Lesson 18: Second Cross CountryTuesday, 1/27/04 Deane and I have been trying to get my second cross country for over a week. Yesterday we canceled due to wind. This morning looked promising when I got up but now that we are at the airport the FSS briefer is telling me of IFR conditions north of Everett and south of Olympia. The weather looks great over Seattle Deane keeps looking at the chart. I call Port Angeles and find decent weather. Sequim is a little closer and still over the required 50 nm distance. I file a flight plan for there and back and we are off. The weather is actually pretty good. Some bands of clouds easily avoided. Deane has me talk to the tower through departure, then Flight Following to file a pilot report (PIREP) to let other pilots know the weather is not so bad. Then to Whidbey approach for Flight Watch. My sense of direction and position is not ready for how fast the plane travels. We get places faster than I'm calibrated for and pass them before I know it. I think that Deane saw the Sequim airport well before I did. He suggests looking for it relative to the town. Fortunately the coast line provides very distinctive landmarks. With out my realizing it we have passed Sequim and the airport is not all that far away. (to be fair, Deane had me playing with VOR settings as another way to find the airport so I my attention was inside the cockpit for a while.) I circle the airport. No other traffic in sight or on the CATF. Clouds at 1,000 ft. I set up for landing on runway 27. On final I appreciate just how narrow this runway is. I'm a little left of center line. I think most of my landings are left of center line for some reason. We take a brief break, then back in the air so we get home before any bad weather moves in. Once in the air I amend the flight plan to include a touch and go at Jefferson County (Port Townsend). The controller asks for my new ETA. I don't know and have to spend a little time calculating. (I had calculated the legs, and new return time, but not ETA). Another reminder to plan out as much as I can before I take off and communicate. From Jefferson County to Boeing field I communicate to Whidbey approach, Seattle Approach, then Boeing Tower. We are back by 12:30. If all I had to do was fly the airplane and find the airports this would be easy. Communicating to the different ATC services, knowing who to call, what frequency to use, how to address them, and just what information to provide is complex. I still have not heard a good explanation as to when to call the Seattle radar facility "Seattle Center", "Seattle Approach", or "Seattle Departure". Now I get to do a solo cross country. Lesson 19: Solo Cross CountrySaturday, 1/31/04 I plan to fly to Bellingham, Friday Harbor, Port Townsend, then back to Boeing field. There are more clouds than forecast around Boeing Field but things are supposed to improve through the day. Off from Boeing field I call up Seattle Radio (FSS) and open my flight plan. Then I try to contact Seattle Center for flight following but am not getting through. For one reason or another it has taken me long enough that I'm no longer in range. I quickly realize this and switch to Everett's frequency and get flight following. I cross lower Whidbey then enter the Whidbey NAS air space. Everything is going great, though still more clouds than I expected. There are low clouds to the west over the San Juans and I doubt that I'm going to be able to fly to Friday Harbor. I cancel flight following, get the Bellingham ATIS, contact the tower and get directed to right downwind for runway 16. As I pull into parking I see Andrew by the fence taking photos of me. I show him the plane I'm flying. He says it's surprisingly small. It is small. we can bairly sit shoulder to shoulder. We go into the terminal where they have a very nice pilot briefing room. I confirm that there are low clouds over Friday Harbor and am considering my options when my cell phone rings. It's Deane calling to tell me there are low clouds over Friday Harbor and I should consider other options. I decide to go south on the east side over Arlington and Harvey field. I call FSS to amend my flight plan. This confuses them because they have me as in the air. I guess you amend in the air and cancel and create new on the ground. Leaving Bellingham I call the tower "Boeing". They point it out, but in a friendly way. The ceilings are high just out of Bellingham. I listen to Flight Watch on the way down. I hear one long drawn out pilot report (PIREP) where the controller had to querry the pilot for each piece of weather information. I decide that I can do better and, using the form Deane provided, file a report that the controller calls "nearly perfect". I then as for the weather at Boeing field. Ceilings around 1500ft with light rain. At Arlington I have to descend to about 1500ft to stay clear of clouds. At Harvey I see the way to the south has limited visibility due to rain and low clouds. I planed to call Flight Watch from here to get an up date on the weather, but decide instead to land at Harvey where I'll have more time to explore the options. Deane says that something like 80% of accidents are due to weather. Elsewhere I hear that a common cause is pilots flying into bad weather. So, regardless of wether Harvey field is on my flight plan or I'm even endorced for landing there I decide that a precautionary landing is warnted for safety. The landing at Harvey field goes well. It's one of my smoother landing. When I call Deane and tell him where I am he's surprised and says that he's never had a student land somewhere with out going there with Deane first. This confuses me because I just landed at Bellingham and planned to go to Friday Harbor, both of which I had never been to before. Anyway, nice airport Harvey field. Deane suggests that I cross south of Paine field to the coast and fly that to Boeing field. I would choose to go north where I can skirt around the north side of the plateau that Paine sits on giving me more clearance between the clouds and the ground, but I take Deane's recomendation. Communication with the tower goes fine, but crossing to the coast I'm too close to the minimums for comfort. I don't feel uncomfortable with the flying, but I do feel uncomfortable near, at, or breaking the minimum clearance below clouds and above ground. Going north would have been better. I take this as a reminder to not substitude other people's advice, regardless of how expert it may be, for my own judgement. Not to say that I won't take advice, but I'll always blend it with my own assessments. Of course that is what I did in this case. I was unsure of my own assessments and chose Deane's experience advice. Going through the situation I saw that my assessment was good and I gain confidence in my assessments. Lesson 20: Local TourMonday, 2/2/04 I hoped to fly to Hoquiam but the weather is bad on the coast so I do a local tour instead. Practice landings at Bremmerton and Tacoma Narrows. At Bremmerton I make a low pass about 40' off the runway, practicing using the low wing technique to shift the plane from one side of the runway to the other. It is one thing to manouver a plane thousands of feet from anything and another to do it 40 ft from the ground. Back at Boeing I request a long landing (land near the far end of the runway so that I don't have to taxi as far). I'm very comfortable flying low over the runway and feel that I could practicly land this plane in the width of the runway. Still, I'm cautious and bring the plane down well from the end. I think that I may be entering a dangerous phase of my training. I'm feeling confident in my flying and landing skills. The past 20 landings or so have all gone very well. They are reasonably soft, not hurried, well centered, and stop well before the far end of the runway. But I suspect there are many things that can go wrong for which my skills are not sharp enough to respond to. I need to keep practicing in slowly increasing difficult landings. |
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