michael arose and took the stand to read out the list of prize recipients. The usual method is to call out the three individuals who placed in no particular order and then once they are presented to the audience they read out who placed where.

The first competition where I was called up was the Ray Cartmill Memorial Trophy for Liferaft Dropping. I knew that I had not done as well as I might have, but was surprised when I (and my dispatcher Chris), won second place.

The next competition I found myself at the front was the Runnymede Challenge Cup for Senior Landings. Imagine my astonishment when I was announced the winner! I was up against some seasoned pilots who have a history of bringing home the trophies. I was kind of numb with shock to be honest, but the night wasn't over there. Barry (aka NZ Propellorhead), if you are reading this, you had your chance mate, looks like a nice cold Stella is coming my way. You can get your revenge next year.

Next came the Pacific Aerospace Shield for Gentlemans Circuits, where I placed second. After my performance I really didn't think I had a hope of placing, so a second place came as a big surprise.

I thought I'd had a decent haul, so imagine my surprise when I was called up once more as a finalist in the Alan Daysh Trophy for Senior Forced Landings Without Power. When they announced me the winner it didn't quite register.

The two wins and two second placings qualified me for the J A Harper cup as Senior Champion. In some sort of daze I numbly went up and received the trophy and handshake. This really is a big deal. I look at the past winners who have their names engraved on the cup, and there are some big shoes to fill.

Here's a photo of my haul:

The broken propellor is quite rightly, the Alan Daysh Trophy for Forced Landings, the smaller trophy back left with the V Tailed Bonanza on top is the J A Harper trophy for Senior Champion, and the big silver cup is the Runnymede Challenge Cup for Senior Landings. The two certificates in front are for the second place finishes.

After that concluded, CFI Roger read out the names of our team to contest the Central Area Rally to be held in November. I will be representing Waikato Aero Club in Forced Landings and Senior Landings. The Senior Landings part is especially important because it is part of the hotly contested Wigram Cup (Senior Landings, Junior Landings, Non-instrument Circuits, Instrument Flying). If Waikato Aero Club can win them we will represent the Central Area in the Nationals which will be held early next year.

Time for me to get out there and practice those landings!!

Club Competitions 2011

2011-08-23T17:27:00.006+12:00

They couldn't have picked a better day for the 2011 Club Competitions (OK maybe a bit warmer), it was 0 degrees celsius, CAVOK, wind variable 3 knots. We set up our landing grind on 18R.

The cones you can see are pretty much the physical manifestation of the grid as per the rules:

The big arrow is the landing direction. The aim is to land in the zone marked with the 50 in bold. The competitions that use the grid are: Junior/Senior Landings, Junior/Senior/Ladies circuits and Junior/Senior Forced Landings. I would compete in the Senior categories of all 3. There are several other circuit competitions being run which would not use the grid but my job as ground judge would be to determine where aircraft landed and award points accordingly.

Of course, when I was flying other club members would mark my performance. This year was unlike others in recent times because we did not have a crosswind (or a tailwind for that matter!) to deal with. In fact, the lack of wind would cause me problems later, but I digress.

The first competition I competed in was Senior Landings, of which I was the second competitor. Here's a hint for young players, if you have the option, go as early in the day as possible if you are competing in Hamilton, the weather is best in the morning. My logbook says I have not flown a 172 since June, so I was a little rusty, but not too bad. I managed to mess up my base to finals turn (its funny what aspects of your flying atrophy when you don't fly a lot) but both approaches were reasonably stable on speed and on centerline and I think I put WAM down somewhere around the 50 mark.

I spent the rest of the morning at the grid judging other landings, and after a nice lunch I was up for the Forced Landing Competition. Most other competitors use the clubs Alphas but I prefer the 172 for its gliding characteristics. From 2500' AGL you have time to make yourself coffee and cake when compared with the Alpha's rather high best glide speed, so I intended to give myself time to size up the situation and not do what I did last year. The initial descent went OK, I managed to get the checks out after a fashion, I hit my 1500' area and turned downwind, arrived at the 1000' point more or less where I should be and started my turn towards my aim point. The new rules this year say you must be established on finals at no lower than 300' AGL or face instant disqualification. Unfortunately for me, I was far too close when I turned finals at 300 and at that moment we hit a patch of lift and WAM levelled off so I ended up floating through the grid. The second attempt I thought I had lost too much height to make it over the fence at the end of runway but I was wrong. Flaring a second too early I bled off too much speed and landed early. An improvement, but I could have done so much better.

After lunch I flew the circuits and I was not happy with my performance, I think the forced landings had hit my confidence. We packed in the grid around 5pm and retreated to the bar.

Sunday was to be the fun stuff, bombing and life raft dropping. We set the bombing target up on Grass 25, which was to fortuitous because the wind swung around later in the day to be blowing 250 degrees at 6 knots, right on the nose. As a result we had some excellent scores on the bombing. I think I got one within 30 meters of the target (a personal best).

As for the liferaft dropping, I got Chris to be my liferaft dropper this year. I love the liferaft dropping, you get to fly around the circuit low level in a 172M with the door off. My first drop I thought was more or less where it needed to be, but on the downwind leg I accidentally (I swear I don't remember doing it) hit the flap switch and lowered full flap. Lowering full flap at 100 knots is not a good idea if you are trying to hold 500' AGL which meant I lost a ton of points (damn it!).

After we dropped the second liferaft I joined left base for Runway 18R and performed my first crosswind landing for a while, which I was rather proud of. Chris took a movie on his iPhone as we came down finals. Turn the sound down because the wind noise is quite loud (not to mention it was freezing - thank goodness I had a warm jacket on).

It was so well run we were all packed up and in the clubrooms by 4.30pm, thats almost unheard of.

We shall see who won what next month at the club dinner.

About time too

2011-07-18T23:54:00.009+12:00

It was about time we had some decent flying weather arrive in the weekend. It was about time I went flying in the Arrow once more. It was also about time I returned to Ardmore. Although I had been there as recently as May 2009, on that occasion we drove. Checking the logbook it was on the 7th of December 2008 that I last flew an aircraft into NZAR (aka Ardmore). The lets face it, awful weather NZ has been experiencing for most of June and July decided it wanted a break too, so we were treated to a stunning Sunday. The only downside was, there was just enough wind to create thick low level stratus, aka fog, over most of the Waikato basin.

Fortunately for me, I had the plane for the day, so was able to sit in the comfortable pilots lounge at the Aero Club and wait for the fog to clear sufficiently for me to fly. Two hours went past, and peering out I could see that the weather had improved to the north to the point I could see the horizon. I already had DQV out, fueled, preflighted and ready. My passenger Chris turned up with a bundle of camera gear and after stowing everything securely, I fired DQV up and taxied out.

After an uneventful runup and departure (off 18R grrr - why do they insist on treating the Arrow like every other Cherokee?) I was cleared for a non standard right turn and we turned northwards.

As you can see, a hole had opened up around Hamilton and the airport. Above was clear blue skies and 50km visibility. As I approached my initial level off altitude of 1200 feet AMSL, Hamilton ATC recleared me to 2500 AMSL and I started to climb once more.

Once I hit 2500 I levelled off, trimmed, leaned and started to think about my course. It would lead us right over the largest patch of fog I have ever seen from above. The PPL met law popped unbidded into my head: "clear of cloud and in sight of the ground..." well there was no way we were going to see the ground through that pea soup. I steered west of my original heading and made sure I was within gliding distance of ground I could see. Chris in the meantime was busy snapping pics of the cloud below us. Looking at the photos you'd almost believe we were a few thousand feet higher than we actually were.

Most of my usual landmarks were under that cloud (the Waikato River, the Meremere Power Station, the Hampton Downs raceway, and the Spring Hill Prison). Once we got closer I could see State Highway 1 crossing over the Bombay hills, then I picked out a bridge over the Waikato river which appeared to our left and triangulating them on my Nav chart I had a pretty good idea where we were. The problem was, we were travelling at around 135 knots over the ground and I had to start my descent to stay under controlled airspace so landmarks were coming and going fairly quickly.

We finally managed to get the relevant information from Ardmore's AWIB and at around 12nm to run I reported in on the frequency and announced I was joining downwind from the west as per the published arrival procedure. I admit I had some reservations about flying the Arrow into Ardmore. Ardmore is the busiest uncontrolled airport in NZ, and at times is busier than some airfields which have the luxury of ATC telling pilots where to go. The Arrow being retractable would also increase my personal workload, which would adversely affect my situational awareness, something you need a lot of in the Ardmore circuit. I started my run at the downwind leg from Papakura township, and seeing a 172 climbing in the crosswind, I aimed to slot in behind them. I realised that having a few extra knots up my sleeve actually aided me in sequencing because I could easily stay ahead of the next aircraft coming up from the runway in the circuit. Then there was the problem of slowing down. I reduced enough manifold pressure to get DQV below the gear limiting speed and dropped the gear, and the 172 ahead stopped getting bigger at the great rate of knots. Once I had DQV more or less straight and level and trimmed I quickly ran through the downwind checks, reported I was number two for landing and continued to follow the plane ahead.

Once I turned finals I gave a call I was intending to land after the leading 172 had decleared they were going to touch and go. Knowing I had 8 knots of headwind with only a very slight crosswind to cope with I crossed the threshold, rounded out and started to flare as I pulled the throttle to idle, that was a mistake. We started to sink so I raised the nose even more. That didn't help either and we arrived with a bit more of a thump than I had intended, but in hindsight it wasn't that bad and I have done a lot worse.

I saw the taxiway to the southern apron and we headed off the busy runway and found a place to park next to a PBY Catalina.

Thats what I love about Ardmore. There are not too many places in the world where you can pull up next to an airworthy Catalina.

After nosing around the Warbirds hangar where they had the P-51, 3 or 4 Harvards and the Beaver getting some sun, Chris and I snapped to our hearts content before making our way over to the Auckland Aero Club for lunch. I'll continue the story in another thread so I can post more photos.

What not to do when refuelling your aircraft

2011-07-18T10:37:00.004+12:00

Do not park your aircraft perpendicular to the fuel pump island instead of parallel.

Do not forget to turn off the master switches prior to pumping gas.

Do not forget to disconnect and retract the earthing wire prior to taxiing.

Do not do all of the above in front of a club full of onlooking pilots including 3 instructors and 2 former Aero Club head instructors.

In case you are wondering, yes this actually happened, yes I was there, no it wasn't me.

Circuit bashing

2011-06-28T11:16:00.004+12:00

Sunday was looking a very nice day (for once, most of the weekends have been heavy rain for the past month) so I headed off to the airport for some circuits. I decided that I would take a 172 up because I wanted to practice some slips. The wind was 180 degrees at 12 knots, straight down runway 18 and fairly brisk, that would make it even more fun.

My first time around there was a bit of traffic so I decided to try a precision approach. I chose a 60 knot approach speed just to get used to it again and went through the checks, aiming point selected, decision height (400 feet) and speed (60 knots) determined, lined it up on final with full flap and our ground speed dropped markedly. It was as if we were hanging in the air. WAM only had around 3 hours of fuel in her so she was quite light and we floated a bit in ground effect before finally settling.

I was determined to try again, but the next circuit was free of traffic so I chose a glide approach, but this time my flaps mysteriously failed as well. Quickly trimming WAM to best glide speed I started my turn to the airfield early because the low groundspeed would be a problem if we were to have too long a final approach. This meant I would be quite high which I wanted to be. When I turned final I increased airspeed to 70 knots, chucked in a bootful of right rudder and left aileron and down we came. Using the PAPI lights as a rough guide for glideslope I rolled wings level when I had 2 white and 2 red, reduced airspeed to 65 knots and flew her down to the runway. Sometimes being tall can be a curse, but when you are trying to land a 172 flapless, being tall enough to see the runway over the cowling with such a nose high attitude is a blessing.

Opening the throttle, the airspeed shot up to 60 knots before I had the wherewithal to raise the nose and by the time the mains unstuck we were accelerating past 65 so I brought the nose up the Vx attitude and the ground seemed to fall away beneath us.

The next approach I chose another precision approach, this time with a 55 knot approach speed. Even with full flap deployed 55 knots has quite a high nose attitude, it was a little disconcerting at first. I nailed the airspeed and we were more or less on centreline when I reached decision height, had it been a small field I was attempting to land on I probably would have gone around, but for the purposes of the exercise and having 750m of runway to land on it was perfectly safe to continue so I did and we touched down precisely on my landing spot.

The final circuit I did another 55 knot approach and it wasn't as good as the previous one, but I had run out of time so I didn't get a chance to improve because the plane was due back.

What I did take out of the trip was how comfortable I felt. I haven't done much flying recently, but I have over 80 hours in WAM from a total of 120 hours on type so flying a 172 around the Hamilton circuit on a nice day doesn't knot my stomach like it used to. It also means I can bring all my brain power to bear on practicing the finer points of aviating rather than having to think about every little action. For those of you who don't fly, think about driving your car. It becomes so second nature that you can concentrate on other things rather than driving the car itself. Well I am pleased to say that I am finally getting to that point in my flying. Its a nice feeling indeed.

Birthday flight not quite to plan

2011-05-26T10:28:00.005+12:00

I haven't posted much because there has not been a lot to post about. To put it simply, I have not been flying. However, for my birthday I thought I would treat myself to a challenge and booked an Alpha 160 (aka Robin 2160) and an instructor for an aerobatic flight. Turned up to the aero club, talked to my instructor Allannah who said the weather was good enough (for once) to go up and would I mind checking the fuel level in WCD (the fleets best aerobatics ship - people in the know tell me it has the best harmonized controls of the 3). After telling her I have never flown one and had no idea about its systems she gave me specific instructions and out I went. The bad news was that some conscientious person had filled the tanks. When you need to cram 120kg of pilot into a 2 seater you kind of need less fuel to keep it within the Utility limit (i.e. the maximum weight you can fly and still do aerobatics without overstressing the airframe), so that ruled out WCD. The even worse news was that neither of the other two Alphas were available either, so no aerobatics for me.

Determined to at least do some flying, I looked at the booking sheet. All the Archers and both 172s were booked for other people. That left DQV. About that time, a fellow club member said he was delivering an aircraft to Tauranga and was hoping for someone to bring him back. I have taken DQV into Tauranga quite a few times since I got my rating so I thought why not?

To digress a little, the trip would also let me test out my birthday present, a David Clark H10-13.4 aviation headset. Without sounding too much like an advert, they are the worlds best selling aviation headset. For a weekend pilot like me, they are perfect, I don't need to spend mega $$$ on an active noise reduction headset because I don't fly enough to make it worthwhile. I pretty much did all my training using the ones belonging to the Aero Club so I was buying a known quantity. The build quality is what you would expect and they are sturdy enough to handle being bumped around without falling apart. The ear seals nicely cover the arms of my sunglasses so there is minimal sound leakage, and the comfy padded head band reduces fatigue.

Back to flying, talking with the guy I was going to pick up, we looked at the weather situation and decided the Waihi Gap would be the way to go because significant cloud had built up along the Kaimai ranges which precluded going over. He was flying a Cherokee 140 so he left first. After rechecking the weather and reading the NOTAMs I departed 20 minutes later. I got away after a slight mixup (I had set the wrong frequency on one of the radios) and set course for Paeroa township, the western gate to the Waihi Gap. As I climbed to 2500 I could see there was no way I could get over the Kaimai's which vindicated plan A of going for the gap. DQV was sitting nicely at 125kts indicated and it was pretty smooth going. As I got closer to the gap the northerly which was forecast at 20 knots started throwing up some chop but DQV just powered through it. I reached the Gap, changed to the appropriate frequency and made my call, but no one else was around. I had intended to cut across the inner Tauranga Harbour overhead Katikati but there a dirty clump of shower cloud sitting at 800 feet in the way so I decided to head to the coast and smoother air. I copied down the ATIS and called Tauranga tower up overhead Athenree township and was cleared for a Matakana 1 arrival. That mean tracking down the coastal beach at 1500. That has to rate as one of the most scenic VFR arrivals in NZ, simply beautiful.

I landed without incident and taxied over to our prearranged meeting site where my pilot/passenger was waiting. He said he had only been on the ground 5 minutes max, so I definitely made up time in the air. We conferred again and chose to depart for Hamilton immediately in case the weather had worsened enroute. If we had decided to have lunch only to be forced to return to Tauranga later on we would have felt like a couple of idiots.

We were cleared for a Matakana 1 departure (flying the other direction 500 feet lower than the arrival procedure) which wasn't as scenic because we were flying into the afternoon sun. We cleared Tauranga airspace and I climbed as high as I could, which was only about 2000 feet or so. Once we cleared the Waihi gap I selected a cruise descent to 1700 (the normal joining height for Hamilton) and we tracked our progress on his GPS, reaching a peak ground speed of 151 knots. I called up overhead Morrinsville and was given a progressive clearance into the zone because there was only 1 controller on duty and 6 aircraft in the circuit.

We were cleared to Matangi, then Mystery Creek, then overhead the tower to join downwind, but we had to stay at 1700 feet. When we were finally cleared to descend we were number 4 to land behind a 172 and ended up on about a 3 mile final. When we got to 1.5 miles someone in a 172 on the downwind leg asked for a glide approach which the controller approved. Since we were landing on 36R that would mean holding on the runway because we were much faster than he was so would be on the ground well before him. Other than that the landing was uneventful.

The trip was longer than my normal trips to Tauranga in the Arrow, 1.1, but it was really the first time I had flown the gap for real (I'd done it once before but the overcast was a lot higher). It was good to get back into the air in the Arrow again. I love flying it.

Balloons over Waik... my house!

2011-04-04T10:21:00.004+12:00

This week saw the premier NZ ballooning event, Balloons over Waikato take place in Hamilton city, where I live. This year they decided to take ballooning to the people literally, because here's a photo of one taken from my back porch on Friday morning just before I went to work:

Not really the place I'd be wanting to land!

Short hop to Paeroa and back

2011-02-24T09:14:00.003+13:00

Why take a plane and fly it to Paeroa township and back? Well because I can! Seriously though, I have a web acquaintance from the UK who is visiting NZ at the moment who told me he was visiting Paeroa over the weekend to watch the motorcycle street racing. I told him to look out for me, so Bill, if you are reading this then that blue and white Archer overhead on Sunday was me. Unfortunately in my haste to get to the airport I clean forgot to take my camera so no photos (sorry). Having said that I had to suffer the indignity of arriving overhead Paeroa between races so there was nothing to photograph in any case.

I must say, it did feel good to be back in the air after more than a month.

Three flights in two days

2011-01-10T11:16:00.004+13:00

After not flying at all since my trip to Whenuapai in early December 2010, I filled a weekend with aviation. I had booked a flight on Sunday in a 172 to take my work colleague and his fiancee along with the lovely Susan to Raglan for lunch. I realised last week I was not current in the 172, so I had to book a currency flight to get some circuits in. Then on Saturday morning pilot friend Aaron asked me to fly DQV back from Tauranga because he wanted to bring another plane back to Hamilton, so I agreed to fly him over. Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos because the batteries in my camera are flat.

The weekend started with what was going to be 3 circuits in a 172 but ended up being 4 plus an orbit and a go around. I made a meal of the glide approach and had to go around, then due to an IFR flight making an approach 2 of us had to orbit. Four approaches later I was current (legally).

The day was very nice, excellent flying conditions with light winds and only a bit of cloud over the Kaimais to make life interesting. Also there was the Walsh Flying School operating out of Matamata so the MBZ was temporarily a control zone. On the way over to Tauranga we kept south of Matamata township (which is approximately 5nm south of the actual airfield) but reported into the ATC which was on watch and they acknowledged our presence and said there was not a lot of activity to report at that stage as far as conflicting traffic was concerned.

We had a small moment getting into Tauranga airspace because the radio I was using decided to glitch and I didn't realise it until we were pretty close to the boundary. I changed radios, made contact and was cleared for the Racecourse 1 arrival. We had to descend quite rapidly to reach the height required the approach procedure, I had to lose 1800 feet in about 5 nm so I reduced MP to 22" and set a nose attitude to give me initially a 400 fpm descent, but as the airspeed increased the nose wanted to come up and because I was busy looking for traffic I didn't notice that we had stopped descending for a couple of seconds then I nosed down to 700 fpm descent and remembered to wind on a bit of nose down trim and that helped.

I made my call overhead Tauranga Hospital and I was cleared to descend for the grass runway. I asked for the seal runway because we were 4 up and reasonably heavy and ATC recleared us for 07 seal. I did the downwind checks and we were quite lucky I had maintained 1000 feet right up until the final turn because a Cherokee went under us on finals for the seal. I then made my turn for the grass runway and ATC recleared us for the grass. In all the confusion I could not remember if I had been cleared to land so as we crossed the threshold I confirmed with ATC before making a light touchdown. I've been told how much easier the Arrow is to flare when there is weight in the back and as I eased back on the controls the nose came up a lot higher than I intended and we ballooned a bit. But we touched down and rolled to a stop without much fuss.

The flight back was quite eventful, Matamata ATC routed us via Waharoa Township at 3000 feet and above, we had a descending tow plane to avoid (never saw him but he reported north of the field which was some distance from where we were), a glider (also never saw him) and a whole heap of activity in the Matamata circuit. In comparison Hamilton was quiet with only one other aircraft in the circuit.

Move onto Sunday. After putting this flight off twice (it was originally supposed to take place in December of 2010) due to marginal weather we hit an absolute peach of a day. I was a little worried about the return trip from Raglan because we would be 4 up and just under max weight at the hottest part of the day departing a strip with obstacles on both approaches. I did a weight and balance and the p-charts using the worst case scenario (max weight, nil headwind and hottest expected temperature) and had my math checked by an instructor. The good news was that according to the p-chart we would only need approximately 480 meters to take off and Raglan is 646 meters.

We took off and set course for Raglan. The flight is only about 10 minutes in duration which is nice for non pilots because 10 minutes is about as long as it takes for 4 people inside a 172 to become uncomfortable. I called up 10nm out and heard there was glider towing in progress off 05. After spotting the tow plane and glider one of my passengers pointed out a glider joining the circuit ahead, we were still a few miles away but it was good to get the picture in my head. As I joined overhead the tow plane ducked in around me and joined downwind for 05. I announced I was descending non traffic to join downwind for 05 and proceeded with the descent.

I like doing approaches on 05 at Raglan because it is very scenic, as the base leg takes you out over the Raglan bar and down Ngarunui beach before turning final. Damn I wish I had batteries for my camera. I flew a steady approach and a good landing before taxiing clear. Once I got out of the plane I inwardly whooped because there was a steady breeze of around 5-8 knots blowing down 05. We had a lovely lunch and after a preflight and runup I taxied us down to the end of 05, briefed my passengers on the short field takeoff procedure and where my check points were, did the lineup checks and with my feet hard on the brakes opened the throttle. Everything came up as expected and I released the brakes. Raglan is quite a wide field so its possible to use an oblique angle to make sure you are properly into wind. With no small relief I announced we had live airspeed some distance short of the first marker and we lifted off at around halfway down the strip. I lowered the nose in ground effect to build a bit of airspeed and then eased the stick back and up we went. We had an excellent rate of climb so I relaxed and set course for home. We detoured past a big wind farm being constructed on the hills south east of Raglan and then joined straight in for Grass 07. I had expected a crosswind because the ATIS had said the wind was swinging about 40 degrees and the tower had quoted a crosswind of about 4 knots so was carrying a lot of speed on final. As we crossed the threshold the wind was dead on the nose so when I flared we ballooned then bounced. I was not happy with the landing but my passengers were none the wiser and were happy we were back in one piece.

Two days, three flights, three airfields, six passengers, two aircraft types and 1.6 hours in the log book thank you very much.

Happy 2011

2011-01-04T09:59:00.002+13:00

Happy New Year and best wishes to all who read this. Lets start with an accounting of 2010:

This time last year I said

1) More cross countries
2) Aerobatic flight
3) Fly into Ohakea
4) Fly into Wellington
5) Pass my BFR

1) I flew one cross country I had not done before ( HN-NE-HN), but the rest was run of the mill stuff.
2) Nope.
3) Kinda moot because they didn't have an open day, but since I got to fly into Whenuapai instead I'll count this as a yes.
4) Nope
5) Yes.

Total hours for the year was 12.8 over 18 flights, 6 hours down on 2009.

