A First Xcountry - Lesson 15
Jul. 1st, 2006 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slipstreamsurfrA good day today. Today is a day of firsts for me. The flight training I had 20 years ago ended after my first solo. I never had a chance to go back and start on anything else. While I may not have soloed again, we did go ahead and start on something new.
We decided last week that we'd take a break from pounding on landings and I'd do my first cross country. We looked at the sectional and picked Possum Kingdom - F35 for our destination. My job last week was to read/learn all I could on cross country planning and give it a shot. We'd meet this morning, go over what I had, I'd learn what I could do better, and then go fly the trip.
F35 is about 69 miles west/northwest of GKY. I read the book, found a flight planning pdf online that I liked and printed them out and started trying to figure out my course. Along the way I installed AOPA's flight planner on the laptop and registered my DUATS account so that I could pull weather and have something to double check my work on paper against.
I did some reading on NDB's and VOR's and ended up talking with dfwpilot about them one evening. He cleared up several things for me on them. It made it much easier to get my head around them then. As this flight was to be pilotage, I limited my notes on them as being nearby and something for a secondary check of my location.
I got to the flight school this morning and I had my course drawn out, my initial true course, I knew what the magnetic variation of the area was, I knew where my checkpoints would be, I even had all the frequencies filled out that I thought I'd need. I hadn't done the wind correction angles because I was still pretty fuzzy on them. While I waited for Mischa to arrive I pulled out my book and E6B and played with them some more. Scratching more on a piece of paper I came up with what I thought was the right correction. I plugged everything together and came up with my magnetic heading. I compared it to what I had written down as my check numbers from the AOPA planner and I matched! There was no happier man than I at that moment. I think I see how it is suppose to work now.
Mischa arrives and we talk for a few before going to the classroom. We go over what I've done so far, he looks at my headings, my checkpoints and he says I've got a pretty good plan. We talked a bit about the Millsap VORTAC and how I had planned on using it for a backup on my navigation and he wasn't so sure it would work the way I had thought it would. We decided though that on the return flight, we'd actually do it via VOR navigation. So we worked out the two legs together, wrote in the headings and distances. I made sure I had the frequency marked (and it's there on the chart.) He led me through doing a fuel burn/check for the flight. We called for the weather briefing to check to see if there had been anything new since what I had printed out at 8 this morning. Nothing was in the offering. The flight is safe, the planning is solid, it's time to go!
We lift off from GKY at 11:45 and take our heading towards F35. We climb to 2500 feet and hit my first checkpoint. At this time he asks me when we left the ground at GKY and I hadn't looked at the clock to start the timing. Bad me. At Lake Arlington we can climb to 3500 feet so that we can overfly the joint navel reserve base airspace. I am slow to get the radios tuned and start talking to him. I mistakingly call him Carswell and am corrected. We overfly the base and stay on our course.
Here we leave the reserve base frequency and contact departure at 135.97. When he responds I tell him we are a few miles west of reserve base, at 3500 feet climbing to 4500 feet. I tell him that we requesting flight following to F35. He gave us a transponder code and told us he would call any traffic he saw for us. It sounds far less painless than it was for me. I was badly behind on things in the cockpit by this point. I really seem to have a lot of problems with the radio work. I need to study up on that. I kept up with things, but only just, and I was a little slow to respond to him on a few exchanges. Something to work on.
We hit the checkpoint at Lake Weatherford but neither of us are quite sure it's the right lake. It doesn't look the same on the sectional as it does in real life. I manage to figure out enough surrounding landmarks(including Mineral Wells airport! I saw it!!) and relate them to the sectional that we accept it as the checkpoint.
From there we fly to the dogleg in the road checkpoint. This is a bad checkpoint. There was enough other stuff around that we placed ourselves, plus the lake was right ahead. Mischa said he had F35 in sight, and for me to tell him when I had it. We went ahead and canceled flight following with the field in site while I kept looking for it. It only took me another minute or two before I saw it. I took the hint to look for something that aligned with their runway headings. (shakes head, now that seems obvious doesn't it.)
