Marc's Public Blog - Flying

Wings History Aircraft Museum

2009-09-05T15:00:00Z

While driving back from Hollister, I notice a 'aircraft museum' sign on 101 close to where south county airport is, and I had a bit of spare time on my hands, so I figure "what the hell?".
I went to check it out, and it was indeed a nice little local museum with a few interesting pieces that aren't that easy to see elsewhere, if at all, and I specifically liked the local maps of airports here 50-60 years ago, before they got wiped by "progress" (well, not that I liked the fact that they are gone, but knowing how things were during simpler times, not so long ago).

Here are a few picts, along with my recommendation to go check it out if you're driving by. It's not pretentious or huge, but it's worth the time.

the bay area used to have lots of airports. Too bad almost all of them are gone

the former santa clara airport

I'd totally want to fly in that.... Not! :)

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My first glider flight

2009-09-05T15:00:00Z

My coworker Wolf nicely agreed to give me a "sled ride" in one of the gliders he flies out of Hollister. Unfortunately, we didn't get any lift at all, so it was only a half hour-ish flight, but still it was nice to see how gliders work and get a feel for one.
It was also a bit eery to fly pretty close to mountain tops without any power, in a position that would have been dire in a powered plane without engine power.

the tailwheel dolly is actually removed before flight

golf car tow to the runway

our tow plane, an old cropduster with a nice biker dude pilot :)

cabin room is limited :)

Hollister runways

tow plane unhooked and flying away

much closer to the rocks as I would have gone in a no engine aircraft :)

wolf was in the back, taking care of the important flying

nice garden maze by the runway

Even though we didn't get any lift whatsoever, it was quite an interesting experience. Thanks Wolf for taking me along. See more images for My first glider flight

Trike Flight with Birds of Paradise in Kauai

2009-09-02T15:00:00Z

These pictures are taken off my blog entry on our Hawaii trip for the flying blog. There is a bit of duplication here, sorry:

When we were in Kauai, I signed us up for a flight in 2 trikes, each of us flying one with a CFI.

This was our first time in a trike

Flying the trike was interesting, but from the back seat it was very tiring to extend your arms so far forward to control it. The other bummer was that for safety reasons, they did not allow us to take a camera due to the risk of it flying off into the prop in the back, which would be a problem if it were to happen.

Unfortunately, the flight was underwhelming because of high winds and too many clouds to see the ground (you can see on the map above that despite 1H of flight, we didn't get far). We had groundspeeds of barely 25kts (i.e. slower than our driving on the road there) and didn't get very good views outside of a few places, due to the cloud cover.

This could have been quite nice, but it turned out to be fairly disappointing unfortunately, especially when we were charged full price for their pictures and we only got a few good ones, the others were pointless or bad due to a fogged in lens :-
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Flight Around Hawaii's Big Island

2009-08-15T15:00:00Z

These pictures are taken off my blog entry on our Hawaii trip for the flying blog. There is a bit of duplication here, sorry:

We had planned on doing a flight around the island when we were on the Hilo side, but the weather was just so poor that I had cancelled it. Thankfully 3 days later on the Kona side things were looking a bit better, so instead of visiting around Kona further, we headed for the airport and did a flight around the island. It ended up being well worth it and even if visibility was marginal for sightseeing in my book (we never saw the mountains in the middle of the island), it was apparently about as good as it gets. Touring the Island in about 2H by plane gave us a much better view of things and allowed us to see the lava flow from the top (although even from there it was mostly just the smoke from the steam generated by lava flowing in the ocean). That said, we saw some other cool spots in Volcano NP that we wouldn't have seen from the road. Incidently I also got a good shot from the pool we were in for our Dolphin Encounter a few hours prior.

I ended up going with a CFI because it was both faster and cheaper than getting checked out first, and it was very useful to have someone who could take us to the cool spots to overfly and take the plane when I was just too busy with taking pictures (like when we flew several times around the current lava flow in the ocean).

It was an old and slow carburated C172, but eh, it flew :)

road across an older lava flow

a couple of craters

the 130 hwy stops where lava took over

lava flow falling in the ocean

actual hot lava seen through a hole

you can see the lava flow through 2 roads and a forest

Waipio Valley, with a shot of the road down we didn't take

can you say waterfalls?

the local grand canyon :)

Waikoloa Resorts

Dolphinquest in action

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Bay Tour with François

2009-08-09T15:00:00Z

Since François, one of my French relatives, came over for our wedding, and he had a pilot's license before he even had a driver's license, it made sense to go for a quick bay tour in a TB20.
I picked the TB20 because François had worked on and flown different kinds of french planes, including the TB10, so it felt like a good choice.

