Nothing major, but the vacuum pump on the plane failed today in the middle of flight. More on that later.
Last night, the forecast for this morning looked good; nice and cool and clear, so I prepared my gear for a motorcycle trip. When I got up at 6:30 to check the weather, it wasn’t looking so good. Fog was in the area and visibility was half a mile. It should go away around 10am, though… great, right after my lesson. Aimee graciously agreed to take off work in the afternoon instead. The plane was still available and so was Gene, so I rescheduled for 1:30 to 3:30.
Since the high today wasn’t supposed to be much over 80 deg, I decided to still ride my motorcycle, and it turned out to be a nice ride. I didn’t leave early enough to get the preflight done before lesson time. When I arrived at the airport, Gene and another of his students were chatting about having just completed his first solo (a couple times around the pattern). We sat for a while and chatted about Gene’s incident in the 70’s when he ran out of fuel (which is always due to poor planning) and how he landed, at night, in a corn field covered with snow. Sounds like something out of a movie, but it happened, and he’s fine. He did mention that he thought he was going to have a heart attack the day after when he was thinking about what had happened the night before.
After a normal preflight, Gene mentioned that he was trying to talk to his soloing student using the radio from the plane we were about to fly but that he was having problems. We ran a few tests and it wasn’t working for him, but my headset worked fine. That pushed forward the inevitable time for me to start doing radio announcements. One of the most difficult things in aviation has nothing to do with flying the plane, but rather dealing with radio communications. It’s not such a big deal in an uncontrolled airport, though, since it’s really just an area “chat line” for letting people in the area know your location and intentions. The real work comes when we have to deal with air traffic control (ATC) and all the procedures that go along with a tower controlled airport; that’ll come later when we start flying to other airports.
After startup, I made my first radio announcement… “Sanford traffic, Cessna 89333 departing the south ramp taxiing to runway 3, Sanford”… or something like that. I get unnecessarily nervous when I have to do stuff like that and I don’t really know what I’m doing, but it went just fine. I’m sure after a while I won’t think twice about it.
Speaking of radio calls, while we were doing our run-up short of runway 3, an incoming IFR flight made a call that was a bit vague and difficult to understand. Gene thought he was 5 miles out on the base leg and I thought he was 5 miles south on the final. After finishing the run-up, another announcement came through that was clear; 2 miles out on the final. I could see him coming in at that point, so it was clear he was much closer than Gene thought from the previous call. “That’s an example of how not to make a call.”, he mentioned. “It just wasn’t clear enough.”
We waited for him to land and watched for him to clear the runway. Before he cleared the runway, he announced that he was clear of the runway…err ok. I made another call, “Sanford traffic, Cessna 89333 departing runway 3 to the west”. Runway 3 is pointed at a heading of 30 deg, which is not to the west, but the “to the west” means we intended to head west once we get in the air.
Takeoff went fine; better than last time, and one more radio call to turn left on the crosswind; “Sanford traffic, Cessna 89333 turning crosswind departing the pattern to the west, Sanford”. I left out the minor detail of which runway the crosswind was, but nobody inquired, so either they didn’t care or they heard my call a minute earlier that we used runway 3. That was my last call of the day. Gene found that his radio was working (perhaps the additional power from a running engine — or an instructor trick to force me to do radio work?), so he took over the rest of the radio calls for the day. Good… one less thing to worry about for the moment.
We headed west, as always, and worked on some turns and steep turns (45 deg.) just to get in a little more practice. The weather wasn’t so nice; lots of clouds above us, visibility was about 7 miles, which meant no pretty horizon, and the air was not smooth at all. That made for a rather challenging lesson. Throughout the whole lesson, I felt like I had much more trouble keeping it under control, but Gene said it was going fine.