Now for 2011:

1) Aerobatic flight
2) Get approval to land at Waiheke Island. I think I have enough hours now to handle this challenge.
3) Fly somewhere different (like Whangarei or Gisbourne)
4) Taildragger flight
5) Go for a ride in something cool

I haven't flown much over the Summer break due to finances. To put things in perspective, when I first started learning to fly the solo rate for a 172 was $175. Now the same plane costs $229. When you include the fact that sundry costs like Airways and Airport charges have also increased by a similar percentage, your dollar doesn't stretch as far and that means less hours in the air. I know I have said it before, but I am frankly quite worried that the day is approaching where I will have to stop flying because I can no longer afford to keep current to the point that I (and my instructors) feel I can fly safely.

A day in the sun

2010-11-15T08:57:00.003+13:00

The Waikato Aero Club hosted the regional flying competition over Friday and Saturday. Members from Central Aero Clubs (ranging from Tauranga to Hawera and points in between) converged on Hamilton to determine who would be representing our area at the National Championships down in Canterbury next February.

I turned up at a reasonable hour to help set up the landing grid on Grass 25 Left which was designated as the grid runway. Grass 25 Right was set up for the bombing and liferaft dropping competitions. Setting up the grid involved delivering a caravan to a spot adjacent the 50 point bullseye box on the landing grid, setting up an awning, constructing a temporary "fence" at the assigned threshold which contestants must avoid or be marked down. We used dry Toi Toi shoots for the fence because being a natural fibre they would be stiff enough to stand upright (or so we thought at the time) in the breeze and yet be flexible enough not to harm an aircraft should they bust through it. Later we had to add some brush of some description to the fence because the Toi Toi kept blowing over as the wind picked up. Adding toilet paper to the fence made it easier to see on finals.

The competitions got underway around 9am on Saturday. I was assigned two boxes to look after on the landing grid. For those of you who have not flown in a landing competition, I shall endeavour to explain. A landing grid is essentially just that, a grid the competitors try to land in. The grid consists of two threshold markers, and around 25 metres inside those markers the grid begins with a series of 10 metre wide boxes. The box in the middle of the grid is worth 50 points, and each subsequent box outside it is worth 10 less points until you get to 0.

The wind was initially blowing at around 6-8 knots straight down Grass 25 Left, but as the day wore on the wind intensified to be around 12 knots at the end of the day.

The competitions that I took part in judging was to be: Junior Landings (student pilots), Senior Landings, Forced Landings, Men's Circuits and Women's Circuits.

I must say, the standard shown in the Landing and Circuit competitions was of a pretty high standard. The usual rise and sink of Grass 25 caught a few people out, it is very difficult to fly a stabilized approach because both the sink and rise are quite pronounced.

However, the most fun we had was the Forced Landing competition. By the time it was run which was around midday, the wind had picked up to 12 knots straight down the runway, and the forecast 2000' wind was 20 knots with only a 20 degree offset which meant little shear and a fairly steady wind to deal with. For the uninitiated, the competition starts at around 2500 feet above the runway where the throttle is closed and the pilot glides the aircraft along the appropriate flight path to land in the grid scoring maximum points, then they climb away to a height around 2000 feet and do it again. However, a lot of the pilots misjudged the low finals groundspeed and sink on the threshold and several of them got very close to the fence, one individual actually put his wheels through the brush but after deliberation among the judges it was agreed that he had not been through the fence because the brush poked up above the Toi Toi shoots which were measured at 1.2m. Never-the-less, pilots were either running out of energy and landing short or carrying too much speed and floating through the grid.

It certainly was gratifying to me to see a bunch of club champions having as hard a time at it as I did back at the club competitions.

After 7 hours in the sun and 3 applications of sunscreen, our job was done and we carefully packed up everything and hit the bar for a well deserved cold one. I did manage to take some photos, so will post a selection soonish.

Quest for the perfect glide approach

2010-10-27T10:25:00.002+13:00

I took FWS up, and according to my logbook is quite some time since I last flew an Archer, this is because the Arrow so awesome to fly... well, it is, but its also a lot cheaper to fly comparatively so my dollar stretches further. I chose FWS for two reasons: 1, it was free; and 2, it's missing its wheel spats so I figured it would have more similar glide characteristics to the Arrow due to the extra drag.

A normal circuit to iron out any kinks in my checks and handling, which went fairly well, although getting reacquainted with the fabled Archer cough took me by surprise again. Now I can't speak for all Archers, but the engine in the two the Aero Club has like to hesitate briefly when power is applied at any pace other than an agonizingly slow trickle. Not having to worry about landing gear or your prop setting was quite refreshing, but I quickly realized a spat-less Archer does not an Arrow make. For one the Archer is lighter and has a totally different wing, and the differences on final were quite marked. I ended up floating for some distance down the runway when I made my first approach at 70 knots.

The second circuit I did at 65 and it was more agreeable, but I still had too much speed crossing the piano keys. The next circuit I was going to start my glide approaches but by the time ATC got back to me to approve the glide I was too far downwind so had to cancel my attempt. Instead I chose to perform a precision approach. When I reached my decision height I said aloud that I would have gone around because although I was on centreline I was too fast, but I elected to continue with the landing to practice some more.

Next time around I finally got a glide approach in, and even though I quickly converted to the best glide attitude I didn't make the runway.

Finally got a glide in from the right spot on downwind, carb heat hot, throttle closed, turn in towards runway keeping landing spot in sight and lined up with my reference point on the wing. Double check speed, trim, adjust course because we hit a patch of lift, hold off the flaps until I am absolutely certain we will make the runway. OK turn final now, check height, we are high, so drop some flap, carb heat cold, throw in a little side slip, not too much, OK wings level, drop the last of the flap, check speed, check height, line up, OK raise the nose slowly, slower than that, OK there's the landing attitude, hold it, hold it, there's the stall buzzer, touchdown!

Overall, not bad, I still need some more practice, but I'll take it. Got some interesting flights planned now that summer is just around the corner, so for where I am in my currency I am feeling good. Hopefully will have photos and video to show you once they're done.

Current again, sort of

2010-10-14T10:35:00.002+13:00

Well 3 circuits later I am legally current in the Pa28 200R. The conditions were trying, 10 knots on the ground, 35 knots at 2000 feet and a nice fat sheer zone in the middle where you are trying to fly. Approaches were better than expected, checks were all there when needed, but I've noticed a new sensation creeping in which I have never experienced before, which is a sense that you are falling behind the plane mentally. Normally you need an instructor in that detached zen-like state of calm to look over at you and say after seemingly spending most of the circuit gazing wistfully out the window, "you're a bit behind the plane aren't you?"

It was certainly an odd feeling to notice it myself. I ended up verbally coaching my approaches and that seemed to help. I guess I still had some spare brain capacity tucked away which kicked in when needed.

Club Competition 2010 results

2010-09-27T11:03:00.002+13:00

At a very nice evening at the Clubrooms where a merry time was had by all, in between courses we had the presentation of awards for the recent club competition. I managed: 3rd place in the Defective Preflight, 3rd in Forced Landings (even with the bounce!) and 2nd in Senior Circuits. Our CFI Roger announced our Regional competition team, and it sounds fairly strong, we'll need it to be because we are hosting them in November!

The weather has been awful recently, with all the bad stuff, low cloud, strong winds and heavy raid all frequenting my home town. I literally have not flown since the Club Competitions but hopefully the weather will start to improve and I can get back into the air once more.

Are 172s created equally?

2010-09-13T11:31:00.002+12:00

Well I threatened to write an essay on this, but in reality its more like a couple of paragraphs. I've often wondered why the Aero Clubs 172s have markedly different performance. Yes, WAM is 20 years newer than JGP, but the basic design did not change a great deal since the M model was released in 1973. Skimming the model changes between the M and R models, the main aerodynamic change is a reduction in max flap deflection (although JGP only has a maximum flap setting of 30 degrees similar to WAM). Most of the other changes are internal, and there are quite a few.

OK so what are the differences that matter? Well lets look at the vital statistics. JGP is powered by a Lycoming O-320-D2J with the STC (supplemental type certificate) modification to 180hp, as compared to WAMs IO-320-L2A, also uprated to 180hp. She has a two bladed Sensenich propellor up front which is of similar size and mass to the two bladed McCauley propellor that WAM has. I forgot to get the exact model specs so I could do a more precise comparison of pitch angles and other relevant details, so watch this space, I'll add it later.

I won't go into the perceived performance differences in the air because you can simply read through my blog to get a sense of that.

I think the most significant difference between the two aircraft is the weight. I found in the technical manuals, the pages where the aircraft was most recently weighed.

WAM: 1666.1 lbs
JGP: 1549.1 lbs

That is a 117lbs difference, which I'd say is pretty significant. That equates to the weight of a smallish person or child.

Tauranga Trip Photos 1

2010-09-04T11:43:00.007+12:00

Just realised I had not posted the photos from my recent Tauranga flight. Here they are as promised, used here by kind permission of Andrew Gera.

Looking east as we clear Hamilton airspace. Centre right in the background is Lake Karapiro and behind it is Mt Maungatautari.

Looking east as we cross the Kaimai ranges. The altimeter was reading 3500 AMSL but it doesn't look like 3500 feet to the ground!

Bottom of descent as we level off at 1500 on a Racecourse 1 arrival into Tauranga. Mt Maunganui is centre shot, note the airspeed indicator, 150 knots, yeah baby!

Flying a Racecourse 1 arrival. West of Tauranga city at 1500 until abeam the Hospital (a bit difficult to make out but it's in there somewhere), report abeam and hold awaiting further instructions. Not much traffic around (for Tauranga that is, there was a lot of activity on the radio) so we expect to be cleared to descend into the circuit without delay.

Looking back the way we came whilst downwind for runway 25.

More to come.

[Edit] For some reason the photos don't link to the larger version. I'll work on fixing this soon.

Club competitions 2010

2010-08-24T13:48:00.002+12:00

As I said previously, the weather forecast for the Club Competitions looked pretty dire but when I awoke on Saturday morning, it wasn’t as bad as first thought. I arrived at the Aero Club as club captain Michael was listening to the ATIS and apart from some low cloud, the wind were reasonably fickle, although the forecast 2000’ wind was a brisk 20 knots at 240 degrees magnetic.

After a discussion with the instructors and ATC Runway 36L was chosen as the landing grid runway because the recent rain had made the grass runways unusable for landings. First competition of the morning was Landings, both Senior and Junior comps got underway. Due to the wind on the ground being variable and light, there was a bit of sheer around which made things interesting to say the least.

My first competition was Senior Landings, and I chose to do it in a 172, which in hindsight was probably not the best idea. The takeoff went OK (it wasn’t being judged in any case) but when I got late downwind and started slowing the plane up we momentarily flew through some cloud and I had to push the nose over to get below it. Judging the turn to finals was the most challenging part because of the sheer, the first time round I turned way too late and had to turn back towards the runway centreline, the second time I turned slightly too early but was able to let the drift carry me back on track. One of the landings was pretty nasty, I realised I need to get more crosswind circuit time in. Based on my performance I think Propellorhead would have won our duel easily.

Then came the Senior Circuits. Fortunately the conditions were largely the same as when I had done the landings and I knew what to expect so I did much better. The second landing especially I was most proud of, I really nailed the crosswind technique. I was told later I had landed in the grid, but to be honest I wasn’t paying attention to that at the time, I was concentrating on landing properly, so getting into the grid was a bonus.

Getting towards the middle of the day ATC were getting concerned about the wind as it was swinging towards the south and aircraft were experiencing a 3-4 knot tailwind component. After some consideration the consensus was that when we stopped for lunch we would pack up the grid and move it to 18R afterwards for the afternoons flying.

The turnout was surprisingly good considering the marginal conditions. The landing competition was fierce, especially in the professional category where we saw some very good examples of aircraft control. What made it even better was that none of the pilots in the professional category were current so the playing field was pretty level. Unfortunately for them, the wind decided to swing north again later on in the afternoon and intensified, so things got quite lively. I couldn’t help but feel a large amount of trepidation for some of our student pilots competing in the Junior Landings and Circuits because most had never flown crosswind circuits before so they were getting a lesson at the same time as competing against each other. The winds had caught out several of us PPLs and even some of the professionals were finding it tough going. Little did I know what was in store for me on Sunday.

Sunday came and the weather was vastly improved, instead of the cloud being scattered at 1200’ we had few at around 3000 and the odd shower cloud passing by. The wind had resolutely stayed blowing from west to east and the grass runway had improved enough for limited operations, but the landing grid was going to remain on 18R, so the competitors were faced with the daunting task of performing a glide approach with a crosswind landing. Earlier in the day the wind was fairly slight so there was not more than a 5 knot crosswind blowing, but as the day got warmer the wind increased and by the time I had my turn it was blowing 15 knots with 20 knot gusts from 240 degrees.

The forced landing competition is as follows. Climb to 2500’ AMSL, “fail” the engine, and perform a forced landing onto the grid. Then power up, climb to 1500 AMSL, “fail” the engine again and perform a glide approach from there. The competitor must declare a clean glide speed, a partial flap glide speed, a full flap glide speed, a threshold glide speed and a minimum glide speed. I chose the standard 65 knot clean glide, 60 knot for all flap settings, 55 for the threshold and 50 for the minimum. Up at 2500 it was quite smooth, but as we descended we hit the sheer zone and things got pretty bumpy. I missed the 1500 foot area and cut in towards my 1000 foot point, which I ended up cutting inside because the changing winds were causing a lot of sink when they eased. On the base leg I thought I would cut in slightly because my groundspeed dropped away. I turned final with what I thought was enough altitude to make the grid but down we came so I had no choice but to go around.

On the climb back to 1500 air judge Luigi suggested I carry more airspeed, I concurred so added 5 knots to all my previous airspeeds. The 172 definitely flew better with the faster speed but I found myself sinking rapidly again so I cut inside my base leg even more. I turned final at around 300 feet AGL and I would not have been more than 300 meters from the markers, I selected full flap and lowered the nose to maintain my airspeed. At that precise moment we dropped like a stone. I remember that my eyes were inside because I was checking my airspeed when I heard Air-Judge Luigi say “power power power!” I think I glanced up at the same time I pushed the throttle all the way in and we were coming down hard. Even pushing the throttle home quickly, the engine will take about a good second to come to full power and then there is another second or so for the propeller to start producing maximum thrust. It was in between those seconds that we hit the ground on our right main gear and bounced back into the air. The observers from the grid said later it looked pretty nasty, I must admit it didn’t feel that bad from inside the plane, but later after hearing the eye witness accounts I gave a silent prayer thanking Cessna for using sprung steel for their undercarriage. Had we been in a Cherokee things might have turned out different. We came around and landed on Grass 25 without further incident.

Later on in the day, the busy schedule cleared enough for us to begin the liferaft dropping competition. The liferaft drop is my favourite competition probably because it’s the only team competition we do. I thought I had talked about exactly what is entailed in the liferaft drop competition but looking through my previous posts I cannot find a description so here it is. A pilot and a helper (along with the air-judge) get into an aircraft (in this case a 172 with the pilots door removed) with two “liferafts”. While these are not strictly liferafts, they come in the form of a vinyl bag of similar dimensions and weight to a small punching bag which simulate a deflated liferaft. Prior to departure the pilot nominates the speed at which the drop will take place to the air-judge. After takeoff the pilot climbs to 500’AGL and flies a normal circuit except at low level. The pilot and helper are judged on the teamwork factor as well, and I briefed three calls with my helper. On late downwind, I could call “ready”, at which time the helper grabs a bag and places it on their lap. After turning on final the pilot descends to no less than 200’ AGL and stabilizes their airspeed to their nominated airspeed. When I was about 20 seconds from the drop I called the second call “standby”, where my helper places the liferaft outside the open door of the plane ready for the final command which is given when I think I am over the target, “drop!”

The target grid is kind of like an upside down keyhole. The place to score the best points is in fact not in the circular part of the keyhole, but where the narrowest part is. In a real life situation, the circular part of the keyhole is where the people you are trying to save are floating, so dropping 12kg of vinyl on their heads is not such a great idea. The trick is to drop it close enough so they can swim to it easily but not close enough to cause harm or distress.

Bombing on the other hand, is purely a solo effort. I was the last competitor of the day, and by the time we got airborne it was fairly late and the winter sun was low on the horizon. Unlike liferaft dropping, you get three passes instead of two and the target is a big archery style target with the bullseye in the middle and the concentric rings around it. I made my first pass, and all was going well until I struggled with the window latch in WAM and dropped a bit later than I intended. I pushed in full power to climb away and the window flung outwards, so I had to fly it right handed in a climbing turn slightly out of trim while I struggled to close the window. In hindsight I can see where experience counts, because I didn’t let it distract me from flying the plane whereas had I been pre-PPL I would have had to ask the air-judge to take over for me while I closed the window. By the time we lined up on our second pass I could clearly see the runway lights on the perpendicular runway 18L shining through the now twilight sky. Air judge Peter said that we’d better make this pass the last one. I concurred but when he said I wouldn’t be marked down for only flying two passes I said, “how about I drop two bombs on this pass?” He chuckled and handed me the third bomb, and at the moment I thought was right I threw both of them out the window. We climbed into a right hand turn to join right base for 18R and was cleared almost immediately to land because there was an ATR on an 8 mile final.

I did a passable crosswind landing and we taxied back to the Aero Club where everyone was packing up. Talking to some of the longer serving members of the club they were quite impressed with the turnout this year, they said its the highest it has been for a long time. We even saw some members of the club who are no longer living in Hamilton turn up and try their hand, that was great to see indeed.

Who won? Well that will be announced at the annual Aero Club dinner which is due to be held in September. I don’t hold much hope for victory but the experiences alone were worth the effort.

That time of year again

2010-08-16T10:20:00.002+12:00

For those of you who like to read the comments in my posts, you'll be aware that the annual Waikato Aero Club competitions are coming up this weekend! I have signed up for the following competitions: Circuits, Landings, Bombing, Life Raft Dropping, Forced Landings Without Power and the obligatory Defective Pre-Flight.

I have challenged fellow blogger and Club member Propellorhead to best me in the Landings competition, but unfortunately for both of us it seems the weather isn't in a charitable mood and it is likely we will be rained out.

If any other club members read my blog, turn up and have a go! The costs are as low as the club can make them and it really is fun and something slightly different to your normal flying which I guarantee you will challenge your ability.

A catch up

2010-08-13T08:46:00.005+12:00

I haven't been idle, just quite busy with real life stuff which has no place in my blog. But I can report I went on several flights which were both fairly relaxed affairs, which I thought was a good indication of my growing experience.

The first flight was a hop across to Tauranga airport for a $200 coffee (or in my case, hot chocolate) with work colleague and student pilot Andrew. Andrew is yet to go solo but has started circuit training, so I thought an example of the cool things you can do once you get your PPL might be a nice piece of motivation for him, as it certainly was for me.

We picked a heck of a nice day for it. From memory the HAMILTON ATIS had cloud few at 4000 feet and a variable wind of 4 knots, temperature of 9 degrees C and a dewpoint of 7 degrees.

Andrew helped me push DQV out of the hangar and I preflighted her while he organised his cameras. We started her up, gained taxi clearance for a Scott Departure off Runway 18L and taxied out to the runup area. Once we were airborne I set climb power and headed northeast out to the Scott Sector and the maximum cruising altitude of 2500 feet.

Once clear I reported clear of the zone, set climb power again and started a climb to 3500 which would be our cruise altitude, albeit only for a few minutes or so before the descent. I dialed up the Matamata MBZ frequency to make a position report and to check on any glider activity, but there was nothing at that time. Once we had leveled off I set course for our waypoint, Ruahihi, set cruise power and handed control over to Andrew while I tuned in the Tauranga ATIS and jotted down the details. I thought he flew very well for such a low timer. The thing about the Arrow is that when you are hurtling towards controlled airspace at 140 knots you get the perception that you have less time available than you actually have.

We crossed the edge of the Kaimais and I was surprised at the lack of turbulence, although as we descended we picked up a few bumps. I called up Tauranga Tower and was cleared for a Racecourse 1 arrival. I pushed the nose over and we started our descent because you need to be at 1500 feet by the time you enter the control zone. We had a slight head wind at that height because the GPS was showing only about 146 knots ground speed while the plane was indicating 150 knots. I think I managed to coax 160 indicated out of DQV before we leveled off at 1500 feet, and the ground was whizzing past beneath us.

I reported west of the hospital and was cleared to descend into the circuit to join downwind for Runway 25. Although my approach was less than stellar, the landing more than made up for it and we taxied over to park outside Bayflight. A short stroll later and we were enjoying a light lunch and a hot drink at the Classic Flyers Aviation Museum cafe.

We had a slight hiccup because when we went to leave, DQV decided she didn't want to start. After a flurry of phone calls and some discussions with senior instructors I wandered over to the Classic Flyers hangar and borrowed a battery cart. With ground power connected DQV turned over after half a revolution of the prop and we were back in business. At this point I wish to thank all the helpful staff and volunteers at Bayflight, Classic Flyers and the Waikato Aero Club for helping Andrew and I get back into the air. The fellowship of aviators never ceases to humble me.

We had a fairly uneventful flight back, although I went around because I was not certain we had been cleared to land, and we were at short short final when I realised it. Talking to the club members later they thought I had nearly done a wheels up landing but I distinctly remember mentioning to Andrew that we could see the shadow of DQV as we came down, and I remember seeing the main gear's shadow, and I have a habit of checking the gear is extended 3 times at various stages of the approach before committing to land.

The second attempt was a nice landing, right on the center line of 18L. Andrew has kindly given permission to use his photos on my blog so they'll be incoming shortly.

A couple of weeks later I went out on an equally nice day to get some 172 time in. I wanted to practice slipping and gliding mainly. Unfortunately for me, the circuit was busier than I had hoped and I was sharing the circuit with up to 6 other aircraft. In the middle of this, two Mount Cook ATR's decided they wanted to leave so I had to land and taxi clear for wake turbulence separation. In the end I got about 5 circuits in, but only 1 was a glide. I was happy with how I went though, because I was straddling the center line more often than not, and I tried different approach speeds to get a feel for the plane and how it responds. My first approach was at 65 knots which is the max weight approach speed, then I tried 60 knots, 55 knots and finally 50 knot approaches. I was flying JGP which is the clubs rocket ship. I did a Vx climb at almost 40 degrees nose up and she was still accelerating. I love that plane! Next time I do solo circuits I might try exploring the back end of the power curve, I've been told that when one up 45 knot approaches are possible in the landing configuration. It will be interesting to finally explore that aspect of the flight envelope on my own.

Winter currency

2010-06-28T15:28:00.005+12:00

Flying is not like riding a bicycle. Skills must be practiced in order to keep them from rusting. I haven't flown since May (my BFR) and I thought a few circuits would maintain my currency at the legal minimum. The weather was better than I was expecting, with very light winds, but there was cloud floating past at 700 and 1200 feet AGL so it made keeping track of the other 4 aircraft in the circuit problematic at times. I would be at circuit height looking for someone on the base leg ahead of me but they would duck behind a wisp of cloud and I'd have to wait a couple of seconds to pick them up again on the far side. It was good to have a busy circuit to contend with though, maintaining the ability to mentally follow all the aircraft in the vicinity is another skill worth keeping sharp.

Landing-wise I did pretty well considering I haven't flown the Arrow for several months (logbook says last flight was April 12). As I alluded to in the first paragraph, the weather has not been particularly good for flying over the past two months, and for us weekend warriors the curse has been having to go to work on Wednesday in near perfect flying conditions only to see them deteriorate by the weekend. Such is life, here's hoping for better weather soon!

AvKiwi Seminar

2010-06-07T23:14:00.002+12:00

I thought I should share a little bit of info about the AvKiwi Seminars held annually by the CAA. I went to my first one in July 2004, basically 3 or 4 lessons into this whole flying thing, and it made a big impression on me. Lets just suffice it to say I have not missed one since, and although they have repeated the subject matter a couple of times the content has always been updated to include the latest safety information so is still worthwhile.

This years topic was Mountain Flying. Now here I was thinking that mountain flying is what they do in the Himalaya's, Rockies, Alps or closer to my home, the Southern Alps. As it turns out, not only is my view shared by a number of other pilots, we are all wrong. In actual fact, almost 60% of New Zealand can be classified as mountainous terrain (not 100% sure of the exact definition, but it has something to do the gradient of our topography), indeed the furthermost point you can travel from mountains within the North and South Islands is a point in the middle of the Kaipara Peninsula, which is a scant 22nm away from the nearest mountain. Even in little old Hamilton we are less than 5 mins flight away from what could be categorized as mountainous terrain.

The CAA have decided to alter the flight training syllabus to include a specific mountain training programme, with skills specific to PPL/CPL standards being tested during flight tests and BFRs. Going through the scenarios put to the attendees during the presentation and thinking about how I would react in those conditions, I've decided to sign up for some mountain training as soon as the club gets it's instructors cleared by the CAA to teach the new syllabus module.