The bay tour was nice and uneventful, and enough of the fog had lifted that we were able to see most of SF and the Golden Gate.

Tata training for her driving class ;)

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Oshkosh/EAA Airventure 2009 Flight and Report

2009-07-28T15:00:00Z

Here's the complete track of our trip:

As you can see the flightpath went north somewhat to avoid restricted airspace, and then south for the way back to avoid thunderstorms over the rockies.

Flight From Palo Alto to Oshkosh

This year I picked the club's Mooney Acclaim and an experienced CFI. Unfortunately, the plane's payload is abysmal and between the two of us, we could only put 70 gallons of fuel instead of the full 102 gallons that would have allowed for a flight with a single refueling stop.
We left soon after 7 in light IMC conditions (typical morning overcast), and picked up some favourable winds which put us in KRKS with around 15 gallons to spare.

IFR Departure from Palo Alto

Lake Tahoe

Salt Lake City's Salt Lake

bis

Fuel stop #1

Weather wasn't bad, but we picked up our IFR flight plan for the second leg as there were still some clouds around our altitude. My forcast said that winds were less favourable at higher altitudes, so we stayed at 19,000ft. In hindsight I kind of regret not knowing what the true airspeed at FL250 was going to be. We only got around 200kts TAS at 30.5" MAP lean of peak.

Bad weather on the way, but south of us

We were watching the weather on the way, but thankfully the bad weather was moving south and allowed us to land at Appleton without problems and on schedule (before 20:00). I totally could have landed at Oshkosh proper, but I figured we'd try Appleton this time (a reliever airport) to have more leeway on when we could arrive and leave. In hindsight, the $50/1H-ish cab ride each way actually made it longer and more expensive than staying at Bassler FBO at Oshkosh proper, but eh, you can't always know.

Second fuel stop

Weather getting worse, even closing up behind us, but clear ahead

On the ground at Appleton, just north of Oshkosh

Just 45mn before sunset or so

Flying the Acclaim wasn't too hard, but I totally sucked at landing it, apparently because I didn't quite get the nose up picture during the flare which I thought to be the same than the SR22/TB20, but wasn't the same at all.

Planes on display

The first day, I visited the Airbus 380 despite the hellishly long line.

The terrafugia roadable airplane was moving along nicely

heavy load carrier, mostly used for carrying water and dropping it over fires

the border patrol UAV

Overflies

Although I missed the simulated army overflies because I'm a moron, there were still many to see

Airshows

Of course, Airventure still had its daily airshows

The Redbull Helicopter, still doing what helis aren't supposed to do

The Spaceship 1 Carrier

Flight back home

Flying home was not going to be a piece of cake due to bad weather forecast, but thankfully it passed through in the early morning and we were able to take off by 11 local time. However, this put us quite behind schedule.

my flyties came in handy for staying on the grass

ready for a flight back

bad weather just passed us, ready to go

first fuel stop was Winter airport

fuel was self serve, based on the honor system (you wrote your own fuel use and receipt)

at least we were still able to fly high enough to benefit from O2 (headwinds died down as we proceeded forward)

a bit on IFR, allowing me to log a few approaches

Evanston, a good place for our fuel stop and deciding how to proceed ahead

I was joking that if we walked to the end of the runway, we'd be in Utah. I was actually right :)

thunderstorms over the rockies were nasty, but we found a course around them

well, kinda, with some help from ATC

clouds at FL200 gave us traces of icing, but nothing too bad

nice sky pictures though.

250kts in the descent, woohoo! :)

home, sweet home

Flight times were 8.5H to fly there (air hobbs) and 9.5H to fly back with the headwinds and weather detours. Not as fast as the supposedly 220-240kt airplane should have delivered (POH quoted 220kts+ for our density altitude, which was apparently a sack of lies, by a whole 20kts), but still pretty good and a personal record for me :)
A big thanks to my trusty CFI, Don Styles, for salvaging my poor landings in the plane, and teaching me about dealing with weather, which was part of the point of this trip (we rarely have "weather" in california :) ).

