Flight of the Cursed!

In my last post, I indicated that I planned to fly on to Galveston or Houston on Sunday, but Sunday evening was spent watching football, so that just didn't work out. I decided to fly tonight though and decided to go to Houston. In hindsight, I should have just gone to bed (read on).

The flight started OK with an evening departure from Lake Charles:

My flight plan was pretty simple, just head west to a VOR station about 80 miles to the east, and then turn SSW to a VOR station within a half mile of Ellington Field, a very old (WWI era) airport that serves military, commercial and general aviation traffic. It's located at 29 36'26.00"N, 95 09'32.00"W in Google Earth.

En route, it got darker and I started looking for constellations. It may be hard to see in this dark image, but I believe that's supposed to be the Milky Way coming up from the horizon below me (and extending above, but very hard to see):
Other than the takeoff and stargazing, everything else about this flight went wrong. First of all, I never could get a signal on the second VOR. I double checked the frequency and everything and even checked on-line later. I think it may be an FSX bug, but I'm not 100% sure of that. Needless to say, that complicated my navigation, which needed to be pretty accurate on a night flight into an airport that's very close to another airport (Houston Hobby) and with a similar runway layout.

As I got closer I spotted an airport about where Ellington should be, could not see another airport nearby, and so I requested clearance to land, got it, and started my approach. On final, I decided that the runways didn't look right, paused the sim, went to an exterior view, and realized I was about to land at Hobby. Oops, that's not going to look good:

The above image is me on final into Hobby (in error). As soon as I sorted things out I gunned the engine, aborted the landing, climbed up a few hundred feet and headed east. The correct airport is just a few miles south-east of Hobby.

Shaken by all of the problems, I got lined up and began my final into Ellington. Even it didn't look right, but I called the tower and got directions to the airport and confirmed that I was heading for the right one. With my confidence level falling, I gradually added full flaps and decided to make a really slow and careful landing. That didn't work out so well either as I got too slow right over the runway threshold, stalled the wings and dropped a good twenty feet onto the tarmac, breaking the nose gear and ending an already problematic flight with a bang:
Ugh! Sometimes everything that can go wrong does. I suppose I'll learn something from this, but right now I think I'll have a beer!

UPDATE - After a nice cold beer and a good night's sleep to reflect on this disaster, I came to the following conclusions: Error number one was trying to "squeeze in a quick flight", when I really didn't have time for it. That led to error two, inadequate planning. I should have had a better backup plan to find the airport in the event of navigational problems. I should have drawn a diagram of the two airports and major roads, rivers, etc. nearby to help identify the correct airport when I got to Houston. A related mistake which I failed to mention in last night's post was that when I loaded the simulator, I neglected to check my controls and therefore failed to notice that the throttle was full forward. Either I had left it that way or my youngest son had been playing with the controls again. As a result, when the simulator finished loading, and while I was up turning off lights, the plane immediately started to taxi and actually drove off into a field near the airport before I could stop it. I also forgot to close the cowl flaps which help cool the engine during takeoff and climb-out, leaving them open for a good thirty minutes after they should have been closed. Both of those mistakes would have been avoided if I had and used a checklist for each phase of flight.

When I got to Houston, error number three was just assuming that the first airport I saw was the correct airport. Sure, it appeared to be in the right position and from a distance, seemed to have the right layout, but I knew there were two airports close together so I should have made sure, even if that meant circling the area until I spotted both airports before requesting clearance to land.

Finally, error number four was allowing the series of mistakes already made to alter my landing procedures and attempting to land in an unfamiliar configuration, somehow thinking that would be safer. Flying with full flaps is like flying with a parachute hanging off your tail. It's hard to maintain your minimum stall speed without a little throttle to pull you through the air. I was used to landing with less flap and with the throttle on idle, so the combination of full flaps and idle throttle and not watching my airspeed close enough led to the stall and crash.

Before my next flight I'm going to obtain and/or make a set of checklists for pre-flight, cruising, pre-landing, etc. and actually use them. I'm going to spend as much time as I need to plan my flights, even if I run out of time to fly and have to put that off to the next day, I'm not going to be in such a rush to land that I don't take the time to verify the airport and runway and I'm not going to change my procedures or my plan mid-flight without completely thinking it through, even if that means circling the airport a few times before committing to the landing.