There are also some training establishments who specialize in mountain flight training, I am seriously considering undertaking the more specialized training in the mid term after I get what the club has to offer.

B-B-BFR complete!

2010-05-10T12:43:00.006+12:00

In the words of the clubs head instructor, a Biennial Flight Review is, "a review of your flying ability to make sure you are safe to operate an aircraft within the parameters set by the CAA for the license you hold (in my case, a PPL(a))". Some people think it's identical to the PPL checkride but it differs in one important aspect, it is not a pass/fail test. It is a potentially ongoing inspection of your ability as a pilot. If you screw up a maneuver here, miss a check there, the appropriately qualified instructor overseeing your BFR may require you to undertake more dual flights to work on aspects that need work. Once the head instructor (in my case) is happy that my flying is of a sufficient standard then he will sign off on my groundwork, complete the paperwork which gets filed with the CAA and endorse my logbook for another 2 years.

If you read my 2008 entries regarding my first BFR I had several attempts at getting the flying part out of the way, but because my BFR falls due in July which for those readers not familiar with the southern hemisphere seasons, is in the middle of our winter and is normally a fairly unsettled time with low temperatures, high winds, poor visibility and rain. This time round I chose to move the date back into our Autumn which generally has the most settled weather of any time of year.

The lead up to my BFR started back in March when I went up alone to see if I could remember those parts of BFR flying which I do not get to do very much when flying cross countries, namely stalls and forced landings. Then I took some time off work last week to do a decent dual session with one of the C Category instructors to ensure I hadn't gotten too sloppy in my flying.

One of the new things they had me do was slow flight. This has been recently added to the NZ PPL (a) flying syllabus to bring us more inline with other countries who have been teaching it for some time now. I cannot remember when exactly it was added to the syllabus, but at least after my last BFR. I must say, I quite enjoyed it. You really get to examine the aircrafts performance in that part of the flight envelope, but flying accurately at such a low airspeed requires a mixture of skills which took me a while to get the hang of. Its like low flying except you are not low flying, its like flying an approach except you are not flying an approach. But the skills necessary to fly both of those come together in slow flight. Once I figured that out it became a lot easier.

After the dual session I went up alone and practiced the areas the instructor identified, namely slow flight and forced landings until I was happy with them.

Then the day came when I had to show the Clubs head instructor that I still had the chops to keep up this flying business. I had booked WAM because I prefer the 172 for BFRs due to the decent glide characteristics. Head instructor Roger said to me, "we'll go up for a bit of a scenic flight and I'll ask you to do certain maneuvers here and there and we'll see how we go."

I chose to head out east because its normally fairly quiet out there. Once we had taken off I was pleased that the engine didn't fail like it always seems to when I take off from Hamilton with in instructor aboard! When we cleared Hamilton airspace I was asked to perform a climbing turn. Piece of cake! Then we did a steep turn which wasn't too bad, I had a bit of a problem maintaining my height because WAM wanted to keep climbing but I saw the error and adjusted for it and things came out more or less within limits. Then it was a run through the stalls which went pretty well, a compass turn which I nailed first go, and then the forced landing.

Roger requested and we were cleared into the eastern low flying zone so after a discussion on paddock selection I chose a suitable paddock and the engine promptly died. I ran through the various checks fairly well, we missed the 1500 foot area but we were getting fairly low so I chose to track direct for the 1000 foot point and continued running through the checks which were paced quite nicely because of the excellent glide characteristics the 172 enjoys.

I thought my base leg was about right for the windspeed (5 knots) but we were a bit high on base, so Roger asked me what my options were. I said we could S turn or deploy flap, he said we could also fly through the centreline and turn back towards the field, and then said another option was to forward slip. When I said I had never been taught to slip he demonstrated one for me and before I knew it we were on glideslope. The ability to slip is certainly a nice skill to have in the tool box.

After the forced landing I climbed us back to 500 feet AGL and we did some low flying, including a coastal reversal turn and a precautionary landing which to my utter amazement I remembered all the procedures except I started my descent to the low level inspection pass at the wrong time.

Then it was off to the same country strip that Roger had taken me to on my last BFR. This time round the wind favoured the opposite direction to what I remembered and was also blowing across it. We did not have sufficient height for an overhead join because we were still in the Hamilton control zone and had to stay at around 1000 feet AGL so I orbited the airfield to determine the windsock direction and once we picked our approach I joined downwind and set up for a precision approach.

We had a crosswind to contend with so I told Roger I was going to add on a few knots for the crosswind and we did the approach at around 65 knots. The crosswind died as we crossed the threshold so I rounded out and flared as normal and we came to a stop.

We taxied back and Roger asked for a max performance takeoff so I picked my spots, lined us up, stood hard on the brakes and after running up to full power we were off. I climbed back into the circuit and Roger asked me to do another with a lower approach speed to see what would happen. I chose 60 knots and we pulled up a good 4 lengths shorter than the previous landing. We then backtracked and performed a normal takeoff and headed back to Hamilton.

We joined for Grass 07 and on downwind Roger told me that my flaps had failed. After extending downwind a bit I managed to end up quite high on finals so Roger suggested a slip so I tried one on my own. Being slightly timid I chose to slip at 70 knots instead of my chosen 65 knot approach speed and after finding the correct glide slope I managed a truly awful landing to end the flight, we bounced once but the second time I managed to control the rate of descent enough to land properly.

As we taxied back to the Aero Club Roger said he was generally happy with my performance and despite the fact we have only flown together once since my last BFR he noted that my 159 hours are starting to show in my confidence and my ability to point the plane where I want it. I thought that it was a solid enough effort, but there are a few little details I need to work on. There always is something you can do better.

So with the flying part out of the way, its just a bit of paperwork and a ground exam and I will be good to go for another two years.

Airshow Season 3

2010-04-16T23:19:00.004+12:00

The Mercury Bay airshow I enjoyed immensely more than the Tauranga one. Mainly because of its low key nature and varied aircraft on display. I will say that the Tauranga airshow gave me a moment I will never forget, the sight and sound of a Spitfire for me the first time I have ever seen one flying.

The highlights of the Mercury Bay airshow:
- The low level handling display by a Learjet
- The irrepressible Phil Hooker in his 152 Aerobat and OH6-A Loach displays
- A slightly less than perfect but still amazing formation aerobatic display from the Yak 52 display team (all 9 of them!!)
- Graham Bethell in his P-51 Mustang
- I am sad to say I have forgotten the name of the pilot, but he did a simply staggering solo aerobatic display in his Tiger Moth in a vicious crosswind which was, by the time he took off, swinging wildly between 090 and 120 degrees and gusting up to 18 knots from a mean of around 10 knots.

Here's a movie I cut together of the Spitfire and P-51 displays from each show.

Airshow Season 2

2010-04-16T22:27:00.006+12:00

Exactly 4 weeks to the day after the Tauranga Airshow we left Hamilton once more for the sunny Coromandel to attend the Mercury Bay Air Show.

Looking west as we climb through 1000 feet off runway 18 and NZHN.

The old one lane Kopu bridge over the Thames river with it's much more modern replacement being built adjacent to it.

Passing through 3000 feet looking north up the penninsula as we climb to clear the Coromandel range.

Looking northwest as we descend into the Coroglen gorge approaching Whitianga from the south.

This shot taken immediately after the previous one, with Mercury Bay in the back ground and Whitianga airfield just to the right of the nose with about 6 nautical miles to go before we are overhead. I recall we were racing a Robin coming in from Auckland to our left and a 172 coming from the south east to our right, but we were coming down at around 160 knots ground speed so we were going to get there first easily.

Looking at the windsock once we were overhead we'd have a crosswind no matter what so we chose the longest runway that was as into wind as we were going to get which was 04 at that time.

Here's the movie of the landing.

Airshow Season 1

2010-04-16T17:45:00.007+12:00

Phew! Its been a while. Well I have not been totally idle, February/March is airshow time, and I attended a couple of the bigger ones, although the biggest, Wings of Wanaka, was beyond my finances this time. First up was a trip to Tauranga for the Tauranga Airshow.

Airborne over the Thames basin looking north at the Kaimais. Matamata airfield can be seen to the left of the A pillar above the small window.
Over Tauranga city looking at the airport at 1700 feet as we make a right turn to join left hand downwind for Runway 25.

Our trusty steed, the Arrow, parked up on Grass 16/34 at Tauranga Airport.
A generous P-40 pilot decided to do their runups right next to where we were standing on the flight line so I thought I would oblige them. Sorry about the over-saturation but I heinously overexposed the shot and had to fiddle with it to get it to look right.

I didn't get a lot of decent photo's, but it was an awesome day. I reckon it may end up rivaling Wanaka if it gets much bigger. The only gripe was that I injured myself but that is another story for a different blog.

More to come very soon.

Grounded

2010-02-22T16:49:00.003+13:00

Not much action here because I've grounded myself due to injury. Had a minor fall and suffered what my doctor tells me is a sprained rib, well, not the rib itself but the muscles surrounding it. The upshot is that doing most things causes me pain in degrees varying from minor discomfort to that akin to having a hot iron held against your ribs. Not really the distraction you need when you are up flying.

Rib injuries take up to 6 weeks to heal, so that's 6 weekends of potentially awesome flying weather I get to curse at as they pass me by. I am not a happy camper at the moment, but there is nothing I nor my doctor can do about it. :(

GPS track for the NZNE flight

2010-01-06T16:54:00.003+13:00

Here's the track from the GPS for the trip to North Shore. Thanks to Aaron and Chris again for their help.

Starting 2010 flying early

2010-01-02T07:30:00.007+13:00

Well to boldly start the new year with a challenge, I decided to mix in some aviation with a New Years Day ritual I have been doing for a few years now. A good friend of mine who lives in Auckland's North Shore and I take turns visiting each other on New Years day. This year was my turn to head up to see him, flying up to see him seemed like a good idea. At this point I want to apologise for not taking any photos. I knowingly left my camera at home so I would concentrate on aviating rather than sightseeing.

As the Aero Club is officially closed on New Years Day I had to get special permission to do the flight. My plan was to take a 172 as the clubs fleet are as familiar to me as a comfortable pair of shoes and as I was going to fly into a virtual unknown I wanted as little distractions as possible. I then realised that it was highly likely I would be flying alone, something I have not done on a cross country since my solo cross country trips as part of my PPL training back in 2006. Due to some mis-communication during the Xmas madness my request was lost and the 172s were already allocated when I turned up. A sympathetic instructor offered me an Archer, then my eye read down the booking sheet to the column assigned to DQV, the Arrow. It was empty. Whether it was my foolhardy streak or the dollar signs talking I asked and received the booking for the Arrow. I remember wondering if it was such a good idea at the time but upon reflection I was more than ready to take it out alone.

I had to make sure everything I needed from the club I got on the 31st so I got the checkout sheet, the keys and a headset and after checking the tanks I needed fuel so with a sigh I pushed DQV out of the hangar, started up, taxied around to the pumps, topped off the tanks, taxied back and put her back in the hangar. Satisfied that the plane was fuelled, I went home.

Once at home I thought about my route. Once again, a direct route was impossible because of conflicts with Auckland and Whenuapai airspace so I would have to go around and under controlled airspace. To make things interesting, I chose an anticlockwise route that would keep me away from airspace but also the busy Ardmore airfield and Auckland City airspace which would no doubt be busy with other returning day trippers when I was expecting to be passing through. The west coast route would be longer but far less busy. I also planned to be airborne early to ensure than anyone who had a bit too much to drink during the New Year celebrations would still be sleeping it off rather than getting in my way. Borrowing a hand held GPS off Chris and after a crash course in how to use it (actually I found it quite intuitive to use and only had one minor hiccup during the trip which resolved itself with a bit of patience on my part). I programmed in all the waypoints I thought I would need (the trip up had 6, the return trip had 4) and we were set.

The first day of 2010 dawned a rather murky gray with broken stratus at 3800 and visibility of only 25km. I got DQV out of the hangar and proceeded with the preflight which went smoothly. As agreed, after I had started up and was waiting for the engine to warm up I sent a text message to the "on duty" instructor saying that DQV had passed a preflight inspection and I would be wheels up soon. During the runups I had a mag that needed clearing, I prayed that it was only carbon deposits that needed burning off rather than a faulty mag or my flight was over before it began. Eventually it cleared and I was cleared out of the zone to the north. The tower gave me an option of 18L or Grass 25, and eventually they let me use 36R as the wind had died sufficiently. It certainly was good to take off in the right direction.

I cleared Hamilton airspace, climbed to 2000 feet, trimmed DQV for the cruise, leaned to 12 gallons per hour and settled in for the trip. There was a few bumps around, but nothing too bad, The forecast wind at 2000 was 20 knots so some turbulence was to be expected. As I headed north past Huntly the haze thickened and the visibility reduced to what I estimated was 15km, more than enough for VFR but enough to make me switch on the landing light. See and be seen.

I skirted Mercer airspace to the east, turned for my first waypoint, Hunua and tried to tune in Ardmore AWIB. It was faint but I heard enough to hear than UNICOM was off watch. I began a cruise descent to 1500 feet to get under Auckland Approach (my flight would take me across the Whitford NDB which is the outer marker for the Auckland ILS). I called up on the Ardmore frequency 6 miles south of Hunua and gave my position report. Another aircraft responded saying he was on a reciprocal heading. I responded I was looking for him, but he saw me and said we were miles apart. He then asked me what the weather was like further south, I said it got better south of Huntly and wished him a good flight. That was the only contact in Ardmore airspace so after 2 more position calls I switched to the Auckland CFZ (common frequency zone) frequency and made a position and intentions report. I heard a commercial pilot saying he was taking off from Waiheke and heading for Matarangi - far east of where I would be. Approaching the Musick Point waypoint I turned towards North Head on the northern shore of the Waitemata Harbour and started to descend to 1000 feet. Over the water the ride smoothed out and I allowed myself to enjoy the sights of Auckland in the morning. The weather was pretty much identical to what it was when I flew into Whenuapai way back in March of 2009 except it was not showery at all.

At North head I made my position report for traffic in the VFR transit lane and after hearing only one response from a rescue helicopter far above me I continued. Spotting my mates house in the North Shore I waved my wings but I did not see anyone. I got as low as 800 feet in the transit lane due to spending too much time looking at people on the beaches. Reaching the northern point of the transit lane, the Okura River mouth, I switched to the North Shore frequency, gave a position and intentions report, turned in land, set climb power and climbed to 1700 feet for the overhead join. Expecting to hear everyone and their dog, I was surprised to find that no one was active on the frequency. About a mile out I used a tip Chris had given me and lowered the gear. This cut my airspeed back to around 100 knots and meant that my turns were tighter. North Shore airfield is located 1.5nm north of the Whenuapai airspace boundary and I didn't want to be circling the airfield at 130 knots. Spotting the windsocks it indicated that runway 21 was favourable so I called I would be descending non traffic to join left hand downwind for 21.

Runway 21 has a pronounced dip in it, for someone who has never flown into North Shore it certainly made my sight picture interesting. Looking at the threshold you would appear low, but at the far end you were high. The finals approach has a motorway and a couple of hills and power lines to negotiate, but I chose a high approach because coming down in DQV is not a problem. I thought the fact that the sealed part of 21 is only 9 meters wide I might flare early but I did a pretty good landing and pulled up fairly quickly too. I vacated the runway in front of the Aero Club and squinted on the map for the casual parking area. I must say, its confusing to see a sign saying Casual Aircraft Parking on a strip of grass next to a sign which says Keep Off the Grass. Eventually when my brain power returned to full capacity I realised I was supposed to taxi around the patch of grass with the signs to the parking area. Duh! I parked on what looked like a weird angle, but it would give me room to swing around and taxi out afterwards, and was facing directly into wind to aid cooling of the block when the big fan in front is off. It's all about airmanship, well, thats what I told myself. :-)

After a fun day, I was dropped off at the airfield around 5pm. After patiently waiting for the GPS to find some satellites and then struggling to activate the return route (which strangely fixed itself) I preflighted DQV and fired her up. The wind had intensified somewhat but was more or less blowing down 21. This bode well, I couldn't see where I should do my runups but chose a spot that looked more or less OK and did them there. I think the summer sun and the later stage in the day than I had wanted to return had given me a mild case of get-there-itis. More on the consequences of that soon. The North Shore frequency was alive with aircraft returning from various parts of the country and there was a Rans RV6 in the circuit. By the time I was ready to go most of them had landed (except a 172 who had gone around on short finals). I announced I was lining up on 21 with the intention of departing west to the coast and down to Hamilton.

A quick check of the instruments and switches, a glance at the windsock and after stepping on the brakes I opened the throttle. Manifold pressure coming up, prop rpm coming up, off the brakes and away we went. After we got airborne I noticed a draft blowing at me. Putting it to the back of my mind, I raised the gear and flaps and set climb power. Once I got to 500 AGL I dared checking what was wrong. I had forgotten to properly latch the door and it had come open. The wind noise was such that I could barely hear the radio and my mike was adding to the noise in my ears. I turned the squelch down till the mike stopped transmitting wind nose, levelled off at 1500 feet and began to slow down. From memory, to close an open door in flight in an Archer is to slow to 80 knots, apply left rudder to skid the aircraft and attempt to pull the door closed. When this made it worse (I know I most likely did the procedure wrong but cannot think what it was) I made the command decision to return to North Shore, land, and close it properly.

Shouting into my mike I told North Shore traffic I had an open door in flight and was returning to North Shore to land. I don't know if they heard me but I lowered the gear early to slow the plane down and that made the wind noise reduce to a level that I could hear the radios. I did a fairly decent landing considering the conditions, I taxied clear and closed and latched the door. After re-announcing my intention to depart I lined up on 21 and away we went. After a much better takeoff, I had DQV cleaned up and in climb configuration early and she was climbing sweetly at 100 knots. I levelled off at 1400 feet, set cruise power, leaned the mixture again and made for the coast, intending to turn south through the Te Henga VFR transit lane on the western edge of Whenuapai airspace. The trip west was a bit lumpy, but once I was off the coast the ride smoothed out considerably. I regretted that I did not have my camera with me as I flew south. The coastal land in that part of New Zealand is breathtaking from 1400 feet with the setting sun on it.

I made a call on the general frequency as I turned south but heard nothing, in fact I did not hear anything from my radios for so long during the flight back I tested them several times to make sure they were working, which they were. This did not stop me from making position calls though. Once I was out from under Auckland Approach airspace I set climb power once more and climbed with the intention of getting to 2500 feet, but the low murky cloud that had dogged me on my trip up was still there and I was forced to descend to 2200 feet to stay below it. Seeing that my second waypoint, Port Waikato, was in sight 6nm away, I made a position report and turned to cut an inside track direct to Hamilton. As I got further inland the bumps came back but nothing too bad. I kept noticing that the wind was pushing me east of my intended track, almost every time I did a course check I was east of where I wanted to be. There are not a lot of recognisable features in that part of the country so I chose to be more vigilant when checking my course. Eventually I saw Huntly off at 10 o'clock and knew that Hamilton was not too far away, I had tuned in the DME but as I was low it couldn't get a clear signal. Switching to the Hamilton ATIS I got the details down and thought about what I would be asked to do upon entering Hamilton airspace. As there was not a lot of flying happening I thought I would get a plain english clearance similar to the one I got that morning rather than a published approach procedure.

After calling Hamilton they cleared me into the zone 2000 feet or below to join right hand down wind for Grass 25 left. The ATIS said the surface wind was 260 degrees at 14 knots, perfect for putting the Arrow down on 25 with room to spare. I took a serpentine course that would take me over my house, Chris's house, Aaron's house and would set me up nicely to turn downwind for 25. As I descended for circuit height, the indicated airspeed quivered up to 150 knots. Once I turned downwind I got to circuit height, levelled off and started reducing manifold pressure, once the airspeed dropped under 130 knots I lowered the gear, increased manifold pressure to maintain circuit height, reported downwind, was cleared to land on Grass 25 Left, and did my downwind checks. Turning onto finals presented a slight problem because I was looking into the sun but it wasn't as bad as it gets in late February when the setting sun is right down the runway. Lowering full flap, I picked out my landing spot on the runway and played with the throttle as the strong wind was giving me the typical Grass 25 rise then sink. I put DQV down very lightly on the grass and rolled to a stop. I was home. I taxied to the pumps to top up the tanks, then took DQV back to the hangar and put her away for the night.

A long day, but a great flying start to 2010.

Happy 2010

2010-01-02T07:13:00.002+13:00

Happy New Year to all! I want to wish you all the best for 2010.

Review of 2009:

Way back in January I said:

Lets look at some goals for 2009.

1) Get checked out in the new Archer
2) Fly to White Island and back
3) Go on some longer cross countries
4) Get checked out for landing at Waiheke
5) Have an aerobatic lesson (or two)

And the drumroll again for the most important goal... pass my flight medical!

1) Check. I did a checkout flight, but the fact the Archer is not airswitched and costs the same as the Arrow per hour it's not really worth it for me to spend my money on.
2) Nope, still no luck there. Maybe this year...
3) Actually I managed to do this, with a flight to New Plymouth and back.
4) Nope. Well this may not happen because it seems to be more trouble than its worth.
5) Nope. I spent my flying budget on a type rating and some cross countries. I will get to this but it is no longer a high priority for me.

Two out of five, can't really say I am on a roll here. But I DID pass my flight medical!

To summarize what I did in 2009, I flew 24 flights, gained 1 type rating, flew into a military airbase for an open day, had a trial flight in a helicopter, flew 18.1 hours in total. I don't think that's too bad.

Now to put some goals on paper for 2010...

1) More cross countries
2) Aerobatic flight
3) Fly into RNZAF Ohakea for the Open Day
4) Fly into Wellington (they tell me its character building - eeek)
5) Pass my BFR!!

Taranaki Trip GPS track

2009-11-10T15:24:00.003+13:00

Courtesy of Aaron Martin.

Taranaki cross country photos

2009-11-08T11:34:00.005+13:00

Not sure what town this is but its a camp ground on the Taranaki coast

Motunui Synthetic Fuel plant just behind the wind with Mt Taranaki in the background

Waitara river mouth and Waitara township

A big queue for the fuel pump while we do our runups.

A $500 Sandwich

2009-11-08T09:19:00.007+13:00

Whats the first thing to do once you get a new type rating? Go flying of course! I want to get some decent stick time in order to consolidate things, so when Aaron sent me a text suggesting we go somewhere I jumped at the chance. He got DQV out of the hangar while I was driving out, to the airport and taxied around to the pumps while I looked at the weather picture and NOTAMs to see where we could go. Aaron mentioned he wanted to go somewhere which had food in easy reach, so that instantly ruled out a stack of places. Raglan was busy with the Black Sands fly in, Ardmore was not far enough away, Tauranga was too run of the mill (Aaron flys there often), we eventually decided on New Plymouth. Club CFI Roger who had popped in mentioned something about getting a muffin from Jim Hickey (a NZ TV weather presenter who it turns out owns the airport cafe) we kind of laughed it off. Little did we know that we'd actually be greeted by him in person an hour later!

The enroute weather didn't look too bad, wind 220 degrees @ 20 knots, broken CUSC (cumulus mixed with stratocumulus) 3000 tops 8000. I filed a VFR flight plan (haven't done that in ages so it was good to get back into that practice) as we would be travelling over some pretty remote and rugged country.

After an uneventful runup and takeoff, we departed via the Pirongia sector as cleared and set course for the first real way point (the first one was Pirongia township but didn't count), Taharoa (a remote mining operation on the west coast of NZ), after checking in with Chch Info (Christchurch Information), I struggled with getting the plane properly trimmed. We were experiencing mild to moderate turbulence but the properties of the Cherokee's slab wing did wonders damping it. We'd still get caught in a patch of lift and a couple of times I found we were in controlled airspace so I had to descend rapidly and then we'd hit a patch of sink and end up 500 feet below my planned cruising altitude of 2500. The weather looked worse than what we had experienced at Hamilton, with the haze giving way to overcast skies and misty drizzle patches here and there, but generally the visibility was adequate and well above legal minimums.

We arrived at Taharoa 1 minute later than planned and swung south, I reported in and gave our ETA for the next waypoint, Mokau township. I want to reiterate here that the folks at Chch Info are always a pleasure to talk to and its nice knowing they are keeping an eye on your progress. Once we got out off the coast the ride smoothed out considerably and I allowed myself to relax a little. Once we got past the 30 minute mark I did my in flight checks (suction, ammeter, DI, icing, engine) and switched tanks. I kept an eye on the weather ahead and the weather behind, as we were travelling into the weather I was mindful of aborting early before we could get enveloped but the wall of cloud that had hindered me making the same trip a few years ago although present was still thin enough to see through and under and we enjoyed at least 10km visibility for the entire journey.