Next, Gene demonstrated a power on stall and recovery. We started at level cruise speed (about 100 knots), then back on the throttle to slow down. Once we got down to about 60 knots, full throttle and pull back on the elevator… a lot — enough to keep the nose way high so that the plane would gradually slow down from 60 knots to 40-ish. It took a minute, but when done properly, the plane would suddenly lose lift and the nose would drop quickly. As soon as that happens, forward on the elevator to pickup speed, and rudder opposite the wing that dropped, if any, to prevent a spin. Once airspeed is back up to about 60-65 knots (normal climbing speed), quickly pull back to establish a climb. Stall recovery is all about getting the plane flying again with the least amount of altitude loss. It all happens really fast, too, so there’s not much time to think.
After a couple of those, I felt like I was having a lot of trouble keeping the heading. I would glance outside, then at the instruments, then outside. I felt like we were turning, but apparently we weren’t. Gene said it was fine, but that I had my head stuck inside the cockpit instead of looking outside. That’s a common student pilot mistake that I had avoided up until now. I wasn’t sure why I was so caught up on the instruments, but thinking back on it, I believe I know why. Read on…
We were done with stalls for the day, so we headed east and climbed to 2,500-ish feet to work more on side and forward slips. While we were climbing, we were turning to try to find areas away from the clouds. At one point, a flock of big birds flew off to our right and startled us both. It’s not pretty to hit a bird in a plane, but we didn’t, so no harm. I did, however, notice that the attitude indicator showed a 30 deg bank, so I shallowed up the turn (a climbing turn should be around 15-20 deg.) until I noticed we were level with the ground. It didn’t feel like 30 deg in the first place, but I’m not yet comfortable with what the angle looks like on the horizon, so I trusted the instrument. That was a mistake. I said to Gene, “Uhh… I’m pretty sure this isn’t a 30 deg. bank.” The attitude indicator was clearly acting up, so we just ignored it. Not really a problem in VFR.
I had trouble with the slips. I don’t know why, but I just could not do it as smoothly as I had before. I don’t know if it was the rough air (probably not so much, since Gene could demo it quite well), but I was having a lapse in coordination. Slips use opposite controls from what is normally used in coordinated flight, so perhaps that was part of it. Left this, right that, and I was just getting mixed up and getting too heavy on the rudder changes. I kept at it and eventually got better, but I definitely need some more time on that.
It was time to head back. We found ourselves directly north of the airport, so we headed south, parallel to the runway and to the right. We checked out the heading indicator and noticed it was off a bit. That’s normal after all the maneuvering we did; it’s adjustable to the compass, so I started to adjust it. Next thing I know, the indicator is spinning around aimlessly. It finally stopped on about 120 deg. We were heading about 210 deg. A quick glance at the suction gauge and it was not in the green; not even close. The vacuum pump was gone. The attitude indicator and the heading indicator were gone. Again, not really a big deal for VFR and since we were at the airport, even less of a problem.
Like before, I worked the pattern, except this time I flew the final all the way to the threshhold, to maybe 30 feet above the runway. I was surprised he let me take it that far and started to get nervous, so without hestation I suggested to Gene… “I think it’s your turn.” He agreed; took over, and the landing was smooth. It was a great approach, though, so I felt pretty good about it.
Thinking back on the instrument failure, it was probably failing while we were doing stalls, and the bogus readings were throwing my mind off. I suspect it was making me think I wasn’t holding my heading, when in fact I was. Yeah, that’s it. It could be.
That was all for the day. A good thing. I was getting much more tired than usual as all the little things were adding up to too much stress at once.
One side note: Motorcycles are heavy. The part of the kickstand that touches the ground is usually very small; mine is about 1/2 square inch. Asphalt is very soft when hot. Add those up and what you get is a kickstand that sinks into the asphalt and a motorcycle that may tip over! I’ve known that for a long time. When I went out to my bike, I noticed that someone had kindly put a steel plate under my kickstand (probably Ronney, an instructor that also rides his motorcycle to the airport). I knew right away what it was for, but I didn’t think it was hot enough when I arrived, so I didn’t bother. It didn’t sink too far, but it probably would have.
After all was done, it was a fun ride, a great lesson, and a fun ride back, but now I’m tired. I logged another 1.3 hours, which brings me to 8.0 total.