More pictures

flight from PAO to ATW

flight from ATW back to PAO

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Flight Out Group Trip To Yellowstone, Glacier Park and Portland / Evergreen Museum

2009-06-24T15:00:00Z

Flight Out Group trip to Yellowstone, Glacier Park and Portland

One of the CFIs at our flight club, Dan Dyer, organizes occasional flights and small trips and this time it was at trip to Yellowstone and Glacier Park (with a stop around Portland on the way back to cut the trip up a little bit). It's a nice little treck, about 2000 miles/3300 km total, see the map at runwayfinder.

Here's the complete track of our trip, including the park visits and scenic flights:

Flight to West Yellowstone

Initially I had planned to do the flight by myself with Jennifer, but when prompted taking an experienced CFI along would be a good oportunity to fly lower in Canyons and learn a few things that I just wouldn't have done by myself where I just keep a bigger safety envelope due to limited experience closer to the peaks. This made it a good learning trip in addition to it being a great sightseeing trip.

We left a little bit later than the rest of the group so that I could have a chance to get enough sleep not to be useless as a pilot, although that still meant a before 06:00 wakeup, but we made up for the time with a non stop flight thanks to the 182's good payload capacity and full fuel takeoff with our limited weighs.

Trip Planning before departure

Jason Miller, keeping me out of trouble and teaching me new things

Runways there are simple, you just spray paint white corners on the ground :)

ILS approach to yellowstone with Voyager

KWYS, West Yellowstone

The flight to Yellowstone was nice and uneventful, even if it was a bit long. However, the weather wasn't ideal when we arrived, so we couldn't go overfly Yellowstone due to clouds and fairly high windws.

Yellowstone Park

As soon as we landed in Yellowstone, we got our rental car and went to the park to get a chance to see as much of it as possible before the day would be over. Jennifer had done a lot of research on the park and knew what to see in the time we had.

Old Faithful

Yellowstone Day 2: Mountain Flying and tour of the Park

Most of us went mountain flying the next morning. While had already gotten 2 mountain checkouts, I figured getting some more practise couldn't hurt. We flew in some canyons, did some practise short radius turns, got pushed around by the wind and turbulence a fair amount before we headed for a Yellowstone overflight.

Jason and Scott in their trusty 172SP

Ok, that wasn't part of our group :)

Grand Prismatic Spring

The old faithful settlement

Mammoth Hot Springs

Practise low radius Canyon turns

After a nice overflight of yellowstone, we went back to the ground and drove to the park to tour it the other way. Unfortunately, they had a stupid roadblock that only opened for 5mn every hour. We got there a couple minutes late and had to wait 30mn. Then, I made the critical mistake of letting the cars go so that we wouldn't get stuck in a long line of cars, but this turned out to be a mistake as they closed the road as soon as the continuous flow of cars stopped, just in front of us, and we got stuck another 30mn.
Oh well, we eventually got through and were able to do the loop the other way while stopping at all the relevant locations. We even ended up having just enough time to finish the loop the other way and get back to our hotel.

The 'Yellowstone Grand Canyon'

A lot of bisons in the park

but they sometimes drive on the wrong side of the road :)

bridge to south entrance

Day 3: Glacier National Park

The next morning, we tried to take off early to beat some brewing bad weather, lowering ceilings and incoming thunderstorms, and we did manage to get off on time towards better weather in Glacier National Park, which we reached by 11:00, in time for doing a nice visit of the park.

a little brewing bad weather

but we thankfully got out of it before it got bad

After a nice picnic by Lake McDonald, we went up to Logan Pass. By sheer luck, the Going to the Sun road had just opened a day earlier, and gave us a chance to reach the peak, along with some other people who had brought their skis and snowboards to ride the little bit of snow left at the top :)

Glacier Park's Lake McDonald

the long road up that had just opened

weeping wall

the first patch of snow left (more higher up)

those two were cute

People got excited to ski/board a few feet of glacier :)

It wasn't that much, really :)

Virginia Falls by Mary's Lake

We had enough time to reach the other side of the mountain range, and do some hiking by Mary's lake to Mary's and Virginia Falls, and then did the long drive back to our hotel.