We passed Awakino township and I saw Mokau in the distance and mentally began thinking about updating my ETA with Chch Info, then about 1 mile north Aaron spotted an aircraft at 10 o'clock. I picked it up visually and although he was some distance from us our courses were converging. He was roughly at our altitude so I started a descent to pick up speed and chose to pass to his right (as is the law for overtaking in the air). Switching to 119.1 which was the listening watch frequency for that region I said, "Mokau traffic, DQV has traffic at my 10 o'clock in sight." I never heard a reply. Our airspeed quivered up to just over 140 knots and we slowly went past him. I think he couldn't have been more than a few hundred meters away when we flew past his wings. Aaron who had taken on the responsibility of maintaining eyes on him while I flew said that he waggled his wings so I did the same and we continued on as he fell in behind us and out of sight.

The DME which Aaron had tuned into New Plymouth and had been fluctuating on and off since Taharoa suddenly gained a strong signal when we were about 18nm out. The control zone (New Plymouth is Class D airspace just like Hamilton is) starts at 10 miles so I had to think about getting in contact. Switching to their ATIS I got Aaron to fly while I jotted down the details. The weather had improved a great deal and we were now in bright sunshine with only a few clouds here and there. Switching to the tower frequency I called up.
"New Plymouth Tower, Delta Quebec Victor."

They reponded and I said in my best pilots voice, "Delta Quebec Victor is a Piper Arrow, 6nm north of Urenui (a town on the edge of the zone), squawking 0572, request entry into the zone for landing, 2 POB, India 1027"
We were given a progressive clearance to enter the zone 2500 or below and track to Motunui synthetic gas plant (pretty hard to miss) and report approaching. The reason for this was that there was a parachute drop in progress. What I didn't realise is how this would cause me to fixate and forget about the number 1 priority, fly the plane!

Once we arrived at Motunui we were cleared to the Waitara river and told to report there. What I didn't realise is that its a roughly 3-4 mile final from the river to the runway threshold, and when I realised this we were two things you shouldn't be on a straight in final approach, high and fast. To my credit when I realised this I acted instinctively, bringing the power back and slowly raising the nose to bleed airspeed. Once it got below the gear limiting speed I lowered the gear. That brought our speed back rapidly to 90 knots. Another thing I could count on was our reduced ground speed due to the 20 knot headwind blowing down the runway. With no power on we came down fairly quickly, and my landing spot was lined up perfectly. However I was not very keen on landing at 90 knots so I had to get some flap down. Once I did that I had to apply power because our sink rate was getting too high. I flew a fairly well stabilized approach, but the sloping runway played its evil trick on me and I rounded out too high. I looked out on a 45 degree angle to check my height, realised we were high and stopped raising the nose instantly. That probably saved us a rather hard arrival but none the less we certainly touched down with protest from the main gear oleos.

After taxiing off the runway we picked a parking spot next to the tower and shutdown. We wandered over to the airport cafe and who was there to welcome us in but Jim Hickey himself! Aaron who was by now quite ravenous ordered himself eggs benedict and an iced coffee while I chose to have some very nice club sandwiches and a V.

After a comfort stop and a wander around the memorabilia at the cafe we walked over to the New Plymouth Aero Club where they kindly let Aaron use a computer to get a weather update. Aaron flight planned a different return track to mine where he would head inland up the Awakino gorge and do a touch and go at Te Kuiti before heading back to Hamilton. He said he had to do 3 touch and goes to maintain currency in the Arrow (he was already current but wanted to reset the clock).

After amending the flight plan I had filed, he preflighted and as we were about to start up, we heard a whole lot of activity on the radio. About 7 aircraft were approaching the zone from the north so we saved our fuel by waiting until most of them had landed before receiving our clearance to taxi. When we lined up the tower cleared us to depart north seaward of the coast to avoid oncoming traffic. It was during this time I snapped a few photos because the ride was smooth. Our ground speed was quite staggering (on this leg we got as high as 158 knots). After turning inland, we were flying directly downwind, so our groundspeed (I got to hold Aarons GPS for the return flight so I was monitoring time and distance to run) got above 160knots. I looked at the ground below and it was zipping past rapidly.

We were approaching Te Kuiti from the south west, and even though I have flown from Te Kuiti before I struggled to spot the air strip until we were right on top of it. We did an overhead join and descended to join the circuit for runway 16, which gave Aaron about a 60 degree crosswind to contend with. He made a reasonable touch and go and soon we were airborne again. Te Kuiti is nestled in a valley so you really need to be ahead of the plane and thinking about the route you are going to fly to avoid terrain. Aaron climbed back to 2000 feet and set course for our final waypoint, Kihikihi.

Upon approaching Kihikihi he got the ATIS, called up to request entry and was given a south arrival. Briefing me to keep my chatter to a minimum, we entered the zone and I began an extra sharp lookout for any other aircraft operating in the swamp sector. As we approached Mystery Creek we were instructed to orbit right. I think we had barely turned more than 90 degrees before our clearance was amended to descend to join left base for Grass 25, number 3 behind UFS which was in the circuit. I saw UFS pass 500 feet below us as we started our descent and as we came out of our orbit it was on base. Aaron had to work pretty fast to reduce our closure rate but he's an old hand at flying the Arrow and before I knew it we had gone from 130 knots to 75. Even then, we were slowly gaining on UFS so Aaron had to bring the Arrow down behind the power curve (never a nice place to be) to reduce closure even further.

UFS was cleared for a touch and go and touched down just as we passed over the main road to the airport which at that point is just outside the boundary fence. We got our clearance to touch and go fairly late and Aaron did our touch and go and I was quite impressed at how fast we came up at UFS which I was keeping an eye on. The tower was on top of things and instructed UFS to make an early left turn, and for us to continue climbing straight until we reach circuit height. The second circuit was almost as problematic because UFS had been instructed to continue downwind till advised as there was other traffic in the 25 circuit as well.

By the time they were cleared to turn base we were already halfway downwind and we were cleared number 3 behind UFS. Aaron slowed us up once more and positioned us behind UFS. This time we were further behind so our closure rate did not matter as much, but we still gained quite a lot on the Archer.

We touched down and taxied back to the hangar. I was stunned to be informed that the hobbs read the same for the flight back as it had for the flight there! Amazing what superior ground speed does! Photos to come.

Arrow type rating complete

2009-11-01T09:45:00.003+13:00

Just had the paperwork completed for my Arrow Type Rating. Something that started in my New Years flying goals in 2008 can finally be checked off the list. I took DQV up for a quick pass over Hamilton to celebrate. I flew over my work, my mother in laws house and Chris's work. Chris was the only person who noticed me. Oh well, it was worth it. Actually getting the Arrow trimmed out in level flight is quite tricky because of the large speed range it enjoys. You think you have it trimmed for 120 knots and a few seconds later it is indicating 130 knots and you are 200 feet higher than you wanted to be. Its definitely not like flying an Archer, you need to be thinking ahead of the plane and definitely have a game plan for approaches because the workload can overwhelm you if you get it wrong. Having said that, I absolutely love flying this plane! Its smooth, fast, it looks cool, and you get treated differently by ATC because you are in a retractable so they know you are not a novice pilot (until they realise its me :-) ). And in other news, this week I ticked over 150 hours total time in my logbook. I am very close to my PIC time exceeding my Dual time, but I have a few hours to go.

Te Kowhai Airfield Pt 2

2009-10-26T23:21:00.003+13:00

Ryan ST-3KR ZK-RYN
Technam P96 Golf ZK-EHG
Technam P2002 Sierra ZK-SGO
De Havilland DH52A Tiger Moth ZK-BFF

Te Kowhai Airfield Pt 1

2009-10-26T22:54:00.003+13:00

Chris and I went out to see the festivities at Te Kowhai airfield. It was immaculately presented today and all sorts of interesting aircraft showed up, bringing equally as interesting people. Here's some of the photos I took, although Chris is sure to have much better ones once he gets his film processed and scanned.

C172S ZK-CWD
C172 ZK-PDD
DHC2 Beaver ZK-CKH dressed as NZ6001 of the Commonwealth Trans Antarctic Expedition - it was a real treat to see this flying.
Sweet! An Arrow! ZK-RTE

Awesome weather = good flying weather

2009-10-26T08:58:00.006+13:00

New Zealand is experiencing a fantastic Labour Weekend weather-wise. Here's Hamiltons current ATIS (now available over the web which is awesome!):

HAMILTON (NZHN):

ATIS NZHN D 1927
APCH: EXPECT VISUAL APPROACH
RWY:  18L
SFC COND: DRY
WIND: CALM
VIS:  40KM
CLD:  SKC    <--- aka CAVOK TEMPERATURE: 12 DEW POINT: 09 QNH:  1015 2000FT WIND: FORECAST 280/10=

I went flying yesterday in JGP and since then the wind has died from a steady 5 knots at 270 degrees magnetic to calm, the forecast 2000 foot wind has swung around 10 degrees and the pressure has dropped 1 hectopascal. We expecting the weather to turn bad but thankfully the last 3 days have been glorious.
Since I had waltzed out to the Aero Club casually to see if a plane was available I couldn't do too much more than circuits. We nearly had the rare occasion that all 9 planes who live on our flightline out flying at the same time so I consider myself lucky I got JGP for an hour!

One of the good things about circuits (are there good things? :-) ) is that there are plenty of different things you can practice while you fly so this time I chose max performance takeoffs and precision approaches (can't call them landings because I was doing touch and goes). It had been a long time since I had done a precision approach but thankfully all of the checks (I did a quick look at my training manual afterwards to make sure) came back to me. Downwind - assess runway distance available, select landing spot, designate approach speed and decision height. I chose a 60 knot approach, I could probably have done a 55 knot approach as JGP was quite light but as I said its been a while and I didn't want to push it too hard.

I was operating in the Grass 25 circuit which those of you who fly at Hamilton or have bothered reading all my early posts about the circuit will know that 25 has a perculiar characteristic in westerly winds of giving you a ton of lift early in your final approach and once you pass the terminal building and are over open grass you fly into a large sink hole. I remember this terrifying me when I was pre solo but when you reintroduce yourself to it you adjust automatically so I didn't do too badly the first time round.

Once on the ground, JGP like all 172Ms accursed flap selector switch had me cursing and wishing for an extra hand. You must hold it in the up position or it won't raise the flaps and you wonder why you can't accelerate past 60 knots. I eventually figured out I could use my large hands to good effect and hold the throttle open with my thumb while I held the flap selector in the raise flaps position with my fingers. I still needed an extra set of eyes to glance at the flap position meter to determine when they were at 10 degrees, but to be honest, JGP was climbing so well I didn't really need to bother. One touch and go I got to 300 feet AGL before I crossed the boundary fence. She really IS the Millenium Falcon of our fleet!

I got a few more approaches in, with my last one being a 55 knot approach which went fine up until really short finals where it got a little loose but I held it together and we rolled to a stop before the first taxiway.

Today I am heading out to take some pics at Te Kowhai airfield, which is hosting a celebration of 50 years of operations. My heartiest congratulations to the operator and users of that fine airstrip (which includes me :-) ). Will post a report on that later.

Club Competitions 2009 - Sunday

2009-09-07T22:11:00.009+12:00

Today was the liferaft and bombing competitions, with other events like Aerobatics and Navigation taking place away from the airport so I don't have any photos. Although I flew briefly on Saturday (forced landings) I did not any snaps of my flying. As I required a backseater to assist me with the liferaft dropping on the Sunday, I have some aerial shots I can include as well as a movie of my landing. Without giving too much away, I can report that the best bomb of the day (definitely NOT mine) landed within 5 meters of the 2 square meter white PVC target you can see in the photo above. Not exactly military precision but not too bad for a bunch of amateurs.

Oh and just so you know, that same 2m square white target can be seen in the top photo taken downwind at 500' AGL. If you follow the perpendicular grass runway from east to west you'll find it just behind and to the right of the control tower. Note how you cannot make out any people standing around wearing high visibility vests, but I assure you that they are there!

Club Competitions 2009 - Saturday

2009-09-07T22:02:00.006+12:00

I'll sum up briefly then I'll let my photos tell the rest of the story. Two absolutely glorious days spent with a bunch of like minded aviators getting sun and wind burnt standing in the middle of Hamilton airport while aircraft, liferafts and other missiles whizz past. It doesn't get much better than this. Saturday was the grid competition day, so there was a lot of spot landings happening. Unfortunately, the photos I took were actually of aircraft which were not being judged. Some of them did pretty good landings though, I bet the pilots wish they were being judged!

I am over the moon right now!

2009-08-24T09:24:00.005+12:00

This post has nothing to do with flying, so feel free to stop reading here. I just wanted to tell everyone how excited I am.

I've just heard my favourite band in the entire universe is coming to New Zealand in December. I have been listening to these guys for 18 years and even flew to Australia last year to see them play. The fact that they have finally decided to treat us long suffering kiwi fans to a concert will be a special event indeed. I can't wait!

Arrow 2, Hangar door 1, Euan 0

2009-08-15T23:14:00.004+12:00

It was a day very much like my first Arrow lesson, a dull grey sky and a generous helping of showers blown through by a forecast 2000 wind of 40 knots. I got out to the Club rooms early to sort out a few things for the upcoming club comps when I recognized fellow blogger Jarred, who had popped down from Auckland accompanying his instructor who was getting instruction from the Waikato Aero Clubs IFR instructor. Nice to finally meet you Jarred!

When I had a good half hour before my flight I was handed the checkout sheet and keys to DQV and walked over to preflight.

The first thing I did was forget the combination to the gate. Then I was surprised when I opened the hangar where DQV is stored that the rather old and dilapidated but interesting Republic RC-3 that shares DQV's hangar was gone, replaced by a much newer but just as interesting AS350 helicopter. That posed the first problem, DQV was parked on an angle and it meant extra care when pushing it out after my preflight to make sure that you didn't hit the door on one side or the NZ$1 million dollar helic0pter on the other.

Once I had DQV outside, the second problem was the hangar doors. The wind on the ground according to ATIS was 030 degrees at 15 knots gusting 25. I had no end of difficulty closing the doors, and it was during one of these attempts the wind grabbed one part of the door and slammed it into my face. I was fortunate enough to only suffer a cut lip. After confering with my instructor we decided to close the doors (together) and would park DQV on the flightline until the wind died down.

After taxiing around and filling the fuel tanks we climbed aboard and taxied to the runup area. After all the fun and excitement of trying to remember all the run up and pre-takeoff checks which I actually did better than I thought I would have, we were lined up. The tower instructed me to line up on runway 36 but did not actually clear me for take off. When my instructor asked why I had not taken off I replied that the tower had only instructed us to line up and had not cleared us for take off. They were just about to key the mike and request take off when ATC suddenly apologised to me and cleared us.

I cautiously opened the throttle and away we went. We got hit by a wind gust after I had advanced the throttle about 30% of the way open and to my surprise the Arrow tried to weathercock away from the wind (when I reflect on this later I think I read some literature somewhere outlining that particular tendency of Cherokee's). I had to apply a lot more right rudder than I am used to just to stop DQV from veering left off the runway. Eventually she settled down as she accelerated and I eased her into the air at 65 knots.

Got the gear and flaps up, trimmed and climb power set, all more or less when they should be done, and set about flying the circuit. As you would expect on a fairly windy day, the ride was not the smoothest but it was no where near as bad as I had expected. I climbed to circuit height, turned downwind, went through my checks and was cleared for a low approach and overshoot over the new parallel tarmac runway very close to its official opening.

I was told that I would probably get the worst of the turbulence on the approach, and we sure did. I used the trick of holding more airspeed and not deploying full flap on finals to try and smooth things out. I got a good dose of sink and bumps at short finals which took a bit of man handling the aircraft to keep her steady on the approach, which was my objective of the flight. At 100 AGL we went around for the second circuit. To the chargrin of my instructor the promised crosswind was negligible and although I fished around a bit there was no drift and we eventually settled on the runway and I took off again.

From memory we did 4 circuits and my instructor asked me if I was happy to continue on my own. I had settled into flying DQV at this point and was fairly happy to do a couple more so we requested a landing with "student to continue solo".

I decided I wanted to try some glide approaches, but due to conflicting traffic I only got two attempts in. Both times I would have failed to make the field due to strong headwinds and the fact that with gear down the Arrow glides like an anchor. With the club comps coming up I won't be able to fly DQV again until next month, but I definitely will be practising those glide approaches when I do.

See you on the other side of the comps!

Staying current vs currency, the cash to lift conversion

2009-07-28T10:16:00.002+12:00

With the recent credit crunch and oil crisis combined, finding money to go flying has become a lot harder than before. I my case I think it reached a point where I had to sit down and think about whether or not I could continue to fly. Not in the legal sense of being current, but at a personal level of “am I safe?” Although the handling of a plane is like riding a bike, once learned you don’t quickly forget, the multitude of other tasks involved in safely flying an aircraft must be considered as well.

Under normal circumstances when you are getting at least an hour or two a month in the cockpit your self confidence rises and you can more easily devote more of your attention to the sundries and less to physically flying the plane. The crunch time occurs when something goes wrong, for example an engine failure. Instantly your attention must be divided between flying the aircraft safely, troubleshooting the problem and finding somewhere safe to land. If you haven’t flown in sometime you tend to be easily distracted by one of those tasks instead of managing all three.

I went up in the weekend to practice my forced landings with an instructor because I thought I needed: a) a safety pilot, b) I was no longer current in the 172 and this would help me regain that, and c) the last time I had been asked to perform a forced landing I was less than perfect with most aspects of the procedure so I wanted some revision and a fresh look at any issues I have.

I found that most of the problems I am having would iron themselves out with an hour or two of going out alone to practice. So it comes back to money (and suitable flying weather).
The Minister of Finance, the Lovely Susan has said there is money available in the war budget for flying, and I believe it is enough for me to maintain a level of competence than I am comfortable with, so watch this space because I’ll be in the air a lot more soon!

A bubble hanging from a disc

2009-05-25T16:09:00.008+12:00

For my birthday this year the lovely Susan decided to buy me a trial flight in a Helicopter. I selected Ardmore Helicopters as they looked like a nice outfit and I wanted to fly in a Schweizer 300 rather than a Robinson 22 because I think they look cooler.

We turned up at the office a lot earlier than planned because at the time there was a nasty southerly change coming through bringing rain and bad visibility with it which would make any flying rather difficult. The weather we were experiencing at the time was all but perfect for flying with a light breeze, sun with a few cumulus around and excellent visibility. My instructor was up flying with another student and the office was busy ringing around trying to inform people of the weather change and recommending their either head home asap or wait it out.

Eventually the unmistakable sound of a helicopter approaching filled the office and we saw ZK-HVO hover taxi in and set down on the apron. Out hopped a young looking instructor called Gary who eyed the weather up and said we should head off sooner rather than later if we were going to get back before the rain hit.

To this point no one in the office had asked me if I had any flying experience so I used my don't ask don't tell policy. It wasn't until Gary and I were walking out to the helicopter if he asked me somewhat casually if I had ever flown before. Upon me telling him I had a PPL(A) and about 130 hours he relaxed and with a wide grin said he'd try to convert me.

My first thought when I climbed in was how spacious the cabin was. There was plenty of head and leg room, and the perspex bubble gave you the feeling that you had all the space you could see to stretch out. Being tall I could see over the engine and enjoyed nearly 360 degrees of unobstructed view. I found the cyclic and pedals fit my 6'1 frame perfectly, but the collective (in a similar position to a handbrake in a car) was a tad cramped due to my long arms.

Gary helped me strap in and climbed in himself. The briefing was, well, brief. Fortunately as I qualify as an aviation nut I was well aware of everything Gary quickly touched on during his explanation of how things worked. After a quick once around the instrument panel (which looked mightly similar to what I am used to, the only difference being the main rotor rpm gauge which is split into several dials for main and tail rotor speeds) Gary started up the Lycoming HO-360-C1A, ran it up and engaged the main rotor. After a quick radio check with Ardmore UNICOM we lifted to the hover and he taxied us out to the taxiway so we could get a good look at the fixed wing traffic in the circuit.

After locating a lull in the circuit traffic he swung us into the wind, announced our imminent departure, raised the collective and up we went. We accelerated to 30 knots which I was told is the best climb angle. Looking at the ground slowly travelling beneath my feet I marvelled at how slow we were actually travelling. I certainly was not used to flying at 30 knots, let alone climbing at that speed. It felt kind of wrong. The other thing I noted was that the ride was just as smooth as in a fixed wing aircraft. Eventually after getting to our circuit height of 700 feet Gary handed control over to me and told me to hold her at 700 feet and look to maintain 70 knots. Helicopter level forward flight in many ways is very similar to fixed wing. To speed up you push forward on the cyclic, to slow down you pull back. Roll and yaw are done exactly the same, with the need to balance the turn with the torque pedals (I would get a dirty look if I called them rudder pedals). When flying visually as I was you align the "rotor shadow" or "disc" to a point above the horizon that gives you the speed that you want and hold it there. One thing I also noted was the sensitivity of the pedals is completely different to that in a plane. They do not gain or lose effectiveness relative to airspeed, indeed they were quite sensitive throughout the entire flight envelope that I experienced at the controls.

Gary pointed to a couple of bush covered hills to the north and asked me to fly us there at 70 knots. Once we got closer he asked me to slow us to 50 knots and upon reaching the hills he took control and we descended in low for some valley flying. The lack of speed, the excellent visibility and manouverability, essential ingredients in low level valley flying and the helicopter has all of that and more. We were at heights that I would never fly an aircraft at unless I was an ag pilot but the slow speeds meant that I didn't feel unsafe or nervous at all.

Some of the turns were simply amazing, pretty much impossible for most fixed wing aircraft to perform. Eventually he us out of the low level stuff, then Gary handed control back to me and we headed back to the airfield and the TLOF (Touchdown and Lift OFf area) at 800 feet and 70 knots. Once we were inside the airfield boundary Gary took control and demonstrated a 180 degree autorotation. We descended so fast my ears popped. I can see now why its said Helicopter Pilots don't screw up forced landings because they don't have time to.

About 10 feet above the ground Gary brought us into the hover and we hover taxied over to an area roughly 20m square with a big number 4 in the middle. It was time to see if I could hover.

Once we were inside he stabilized us in the middle of the square, handed back control and asked me to keep us inside the square at a constant height. Being dynamically unstable the helicopter literally has a mind of its own and careful hands (and feet) and good reflexes are required to keep the machine in one spot. When I tried I would always over correct then the helicopter would get into a massive oscillation that fed on my poorly coordinated inputs, eventually requiring Gary to take control to tame the monster. After failing dismally at using all three controls Gary took the collective and pedals and gave me the cyclic. I think I managed to maintain the hover for a good 3 seconds on one of my many attempts before we lurched off at some odd angle. Gary got me to shadow his movements on the controls as he held HVO in a stable hover, but his movements seemed totally imperceptible to me.

When our 0.5 was up he hover taxied us back to the apron outside the office, consoling me that it takes about 14 hours of dual to solo in a training helicopter. I reckon those small boxes in the TLOF must be a prison for the pre solo helicopter student just like the circuit is to us fixed wingers.

Over all the experience was a heck of a lot of fun. Do I want to go up again in a helicopter? YES! Would I consider getting a license in a helicopter? I would like to get myself to the solo stage just to prove to myself that I can fly one. However the hourly rate in a 300 is similar to a multi engined training aircraft. That is an awful lot of fixed wing flying I would miss out on.

The internal debate rages on...

Finals three greens

2009-04-25T20:47:00.004+12:00

I had all but given up on flying this morning. I got out of bed and looked out the window, and a murky dull grey sky greeted me. It was also quite windy which was fairly unusual for this time of year.

Resigning myself to the fact that my first lesson in the Piper Arrow would be a ground lesson, I sleepily plodded my way through several pieces of toast and after packing my flight bag together I jumped in the car and off I went. On the way to the airport the weather seemed to have the final say on the matter by shedding droplets on my windscreen.

Once I arrived at the Aero Club, I counted all the clubs planes sitting miserably on the flightline, with tie downs secured and covers on. I was wondering if this was one of those days which corresponded to that age old adage, “better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air rather than in the air wishing you were on the ground.”

After presenting myself to Wendy who was minding the office, the clubs 2IC B Cat Ash strode out of the inner sanctum of the club where instructors hide from voracious students and after wincing at the outside picture picked up the hand held radio and tuned into the ATIS.