We were high, at 4500 feet, and field pattern is at 2000 feet. So it was time to drop like a rock and make a straight in approach for landing. There was nobody else in the pattern. I fumbled a bit on setting it up for losing lots of altitude, I first pulled the power back and pitched up to slow the plane, I think my thinking was that I didn't want to build up too much speed with a nose over. I figured out what I was doing wrong and pulled out the rest of the power and dropped the nose. We lost our altitude, kept the airspeed within limits and then dropped in flaps at the right time to bleed off the speed. I did a pretty good landing, braked and made a turn off at too high a speed. I need to make sure to bleed more speed off before turning on to the taxiways. I know better. I blame adrenaline from the drop like a rock approach. (shakes head)
We park the plane, get out to stretch our legs for a minute or two. Walk over to an open hanger and take a peak at the citabra there, a c170 beside it, and tucked in the other side of the hanger was an old B18 in military silver paint. Cool planes to see. We are running short on time so it's back to 501 and off for Millsap VOR.
As we climb to 5500 feet I dial the TO heading into the VOR and we intercept the radial and start to track in on it. We talk to departure control again and pick up flight following again. At this point Mischa pulls out a hood from the back and asks me to put it on. It's time for my introduction to the gauges. It was entertaining. Chasing wings level, nose up, nose down. What's my heading, let's get back to it. He explains the basic spoke scan as well as the inverted V scan. I start to get things to settle down. He also wants me to change the way I am holding the controls, more fingertip control from below the yoke. With those changes the tendency of me to overcontrol or develop a heavy wing goes away.
We hit the top of the VORTAC and we then dial in the new FROM heading to send us towards GKY. I intercept the radial and we start to track out from there. 15 miles later by the DME he lets me take off the hood. We drop to 2500 feet and are about to enter the reserve bases airspace, we ask our controller we've been talking to in flight following and he handles clearing us through their airspace for us. That was easy. (except for what to say when to say it for me. again, something I need to work on)
We talk some more about what Mischa thinks are some of my problems right now. I tend to not cancel my control inputs until after I cross whatever line I'm going for, wing down to scoot us across the runway to line up the center line, I won't pick up the wing to stop the scoot until I hit the center. When I roll into a bank, I am not rolling out ahead of when I need to stop. The plane doesn't react instantly. I need to trust that even if I go wings level 5 degree's before my turn needs to end and I'm in a 10 degree bank turn, it's going to still turn that extra 5 degrees before it stops.
I make an entry into the pattern at GKY. The c172 ahead of me seems to be flying an odd pattern. He seems to go way out before turning base, then final. In watching what he was doing I managed to get my own pattern really out of whack. I get the plane onto final and ride it down, I've got the cross wind correction in and we are tracking down the centerline. I'm taking his most recent advice and our discovery of my tendency to not expect the lag that exists to be there. Things are looking good, I flare at a good height, touch, then have a little too much speed and we float back off. It wasn't a bounce, at least it didn't feel like one, just a float, I kept working it, not letting it balloon and we touched again, one main, the second, the nose floats down. THEN I DROPPED OUT THE CROSSWIND CORRECTION. skiiert the tires sound as we get shoved sideways slightly. It was a really good landing, on the centerline, tracking nicely, nice crosswind work, nice low touchdown speed, nice recovery and I went and dropped out the crosswind correction once the tires all sat down firm.
I braked correctly this time and exited via the taxiway at the PROPER rate of speed and we cleaned up from the landing and headed to park it. Mischa said he was really happy with both of those landings. ;) if I hadn't dropped out the crosswind correction at the last moment, they would have been great.
We parked the plane and I cleaned up the cockpit for the next student (hi Kathy .. wave..) Mischa said that he felt it was a good first cross country. To not feel too bad about being behind the plane, the workload in the cockpit was far higher today than it has ever been before for me. I did an outstanding job on the hood work, and really seemed to get how the VOR's work (Thanks David, I owe you a Dr. Pepper.) He said that even with being behind a bit on things in the cockpit I kept a good awareness of where we were on the sectional, AND we made it to the airport, AND we made it on time. He suggests I think some more about the radio work. I really need to focus on that a bit. Also that I need to BELIEVE that I have to leave in the crosswind correction after the gear is planted.
All in all, it was a great lesson. I felt pretty beat up when it was over, because I didn't like feeling that far behind the plane as I was today. It's a natural progression though, as I learn things, new things are added. Eventually all the new things will settle down and my workflow/time will settle in. The next lesson will be a bit of air work, then back to some more patterns and landings.
Oh, and F35, is a really pretty area. I am looking forward to going back there again, perhaps with a bit more time available on the plane so we can fly around a bit more.