Day 4: Glacier Park Overfly and Spruce Goose at the Air and Space Museum in Mc Minnville by Portland

The next morning we did an overfly of Glacier Park and headed for south of Portland to see Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose at the Air and Space Museum.
Flying Glacier Park at peak's height was impressive, even in nice weather and low winds.

KGPI / Glacier Park

KGPI

Nice Little Runway

Logan Pass

that's lower than I would fly :)

We then went south to fly Clearwater Canyon for a while, and took a more direct route to Portland.

Clearwater River Canyon

Those are not the missile silos you are looking for :)

Crossing traffic

The Minnville Air and Space Museum was actually better than what we were hoping for. Quite a collection of planes, and of course the one and only monster wooden plane.

the Spruce Goose

Damn, those aren't flaps, those are barn doors :)

With this you can become #1 on final if you were #5 :)

The Spruce Goose's rudder is bigger than most planes' wings

SR-71

We then still had enough time to fly back to Palo Alto, as we didn't have much to do in Portland that we could think of, and were happy with the prospect of a nice night at home. Mt Sashta was on the way, so we flew right by it on the way down.

Mt Sashta

its ski slopes are in the wrong place though :(

home, sweet home :)

While it was a bit short and packed compared to what there was to see and do, it was a great trip. Too bad we didn't have more time to hang out and socialize as a result.
Thanks to the people who helped organize it.

You can see pictures about:

Palo Alto to Yellowstone

Yellowstone Day 1

Overflight of Yellowstone

Yellowstone Day 2

Flight from Yellowstone to Glacier Park

Visit of Glacier Park

Overflight of Glacier Park

Flight from Glacier Park to Evergreen Museum

Visit of Evergreen Air and Space Museum/Spruce Goose

Flight back to Palo Alto

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Flight to Norcal TRACON

2009-06-12T15:00:00Z

A few pilots from my flight club went to Norcal TRACON to visit the radar facility and see the air controllers who work there. Unfortunately, I have 0 pictures from there as it is a fairly secured facility and all pictures are forbidden, but it was a nice, albeit short visit (we only got 10-15mn minutes to sit with controllers, which was the most interesting part, but I suppose we're kind of a distraction for them, no matter how incredibly good they are at multitasking).

The other remarkable portion of that flight was that I went in a Mooney Acclaim (fastest piston plane on the market).

The for hire Moffett Blimp advertising the UP movie

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Flight to Willows/Thunderhill and Back

2009-05-15T15:00:00Z

I did another quick flight to Willows for my thunderhill track day. Unfortunately, that morning was going to be IFR due to a solid overcast, which for an otherwise 50mn VFR flight added quite a bit of overhead. I could have flown the previous evening, but had already made arrangements otherwise. I also reasoned that there was no point for me to be IFR rated if I went out of my way to avoid even the softest IFR.

So there it went, I filed for willows, showed up at Palo Alto around 06:20 and had the plane ready by 06:40. When I taxied to the rununp area, I heard the tower folks on CTAF who nicely gave me a weather update even though the tower would be closed until 07:00.
I asked them if they would mind getting my IFR clearance, and they nicely agreed. When I was all done with my flight plan, it was 06:58, 2 minutes before the tower would officially open, so I just called CTAF to announce my takeoff and took off in the 600ft overcast. When I switched to norcal on 121.3, which is typically what I'd do after Palo Alto tower handed me over to them, norcal asked me "are you VFR or IFR?". I misunderstood that as whether I was on an VFR or IFR flight plan, not visual vs instrument actual conditions, so I said "IFR" for "IFR flight plan", except that this is right about when I entered the clouds.
Now, hopefully most IFR pilots would have figured out by then that I was supposed to be in contact with norcal before entering IFR for them to be ready for me, even if they knew I was about to enter the system since I had gotten my IFR clearance (but not release) from them. I could have gotten it in the air although staying VFR in the meantime would have been tough, or better, gotten it on the ground as a takeoff clearance, which is what I would have gotten if the tower had been opened. That said, I hadn't talked to the not yet open tower at all, I would have called norcal from the ground and gotten my clearance and release directly from them. This goes to show that you have to be careful when you get outside of the workflow you're used to.
Unfortunately, it's the mix of the two that caused my confusion, for a situation that I did learn 3 years ago, but never had to use. Thankfully there were no consequences and the norcal controller just gave me a friendly notice about my mistake in the procedure.