“Hamilton information Delta, issued at 2123, expect VOR/DME approach, runway 36,”

Not exactly an auspicious start, but the thick layer of overcast hanging overhead would make a visual approach kind of difficult.

“Runway conditions, damp. Surface wind, 040 degrees, 12 knots. Visibility, 25km reducing to 1000m, showers in the vicinity.”

Oh great, even if we can take off, I have my first take off in an Arrow with a crosswind to contend with. I was already feeling better… not.

“Cloud, few 2200 feet, scattered 3400 feet, broken 4400 feet, temperature 18 dew point 15, QNH 1020. Forecast 2000 foot wind, 060 degrees, 35 knots. On first contact with Hamilton Tower or Christchurch control, notify in receipt of Delta.”

So the cloud wasn’t a problem, neither was the visibility (unless we hit a shower). The problem would be the 25 knot sheer zone that we could expect to hit on the climb out. Fun fun fun!

Ash sniffed, turned the radio off and said he was happy for us to go out. I resisted the urge to ask him if he had heard the same ATIS I had.

On the walk out to the hangar that houses DQV, which unlike most other aircraft in the club fleet is permanently hangared and is not owned by the club (the Twin Comanche the club uses is similarly owned and stored), Ash asked me about how many Archer hours I had. I said roughly 30 hours (check of my logbook says I have 26 hours total time in Archers, 20.1 as PIC).

I won’t bore you with the specifics of the preflight, but the additional necessity of crawling under each wing and under the nose to inspect the gear wells could become trying as you are guaranteed to get dirty doing it. Good thing I wore my jacket which I could remove prior to taking my seat.

The inside appears pretty much as a Piper Archer’s which I am used to, with the exception that as this aircraft is older (about 6-8 years older I think) that the clubs Archer 2’s, there are some notable differences. First is the lack of an avionics master switch, so each unit in the stack needs to be turned on individually. Potentially annoying, but for those of us whole like to act like astronauts and press lots of buttons and switches its pure nirvana.

Unlike our Archer fleet the Arrow is fuel injected, and just like fuel injected aircraft, this is both a blessing and a curse. No carb heat equates to one less lever to worry about when you are on short finals. But this particular model of Arrow is prone to flooding between hot starts. While this is not too much of issue, I can see the instructors pulling their hair out while watching some hapless student endlessly crank the starter over outside the clubrooms by the fuel pumps.

After we got DQV out and received our taxiing instructions, Ash kept referring to how nose heavy the Arrow is compared with an Archer. In the air that would be the main difference he told me.

During the runups I got to exercise the prop. Check prop pitch is full fine, then throttle up to 2000rpm. Ash had me put my left thumb under the prop lever then bring the lever back until I see the rpm drop 300rpm. Then keeping my thumb where it is, move the prop lever back up to full fine, then down to my thumb and back again. At the risk of being too technical, exercising the prop pumps warm oil into the linkages which control the rpm of the prop during flight. If a large temperature differential exists between the oil in the constant speed unit (CSU) and the engine sump you run the risk of the CSU malfunctioning or even not working at all. While the prop won’t stop, it almost certainly won’t be producing full thrust, and that’s a big problem if you need it.

After lining up, I went through the lineup checks and we waited a while due to wake turbulence from a departing Dash 8. I silently thanked the owner for installing an air switch and after receiving clearance to take off, I opened the throttle.

The litany of checks ran through my head, “throttle slowly forward, check manifold pressure increasing, check prop rpm increasing, check fuel flow increasing, check that we are tracking straight,” which we were not. “Damn crosswind takeoff.”

“Airborne finally. Keep the nose low, we need to climb at a speed higher than the best glide of 91 knots. Heck that’s quite a low nose attitude. OK we are out of sufficient runway, so gear up.” I had thought weeks earlier that raising the gear during my first left seat flight in DQV would be a proud moment, but with a handful of aircraft and a head full of endless checklists it came and went without my giving it much more thought than “ok that’s done, what’s the next thing for me to do?”

Ash was a calm spot in the maelstrom, casually telling me to set the manifold pressure to 25 inches of mercury, the prop rpm to 2500rpm and lean it to 13 gallons per hour fuel burn, aka climb power settings.

We had just turned crosswind when there was an almighty thump and I banged my head against the roof. Strangely enough I was not particularly worried. Maybe having Ash sitting next to me showing that detached air of calm all instructors have was infectious?

He made a comment about us finally hitting that sheer zone and asked me to continue to climb to 2000 feet. Once we got above 1700 feet the ride smoothed out and I started to relax a little. Ash was right, this aircraft did indeed handle like an Archer with a heavy nose, despite the Arrow having the older Cherokee slab wing (commonly called the Hershey Bar wing due to its resemblance to a bar of chocolate) which was also a shorter overall span. I was feeling the effects of the short wingspan as DQV had smoothed out most of the bumps quite nicely.

Once we had reported clear of the Hamilton control zone Ash said I could go through a couple of turns just to get a feel for DQV. He said the main difference was to not touch the throttle but my right hand kept snaking out and affixing itself to the throttle quadrant. A good habit to stay in if I’m going to be flying fixed pitch aircraft again, which is almost certain.

So I was told by lots of people including Ash that the Arrow has a heavy nose, and I found out when I entered a medium turn from a trimmed straight and level and the nose started dropping inside the turn to the point it took a great deal of strength to bring the nose up. When I tried a steep turn it was worse. I did think about trimming in the turn but when I tried doing that during my primary training I received a smack on the hand so I chose to sit there and hold it.

I rolled wings level and we did a basic stall followed by a power and flap stall. Just like an Archer they said. I can now confirm it is similar, except I enjoyed the clear warnings from the aircraft. There was a nice nibble from buffet followed by a touch of wallow then the nose broke straight down with a slight hint of a wing drop but nothing as violent as Cessna’s can be.

The stall recovery technique is just like any aircraft, stick and rudder to get the plane flying again, then pile on the power and regain lost height. I was guilty of not bringing power all the way forward on recovery. Too much reading about prop overspeeds and not enough confidence in constant speed units (a totally misguided notion, this technology has been proven in aerial combat and is over 60 years old).

Next we climbed to 2500 so I could have a forced landing demonstrated. As we were pretty much overhead Te Kowhai airstrip, Ash decided that would be a good spot to do a forced landing and after I made a radio call stating I would be operating at the strip he pulled back the manifold pressure and we were gliding.

Well if you could call it gliding. The VSI (vertical speed indicator) quivered down to show a 900 feet per minute descent as I struggled to find and maintain the 91 knot nose attitude. All those forced landing checks went out the window as I concentrated on the first rule of aviation, fly the plane. Ash wanted to demonstrate the gliding differences between gear up and down so he had me lower the gear. The VSI plummeted to read a 1400 feet per minute descent, I could see we needed to get to the field asap so I aimed at the landing point and hoped we had enough height to make it. The main thing to remember with forced landings in a retractable is that one of the decisions a pilot must make is should he or she lower the gear at all, and if so, when is a good time to do it. Short finals means the gear will not be down in time so you need to pick your paddock quickly and have your approach sorted fast if you are going to lower the gear.

I remember we were fairly high on the base leg and I had resisted lowering flaps because I still did not have a feel for the glide characteristics yet and was erring on the side of caution. Ash told me to drop full flaps, mechanically I obeyed and at that precise moment we hit a patch of sink.

All that height I had stored disappeared in a few seconds and we came in over the fence pretty much like we would have had I made a powered approach. I rounded out, flared and touched down.

I went to full power, Ash reminded me to set flaps to 10 degrees, my eyes flicked to the ASI and when it showed 65 knots I rotated and we were airborne again.

We then went around the circuit a few times to get me used to the circuit procedures. Because DQV doesn’t climb like an Archer but you have a lot of checks to get through and you must climb at a speed faster than the Archer, Ash recommended a continuous climbing turn onto downwind from the climb out. I can see now why Air Forces fly those race course style circuits instead of the box types us GA pilots fly.

I recall one time I was bringing back the manifold pressure but was looking at the rpm gauge as I would in a fixed pitch plane so was wondering why it wasn’t changing at all. By the time I realized what I had done the manifold pressure was back at about 20 inches. A newbie mistake, but fortunately one which is not harmful to the aircraft so I quickly set the power and rpm and continued flying. Ash said nothing but I know he knew what I was doing.

After a few circuits Ash declared the next touch and go would be the last and we’d climb out and head back to Hamilton.

I set climb power and prop and was heading back to Temple View listening to the ATIS. The wind on the ground had intensified and the visibility had dropped even further. From the 5 nautical mile boundary at Temple View I could just and only just make out the Airport in the murk.

I requested joining instructions and we were cleared direct to the airfield to join left base for runway 36. I acknowledged and a moment later they asked us to keep the speed up as there was a Dash 8 incoming.

Ash grinned and admitted he was going to scold me for not setting cruise power but this time he would make an exception. I lowered the nose and set a 400 foot per minute descent that would get us to circuit height just as we entered base leg.

The ASI (air speed indicator) slowly crept up to 140 knots. Ash keyed his mike and said to ATC that we were doing our best but were fighting a headwind, the DME was indicating a groundspeed of only 77 knots. There would be some error in that reading as we were not flying directly at the DME transmitter but it was definitely eye opening to realize just how windy it was up there.

During the descent Ash and I were joking with each other as to when we would hit the shear layer. I reckoned about 1300 feet and Ash thought it would be lower. He won.

I remember turning final when ATC announced we had a 10 knot crosswind and cleared me to land. I thought my approach was pretty good. I had everything organized and we were coming down with a stable airspeed and more or less on centerline.

I think I tried to do a Cessna landing which the Arrow being quite a different beast decided it would have nothing to do with it. Abruptly it decided to stop flying on me and down we came. This time I was comfortable flying it and was far enough ahead of the plane to apply power to cushion the landing but we came down right mains left mains and nosewheel. I was rather disgusted with myself but Ash didn’t seem too phased so we taxied clear and set course for the hangar.

We were gone ninety minutes, but due to air-switching the hobbs read 0.8. As the Arrow is more expensive than the Archer to fly it was a similar cost but at least that was the flying part that I was paying for, not the sitting around on the ground with the prop turning. Fantastic!

Overall, I must admit I like flying the Arrow. For a humble private pilot with a modest budget it will be the closest I may ever get to flying a Spitfire. They are both all metal low wing monoplanes with retractable gear and constant speed propellers. OK so one has 7 times the horse power of the other but we can all dream.

Whenuapai Open Day 2009

2009-03-22T10:58:00.013+13:00

An epic flying adventure! I have never flown through Auckland airspace before, nor landed at a RNZAF airbase, so there were a lot of challenges ahead of me when I planned this trip. I had planned to fly down to the Ohakea Open Day in 2008 but due to a couple of unforeseen problems we had to drive down instead, and that fact gnawed at me.

Originally Chris and I had booked two aircraft with the intention of flying in a couple of plane loads of Waikato Aero Club members, but yet again, unforeseeable circumstances meant that we could only take one plane. We had FWS booked for the day well in advance so I just crossed my fingers and hoped it would be serviceable.

As Whenuapai is an active military air base the Open Day gave civilian pilots the rare opportunity to fly in. We had to go through the process of approval, which meant emailling a representative of the Air Force Base Commander and asking for approval. Here's the arrival procedure I received, which is a mixture of an informal email and the part in caps is from the promulgated NOTAM:Air Force Open Day Update. Unclassified

Please expect all arrivals into the control Zone from Auckland Harbour bridge, those of you who are transiting north up the west coast please track from Manukau Heads to Auckland harbour bridge via Cornwallis. Time slots will be allocated from 0730 hrs until 0840 in blocks of 10 minutes with approximately 8 aircraft in each block, please arrive at Auckland harbour bridge earlier in the block. Follow ATC instructions there after. Aircraft from closer destinations' will be given earlier slots, as further distance will have later slots.

AFTER BEING CLEARED TO ENTER THE WHENUAPAI
CTR/D, ROUTE AS FOLLOWS UNLESS OTHERWISE CLEARED BY ATC:
RWY 21 IN USE
ROUTE HARBOUR BRIDGE TO TE ATATU, 1500FT OR BLW, THEN
TURN RIGHT TO JOIN DOWNWIND LEFT HAND RWY 21.
REPORT TURNING RIGHT AT TE ATATU.

The significance of this is that I could not simply fly direct from Hamilton because in between the two airfields sits Auckland International airport. The missed approach altitude for Auckland is 3000 feet, so asking for transit at 3500 would most likely get you an emphatic "remain clear" and having to do a descent from 5500 to an airport whose elevation is 100 feet and is approximately 15nm away from Auckland would be less than comfortable. So we had to scud run under controlled airspace around Auckland, which meant a maximum altitude of 1500.An 0830 arrival time as well as a crooked track meant our estimated flight time would be around 40 minutes, because the Aero Club office doesn't open until 0800, I had to get everything I need from them the night before. It was a good thing that I did this, because I was told that we were being bumped from FWS to UFS as a last minute slot became available for a Single Engine IFR checkride and they needed FWS to do it in. A quick email to Whenuapai sorted out the aircraft name change and we received our arrival slot:

ZK-UFS Cherokee Archer Hamilton 0830-0850

We had a full aircraft as one of the other club members and his son would take the back seat. We arrived at the club just after 0730 and after a few minutes sorting ourselves out in the aircraft I started up we headed out to the runup area. Fortunately at that time of the morning Hamilton was pretty quiet and I managed to get in front of the first CTC flight of the day. We were cleared onto runway 18 with a right turn and a city departure approved. After clearance for takeoff I have the cabin a quick glance to make sure all my passengers were ready to go, scanned the engine gauges and opened the throttle.

One airborne we were recleared through the Hamilton city sector 2500 or below with traffic a balloon (March/April is Balloon weather and some lucky person was up on a nice morning for flying) at our eleven o'clock. I replied that we had the balloon in sight and would pass east of him. I wonder now why I said that but now I realise that it was as much for the balloon pilots benefit as Hamilton Towers.

Once we were overhead the Te Rapa VRP (visual reporting point) I reported clear and after the tower queried as to my return time I replied "around 1800". I then set the nose towards our first waypoint, Port Waikato at the mouth of the Waikato River.

It was a lovely morning to be flying, mill pond smooth with good visibility of 30km. I levelled off at 2500 and switched to the Class G airspace frequency to start my listening watch. There was not a great deal of activity north of Hamilton, most of the traffic was training traffic to the south west and some around the Coromandel area. I continued to keep an ear out.

Because we were heading into what normally is quite busy airspace I had delegated Chris control of the radios. I was using a combination of our nav chart and Chris's Garmin 96C to navigate. Once I picked up Port Waikato visually I knew we had about 15nm to run before we hit the lower limit of Auckland airspace at 1500 so I began a cruise descent. The ASI quivered up to 125 knots indicated and the GPS responded with a ground speed of around 130. The ETA revised itself down to 0832. We were looking good.

Once I levelled off at 1500 feet we reached the boundary of airspace so I did a SADIE check, switched tanks and re trimmed. Cross checking my watch with the GPS it seemed we were running a little bit late so I chose to cut the corner of our planned track (not airspace!) and set course for Cornwallis which I could now see. At the same time Chris tuned into the Whenuapai ATIS and we noted they were using runway 21 which I had figured they would be. The clear skies of Hamilton had changed to a dull overcast with light showers here and there but nothing I couldn't handle.

We crossed Cornwallis and I pointed the nose at the Auckland Habour Bridge in the distance. Chris had my camera out and took a pic facing east.

Almost immediately afterwards he found the movie mode and made several movies which I have pieced together below. During the time between the two movie clips I managed an orbit overhead the Harbour Bridge and Auckland city while Chris announced our presence to Whenuapai Tower and they cleared us into their control zone.

A quick note: although the NOTAM stated we had to join via Pt Chevalier, in actuality it was more practical for ATC to have everyone join on a wide left base for runway 21, so the track I did above is pretty close to what we actually flew. Once on the ground we were directed with military efficiency to our parking spot. We were the last GA plane to arrive, and I distinctly remember looking at my watch after engine shutdown and it read 0852.

I'll post some of the pictures I took in another post, but the best photos will appear over at Chris's blog once he gets his film developed.

I wanted to see the now famous RNZAF Boeing 757 do its high speed pass followed by a 45 degree nose up and then wingover. Seeing it on YouTube is one thing, but seeing it for real is something completely different. It definitely was the highlight of the day for me.

After a day in the sun, we made our way back to UFS as people fled to the carpark in the mad rush to get out. The rush to leave for GA planes was no less frantic. We sat near the plane watching the warbirds leave, and Chris took some great photos with my camera while I preflighted.

As a side note, the floating wreck you see in the background of the last photo is a piece of Auckland Maritime history, the the former RNZN Fairmile ”B” Class, Q411, P3571, HMNZS Kahu. She is the last of twelve built in NZ during WWII. She was originally commissioned 20th December 1943, finally decommissioned 1965. I spent time aboard 3 Fairmiles who were converted as ferries when I took my school holidays on Waiheke Island with my parents during the 1970's. Its fitting company to the 3 Warbirds of yesteryear.

I guess it was also fitting that as the last GA plane to arrive we were also the last to depart. Once airborne we could clearly see the solid line of traffic on the main road out of the airbase that stretched quite a long way in both directions.

Since we were already within the Whenuapai control zone we flipped the course on the GPS, removed a couple of waypoints which we no longer needed (the Harbour Bridge, Pt Chevalier, Avondale Race Course) and headed directly for Cornwallis.

Chris asked if he could report clear to Whenuapai when we were about to clear their zone, I was still in the process of trimming UFS for the cruise and intercepting our track so I let him. He thanked the tower for having us, they wished us a safe trip to Hamilton.

I switched over to the Auckland City MBZ, made one position report and listened in for any conflicts. Most of the traffic was far to the east of us as we were effectively clipping the western corner of the zone. We picked up a few bumps as we passed east of the Waitakere Range and crossed the Manukau Harbour at Cornwallis.

From there it was pretty much a reverse course. Once I was out from under Auckland Airspace I climbed to 2300 feet and the ride smoothed out so I stayed there. Once I reached Port Waikato I turned the nose towards Hamilton and climbed to 2500. We heard another aircraft report that he was transiting across our intended track to Ardmore at 2500 feet so we went eyes out looking for him. I never saw him until he reported 3 miles southwest of Huntly and I looked right at him. He was a good distance away to our 10 o'clock so I relaxed a little. I made several calls to Te Kowhai air strip to make sure they knew I was coming then dialled up Hamilton ATIS, noted it down and finally called Hamilton for clearance.

We were cleared for a North Arrival but they later amended us to join wide right base for Grass 18. I asked for the runway considering we were 4 up and we were cleared number 2 following a CTC 172 landing ahead. The wind was swinging around a little but the breeze was not more than a few knots. I chose to err on the side of caution and perform a crosswind landing so I lowered the right mains first and we landed. A combination of dirty cabin windows and the sun being low on the horizon meant I had a hard time finding the taxiway but I found it by the time I was cleared across the grass runway to the tie down area outside the club.

After refuelling UFS and tying her down I wrote 2.0 hours of PIC time in my logbook and went home to look at my photos and movies and to organise my thoughts for this blog. I rate this as my best flying trip to date. I hope there are many more to come.

Aerial photos

2009-02-23T20:15:00.010+13:00

Sorry about the lateness, been busy with other things. All photos belong to Chris Nielsen and are used here with his kind permission. Thanks Chris!

1. Takeoff Grass 36, 1735hrs.

2. Scott Sector 2500 ft heading northeast

3. Over Thames Valley looking east.

4. West coast of Coromandel Peninsula heading north.

5. "Marry me Bee!"

PS. I hope they come out looking right.

Favour for a friend

2009-02-11T09:25:00.005+13:00

It's funny how you can use aircraft for wild and whacky ideas. My workmate had hatched a plan to secretly propose to his girlfriend of several years. Other people at work have a holiday house up on the Coromandel Penninsula and had invited both of them up there over the recent long weekend in NZ. The groom to be's plan was to have his girlfriend distracted while he and his best man to be slipped out to the next bay over from their house to write his marriage proposal on the beach.

For some reason I cannot remember he chose to tell me of his plans, and I came up with the idea of taking an aerial photo of his efforts to commemorate the big occasion. One of my pilot mates Chris is a budding amateur photographer and has some limited aerial photography experience. There were several problems facing us. One, I had only a rough idea of where it was he was going to be doing this, and two, I had never flown any sort of air to ground photography mission before.

We solved the first problem by using the wonders of the interweb. GPS coordinates from Google Earth are very very accurate, and it was a testament to my workmates attention to detail that it worked out. I got him to pinpoint on Google Earth where his sign would be and we put those numbers into Chris's Garmin 96C. The 172 we booked also has a GPS but I'm not well versed in its use.

I had also looked at my chart of the area and although the contours gave me a rough idea of the surrounding terrain, I was fairly confident that I'd be able to formulate a plan of attack once I arrived.

View Larger Map

The two things I was worried about turned out to be non events, namely the weather and the aircraft's serviceability. Weatherwise the 2000' wind was forecast as 060@20 knots with few CUSC around 3500 with the possibility of embedded TCUs. While the cloud was not a problem, the fact that the wind would be coming from the north east meant that below the level of the ranges close to the western coast we could expect turbulence. Since Chris and I are both pilots I wasn't worried about our ability to cope with it though.

The sky overhead Hamilton was cloudless as we lined up our 172R WAM on grass 36, surface wind was 020@8 knots and my crosswind takeoff went ahead without drama. As we climbed out we could see the cloud building up to the northeast as we headed north. I leveled off at 2200 feet as I wanted to be well under any TCUs we might encounter. Once we crossed into the Firth of Thames I tried to climb up above it but we got to 4000 feet and still needed to climb further and 4500 was the lower limit of controlled airspace so I chose to descend once more. I put WAM into a cruise descent and we hit 130KIAS on the way down.

With about 6 miles to run I could see the area I would be operating in, and I decided we would slow to the bad weather configuration and make a reconnoiter pass at 1500 feet to get the lay of the land. Although there was a bit of cloud around the setting sun (it was around 1815 local) bathed the area in golden sunlight. I did our first pass at 80 knots and Chris scanned the beach for our target. Nothing. We then descended to 1000 feet and tried again. Nothing. We checked the bays on either side of the "target" bay at 800 feet. Nothing. I realised that doing passes offshore would mean that if we did get a photo it would be upside down. I then made a decision to do a pass over the beach itself at 500 AGL for one last go at it before we gave up and went home empty handed. I took us north and performed a very nice coastal reversal turn. As I turned towards the coast we got below the level of the surrounding hills we really got bounced around. At that precise moment I uttered a silent prayer that we were in the bad weather configuration already. I did one run over all 3 beaches at around 500 feet (I was doing my best impression of terrain following), during which Chris aimed his camera at the beach in continuous mode and shot a few 5 frame bursts.

Chris said he was not sure if he had shot anything worthy, and since he works in film and not digital there was no way we could climb up to a safe height and orbit while Chris checked his work so I headed out off the coast, cleaned WAM up and climbed back to 2200 feet for the return trip home.

My memory of the trip back was that we didn't talk much for the first 10 minutes or so, but after a while we just commiserated each other by saying that the adventure aspect of the flight was worth the expense, and we had both learned a lot about the practicalities of Aviation photography.

When I was cleared into Hamilton airspace I was the only plane active, so I got a plain English clearance. We entered the circuit downwind as instructed and when I stood on the toe brakes during the downwind checks the right had side seemed a bit mushy, so I asked for the 2200m runway so I wouldn't have to use the brakes. The wind had intensified to 12 knots since we had been away so fortunately our ground speed was such not only did I not need the brakes I actually had to apply power to taxi to the taxiway.

So after a 1.8 trip we still were in the dark (excuse the pun) as far as whether or not we had succeeded. A day later Chris rang my mobile to say that by some stroke of luck he had managed to snap the proposal centre frame and the right way up. The fact that they had used driftwood instead of sand or seaweed meant the camouflaged nature of the wood made it really hard to see from the air.

The groom to be was stoked at the result, and so were we.

PS. Photos to follow
PPS. Her reply was yes.

Test driving the new Archer 3

2009-02-04T10:38:00.003+13:00

My instructor Rocky called the Aero Clubs new Archer III ZK-WIT "the Mercedes Benz of our fleet". To be honest, I must agree. Everything inside is new (it has around 340 hours total time on the airframe), it even has a new car smell from the plush leather seats. The seat adjusts in 6 different directions, has lumbar support, pre-tensioned seatbelts, the aircraft even has air-conditioning!

The major difference between WIT and the two Archer II's I fly FWS and UFS is the start up procedure. Unlike the Archer II, WIT does not have a key turn starter. Instead it has a push button starter (very English I thought). You must also start the engine on one magneto and turn the second one on once the engine starts.