Lessons learned. January 27, 2010.

Houma to Lake Charles

After a full week of being too busy to fly I got back in the air today. It wasn't easy though. I worked out a flight plan from Houma to Galviston, Texas, but when I loaded up the sim with real-world weather and requested permission to taxi to the runway for takeoff, the tower denied the request!

That's not happened before, but the clouds were down to 600 feet, visibility was less than 2 miles, and IFR (instrument flight rules) were in effect. I'm not instrument rated and did not file an IFR flight plan, so I was grounded. Fortunately in the sim you can just click the weather option on the menu and change the weather to whatever you want. After exercising that god-like power, I was granted clearance and took off. Here I am climbing out over the city of Houma, Louisiana. You can just barely see the airport behind me to my right (left side of image):

I got lined up on my VOR's and headed west with the Gulf of Mexico off to my left. After a while, I looked over and noticed an oil rig off in the distance. I had looked for those on my last flight without finding one, so I had to check it out:
In the image above, I'm about 500 feet over the water, about to buzz the rig. My actual flyby (see below), probably dipped to about 300 feet and pretty close to the rig itself. Pretty neat:
Here's another shot, exterior view, of my flyby. Notice my shadow on the water:Anyway, that detour cost me a good half-hour, so before I could even get to the Texas border my allotted flying time for the day was running out and I was getting tired. I did notice one more oil rig off the coast about that time, but decided not to go any further for the day but to divert to Lake Charles Regional airport which is in western Louisiana. The airport was about 25 miles north of my flight path, so it only took me 10-15 minutes to get there and land:
The landing itself was pretty good, although right at the end I floated a bit (stopped descending while only 10-20 feet off the ground), and when I started dropping again my descent rate got a little faster than I'd prefer. No damage to the airplane, but not my smoothest touch-down.

Tomorrow I'm going to either continue to Galveston, or maybe just go straight to Houston from here. Either way it's about an hour flight.

Houma-Terrebonne

Today's flight was another for mostly sight-seeing. I took off from Louis Armstrong and flew back over New Orleans. You can see most of the city, including down-town and Lake Pontchartrain in the background:

About this time I had to pause the flight for a while. When I picked back up my father-in-law, who used to have a pilot's license, was visiting so he watched me fly for a while. We followed the Mississippi River south towards the gulf. Shortly before its end, we turned to the right and headed along the coastline, first over Grande Isle, Louisiana:
Part of my reason for flying down to the gulf was to see if FSX modeled the many off-shore oil rigs in this area. Either it doesn't, or they don't show up with my display settings. Yet another FSX scenery disappointment.

There's also not much else to see down here, mostly rivers and swamps, classic bayou country:
After a while I turned northwest, planning to head up to Baton Rouge. My father-in-law needed to leave though, so I decided to land early so he could see that part of the flight. I started looking around and spotted a mid-sized airport ahead and off to the right a bit. Using the air traffic control function, I identified it as Houma-Terrebonne. Houma is the town just to the north and is the largest town in the Terrebonne Parrish.

When I requested clearance too land, I was several miles to the south of the airport and cruising at 5,000 feet. I had to line-up and loose a bunch of altitude pretty quick. I ended up trying a maneuver I had recently learned from a book, Microsoft Flight Simulator X for Real World Pilots. It's a good book for learning how to fly, whether just in FSX, or in real life, using FSX for additional practice and training.

The maneuver is called a slip, and is performed by banking the wings in one direction and then using the rudder in the other direction to compensate and keep from turning. As you bank, the wings lift is partly diverted in the direction of the bank to make you turn. The rudder then cancels the turn so the net effect is to keep flying straight, but with less lift from the wings. You thereby increase your rate of descent but without gaining airspeed the way you would if you just pointed the nose at the ground and kept your wings level.

Anyway, the trick worked like a charm. I got my altitude bled off while simultaneously reducing air speed and made a text-book landing:
Good landings are always fun, but are especially sweet when your father-in-law, who used to be a pilot, happens to be watching.