--2.0 dual
--2.0 of it xcountry
--0.5 of it hood
--2 landings that I can count ;)
We decided last week that we'd take a break from pounding on landings and I'd do my first cross country. We looked at the sectional and picked Possum Kingdom - F35 for our destination. My job last week was to read/learn all I could on cross country planning and give it a shot. We'd meet this morning, go over what I had, I'd learn what I could do better, and then go fly the trip.
F35 is about 69 miles west/northwest of GKY. I read the book, found a flight planning pdf online that I liked and printed them out and started trying to figure out my course. Along the way I installed AOPA's flight planner on the laptop and registered my DUATS account so that I could pull weather and have something to double check my work on paper against.
I did some reading on NDB's and VOR's and ended up talking with dfwpilot about them one evening. He cleared up several things for me on them. It made it much easier to get my head around them then. As this flight was to be pilotage, I limited my notes on them as being nearby and something for a secondary check of my location.
I got to the flight school this morning and I had my course drawn out, my initial true course, I knew what the magnetic variation of the area was, I knew where my checkpoints would be, I even had all the frequencies filled out that I thought I'd need. I hadn't done the wind correction angles because I was still pretty fuzzy on them. While I waited for Mischa to arrive I pulled out my book and E6B and played with them some more. Scratching more on a piece of paper I came up with what I thought was the right correction. I plugged everything together and came up with my magnetic heading. I compared it to what I had written down as my check numbers from the AOPA planner and I matched! There was no happier man than I at that moment. I think I see how it is suppose to work now.
Mischa arrives and we talk for a few before going to the classroom. We go over what I've done so far, he looks at my headings, my checkpoints and he says I've got a pretty good plan. We talked a bit about the Millsap VORTAC and how I had planned on using it for a backup on my navigation and he wasn't so sure it would work the way I had thought it would. We decided though that on the return flight, we'd actually do it via VOR navigation. So we worked out the two legs together, wrote in the headings and distances. I made sure I had the frequency marked (and it's there on the chart.) He led me through doing a fuel burn/check for the flight. We called for the weather briefing to check to see if there had been anything new since what I had printed out at 8 this morning. Nothing was in the offering. The flight is safe, the planning is solid, it's time to go!
We lift off from GKY at 11:45 and take our heading towards F35. We climb to 2500 feet and hit my first checkpoint. At this time he asks me when we left the ground at GKY and I hadn't looked at the clock to start the timing. Bad me. At Lake Arlington we can climb to 3500 feet so that we can overfly the joint navel reserve base airspace. I am slow to get the radios tuned and start talking to him. I mistakingly call him Carswell and am corrected. We overfly the base and stay on our course.
Here we leave the reserve base frequency and contact departure at 135.97. When he responds I tell him we are a few miles west of reserve base, at 3500 feet climbing to 4500 feet. I tell him that we requesting flight following to F35. He gave us a transponder code and told us he would call any traffic he saw for us. It sounds far less painless than it was for me. I was badly behind on things in the cockpit by this point. I really seem to have a lot of problems with the radio work. I need to study up on that. I kept up with things, but only just, and I was a little slow to respond to him on a few exchanges. Something to work on.
We hit the checkpoint at Lake Weatherford but neither of us are quite sure it's the right lake. It doesn't look the same on the sectional as it does in real life. I manage to figure out enough surrounding landmarks(including Mineral Wells airport! I saw it!!) and relate them to the sectional that we accept it as the checkpoint.
From there we fly to the dogleg in the road checkpoint. This is a bad checkpoint. There was enough other stuff around that we placed ourselves, plus the lake was right ahead. Mischa said he had F35 in sight, and for me to tell him when I had it. We went ahead and canceled flight following with the field in site while I kept looking for it. It only took me another minute or two before I saw it. I took the hint to look for something that aligned with their runway headings. (shakes head, now that seems obvious doesn't it.)