The pilots control column has a lot of hands on functions. Two axis electric trim, push to talk (PTT), autopilot disconnect, and a button that I didn't use and didn't ask about either.

Doing a walk around I notice the improved wing with a few aerodynamic aids like small wing fences on the outboard tapered section of the wing and some stall strips. There is a totally new engine cowling with smaller engine cooling ducts and the absence of a nose mounted landing light (it was moved to the wing).

Everything else was pretty much the same as an Archer II.

I climbed into the pilots seat and adjusted my chair. One thing that separates our Archer III from our II's is that the instrument panel takes up a large amount of forward view, but after adjusting my seat height up (I wonder how vertically challenged people will cope) I could see out front to my satisfaction. Another thing that you can see from the outside is that the Archer III has smaller windows than the II. I thought this might be a problem but I didn't notice any difference once I was inside.

After starting up we taxied out to do the runup and checks. They are essentially the same as what I was used to with the singular exception of checking that the airconditioning unit is off prior to takeoff.

The first thing that struck me when I applied full power was how quiet the plane is. While it will never be whisper quiet the interior engine and prop noise was significantly lower that what I expected. Once airborne I found WIT to be stable and smooth through all the standard manouvers I put her through.

Once we were established at our cruise altitude, Rocky demonstrated the autopilot to me. WIT has dual Garmin 1000s slaved to a 3 axis autopilot. I didn't get to use the Garmins but the default moving map feature was very cool. We tried a few turns and climbs using the autopilot to fly the plane and I must admit it does a better job than I do.

I had a problem with the throttle friction being too heavy. Rocky fiddled with it and eased it somewhat but it was still a little too heavy. We came in on final for Grass 36 and caught a patch of lift crossing the boundary fence. I reduced power to idle and deployed full flap. At that precise moment the lift went away and down we came. I applied power but we had too much for too long and we drifted down the runway before touching down. My second landing was better but we still came down hard. After plenty of soul searching and thinking about it I must take the blame.

My final verdict is that it is one lovely plane to fly and be flown in. No expense has been spared in the comfort stakes and you feel like you are aboard a much larger passenger jet. The downsides are two fold. Firstly, as it is intended as the Clubs primary instrument trainer the opportunities I will get to fly it will be limited to an hour here and there. Secondly, as it is also a pretty new airplane the hourly rate will reflect the clubs financial investment.

I forgot to take my camera with me but Chris has some nice photos of WIT on his blog.

2009 Already!

2009-01-22T13:34:00.003+13:00

Firstly, I want to wish you all a very happy and safe 2009. Well after promising you lots of flying I have done the exact opposite. The only excuse I shall offer is that Christmas cost more than we were expecting and it has taken us some time to pay it off to the point that there is money in the bank to go flying with. Yeah it’s a pretty lame one, but that’s the honest truth.

Let me go back 12 months and see what I listed:

1) Fly more than 10.5 hours – I am at approximately 135 hours so CHECK!
2) Fly to White Island and back (in any aircraft) – Still haven’t done this. :(
3) Take Susan to Great Barrier Island - CHECK
4) Go on some longer cross countries than I've been doing – Sadly no.
5) Go airfield hopping as Aaron suggested – No again.
6) Get approval to land at Waiheke Island (I know there are some minimum hours before they'll let me take club planes in there for insurance reasons so I'll check out what they are and let you all know). – And no.

Two from six isn’t great. I did pass my BFR so thats all good.
Lets look at some goals for 2009.

1) Get checked out in the new Archer
2) Fly to White Island and back
3) Go on some longer cross countries
4) Get checked out for landing at Waiheke
5) Have an aerobatic lesson (or two)

And the drumroll again for the most important goal... pass my flight medical!

Getting in some Archery practice

2008-11-12T10:54:00.005+13:00

Just checking in to say I am now current once again in the Archer. My logbook said I hadn't logged any PIC time in an Archer since May, so after 4 circuits in FWS (including one go around after I failed to receive landing clearance) I landed and am now legally current. The ironic thing was, only the landings were actually any good. Not trimming properly at straight and level, airspeed all over the place on the approach, forgetting about the carb heat (only did it once though!); all elementary errors that I should not be making now that I have 135 hours total time.

Summer is just around the corner so I'm planning more flights so hopefully there will be more stories with photos and film coming soon. Watch this space!

Wellington video

2008-10-20T22:15:00.004+13:00

Added as promised.

The takeoff.

And the landing. I muted the recorded soundtrack because I had to do some time compression to stave off people getting bored and it doesn't sound quite as good at two times speed. I hope you get a decent impression of how awesome the day was. We really were spoiled. Thanks again Rodney for arranging it for us.

Flying with Rodney

2008-10-18T17:25:00.016+13:00

As part of a trip to Wellington, I hatched a plan to go up flying with another kiwi pilot and fellow blogger Rodney. The lovely Susan had managed to score us some very cheap tickets to fly to Wellington commercially (much cheaper than the price of gas for driving down), so around 10 weeks ago I had emailled Rodney and he thought it would be a brilliant idea to go up for a scenic flight around Wellington.

Rodney kindly collected us from our motel and we turned up at the Wellington Aero Club, where Rodney flies from. Eventually our plane, an Archer which Rodney had booked for 10.30am arrived back from the previous booking and he got to work pre-flighting while I snapped some photos of our mount.

Eventually we got strapped into our life jackets and taxied out onto runway 16 and with very little ceremony we were off! (Film to follow when edited)

I had listened into the Wellington ATIS and the wind was pretty light but I was amazed at how smooth the flying conditions were. Remember Wellington NZ has a reputation of being a bit of a plane bender but conditions were nothing if not docile.

If I recall correctly we were cleared for an Eastborne departure so we turned left and flew up the entrance to Wellington Harbour.

As you can see here, there was a bit of cloud cover overhead but the visibility was excellent. This photo looks northwest back towards Wellington City, although most of downtown is obscured by the pillar. In the foreground is the seaside suburb of Seatoun.

Here is the Department of Conservation controlled island of Matiu (formerly known as Somes Island). The largest island inside Wellington Harbour, we visited the island briefly a few days earlier by ferry, but it looks heaps better from the air.

Looking north up the Hutt Valley, showing the Hutt River and on the left hand side of the river, the main fault line running through New Zealand. The quarry you can see in the centre left of shot is where both the Helms Deep and Minas Tirith sets for the Lord of the Rings Films were located.

Looking west towards Mana Island off the coast. In the back ground you can see the South Island!

Pretty much taken straight after the previous photo, looking north at Kapiti Island.

Rodney then proceeded to descend and we orbited Mana Island from about 1500 feet. You can see Kapiti Island to the north in the distance and the North Island mainland to the right.

After the orbit we headed south and Rodney put us in a cruise climb to regain some altitude prior to rejoining Wellington airspace. This photo looks southwards. On the left is the North Island and in the background is the South Island. If you look closely you can see the Kaikoura Ranges with snow on them.

Here's my last airborne photo of Rodney commencing the Sinclair Arrival procedure. We need to remain on this side of that little witches hat looking island just off the coast in the middle of the photo.

It was an awesome flight, much better than I could have hoped for. When Susan and I flew out of Wellington commercially later in the day the wind had picked up to around 15-20 knots and the cloud was moving in preceding a cold front. I will post video of the takeoff and landing later when I edit them appropriately.

PS. As this blog site has been updated with a new template, I will now post in larger text to make it easier to read. Enjoy.

Pauanui Beach

2008-10-03T09:40:00.006+13:00

Pauanui Beach is an idyllic little settlement on the Eastern Coromandel peninsula exactly 57nm north northeast from Hamilton as the Cessna flies. Susan had always wanted to go there, and judging by the fact that the airstrip is bang smack in the middle of town, it’s an aviation friendly place.

The day was pretty nice by most standards, although it was quite hazy and the ATIS at Hamilton reported broken at 3500’ and vis of only 25km. I did a weight and balance for max fuel and we were way under the limits so after preflighting we got underway. I haven’t done much flying recently, and I was a little concerned about my currency, but the met was well within my personal minimums so it was more of a nagging doubt than a concern.

Once we were clear of airspace I climbed up to 3000’ and surveyed my options. It didn’t look like I could get across the Kaimais with any sort of safety margin so I decided to make for the Waihi Gap. As we got closer to the town of Paeroa which sits at the western entrance to the Gap, I heard traffic on the Coromandel frequency stating that they were happily VFR at 4500 so I knew the cloud conditions were better the further east I went. The cloudbase had started to break up, and by the time I was overhead Paeroa the cloud was few at 3500 so I picked a gap and climbed.

Once we were on top the ride smoothed out and the entire eastern side of the Coromandel was CAVOK. Once I started our descent (Pauanui’s elevation is 12’) we hit some clear air turbulence, but it was nothing major. I had been monitoring traffic around Pauanui and there was quite a bit, and they were using both runways so after dialling up the AWIB and being told that the wind was variable, I chose to perform an overhead join and see for myself.

After not spotting the windsock at one end, I eventually saw the other one and it was indicating an off shore easterly breeze of around 5-8 knots so I announced I was descending non traffic for 05. Pauanui is bordered by a range of hills to the south about 1nm from the airstrip which are higher than circuit height. I remember a pilot telling me that you need to fly at the hills till you think you are too close then turn away. I was descending to 1000’ at the same time so the hills seemed to rush up at you. But it worked because I ended up perfectly spaced at circuit height to join downwind.

The rest of the approach went well until very short final when I hit a patch of sheer and the plane lurched to the right. I overcorrected and we drifted left, I thought about going around but sorted everything out by the time we hit ground effect and we touched down surprisingly lightly, albeit half a wingspan off centreline.

The trip back was fairly uneventful other than our arrival being at the same time as a flock of CTC aircraft returning so I had to hold north of the airport while the controller got everyone sorted out. I did a passable crosswind landing and taxied clear. A 1.8hr flight and a whole day of fun.

Some decent weather at last

2008-08-12T08:41:00.004+12:00

New Zealand managed to get some blue sky and light winds. I figured that since we'd had total and utter crap for the past 6 weeks that there'd be no chance I'd get a plane. But I decided to chance my arm and headed out to the Aero Club on a whim. Even if I couldn't get a plane, there would be something happening that I could take photos of.

As I walked into the Club I saw JGP sitting out on the flightline. My first thought was, oh its unserviceable, but then I saw 3 Alpha's sitting there as well, and I dared to hope. As it happened there was only one instructor on duty and he was flat out booked, both the Archers and WAM were out, and so was the Arrow. JGP had one booking listed, and that was an hour in the morning, so it was all mine for as long as I wanted.

I chose to fly out to Matamata and do some circuits. I sent a text to Aaron and just as soon as I finished the preflight he turned up. Over winter the Airport company have closed some of the Grass runways to allow the grass to regrow, after the hot and dry summer combined with lots of landings roughed them up quite a bit. The upshot of this is long waiting times as aircraft queue at the holding points. This was no exception as we sat there for a good 5 minutes waiting for a free spot to open up.

In hindsight I realise I should have let the tower know I was willing to perform an intersection departure as we had a reasonably light plane, but I didn't so we had to wait.

After being cleared for take off I did a quick check of the instruments, checked to make sure that both Aaron and I were belted in and the doors were locked and opened the throttle. Shortly afterwards the airspeed came alive and we were airborne. The climb performance today was outstanding, and I brought the nose up higher than I normally would to achieve an 80 knot climb out.

I turned us downwind and then departed the circuit for the Scott sector. The day was very smooth and clear, an excellent day for flying, and Aaron made liberal use of my camera taking snaps of all and sundry.

Clear of Hamilton airspace and overhead Mount Ruru I radioed up Matamata traffic and announced my imminent arrival and was greeted by silence. We started our descent and Aaron saw a glider circling above us to the east of the field. I decided to make an overhead join (first time I have done that at Matamata) so I leveled off at 1700 feet and circled the field, finally selecting runway 28 and starting our descent into the circuit.

We lost sight of the glider several times and I decided that since we couldn't hear him and he might be trying to land that I'd make a full stop landing and wait for him to land before taking off again for circuits.

I noted a 5 knot crosswind so set up for a crosswind landing, and I thought I did a fairly good one. In the meantime the glider had set off northwards. We taxied clear as a Tecnam rolled out of its parking spot and trundled out down towards our end of the runway.

After a brief discussion with Aaron I decided to take off immediately and head back to Hamilton. I was having more fun in the air than on the ground and the day was starting to run out of daylight and the club rule of being on the ground 45 mins before ECT was ringing in my ears.

I lined up and performed a crosswind takeoff, which I thought went pretty good. We trundled northwest around the Hamilton control zone so I could approach from the north, as the Hamilton traffic was starting to get busy with the return of all the CTC VFR flights from the south and east. I called up Hamilton overhead Gordonton and was strangely cleared straight in with an instruction to report at a 5 mile final.

The Hamilton area was shaded by cirrus, Aaron and I argued over where the airport actually was. In the end we were both wrong. I really feel sorry for pilots who are not familiar with Hamilton, as at least I can fly in the general direction of the airfield and eventually I'll pick it up, which I did.

I reported a 5 mile final and was cleared number 2 following a plane on short final. I decided to do a flapless landing and kept the speed up around 85knots as we made our approach. Just before the threshold I cut the throttle and raised the nose to bleed airspeed as we crossed the numbers. We ended up slightly long and the tower instructed me to expedite ahead and vacate via the western taxiway. That meant a quick burst of power to keep the speed up and we rounded the corner and were off the runway in good time. The Dash 8 waiting on the apron seemed to appreciate our speedy departure.

I taxied back to the club and shut down, at precisely 5pm and 1 hour showing on the Hobbs. Another flight done, time to put JGP to bed and quit to the bar for a beer.

Photos to come soon.

HTML help needed!

2008-07-10T09:04:00.002+12:00

I had to update my blog template so I could add a bloglist. The bad news is that now it has this enormous sidebar that looks really ungainly in Firefox (haven't tried it on IE yet). As you all know, I am the worlds worst person when it comes to HTML coding so if you could help me work out how to reduce the frame size I'd very much appreciate it.

Two years to the day - BFR passed

2008-07-09T17:46:00.004+12:00

Well it was almost two years to the hour that I undertook my PPL flight test, I took off out of Hamilton airport with head instructor Roger next to me to see if I could still remember everything I had done 24 months earlier.

I had pre flighted WAM (hooray for a decent flap selector rather than the hit and miss toggle of the 172M) remembering to check all 13 fuel drains (did I remember where they all were?) and topping off the oil because it looked a bit low. We had 98 litres useable, which my rough mental calculation would give us around 2 hours and 45 minutes at the nominal burn of 35 litres per hour.

We requested and received clearance for a swamp departure. Hamilton is a pretty busy place these days, and with all the poor weather our grass runways have been closed while the ground regenerates (in golf its called GUR, ground under repair).

I taxied over to the runup area and after a quick reminder about airmanship from Roger I found a spot suitable to both of us and commenced the runup procedure. The right mag was a little rough but within limits, and I almost forgot to check the alternator but remembered in time. Went through the pre take off checks OK and gave my pre take off briefing. Then we waited at the hold point, because there were 4 other planes all waiting their turn to depart. We were two up in a 180hp 172 with 2 and a bit hours gas, so getting off the runway would not be a problem so we called in to say we would accept an intersection departure (almost 800m of tarmc runway in front). So the Robin in front took off and I lined us up, did the pre take off checks, finally got clearance to depart and away we went.

Roger asked for a south east heading but I went more south than east and we didn't establish ourselves in the "swamp" sector (the south east one!) for some time. I then failed to report clear in a manner that Roger liked but it was a minor thing and he corrected me.

We climbed up and did some medium and steep turns, followed by some compass turns (which I nailed!!) and finally onto the stalls....

Roger asked me to identify a basic stall and recover. Its so clear to me what he wanted now that I am on the ground but at 2500 feet with a handful of plane it took a while to click inside my thick skull. In a semi bewildered state I performed a basic stall complete with the nose breaking and recovered, and Roger said I had done what he wanted to see, he just wasn't allowed to tell me. He then asked for a power and flap stall with recovery at the onset, which I did ok except I didn't raise the nose high enough and we wallowed a bit before the nose went over. I also wasn't entirely wings level so we had a touch of wing drop as well. And then (drum roll) we came to the wing drop stall. Now I realised all too late that the last wing drop stall in a 172 I had performed was about a week after my PPL flight test when I did my maximum all up weight check. I knew the theory behind it, but knowing what to do is one thing and doing it is another. Again I failed to raise the nose high enough and we wallowed and again I was not ailerons level when the nose went over and the nose pitched and yawed as it should and I made a bit of a hash of it. The subsequent one was better but I failed to apply full power on the recovery, another no no. Roger then demonstrated a stall in a turn and got me to do one. That was a lot of fun, and I can see the practical instances where things could cause me to stall in a turn. I made a mental note at that point to book an instructor and go up and explore more of this sort of thing.

The forced landing went well up to the point that I realised that I had not set myself up the right way around and ended up landing downwind. Roger said that he thought we were at worst doing a crosswind landing and wanted me to see if I could make the field anyway. We ended up floating a good 600m past the paddock I had chosen. Where I would have landed was far from ideal, but it was good enough according to Roger. When he asked me where I thought I went wrong, I replied that I was way too high turning final and I hadn't fixed the problem early enough. He said that was an accurate assessment.

We then flew on to an unpublished airstrip on the southern edge of the Hamilton control zone. Roger said it was to both check out my circuit flying and to give me some experience in strip flying, which up until that point I had exactly zero hours experience.

This strip is in a farmers field, and apart from being in a shallow gully it has hills and trees on both approaches. The wind coming up from the south meant we were going to land up hill, as the strip has a fairly pronounced slope. I thought my first approach was pretty good, but the landing itself left a great deal to be desired. I flared late and we made one of those "arrivals" where the plane just plonks itself onto the runway, the bounce was kind of high, and I couldn't think why I had done it until I realised the sight picture was totally different and I was attempting to flare too high because of the upslope.

We didn't do a touch and go, instead we came to a stop and Roger asked me to backtrack and perform a normal take off. It was interesting because you really have to concentrate on tracking straight on such a narrow runway as well as having eyes in double checking instruments. I got us airborne and we entered the circuit for a precision approach. Again, I thought that for the most part my precision approach was fine but again we bounced the landing, although this time I was more because I didn't flare enough and we three pointed it. Roger then introduced me to the "aviators ABS", where you pump the brake pedals to brake more efficiently. I thought it was a real hoot for some reason. Small things entertain small minds I guess.

We backtracked once more and Roger asked for a max performance takeoff. I went through the checks and away we went. I got the nosewheel up and when we lifted off Roger asked me to maintain 50 knots on the climb, and by the time we got past the far threshold we were at 150 feet AGL and climbing, with the first note of the stall warning reed buzzing away happily. Now I have never seen WAM perform like that, it was a real eye opener to see what a lightly loaded 180hp 172R is capable of. It certainly made an impression on me. JGP has performed like that in the past but I still have memories of flying WAM when she was only 160hp and I never would have believed it possible.

Roger then asked for a short approach which again, I thought I handled pretty well, and the landing this time was passable, but far from my best. Roger then asked me to perform a normal take off, but this time, we would simulate being heavy by not using full power. After backtracking and lining up, I stood on the brakes and dialed up 2000 rpm before releasing them and WAM shot off like a herd of turtles. Sluggish in the wet grass, the airspeed didn't come alive for quite some time, then when I lifted the nosewheel up at 40 knots it took even more runway up to unstick. We got off the ground and I set a 65 knot attitude as we struggled into the air. We hit a patch of sink and I instinctively lowered the nose, and Roger then asked to abort the exercise and I applied full power to climb out. On the way to the low flying area for the last part of the flight review he explained about how I tend to fly the dials too much and not the aircraft. He said that if you set a nose attitude the aircraft will fly at that attitude if the power setting is static. When I reacted to a slight down draft he said I had done which technically was the right thing to do, but the plane would still have flown at the attitude I had set if I had done nothing at all. His explanation was, if the pitot had swallowed a bug our ASI would have done something similar. Definite lesson learned there!

Low flying, well I love low flying, so much so that after a couple of maneuvers (including a precautionary landing) Roger was satisfied I knew what I was doing so I got down the ATIS (after a light hearted philosophical debate about whether we needed to or not) and got us cleared to rejoin the circuit at Hamilton. Roger's last request was for a flapless precision approach, which after the last hour and a bits practice on a grass airstrip was like childs play onto the long and wide Hamilton runway. After a pretty good approach I even saved my best landing for last, and we touched lightly down and rolled ahead to clear the runway at the designated exit.

Roger said I had performed well enough to pass, but his philosophy when it comes to BFRs is not only to test a pilots skill but place challenges in front of them which they have never faced. If I had to rate my performance overall, I'd give myself about a 7 out of 10. There is plenty to work on, but at least I now have 24 months to practice for the next one!

BFR - Strike 2

2008-06-27T11:38:00.007+12:00

If I ever decide to do a CPL, I shall plan to sit my flight test in February, because sitting my PPL flight test in July has meant getting a decent enough day to sit my BFR on top of tying down a B cat and a suitable aircraft has been nigh on impossible.

My first attempt on June 9th was socked in with fog, and a reschedule to the 26th has seen a forecast 2000 foot wind of 35 knots and heavy rain making me kind of wary of sitting a flight test under those conditions. In actual fact, looking around the Aero Club and the airport in general and seeing all the planes tied down and covered meant that no one was brave (or stupid) enough to chance their arm, and I'm more cowardly than most!

I have rescheduled for the 8th of July, which is the day before my BFR lapses and I revert to student privileges. Its not really that much of an issue, but my attempts to be proactive about it have been thwarted thus far. Here's hoping that the weather will calm down, the plane will be serviceable and the B-Cat is healthy.

And here's my homage to another one of my fellow Bloggers Rodney, who posts wonderful pictures of aircraft visiting Wellington airport. Right next door to the Aero Club is an aircraft maintenance firm whose reputation is such that we get all sorts of interesting aircraft showing up parked outside their hangar. This one caught my eye because it is one of the planes I would love to get rated in and possibly jointly own if the opportunity presented itself and I was financially able (which I am not at present). A Rockwell Commander 114. What you don't see is that parked next to the Commander is an airworthy Consolidated PBY Catalina undergoing maintenance.

Barrier Pics

2008-06-17T20:22:00.026+12:00

Good news and bad news

2008-06-17T17:11:00.007+12:00

Well actually I'll put the bad news first since its not really that much of a problem. My BFR got postponed due to weather. I still put in a solid hour or so going over the ground study, but much of it I was unable to complete as the aircraft I had booked was stuck on the ground at New Plymouth so I couldn't get my hands on the flight manual to complete all the weight and balance and flight performance data questions.

Now the good news, we finally got to Great Barrier Island!!

Although the weather wasn't ideal, it was still good enough for us to load up the Arrow and get going more or less on time on Saturday morning. The enroute weather forecast had a ceiling at 3000 feet with north easterly winds between 10-15 knots at 200o feet. Chris was flying so I took the opportunity to take lots of photos. The visibility under the cloud was surprisingly good, almost 35 km, and for the most part the flight up was as smooth as a mill pond. We picked up a couple of lumps crossing Coromandel Peninsula to make a beeline for the eastern coast of Great Barrier Island as it had a fair amount of squall cloud sitting overhead which meant a straight in approach over Blind Bay was out.

We descended to around 1400 feet and flew under most of the bad stuff, I remember Kaitoke Beach coming into view up the coast as we rounded the southeastern tip of the island. The cliffs there rose straight out of the water up some several hundred feet and were totally covered in bush at the top. Pretty rugged and remote.

We figured the wind was blowing roughly 360 on the ground, which meant a crosswind landing no matter which runway we chose. Chris selected to come in low and fast on runway 28. I made a video of it and its been uploaded to YouTube. By the way, the tarmac runway is only 9 meters wide so you have to be fairly precise when you land or else you can snag a wheel on the verge and bad things could happen.

After we landed Chris informed us he had booked a rental car so we collected it and drove the 60 or so meters to the club's lodge which sits adjacent to the airport. After giving Susan a tour and using the facilities to freshen up we locked up the lodge and hit the road, deciding to head to Tryphena for lunch. Chris drove as we wound our way along the narrow but sealed road which snakes through the windswept countryside on its way over the spine of hills which make up the backbone of Great Barrier to Tryphena Bay on the south western side of the island. After taking a few snaps of the wharf and the bay we found a delightful restaurant/bar to have lunch.