Anyway, not sure if I'm going to fly from here up to Baton Rouge or not. Maybe I'll just leave from here and head straight to Texas, maybe Galveston to keep me near the coast. There's a bunch of oil rigs along that route (in the real world), so maybe I'll give FSX another chance to show me one. I may even crank up the display settings to improve my odds.

New Orleans Flyover

Not much time for flying tonight but I decided to cross Lake Pontchartrain and check out New Orleans, then land at Louis Armstrong International Airport. I loaded up back in Slidel where I found it overcast and raining. From the ground it didn't look too bad, but once airborne it was obvious that visibility was going to be an issue. Here I am along the northern coast of the lake unable to see much of anything:

I flew west along the coast until I found the causeway that bisects the lake running north to south. At almost 24 miles, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest bridge over water anywhere in the world. There's a bridge in Bangkok that's longer, about 33 miles, but is mostly just an elevated roadway, with only part of its span being over water. Here I am following the causeway south across the lake. The weather seems to be clearing up a bit:

Once across the lake the skies turned blue with just a few clouds, so I climbed a little higher and turned back east towards the city. Here I am approaching downtown with the Super Dome at the right edge of the picture and the Mississippi river in the background:
Just past down-town I banked towards the north to check out the French Quarter. Just below me, the bullseye shaped park is Jackson Square, also known as Place de'Armes. You can find it and get more info in Google Earth at 29 57'26.89"N, 90 03'46.61"W:
After flying around a bit more and checking out the sights I turned back west towards the airport. I've been through New Orleans before in real life, but never really visited, so I wasn't really sure what to look for other than just anything interesting visible from the air.

The tower at Louis Armstrong International gave me clearance for a straight in approach so no landing pattern to fly. Had a little trouble staying lined up on the runway but otherwise a good landing. I'll use this as my starting point for my next flight, probably down to the Mississippi River delta and out over the gulf looking for oil rigs and such, then Maybe up to Baton Rouge before leaving MegaScenery Louisiana behind and heading to Texas.

Slidel on Autopilot

Took off from Meridian (Key Field) this afternoon with blue skies all around. As with the landing, I took off to the north and then had to turn around to head back south. In this shot, you can see the airport behind me and I-58 directly below. I pretty much followed the Interstate on my way to Slidel, Louisiana, but was also navigating by VOR.

Once airborne, I started messing around with the autopilot. Even on a small plane like this, the autopilot has a lot of features, but for this flight I just focused on one, the Heading Select function. With the autopilot engaged and the Heading Select button pushed in, the plane will steer towards a selected heading. Basically, on the heading indicator (compass which shows you which direction your nose is pointed), there's a little knob that you can twist to spin a heading marker around through all 360 degrees. Where-ever you set that marker, the autopilot will turn to that heading. Once on course, you can make adjustments just by turning the knob and changing the desired heading a degree or two left or right and the plane automatically adjusts to the new heading. Then, all you have to do is maintain altitude and airspeed and let the plane steer itself. Pretty awesome!

My direct flight plan would have kept me mostly in Mississippi, only entering Louisiana right at the tip of the toe, just above Slidel, but I've got MegaScenery for that part of the State and spotted the transition between that and regular scenery as I was flying. I naturally had to change course and check it out. A quick twist of the heading select knob and my plane steered westward:

As you may recall from Florida, the transition from regular boring monotonous scenery to photo-realistic MegaScenery is pretty dramatic.

Right at that corner of Louisiana, there's a river that snakes in from Mississippi. I think it's the Pearl River, but oddly enough, Google Earth doesn't label rivers, so it really takes more research than you'd think to try to identify one.

Anyway, I noticed this odd feature in a bend of the river and took a picture so I could get more info later. It's located at 34 51'57.49N, 98 46'35.47W in Google Earth. There's no info there, but looking up and down river at similar features that were named I deduced that this is an old bend in the river that got by-passed when the main channel jumped its banks and took a short-cut around it. There are a number of little horseshoe lakes like this up and down the river for the same reason.
Further south, I located the Slidel Airport (lower left), with Lake Pontchartrain in the background. The weather was still nice, but I was going to have a bit of a cross-wind on the landing. The runway orients north-south, so from this point I need to fly downwind to the west of the airport and then turn back north to land.
Here I am on final approach. With the new rudder pedals I can actually point my nose into the wind and fly at an angle. It's hard to tell in a still image, but the plane is actually moving straight towards the runway, even though the nose is pointed to the left, towards the hangers.