We were high, at 4500 feet, and field pattern is at 2000 feet. So it was time to drop like a rock and make a straight in approach for landing. There was nobody else in the pattern. I fumbled a bit on setting it up for losing lots of altitude, I first pulled the power back and pitched up to slow the plane, I think my thinking was that I didn't want to build up too much speed with a nose over. I figured out what I was doing wrong and pulled out the rest of the power and dropped the nose. We lost our altitude, kept the airspeed within limits and then dropped in flaps at the right time to bleed off the speed. I did a pretty good landing, braked and made a turn off at too high a speed. I need to make sure to bleed more speed off before turning on to the taxiways. I know better. I blame adrenaline from the drop like a rock approach. (shakes head)
We park the plane, get out to stretch our legs for a minute or two. Walk over to an open hanger and take a peak at the citabra there, a c170 beside it, and tucked in the other side of the hanger was an old B18 in military silver paint. Cool planes to see. We are running short on time so it's back to 501 and off for Millsap VOR.
As we climb to 5500 feet I dial the TO heading into the VOR and we intercept the radial and start to track in on it. We talk to departure control again and pick up flight following again. At this point Mischa pulls out a hood from the back and asks me to put it on. It's time for my introduction to the gauges. It was entertaining. Chasing wings level, nose up, nose down. What's my heading, let's get back to it. He explains the basic spoke scan as well as the inverted V scan. I start to get things to settle down. He also wants me to change the way I am holding the controls, more fingertip control from below the yoke. With those changes the tendency of me to overcontrol or develop a heavy wing goes away.
We hit the top of the VORTAC and we then dial in the new FROM heading to send us towards GKY. I intercept the radial and we start to track out from there. 15 miles later by the DME he lets me take off the hood. We drop to 2500 feet and are about to enter the reserve bases airspace, we ask our controller we've been talking to in flight following and he handles clearing us through their airspace for us. That was easy. (except for what to say when to say it for me. again, something I need to work on)
We talk some more about what Mischa thinks are some of my problems right now. I tend to not cancel my control inputs until after I cross whatever line I'm going for, wing down to scoot us across the runway to line up the center line, I won't pick up the wing to stop the scoot until I hit the center. When I roll into a bank, I am not rolling out ahead of when I need to stop. The plane doesn't react instantly. I need to trust that even if I go wings level 5 degree's before my turn needs to end and I'm in a 10 degree bank turn, it's going to still turn that extra 5 degrees before it stops.
I make an entry into the pattern at GKY. The c172 ahead of me seems to be flying an odd pattern. He seems to go way out before turning base, then final. In watching what he was doing I managed to get my own pattern really out of whack. I get the plane onto final and ride it down, I've got the cross wind correction in and we are tracking down the centerline. I'm taking his most recent advice and our discovery of my tendency to not expect the lag that exists to be there. Things are looking good, I flare at a good height, touch, then have a little too much speed and we float back off. It wasn't a bounce, at least it didn't feel like one, just a float, I kept working it, not letting it balloon and we touched again, one main, the second, the nose floats down. THEN I DROPPED OUT THE CROSSWIND CORRECTION. skiiert the tires sound as we get shoved sideways slightly. It was a really good landing, on the centerline, tracking nicely, nice crosswind work, nice low touchdown speed, nice recovery and I went and dropped out the crosswind correction once the tires all sat down firm.
I braked correctly this time and exited via the taxiway at the PROPER rate of speed and we cleaned up from the landing and headed to park it. Mischa said he was really happy with both of those landings. ;) if I hadn't dropped out the crosswind correction at the last moment, they would have been great.
We parked the plane and I cleaned up the cockpit for the next student (hi Kathy .. wave..) Mischa said that he felt it was a good first cross country. To not feel too bad about being behind the plane, the workload in the cockpit was far higher today than it has ever been before for me. I did an outstanding job on the hood work, and really seemed to get how the VOR's work (Thanks David, I owe you a Dr. Pepper.) He said that even with being behind a bit on things in the cockpit I kept a good awareness of where we were on the sectional, AND we made it to the airport, AND we made it on time. He suggests I think some more about the radio work. I really need to focus on that a bit. Also that I need to BELIEVE that I have to leave in the crosswind correction after the gear is planted.
All in all, it was a great lesson. I felt pretty beat up when it was over, because I didn't like feeling that far behind the plane as I was today. It's a natural progression though, as I learn things, new things are added. Eventually all the new things will settle down and my workflow/time will settle in. The next lesson will be a bit of air work, then back to some more patterns and landings.
Oh, and F35, is a really pretty area. I am looking forward to going back there again, perhaps with a bit more time available on the plane so we can fly around a bit more.
--2.0 dual
--2.0 of it xcountry
--0.5 of it hood
--2 landings that I can count ;)