During lunch I decided it might be better if I drove and Chris rested as it didn't seem fair to me that he flew us in, then chauffeured us around the island before flying us home again. As we were in the Arrow I wasn't able to fly us back because I am not rated in it. Of course I had taken the precaution of registering myself as the second driver when we had picked up the rental so it was all above board.

I really wanted to see Port Fitzroy (for some strange reason thats still not very apparent to me) so we finished our fresh Hoki and chips, saddled up our trusty rental and headed north.

Eventually our travels brought us to Okiwi airfield, the secondary airfield on the island, and one which the Clubs head instructor has banned us from flying into. My first impression was one of confusion, as the place looked pretty innocuous to me, then I saw the windsocks at each end pointing in different directions and it made sense to me.

After taking a few photos we headed on towards Port Fitzroy. By this time the road had gone from narrow seal to extremely narrow gravel, and our little car bounced and shuddered over the uneven surface as we picked our way around most of the potholes. By the time we reached Port Fitzroy, our time was being cut fine somewhat as we had not expected a 40km drive to take more than an hour. I had just enough time to take a couple of photos before we headed back to the lodge. After a comfort stop we returned the rental car "island style," by leaving it in the carpark of the airfield unlocked with the keys in it.

I took a couple more photos while Chris preflighted DQV and we climbed in, warmed her up, did the runups, made some last minute decisions about how we were going to depart and away we went. Chris chose to depart on runway 10 heading out to sea initially before climbing and heading out south west over Blind Bay, as the cloud base had lifted enough for us to slip through the saddle comfortably.

As we were overhead Blind Bay we heard an inbound commercial flight announce their position as being overhead channel island heading for Blind Bay and eventually we picked them up as they passed overhead.

The rest of the flight back was rather uneventful until we were on finals for Grass 36. Due to the 2008 Agricultural Fielddays being held in Hamilton that weekend the airport was busy with all kinds of traffic and we were instructed to land on the Grass rather than our preferred tarmac runway. We were on finals when another plane swept past our left wing and peeled away. Chris started then when he looked forward Susan said from the back seat that we were heading for a flock of birds. Fortunately, the birds were better at taking evasive action than we were, as we were quite slow as we had to follow a Cessna 172 down on finals and the Arrow likes a much faster final approach speed than the 172 does.

Chris landed on Grass 36 without too much drama and we taxied clear. What I found incredulous was that the entire trip to and from Great Barrier only took 1.6 hours as DQV is airswitched. For trips like that it really is a heck of a lot cheaper than an Archer thats for sure.

I did manage to ask the clubs head instructor about getting an Arrow rating and he's happy for me to start, so now its just a matter of coming up with the money and soon I'll have another type rating next to my name, and I get to say "gear up" as part of the post takeoff checklist. I cannot wait!

Photos to follow shortly.

BFR - the countdown begins

2008-05-27T15:14:00.005+12:00

I have 50 days before my BFR is due. I have booked in a BFR with head instructor at the Waikato Aero Club Roger. I think I'll need one more practice flight beforehand to go up and go over the stalls again, since thats the only thing I haven't done recently (if memory serves the last time I did a stall was my max all up weight check for the Archer, about 20 months ago). Other than that its time to bury my head in the books and study up on performance stats and flight planning notes.

I'm fairly confident I'll do well enough to pass, I've been keeping current enough IMO, but time will tell I guess.

Barrier Trip take 2

2008-05-18T08:38:00.006+12:00

After being thwarted by a faulty aircraft, we rescheduled our trip to Great Barrier Island and hoped the weather would be nice to us. We were greeted with a superb day, with a large anticyclone covering most of the country. Hamilton had been covered in fog most mornings due to the slow moving air, but fortunately for us it had all but gone from the airport by 10am. After a quick scan of my logbook I realized I was not current in an Archer so I had to do three circuits in UFS first before I would be able to carry passengers.

The Hamilton circuit was as busy as I have ever seen it, with 6 aircraft doing circuits and commercial flights coming and going. I thought my circuits were OK, except I still tend to fly too close to the runway on base. Something I shall work on.

Once that was done I taxied back to the Club and filled the plane. We loaded up, grabbed some lifejackets, fiddled with them to put them on ( love how you just clip them around your waist and leave them unless you need them). I started UFS up, got taxi instructions, asked for the tarmac runway (I think I might have slightly annoyed the controller) and we took off. The first thing I noticed is how different the climb performance is with 2 extra people, their luggage and full fuel tanks. The ride was silky smooth as we left via the downwind leg and headed north.

There was a thin layer of stratus at ground level which I skirted the thickest part and I chose to climb to 3500 to give us the best options should we have an engine failure (being forefront in my mind after the last flight). ATIS had forecast 50km visibility and it was roughly accurate, but once you get more than 20km vis it doesn't really matter at our modest speed.

There was a bit of traffic around Thames so we checked the VNC for the maximum altitude and started climbing to 4000 feet. There was some fair weather cumulus being blown in from the east so I climbed a little higher to 4300 to get above the base.

About 5 minutes after levelling off the engine started to surge. I knew instinctively it was probably carb icing but selected fuel pump on, then carb heat to hot. We held it for some time and the engine got worse as expected but did not seem to get better after about 2 minutes.

I did some mental maths. We were close enough to make Matarangi, Coromandel township, Whitianga or possibly Thames at our current position, even if we were forced to glide. If I continued north that list would be cut to Coromandel or Matarangi, and other alternatives like roads, beaches or somewhere in the mountainous and heavily forested Coromandel Penninsula.

View Larger Map

I chose to divert to Whitianga for two reasons, one, it had a long main runway, and two I had flown there before and was familiar with flying in that area. Our position was roughly 3nm from Whitianga, and I had a lot of altitude to lose, so I chose to remove distance from the equation and flew a shallow descent to the airfield and then descended in a spiral descent over the field until we reached joining height. I had performed a couple of engine warms during that time and the engine was fine till the throttle hit the end stop then it would surge and cough. When I leveled off at 1500 feet and performed an overhead join, at shallow throttle settings the engine was running fine and we were easily able to maintain altitude so I joined and landed without any fuss.

We taxied to the Mercury Bay clubrooms and shutdown. Chris rang up the Waikato Aero Club on his mobile and spoke with an instructor who counseled us on our options. They were pretty sure it was simple carb icing and had we climbed or descended it would have cleared in due course. They did ask me to check the fuel drains for water contamination, which thankfully was not the case. I wasn't 100% certain I wanted to continue onto the Barrier. The rough terrain, a trip across 5nm of open sea and a lack of suitable landing sites didn't instill me with much confidence. And we were also running out of time.

We chose instead to return to Hamilton, a trip I have flown about 3 times previously. Needless to say, the trip back was as normal as the trip over had been eventful. It was still an awesome day to go flying though, and I am simply glad I was up there. Chris took some photos with his array of different camera's so I am waiting to see the results appear on his site shortly.

{addendum} A day later in the nice warm Aero Club Bar on a chilly Sunday evening, Chris and I related our story to the clubs old timers. They rubbed their chins thoughtfully, nodded their heads together and said sounded like fuel contamination and not carb icing that was my problem. They reckoned I had a few small drops of water in one of the tanks (switching tanks didn't occur to me at the time but I'll try it next time) and that was what was causing the issue. One of the two off duty instructors present concurred with them. When I asked the instructor if one got carb icing how long should it take carb heat to remove the icing they replied no longer than 20 seconds or so. Since I had carb heat selected for a couple of minutes the pieces of this puzzle all seem to fit now. So remember to check and double check those fuel drains folks!

My shortest flight ever

2008-04-28T09:14:00.004+12:00

I was all geared up for a cross country flight on Anzac Day morning to Great Barrier Island. Me, my partner Susan and Chris were all strapped into ZK JGP. I got clearance to taxi to the runup area and proceeded out there. I was told the DI was non functioning, and needless to say it was about as much use to me as a roulette wheel. When I did the engine runup I noticed a large drop in rpm on the right mag. Not a problem, power up to 2000rpm and lean the engine out till it runs rough (while keeping an eye on the EGT so it doesn't get away from me). Reduce power down to runup rpm and recheck both mags, all fine. Complete the rest of the runup checks, taxi to the hold point and report ready. We are 3 up and heavy so I request the tarmac runway instead of the grass, get cleared across the grass to line up. We cross the grass and I line up. Complete the pre-take off checks, sit there for a few seconds waiting for the tower to clear me to take off. OK there is the call, repeat back the clearance to the tower, check with the passengers if they are ready to go, and on confirmation open the throttle. Check rpm, suction, fuel pressure, oil pressure, EGT, oil temp, all in the green. Airspeed comes alive, we have 1250m of wide sealed runway to use so I leave JGP on the ground till we hit 50 knots before rotating. Once the airspeed hits 55knots we take off and I set a nose attitude for a 65 knot climb.

Sounds like a normal takeoff? Yes it was, but as they say, things can change in a heartbeat. At 100feet AGL the engine coughs once. Both Chris and I instantly comment, "that wasn't good". I scan the gauges again, everything is OK. At 250 AGL the engine coughs again and the whole cowling begins to shake. At that precise moment in time the engine failure after takeoff procedure pops into my head. A split second later I realise that although the engine is running rough we are still climbing, so at the very least I can maintain altitude. A split second after that I say, "OK we're going to land," and I key the mike.

"Juliet Golf Papa has a rough running engine, request expedite landing Grass 07 Left." While that sounds impressive, I actually asked for the wrong runway. Fortunately the Tower saw what I was doing (I had levelled off into a left hand turn for a left base on Grass 25 left at 300AGL).

"Juliet Golf Papa, Grass 25 left, cleared to land."
"Grass 25 left, cleared to land, Juliet Golf Papa."
"Are you declaring an emergency at this time?" I remember thinking is the plane and passengers in any distress or real emergency? Am I able to land safely? After throttling back the engine had regained some smoothness and was not really any different to fly than any other normal approach. There was almost no wind so I didn't have a crosswind to think about.
"Negative."

I brought JGP in and landed uneventfully, not the best landing I have ever done, but under the circumstances I was pretty happy with it.

We taxied back to the Club, shutdown and I ran into the office and spoke with the head flying instructor who happened to be working that morning. He came out and after asking about possible carb icing took JGP out to the runup area and did a thorough runup before taxiing back in and parking it. His only comment was,

"Thats not a happy plane." I was told later it was definitely some kind of fault in the left magneto.

When I think back on what happened, if asking for the wrong runway was the only thing I did wrong, I'm pretty happy with how I dealt with the problem. I've thought time and time again about anything I might have missed that might have stopped me attempting to takeoff, but everything was fine after the runup, and the engine was developing full power as we started rolling on the runway. Its funny how aircraft engines like to wait till you are airborne before letting go on you.

Catching up

2008-03-26T09:54:00.004+13:00

Well I've been doing a lot of non flying things recently which have meant I've missed out on a lot of opportunities to exploit the excellent flying weather NZ has at this time of year. I have done a few aviation related activities so I shall summarize them for you.

I attended the annual CAA Pilots Safety Seminar, an excellent forum for learning neat tricks and tips. This years topic was an adaptation of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) concept of "Time in Your Tanks" fuel management. Just so you know, CASA is the Australian Equivalent of our CAA. As a concept I like it because it works much more instinctively and you know fairly well how much time that whirly thing in front of the plane will continue cooling you down and making its terrible racket. I read somewhere that people call the propeller a fan for cooling the pilot, because one it stops he starts to sweat profusely. What I found amazing was that the case studies they presented (sadly all fatalities) all had pilots with over 500 hours total time. I wondered if complacency must have slipped in somewhere? We'll never know unfortunately.

The next act of aviation I committed was the dual section of my BFR revision. Jonathan and I took JGP out to the Eastern Low Flying Zone. For the uninitiated, a Low Flying Zone is a specifically designated area where the minimum height laws do not apply for training purposes. We are allowed to fly as low as the instructor thinks is necessary to teach a particular point. It comes in handy when you are learning precautionary landings. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the farmers who graciously allow us to buzz around their lands at low level. I always take care to stay as far away from stock as I can, but most of them are so used to having planes buzzing around their heads they don't really bat an eyelid anymore. Low flying is really the only portion of the PPL training that I cannot practice on my own so it was good to get in and give it a good hour of flying. I was surprised I was not as rusty as I expected I would be. I even got to do a favour for the Aero Club. A former member of the club recently passed away and his family requested a 172 do a flyover of the burial committal. We did a couple of passes at 500AGL and 120 knots, which was perfectly legal because the graveyard was outside the city limits. I got to fly too which was cool because Jonathan was there the Club could charge them for that portion of the flight and I could claim it all as dual. I did a nice 45 degree bank as we flew past on the second pass. I found out later that the family was still inside the graveyard chapel at the time but they definitely heard us go past and thanked the Club for doing it.

The third aviation event was a trip to the Royal New Zealand Airforces Open Day at the Ohakea Airbase. Chris had planned to fly down, and indeed the weather conditions really didn't get any better than what they were, but due to an unserviceable aircraft and a minor oversight on Chris's part we couldn't secure a plane and so we drove the 350km down to Ohakea. It was my first time on base and my first impression was how clean everything was. The apron looked like it had been recently waterblasted, and indeed so did the buildings! We arrived just after the beginning of the flying display, but after reviewing the schedule we decided to spend time wandering around the static displays before finding a spot on the flightline to watch the flying.

I took a few snaps myself but I decided since Chris had his DSLR still camera I'd use my camera for video. So here's my 3 best videos of the day. If you listen closely you can hear Chris's DSLR shutter going off in continuous mode as the planes fly by. Enjoy.

Avex Photos

2008-02-19T01:56:00.006+13:00

Photo list:
1) On my downwind orbit. You can see Tauranga Airport with Mt Maunganui township behind with the mount itself to the left of shot.
2) Lined up (almost!) on Runway 25.
3) The Seawind. I'd love to own one of these babies.
4) A cool 3/4 scale FW190 homebuilt.
5) And a 3/4 scale Spitfire to go with it.
6) A closed cockpit Gryoplane. Interesting, well at least Aaron thinks so!
7) Nearly home! On short finals for Grass 25 left. I'm surprised Gav managed to take such a nice shot considering everything that was going on!

Sport Avex 2008 - Sunday 17 Feb 2008

2008-02-18T11:11:00.004+13:00

Arrived at the club around 8.00am to get everything organised. It was a glorious Sunday morning, with a few wisps of stratus around and some cumulus building out to the west but we were heading east so it was no big deal.

I was going to fly FWS over to Tauranga with flying buddy Gav, along with Chris, Aaron and one of the Clubs life members Mike in JGP. The plan was that we'd take off as together as separation allowed and fly to Tauranga together. As it happened they called ready first and was cleared for takeoff on Runway 18. I decided to request the same since we were two up with full tanks. Chris said later that he enjoyed watching our takeoff and climb from the upwind leg as they headed out to the Scott sector.

We had planned on choosing an unused frequency to talk on but on the way over we had the wrong one selected so neither plane could talk to each other. That brought home the usefulness of a thorough preflight briefing.

We eventually called clear of Hamilton airspace with JGP a nice speck in our window against the dawn sky about a mile ahead. I settled in to follow them. Gav pointed out another aircraft at 10 o'clock and we saw a Vans RV fly past at our altitude about 300m away. I wondered if he was supposed to pass us on the right but he was far enough away not to cause any alarm.

It wasn't until we were approaching the Kaimai's that things started to run not so smoothly for us. Chris the old hand got cleared into the control zone with plenty of time and space to use. I reported in at the same spot but the poor radio discipline of some pilots meant that calls were not as concise as they should be and I had to turn away from my track lest I bust airspace. Eventually I got cleared in on a Racecourse 1 arrival which I proceeded to follow. By now we'd lost sight of Chris and he was about 3-4 miles ahead happily radioing in at the holding point and being cleared to descend into the circuit for 25.

I reported approaching the hospital but some pilot in another plane (I know which plane but will not divulge it to the open net) decided to have a lengthy chat on the tower frequency about his parking spot. I made a split second decision to orbit but chose the wrong direction and realised this when I was already in a place I really shouldn't have been. The tower called me up and asked my intentions. I replied that I was holding at the hospital and they cleared me to descend into the circuit. By the time I was downwind, Chris was on finals for the grass and was cleared to land on Grass 25. I reported downwind and was instructed to orbit to maintain separation. I bit back the impulse (this is a joke by the way) to tell the controller he owed me two beers (the Archer costs NZ$3 a minute to fly and one orbit is 2 minutes in length) and started the orbit. Once complete I was cleared to approach the tarmac runway 25 behind a Devon I spotted on base turning finals.

I reduced power and began to make my approach and we landed without further incident. I was instructed to hold on the taxiway as there was aircraft landing on the Grass adjacent to me and eventually I was instructed to taxi to the apron and contact the Ground controller for parking instructions. When I called ground they said to "park behind the Tomahawk." So we taxied forwards slowly dodging planes going in all sorts of directions till we spotted a Tomahawk and I slotted in behind it and shut down.

It was an interesting contrast between Chris's flight and my own and as we discussed it as we strolled over to the show area.

There was a lot of interesting aircraft at the parking area as well as a fair number of people for 9am in the morning, so we wandered around snapping photos of things of interest and chatting to enthusiastic owners of aircraft as well as salesmen (and saleswomen too!) trying to generate interest in the latest sport planes. I must admit, there certainly were some tasty aircraft on static display there that caught my eye. I particularly liked the Alpi Pioneer but my favourite plane was the futuristic looking Seawind.

The flying display was of a standard similar to the 2006 show which I really enjoyed. Highlights were the Yak 52 display team, the RNZAF Red Chequers display team, the original P51 Mustang and the De Havilland Vampire. Some people have commented that the Vampire sounds like a vacuum cleaner. After hearing one do some low passes I'd have to agree, but that didn't detract from the amazing show the display pilot put on.

We made our way back to the aircraft and had preflighted, boarded and were ready to depart when the airport reopened at 1430 hours. There were a couple of aircraft ahead but we didn't face the same queues we had in 2006. I had a lump in my throat as I lined up FWS onto Grass 25. They had shortened the runway length to 550m and although we were only two up with full tanks on a hot afternoon I have had a few moments of worry getting FWS off the ground in similar conditions (although with hindsight the 12 knots of headwind meant I need not have worried). I chose to make a short field take off so I lowered two notches of flap and after being cleared for take off I stood hard on the brakes as I slowly opened the throttle to full power, then I released the brakes and off we went. It was with huge relief that I saw the airspeed indicator flick and come alive after about 100m (being a pressure differential instrument it requires airflow to become effective). I checked the engine instruments again and everything was as they should be so I rotated at 50 knots indicated and FWS sprang into the air at 55. I made a slight left turn away from the display line as the public area was right underneath the Grass 25 centreline. We were cleared for a racecourse 1 departure so I climbed to 1500 feet and looked ahead for Chris and the guys in JGP who yet again had gotten ahead of me.

Before I began the preflight I was speaking to some guys who were milling around an immaculate 172 about the flying conditions. One of them said they were heading back to Whenuapai, which made them Airforce guys. When I said I was bound for Hamilton he wished me luck as things would be pretty lumpy overhead the Kaimai's. They were intending to climb to 5500 and cruise back to Auckland in controlled airspace. I considered climbing into controlled airspace too for the trip back to Hamilton for a moment or two but in the end I chose to simply follow Chris back.

As soon as I was clear of Tauranga airspace I began a climb to 3500 to clear the Kaimai's with enough ground clearance to hopefully get above the worst of the turbulence. It was actually surprisingly smooth, sure there was the odd bump here and there but it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting.

In a replay of the mornings flight I was again following Chris at about a mile trail, his plane again a speck in the windscreen highlighted this time by the setting afternoon sun. We both made calls as we descended through the Matamata MBZ and he called up Hamilton tower some distance from the control zone and was cleared in 2500 feet or below to join right base for Grass 25. I called up about 15 seconds later and after the tower had established that I had Chris insight I was given the same clearance with instructions to follow him.

I noted that during the flight back in the climb I could catch Chris but on descents he rapidly got away from us. I lost him a couple of times but finally picked him up again as he made a left turn to join right base for Grass 25. He was quite wide so I chose to cut the corner and make up some of the gap. He was about to turn finals for 25 when a Beech 1900D on a visual approach was cleared into the downwind. I could not see Chris but was instructed to separate myself from the Beech which I picked up visually fairly quickly. He was downwind so I slowed FWS up and dropped two notches of flap. Eventually I settled on a nose attitude that would give me 80 knots and turned final with about 3 miles to the threshold. During this time Chris had been ordered to go around and was nicely sequenced in behind me. I then made sure that the Beech would be on the ground and clear before I was even remotely close to landing in case the controller might decide to send me around as well. There was plenty of low level turbulence and chop on the Grass 25 approach as there normally is in the prevalent westerly winds at Hamilton, but I was expecting it and played with the throttle to maintain our descent profile. I also chose to come in fairly quick, 75 knots to smooth out some of the chop. Once we cleared the boundary fence I let the airspeed drop too quickly and had to lower the nose and apply some generous throttle to sort things out. We eventually crossed the markers and I cut the power and let the airspeed bleed off and we touched down with a couple of skips.

I taxied us back, shut down and begun to secure FWS for the night. It had been an interesting day, a trying day, but a lot of fun. When FWS and JGP were tied down and had their covers on we retired to the clubhouse for a beer, and it was there that I learned of a triple fatality involving an aircraft and a helicopter near Paraparaumu (which is close to Wellington). While the accident is indeed tragic and it was sheer luck no bystanders were injured or killed, I'd like to contrast this sad event with an airshow occurring at the same time involving over 100 aircraft of many different types all arriving, performing and then departing with not one reportable incident. Any loss of life is indeed regrettable, but civil aviation is not as dangerous as the news media would have you believe.

Almost made it!

2008-01-20T16:07:00.002+13:00

We were supposed to go to the War Museum at Waiouru. It was going to be a pretty awesome adventure, the army base which has its own airfield were going to open it up to members of the Tauranga and Hawkes Bay Aero Clubs to fly there and then go by bus to the museum. Since my mate Aaron has a lot of contacts at the Hawkes Bay Aero Club he organised for himself, Chris and me to tag along.

The weather this morning was quite nice looking until you read the met information. A 2000 foot wind forecast at 30 knots didn't make for fun times. I arrived at the club to find I was the first one there. Aaron arrived bearing bad news, Hawkes Bay were a non starter because the cloud cover was so low there was no way for them to get inland. Tauranga had decided not to go either and it wasn't feasible for us to go alone so we looked for an alternative destination and found one in the North Shore Aero Club. Neither Chris nor I had ever been there so we decided to give it a go.

Chris was chosen to fly us there, with the intention for me to fly the return leg. We got airborne and although the expected turbulence was present it wasn't nearly as bad as we had feared. We gained clearance to and climbed up to 2500 feet. At that height the turbulence was bad enough to make accurate flying a challenge so Aaron and Chris decided to climb up to 3500 once we could and attempt to cross direct through Auckland airspace at 3500. Being a Sunday morning you would assume that Auckland International Airport would be fairly quiet. WRONG! While not as busy as it can get, there was a lot of aircraft operating within the vast chunk of airspace Auckland Control looks after. Chris requested 3500 and they said it was not available and to remain clear of airspace. That was the end of it. We descended to 2500 to get under it and made for the transit lane at Bucklands Beach. Crossing the hills near Hunua we hit a patch of pretty nasty clear air turbulence. I hit my head on the roof hard, and things went flying inside the cockpit. I asked the guys if they minded not continuing and diverting to Ardmore. They agreed and a scant 4 minutes later we were on the ground having a coffee at the airport cafe.

They chose me to fly us back to Hamilton, so I chose to climb to 2500 as quickly as possible to avoid the turbulence. We still were tossed around the sky a bit initially which cleared once we cleared the Bombay hills and entered the Mercer MBZ. In fact, the further south we went the better the flying conditions got.

I contacted Hamilton tower 3 nm east of Huntly at 2300 and requested joining instructions. At first I was instructed to perform a north arrival but that was amended immediately to a clearance to enter the city sector 1500 feet or below. I've never been asked to do that before so I made sure I articulated my reply clearly to make sure there was no mishearing on my part. I was not corrected so I began a shallow descent to 1500 and headed us towards Hamilton city.

I reported my position at the Showgrounds visual reporting point and was cleared to continue approach number 1 for Grass 07 Right. Below is the movie Chris took of my landing. A few seconds after the movie begins the tower amends my clearance to Grass 07 Left and clears me to land.

Not my best landing, but we landed safely and have plenty to ponder about over a cold beer.