Landing was great and after my taxi to the parking area I discovered a hidden feature of the Corenado Skylane. If you turn the engine off, turn the batteries off, and put the parking brake on, the airplane graphic changes to include wheel chocks and a pitot tube cover (the little red flag handing under the wing). Pretty neat.

Hunstville to Meridian

Another day mostly snowed in here in Dalton. Actually the roads are pretty clear, but in Georgia if there's one flake of snow on the ground, you have to sit at home and do nothing. I think it's a state law or something.

Anyway, decided to do some flying this afternoon. I started back at Madison Executive, where I had made my snowy landing yesterday. When the simulator loaded up, I had beautiful blue skies and now sign of snow. I don't think FSX draws snow on the ground unless it's currently snowing, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I listened in on the weather broadcast at the airport, selected a runway for takeoff, and started my taxi. Oddly though, by the time I got out to the runway the weather had taken a dramatic turn for the worst. Instead of blue skies, it had started snowing, and the wind direction had changed almost 180 degrees. I was forced to change my takeoff runway designation and taxi down to take off from the other direction based on the new wind direction.

You can see there's now snow on the ground and falling from the sky, although the sky itself still shows a lot of blue oddly enough.

Takeoff was uneventful. Due to the wind, I took off heading north and then had to bank around to the southwest to pick up the VOR station I would be using to start my navigation.

Once I had flown over the station and picked up my radian heading south and a bit west, I started trying to tune in the VOR in Birmingham for the next leg of the flight. It's only about 70 nautical miles to the south, so I picked it up pretty quickly.

Here's another FSX oddity. As I left the snowstorm behind, I looked back at Huntsville and notice that the snowfall seemed to be confined to a rectangular area around the city. In this image, you can see the southwest corner of the snowy rectangle covering Huntsville.

I continued south and then southwest, picking up VOR stations along the way. I used a total of four to reach Meridian, although there was a fifth on my flight plan that I never could get tuned in for some reason. I even double checked and made sure I had written the frequency down correctly.

By the time I got to Meridian, just across the border in Mississippi, the skies were clear blue and the weather was great. I flew most of the trip at about 10,000 feet to try to stay above the clouds, but about 40 miles out I dropped down to 4500 feet and then down to about 2,000 feet as I approached the airport.

Here I am entering the landing pattern at Key Field (Meridian Airport). That's I-59 between me and the airport and snaking off to the south. The active runway is the one heading opposite my direction so I had to fly downwind, turn around, and come back north to land.

My landing pattern was flawless and my landing was pretty good. No stall alarms or other major problems, just a nice steady descent to the runway.

I did catch a bit of crosswind right before touchdown which made the wings wobble a bit, but I got her straightened out and touchdown just fine.

This was about a 200 nautical mile trip, so almost two hours of flight time. The Skylane handled like a dream, so I'm glad I switched back to it for the time being. I'll obviously need to work my way up to more difficulty and demanding aircraft in the future, but I don't think I'm there yet.

Snowing in Huntsville

At least according to Microsoft Flight Simulator it is. I decided to give up on the Mooney Bravo, switch back to the Skylane, and go ahead and start my long journey westward. First stop - Huntsville, Alabama.

Taking off from Dalton the weather looks great (better than it does looking out my window at least). No sign of any snow on the ground but we probably got less than an inch last night, so no big deal. In the picture above, you can see I-75 as it zig-zags through the gap in the ridge-line at Rocky Face.

As I crossed the larger mountains between Georgia and Alabama though it got cloudier and cloudier. My flight planned called for a 6,500 feet cruise altitude to clear all mountains comfortably, but that put me right in the clouds. Rather than climb (given that I was nearing my destination), I decided that once I was over the worst of the mountains, I'd dropped down to about 5,000 feet and try to get below the clouds. As I did, I found that it was snowing down there.

Yikes! This was a VFR flight plan (visual flight rules), which requires better visibility than this. I don't even know how to fly IFR (instrument flight rules) yet so that's no help. Hopefully closer to the ground and closer to the airport it will clear up enough for me to land. Otherwise, I suppose I have enough fuel to make it out of the storm and find an alternate airport.

Forgetting about the hills to the east of Huntsville, I continue to descend down to 2,500 feet at which point I looked down and saw the tops of trees not far below me, maybe 500 feet. I was flying over one of those ridges that's almost 2,000 feet above sea level. Good thing I didn't smack into a radio tower and instead was able to throttle up and climb back to 3,500 feet for more comfort but less visibility.

An IFR flight plan would have been nice, but at least I know VOR navigation. That got me to the airport (Madison Executive), where visibility was about 2-miles, not great but good enough to land. You can just barely see the runway and landing lights in the image above, at my 11:00 position. Or maybe you can't, but I could at full screen and with the light blinking.

Lining up would have been harder, but fortunately most of the roads in this area run north-south or east-west, not at angles like in Dalton, and I knew the runway ran straight north-south, so that helped with the turns.
On final approach I got too slow with full flaps deployed and set off the stall alarm. I was able to go full throttle for a few seconds though and hold the nose level or slightly downward to recover and continue my landing. The landing itself was a little choppy as you can see above, with my right rear landing gear touching down before the left. I made it down in one piece though, which is more than I can say for my last landing.

Anyway, here I am parked at Madison Executive Airport. Watching it snow.

Actual Death Experience in Chattanooga

Unlike my earlier near-death experience, I went all the way this time. I was doing more training flights with the Mooney, which I've decided I hate, and attempted to fly up to Chattanooga and land.

The weather wasn't bad, but the Mooney was bucking like a bronco, just pointing it's nose left-right, up-down, all over the place - just very hard to control. That's bad enough when you're trying to maintain level flight, but really a problem when you try to land.

I came in a little shallow but tried to make it over the buildings and houses short of the runway and failed. The Bravo was just misbehaving too badly for me to compensate given my experience level and I clipped a building just short of the runway - game over!

Unfortunately, I wasn't running the video recorder, and after a crash it kicks out and doesn't give you a chance to use replay, so there's not even a photo to commemorate my demise.

I think I'll switch back to the Skylane, or at least, my zombie will. It's not as fast but it flies like a comfortable old pair of shoes. (If shoes could fly, I mean).

Still Flying in 2010

It's been a busy few days but everyone had a good Christmas and New Years. I decided to get in a little more Mooney Bravo practice before having to go back to work tomorrow. Here I am at about 4,000 feet over Dalton:

I'm still not sure if I like this plane or not. I definitely like the idea of going 200 knots, especially if I'm going to take longer and longer trips, and I like the turning visibility you get with a low wing. That is, when you're banking left or right and you look in the direction of the bank, you can actually see what you're turning towards. With high-wing planes like the Skyhawk and Skylane, all you see in a bank is the bottom of the wing.

On the other hand, the high-wing is nice when you're trying to look at the ground. In the Mooney at least the pilot sits slight forward of the wing, so you can look left and down and see what's under you, but visibility below is clearly better in the Cessnas. What they really need to invent is a plane with the wing at eye level and with windows above and below it. Yeah, that's it!

Anyway, Tom had mentioned in his comment to my last post about some volcanic activity in Puerto Rico that was causing visibility issues for air traffic. That comment was a few days ago, but I decided to check it out anyway, loading up a quick flight from San Juan Int'l in my trusty Skylane with real world weather turned on:
Nothing to report on takeoff. A little cloudy but other wise skies look blue. After gaining some altitude though the air below me got decidedly hazy:
I doubt FSX has a volcano simulator built into it but this may be it's effort to simulate the visibility data it's getting from its weather service. Hard to tell.

Anyway, back to comparing the Mooney to the Cessna. The main problem is that the Mooney is significantly harder to fly and harder to land. I've not crashed yet, but I've not had a really good landing either. Every one of my 5 landings in the Mooney have been nail-biters. I may rethink the switch and keep flying the Skylane a bit longer until I get more experienced.