Thats why you have a pilots license

2008-01-18T08:53:00.001+13:00

I'm writing this a week after the fact because various events in real life have taken precedence over writing a blog, and I will not relate them to you for fear of boring you to death.

Last Friday, Susan and I were driving out of the University car park on our way home when she looks up and the sky and says to me, "why don't we fly out to Raglan for dinner"? I considered this for a second and said that would be a great idea.

Funnily enough the Aero Club is closer to work than it is to where our house is so by 5.10pm we were standing on the deck at the clubroom looking at the parked aircraft. Since it was Raglan I wanted to take a 172, and JGP was available so I asked for it.

A quick preflight later we were taxiing out to do the runup with just over 3 hours fuel on board. We were cleared to take off from the tarmac runway which Susan commented she had never taken off from before. I got us airborne and was surprised at the lack of turbulence. There was a little shaking but nothing like what I was expecting.

About 12 minutes later I was joining overhead Raglan and trying to spot the windsocks. I had to circle a couple of times because the windsocks were definitely not in agreement and I had to think about how I was going to land and which direction was the right one. I eventually chose 23 and reported I was joining non traffic side for 23. What I didn't realise at the time was that the wind was in actual fact blowing across the runway, and the location of the airstrip was such that the surrounding terrain made the wind funnel past it rather than blow steadily.

My first attempt at a landing was a shocker because I was getting plenty of lift during the final approach and ended up very high. I went around and the second time I was ready for it and managed a slightly high approach profile but it was manageable.

Strangely enough the aircraft was not behaving like it would in a normal crosswind approach, so I suspect there might have been a vertical sheerzone somewhere. We landed long, and Susan was worried we might run through the fence, but I had kept us airborne as long as possible to bleed off airspeed and we landed sufficiently slowly that even had the brakes failed we probably would not have hit the fence very hard if at all.

I taxied us back to the parking spot and shutdown. After getting out I studied the nearest windsock closely for several seconds and it was certainly doing some strange things. The apparent breeze where I was standing was blowing across the runway at about 70-80 degrees.

We had a lovely dinner at a local restaurant, and during the walk back I was considering the best method to tackle the takeoff and departure. We could go in either direction, but I chose to continue in the direction we had landed. My plan was to take off on an oblique angle as Raglan is 65m wide so we would get as much of a head wind as possible, climb to a safe height and make an early turn into wind to take advantage of the extra lift. I have written before about JGPs climbing ability, and I knew that it was more than capable of performing as required. My only question marks were about possible sheer and its affect on JGPs ability to climb. My calculated gamble was that once into wind JGP would easily outclimb the low hills to the south of the airport.

As it happened we got airborne fairly early in the takeoff roll (gotta love JGP), so once I got to 300 feet AGL I began a shallow left turn to keep away from the houses and we climbed away as planned, with no drama at all.

The flight back to Hamilton was even smoother than the flight to Raglan, and once I got to cruising altitude I trimmed up JGP and asked Susan if she wanted to put her hands on the controls and feel the plane for a moment or two. She chickened out a couple of times but dug up enough courage to follow my movements for a moment or two. The interesting observation I made was that when she closed her fingers around the control column, the clenching motion moved the elevators about 1 cm rearwards causing a slow pitch up of the nose. She immediately released the controls and I corrected our climb. She admitted after she had calmed down that she wasn't expecting such sensitive controls, and that comment transported me back to my first ever lesson with the club. We landed without incident and taxied back to the club where I shut down, tied down and covered JGP for the night.

For a relatively short flight, and one that I have done quite a few times in my flying history, it threw up a number of challenges that I had to solve to my satisfaction before I was confident we would be able to fly out. In reality, it was a no brainer (yes really it was - call me overanxious if you like) but I hope you get an idea about some of the multitude of considerations pilots must weigh up before choosing to fly.

No flying yet

2008-01-08T10:26:00.000+13:00

But here's some cool movies I've found to keep you going in the meantime.

Happy New Year

2008-01-03T08:48:00.001+13:00

Welcome to 2008 everyone! Well lets briefly look back before going forwards. In 2007 I said I wanted to:

"1) Get more cross country time in the Archer
2) Fly to White Island and back (in the Archer)
3) Take Susan and friends out to Great Barrier Island (in the Archer)
4) If time and finances allow, get a rating in the Piper Cherokee Arrow.
5) Go landing on airfields around the Waikato as suggested by one of my readers Aaron.

I managed to achieve 1), didn't do 2 (see the relevant blog post) or 3, don't qualify to get 4 (yet), and 5 was financially out of the question. Total flight time for the year was 10.5 hours, with a total overall time of 117.5 hours.

So for 2008 lets look at my goals for this year:

1) Fly more than 10.5 hours
2) Fly to White Island and back (in any aircraft)
3) Take Susan to Great Barrier Island
4) Go on some longer cross countries than I've been doing
5) Go airfield hopping as Aaron suggested
6) Get approval to land at Waiheke Island (I know there are some minimum hours before they'll let me take club planes in there for insurance reasons so I'll check out what they are and let you all know).

{edit} I forgot the most important goal (drum roll please)... pass my BFR!

I want to wish everyone a prosperous and safe 2008!

No passengers allowed

2007-12-08T14:15:00.001+13:00

I've booked a 172 for a trip to Pauanui with Susan for Wednesday. The forecast rain for today (Saturday) hasn't arrived yet so it was a beautiful spring morning that greeted me as I arrived at the Aero Club to do my 3 circuits to pass the currency test (according to my logbook I have not logged PIC time in a 172 since August). Thats well outside the minimum 3 takeoffs and landings required every 90 days to satisfy the legal requirements of carrying passengers.

I got to fly WAM again for the first time since it had the 180hp STC conversion performed (according to my logbook it was way back in February that I last flew WAM), and it also had some nice leather seats replacing the old velour ones. An instructor asked me to treat the new engine with care, no glide approaches and to try to keep the revs up. I got in to find that half the radio stack was missing, and so I had to give myself a crash course on how to use the radio function of the GPS. Then there was maneuvering for a run up near holding point Golf. There is enough room there for two aircraft and I hesitated because I wasn't entirely sure there was. I ended up in no mans land and effectively blocked the taxiway, which got a polite request from the aircraft behind me (with Club instructor aboard) to move.

On the first circuit despite a slowly falling air pressure WAM showed just how much difference a new engine makes, climbing sharply away. I was overhauling the Alpha in the circuit ahead of me so I widened the circuit out and kept an eye on him.

It was almost impossible to descend with the throttle open. I tried a descent at 2000 rpm, then 1800, then 1700 but WAM just wanted to keep flying. I ended up almost having to glide her in because at those power settings she just resolutely refused to come down.

Once I was on the ground just opening the throttle was enough to get WAM airborne again, never mind raising the flaps. I tried a Vx climb andWAM didn't disappoint. By this time I had worked out a way for WAM to come down at a decent engine speed, using the precision approach method. I needed to practice them so it was good compromise.

I was circuiting on Grass 07, which hardly gets used because Hamilton very rarely has easterly winds. I like approaches to Grass 07 because of the lack of turbulence on short finals. There was a very slight crosswind (less than a knot or two) so I got to practice my crosswind landing technique as well. I aimed to land on the centreline as well, and for the most part I was successful.

As per usual, my last landing was my best, probably because by now I had come to terms with WAMs new flight characteristics and my confidence had returned. I taxied back and shut down, and then came a quick lesson from the polite instructor in the aircraft behind me on runup area etiquette and spacing. All of what he said I knew, I guess I just was thinking about a million things at once at the time and plain common sense wasn't one of them. Thats why the one thing you simply cannot afford to do in aviation is hurry. Haste most certainly makes waste, the consequences of which are most unpleasant.

I'll post again after my flight on Wednesday. Those of you who read Chris's blog would have seen his photos of Pauanui airfield and I hope to post some of my own here after my flight there.

Whitianga trip pics

2007-11-18T11:10:00.001+13:00

Our very own Table Mountain at 4000 ft AMSL. Not nearly as grand as the one in South Africa but its ours.

Departing Whitianga from downwind, note the waterways development.

Another shot of the waterways, the airfield is to the right middle of the photo.

Flying mate Gav next to that other way to fly, only its twice as expensive. Gav has almost got his PPL (h) in the R22 but will fly in anything that goes up.

Yours truly giving the starboard oleos on FWS a workout. Archers are a great plane to fly and I think they look cooler than the Cessna 172. But I have no real preference for which one I fly.

The photos are in reverse chronological order, and the aerial shots were all taken on the return trip to Hamilton. This was because I left my camera in my bag and only realised where it was after we had taken off.

Another milestone past

2007-11-13T10:39:00.000+13:00

The previous Ardmore trip as well as my weekend trip to Whitianga (photos + film to follow) allowed me to tick over the 50 hours PIC mark. My new goal is 40 hours Archer time (there is also a total time requirement but I meet that) so the Club will let me fly the Arrow.

Isn't it funny how you are told things time and time again by your instructor that you just don't get, then one day something happens and you realise they were right all along? Well this weekend the lesson I learned was about leaning the mixture. I was taught to lean above 3000 AMSL for best power and to save the engine from carbon buildup in the cylinders from unburnt or half burnt fuel. But what I found out was how much fuel you can save when the plane is only burning 40 litres an hour instead of 55!

The pics and movie were taken on the return flight to Hamilton as my camera sat in my bag the whole trip over. The weather was nicer on the return flight and it was a lot smoother as the late afternoon meant cooler air and less turbulence.

Photos of the Ardmore trip.

2007-11-01T00:00:00.001+13:00

Established on finals, runway 03 at Ardmore (NZAR)Watch that sink rate!

A crosswind is no excuse for not landing on the centerline (although we actually did land on the centerline, it was one of those rare occasions).

And a movie of the landing back at Hamilton. No I am not missing the runway, I was cleared onto the adjacent grass runway (believe it or not that is not a taxiway). Note the difference in the weather, the movie was shot several hours after the photos.

Another Ardmore hop

2007-10-31T16:46:00.001+13:00

I was for some reason itching to go flying in the weekend. I guess it was partly because the weather was slowly becoming favourable for flying, and it also had the added bonus of being in the weekend as well. A major factor was that a young up and coming instructor had been killed on Friday and I wanted to go up as a tribute to them.

I have a group of flying buddies not unlike some of the people on this forum. I lined up one of them to come along for the company and selected Ardmore as the destination because I wanted to keep the total flight time to around the 1 hour mark as I could. Ardmore is about 40 minutes away from Hamilton by air. Ardmore also has a large fleet of privately owned aircraft (including warbirds) that you get to see in operation as they perform their weekend flying.

I don't drink coffee, but my mates do and they agree the coffee at the Ardmore cafe is the icing on the cake of sitting there watching aircraft come and go and talking flying. I had booked a 172 for the trip but when I arrived at the aero club I spotted a Piper Cherokee Archer sitting in the flight line. A quick perusal of the booking sheet confirmed that the person who had it booked was a no show so I took the opportunity of building some more PIC time in PA28s.

My buddy turned up and as we were walking out to the aircraft, another mate of mine landed in the clubs other 172, which he had flown back from Whangarei (about 1.5 hours north by air, and about 4 hours by car). Its just had the STC conversion to 180hp so it needed 15 hours of running in. I waved to him and when he found out we were off to Ardmore he asked to join us.

All 3 of us piled into ZK-FWS and after a rather shaky take-off (we were just under max all up weight but FWS didn't want to unstick so I had to haul her into the air) we climbed steadily away.

I got us to our cruising altitude of 2000, cleared us out of Hamilton airspace into class G, and handed the plane over to Gavin while I fiddled with the radio's and got the DME tuned in. We were crossing a small range of hills north of Hamilton when I saw a paraglider just to port at about half a mile's distance. Not close enough to warrant a near miss incident report but enough to give both of us a bit of a scare. That part of the country is one of the VFR routes between Hamilton and Ardmore. I hope he was as freaked as we were.

I managed to get the AWIB down and selected a western approach to join a wide right base. After switching to the Ardmore frequency I heard the circuit was quite full, including 3 Harvard trainers who were up doing formation flying practice. At about 8 miles southwest of Ardmore I took control back and joined as a wide number 4 behind them. By the time we were on finals I couldn't see anyone downwind or behind me on base so I had a free run in.

The guys thought my landing was excellent, a rare "greaser", but truth be told I actually landed earlier than I was planning to and had only just started to flare. But I'll take accolades when they are given freely. I taxied to outside the Auckland Aero Club where the cafe is and shut down. The weather there was rather cloudy, with seven eighths of cloud at 3000, and a light breeze which was giving some people problems with their crosswind landings but the crosswind component being only 5 knots at its strongest shouldn't have given too many headaches (although watching some of the student traffic in the circuit you'd think otherwise!).

We enjoyed a drink and some food before wandering off to the hangars to see what action was taking place. We chatted to a guy about the PBY Catalina parked outside one of the hangars, we saw a 3/4 scale Mustang land (its powered by a V12 and damn it sounds good), there were the previously mentioned Harvards which were operating in the circuit, we saw a Giles 202, various training planes including (C152's, Grumman AA5's, Piper Tomahawks), some training helicopters (R22's and Hughes 269s/300Cbs), and awesome looking Trojan warbird (imagine one of the largest radials you've ever seen with a plane wrapped around it), a Beaver and a Chipmunk.

All too soon it was time to return to Hamilton so I left the guys ogling over old aircraft while I went and preflighted FWS. There was a small queue at the holding point but I found a safe spot out of the way to do my runups and was ready to go when my takeoff spot became available. Ardmore only runs a UNICOM so its first in best dressed when it comes to takeoff order.

I lined up just as a C172 in the circuit took off and as I was climbing out noticed that he was descending rather rapidly. Eventually he started to climb again so I guess they were doing a practice engine failure. I followed the departure procedure and we made it out of Ardmore airspace without incident. It can be one of the busiest parts of NZ airspace because of its proximity to Auckland International and the attendant VFR transit lanes through Auckland airspace.

The trip back was a fairly relaxed affair although I did pay extra attention when nearing the vicinity of where we had nearly met the paraglider. At about 13nm on the DME I requested entry into Hamilton airspace and made another excellent landing (which was filmed by Aaron). Then it was taxi back, tie down and cover on, and back for a cold beer before calling it a day.

I'll edit the movie down to a more web friendly version and post it soon.

Down but not out

2007-10-27T11:57:00.000+13:00

I am still around, just bad weather and indifferent finance have curtailed any chance I've had of getting airborne once again. I also want to offer my condolences to the family of the Tauranga flying instructor killed yesterday when the 152 she was in went down in rugged bush country east of Whakatane. Statistically flying is much safer than driving in this country but it's still a potentially hazardous vocation.

Pics from Sunday's Flight

2007-09-19T10:20:00.001+12:00

I got my hands on some of the photos taken on Sundays flight so here they are. Unfortunately, they are displayed in reverse chronological order so for those of you that know Hamilton well it doesn't give an accurate depiction of the flight.

I'm still not all that up with the play as far as html formatting goes so I'll caption them here and hopefully will format them properly later.

1) Looking south over Hamilton Lake. Mt Kakepuku is in the left distance and Mt Pirongia is in the right distance.

2) Looking south down the main street of Hamilton.

3) Looking over the sporting belt - in the foreground is Waikato Stadium, home of the Mighty Mooloo rugby union team, and near the top center is Seddon Park, an excellent Cricket ground.

4) In a turn looking southeast over the city. The big white building to the right of the A pillar centre shot is the Te Rapa Pool Complex.

5 and 6) The University of Waikato where we all work (for the time being). In pic 5, the buildings appear to make a 'S' lying on its side. The 3 buildings in the right of frame are where we all work. Photo 6 doesn't show a sizable portion of the campus because its obscured by the wing of the plane.

A fun weekend

2007-09-17T08:59:00.001+12:00

I had two pretty good flights in the weekend. One was a jaunt with my partners in crime Chris and Aaron up to Ardmore then back to Hamilton via Thames. The only thing that still bugs me is that I completely forgot my camera, so I couldn't get some photos of the excellent views we had flying over the NZ countryside in perfect flying conditions. Aaron flew the first leg to Ardmore, and he chose to take the route into Ardmore via the Hunua valley. This is the recommended approach for aircraft coming in from the south, and it was a good thing we did this because there was active gliding activity from Drury gliding strip, 4nm southwest of Ardmore. Aaron hadn't flown a 172 for some time and only has a few hours in them (most of his time is in various Piper types but he does have a 182 rating as well) but his touchdown at Ardmore was excellent.

We wandered over to the Auckland Aero Club cafe and had a soft drink/coffee/water while we waited for a guy to show up who was selling Aaron a car (the reason Ardmore was the destination). He went off to test drive it while Chris and I wandered around the aircraft sales yard looking at the different planes and dreaming about eventually owning one. We headed back to the aircraft so Chris could preflight before Aaron got back. Time was on the verge of becoming an issue as we only had about 100 minutes before the plane had to be back on the ground in Hamilton. While that was ample for our purposes, we couldn't afford to dally.

Once we were all aboard we taxied out and warmed up, all the while Aaron was keeping an eye on circuit traffic trying to pick a spot for us to slot into. I think there was 4 or possibly 5 planes in the circuit at the time as well as a couple of helicopters in the TLOF circuit on the other side of the aerodrome.

We picked a gap and gunned it. JGP didn't disappoint and we were quickly rolling and airborne before the guy behind us touched down. Ardmore has fairly strict VFR departure procedures so we stuck to them, but surprisingly for me there was not a lot of incoming or outgoing traffic around to worry about. We found the coast and turned eastwards to follow it into the Firth of Thames. Since we hadn't planned to fly over water we climbed to the maximum altitude we could to stay within uncontrolled airspace and Chris kept us within gliding distance of the shore at all times. He did a fairly good overhead join and did a very nice landing. The pressure would well and truly be on my shoulders for the final landing in Hamilton!

After a stretch and a quick dip of the tanks I climbed into the left seat for the return trip to Hamilton. I taxied us out to the end of the runway and decided to perform a max performance takeoff due to the damp runway conditions and fairly heavy loading of the plane. Never the less we were airborne with just over a third of the runway behind us and we climbed away. I set course for Gordonton (just outside the control zone) and away we went. The entire flight had been in mill pond smooth conditions with very light winds on the ground, it really didn't get better than that, and its certainly one of those days you never forget in your flying career.

We were cleared into Hamilton at 2500 feet or below and I began a gentle descent to circuit height. Once we were over the city I had a flashback to July 2004 (Lesson 4 of my blog) when I went up with a PPL who flew like the plane was on rails compared with my sloppy attempts. Here I was, 100 hours (and a few years) later overhead Hamilton in a similar aircraft in similar conditions flying it like it was on rails. I don't remember feeling so proud since I passed my PPL flight test.

My landing was of the same standard as the other two's were (to my intense relief) and we taxied back to the club, 45 minutes before ECT. A truly magical afternoons flying.

On Sunday, I was out at the club once more, taking a couple of workmates for a flight as a treat to them since they are both leaving their jobs and moving towns to follow their partners who have had big career moves. I secured FWS (my favourite Archer) and went up to do some circuits beforehand to maintain my currency. I picked the wrong time because there was commercial traffic due to depart and I only got downwind on my first circuit when I was instructed to land by ATC due to wake turbulence, so I asked to taxi back to the club and was cleared to do so after I landed (which wasn't too bad since I haven't flown an Archer for a month or two).

We piled in and took off, and I took them overhead and around Hamilton looking at all the usual spots and I brought them back in for a somewhat bumpy landing (far from my best which means I need more Archer time!!) and we taxied back to the club. Not really a great deal to report here, scenics are becoming somewhat ho hum to me but I do my best to be as professional as I can be without being paid. :-P

Annual Club Competitions Day 1

2007-08-14T11:09:00.001+12:00

As per usual, we had some tricky weather to contend with. The wind was swinging between 330 and 290 degrees magnetic but was steady at around 12 knots. Fortunately when it came to my turn to compete in the Senior Landings the wind was closer to 290 degrees which lessened the crosswind component tremendously. I did a quick check over of JGP and climbed in, and sitting in the right seat was none other that head instructor Roger! After exclaiming inwardly I set about getting JGP started and Roger said we wouldn't need a runup since JGP had been flown less than an hour earlier. I did a shortened pre take off check and we were cleared onto Grass 25 left and as I lined up Roger said go and I got us going. The ride once airborne was a little bumpy but not nearly as bad as I had feared after watching other competitors. At circuit height the ride was surprisingly smooth.

I went through the landing checks and got us slowed up. The forecast 2000 foot wind was 340 degrees magnetic at 40 knots! I adjusted our heading to make sure we tracked in a reasonably square circuit but I did mess up the turn to finals. After lining up I made sure I was trimmed for 70 knots and looked for the landing area the ground judges had marked out. Having so much headwind meant my ground speed was such that it took what seemed like an age for JGP to crawl towards the runway. I've said it before and I'll touch on it again, the threshold to Grass 25L and 25R can be a "region of moderate to severe turbulence in westerly conditions". Today was no different. On the first approach we hit an area of sink and I had to apply full power to arrest it. Roger commented that I'd get full marks for using the throttle. Needless to say we probably would not have made the runway if I hadn't used all of it!

What was interesting was the wind characteristics and how they changed radically on final approach. I started the finals leg with the nose pointing right to maintain track, but as we got lower I found I could swing the nose onto centerline with almost no sideways drift.

I crossed the marker boards a little low for my liking and gave the engine a tiniest smidgen of power to aid our ground effect then as we floated over the landing grid I cut the power and we touched down (later I was to find I scored 40/50 so it wasn't too bad).

I applied full throttle and went to raise the flaps when Roger in that calm voice of his told me to get the plane back into the air and then worry about the flaps. JGP being a 172M doesn't have a flap position lever, instead it has a raise/lower toggle switch which is a real pain in the butt when you are doing touch and goes. Fortunately the power and prop combination means it will climb away easily at full throttle (even with the carb heat on - as I was to realise I'd forgotten to turn it off before we landed!) so I feel better about doing this from now on.

My second turn to finals was better than my first, but the approach despite not getting as much sink I didn't control my airspeed nearly as well. I was anticipating a similar sink rate and when it didn't happen I had to act to stop getting too high. I ended up flying through the grid somewhat but I was told I still landed in the 40 zone so my aggregate ground score wasn't too bad. I think my air judge score would be OK but not fantastic. Chris had kindly filmed my approaches but they don't look nearly as good from the ground as they do ifrom the air so I probably won't put them up.

I had to leave the Aero Club early before I could compete in the Senior Circuits but next weekend will see me compete in my favourite competitions, the bombing and life raft dropping. I just hope the weather is kinder to us on Saturday.

Whats with the weather?

2007-08-06T13:17:00.001+12:00

Todays Met for Hamilton:

SPECI NZHN 060105Z 34010KT 3000S SHRA FEW010 SCT015 BKN035 12/10
Q0998=

SPAR NZHN 060104Z
15KM RED 3000 SHRA=

TAF NZHN 052134Z 052112
34005KT 30KM -SHRA BKN030
BECMG 2123 34015KT
TEMPO 0006 4000 RA BKN014 FEW020CB
BECMG 0103 28015KT
BECMG 0911 33005KT
TEMPO 1012 6000 SHRA
2000FT WIND 29025KT =

Pretty typical for the last month, hence no flying and no activity here. Its ironic that for a lot of the previous months its been financial issues which have grounded me, only to have the weather chip in when I finally get some money. I have our annual club competitions coming up soon and I'd like to get some practice in beforehand. Just so my competitors know I have entered in:

Bombing (now this is fun, and I believe everyone should give it a go)
Life Raft Dropping (flying without a door on is fun enough, but you get to throw things out as well!)
Circuits (I only do this to have a crack at the grid landing)
Landings (see above)
Forced Landings (well I haven't practised one of these for ages so it will be interesting to say the least)

If any of you lurkers are in NZ and want to have a go, come along. You don't have to be current, as an instructor acts as air judge (and instructor for those who need it). I would recommend that as a prerequisite you are comfortable with handling a plane in a circuit. Contact the Waikato Aero Club (link is in the side bar) and come have some fun.

Happy PPL Day to me

2007-07-10T10:52:00.001+12:00

July 9 marks the one year anniversary of my successful PPL flight test. An accounting of achievements over the past year tells me more about the sad state of my financial affairs rather than any lack of enthusiasm for doing things. I've gained two ratings (172 rating came after my checkride), flown friends and family overhead Hamilton city, been on a couple of short trips around the Waikato/Bay of Plenty area and even flown in another country!

I've flown 24.9 hours since my PPL arrived, and looking back that seems like a lot more hours than it was.

Now I guess I should start practicing for my Biennial Flight Review, I have 12 months to get ready. :-)