The flight to Willows was otherwise uneventful outside of a nordo cropduster that crossed my path on final probably just 30 feet over the ground (a fair distance from me), and the return flight was nice and brief thanks to a nice tailwind.

Fremont and Sunol

Mt Diablo in the background

Silicon Valley in the morning

Cropduster by Willows

San Francisco half fogged up

Southwest Landing at Oakland

Oakland Runway 29

Fedex landing at Oakland

The new paint job for the blimp for hire at Moffett

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10 Years Since My First Snow And Small Plane Flight

2009-03-27T15:00:00Z

Damn, time flies... It's been 10 years since my first flight to Mammoth where I first skied.
I ended up not picking up skiing, snowboarding is a lot better :) but I did pick up flying and flew my own butt back to Mammoth later.

Flying Lessons

2009-03-04T16:00:00Z

My flight club asked us what what had learned from our flying experiences and could share with other club members. This is what I wrote:

learning from different CFIs is not always a good idea since they don't know what you did or did not learn from their colleagues.

Case in point: when we got our first G1000 airplane, a while ago, I was not taught that the G1000 had to have its fuel level manually set (it's now more obvious and in the startup screens when you start the avionics).
As a result, I went on a flight where the G1000 was telling me I was running out of fuel when the analog gauges disagreed. It could have been the other way around where the G1000 could have thought I had more fuel than I really had on the analog gauges.
Lesson learned: go with the lowest fuel reading just in case, and beware of learning aircraft systems from multiple CFIs

At least on the mooney 231, there are 2 light switches that are not wired to the master switch. This means that they'll drain the battery down after you turn the masters off.

One of the switches is inconveniently located in the baggage compartment where you can easily knock it on while taking off your luggage at an airport without an AP or any kind of spare startup power.
(I got lucky, I got a jump from a car with an AP power cable lent to us by a turboprop that had just landed, although I lost several hours, got very lucky not to be stranded any longer, and it cost me a new battery for the plane).
Lesson learned: had it been my plane that light switch would have been glued in the off position.

learn to start a hot plane, or learn that some won't start even with hot start procedures without a clear risk of draining the battery (TB20 is a culprit there). I once landed at SMO and was told after I had shut down the plane that I couldn't park in transient because they were resurfacing (I had made calls to the FBO on their frequency before shutting down, but they went unanswered so I just shut down). I tried to restart the plane after cooling the fuel lines down by injecting fuel with 0 throttle, but even that trick did not do it. Eventually I told them I was sorry but that I could not move the plane and would not drain the battery trying.

(incidently their tow cart did not have the two hook that fit that plane, so they were not able to move it either and had to work around it). Plane started fine when I came back the next day.

Landed in Fernley, just south-east of Reno in March. We got hail on the track I was racing at and I was unable to make a safe flight back home due to IFR conditions, icing and high tops. I tried to time the weather, work with real time weather I had via XM but could not find a time window that felt safe. I ended up hitching a ride home with one of the drivers and it took 6 days before the weather was good enough to bring the plane back safely (SR22).

It is regrettable that WVFC (my club) doesn't have some kind of insurance that covers the cost of getting the plane back later since there is some financial pressure on the renter to try and bring the plane back him/herself, but I'll never regret not having attempted that flight, it was way too risky.
I don't regret not making that flight any more than not making the flight where I attempted to get home from Visalia at night and where I lost all electrical on ground after starting the engine due to a stuck starter on July 3rd after having dropped the rental car keys in the lockbox. I knew I'd be screwed on the ground with no rental car, no cabs, and no one to fix the plane for at least 2 days but taking off just wasn't a good idea (I got lucky, a landing pilot gave me a ride to a hotel and flew us home to PAO the next morning).

I went to Shelter Cove (0Q5), and was on VFR flight following. I told the controller as I was lowering on the ocean side of the mountains and that if I lost him, I'd squawk VFR (something he would typically have done).

Once on the ground, some police/ranger came to meet me on the runway to make sure I was ok. The controller apparently didn't get my call or the calls I tried to get relayed from the ground from other planes I could hear while on the ground.
Aviate came first (it was a challenging landing which worked out fine, but required all my attention), and by the time I tried to communicate, it was too late, I was out of reach of the controller's radios. I guess next time, I'll talk to the controller earlier and just cancel flight following if there is a risk that I'll lose him.

Unfortunately with the current club setup, on 3 separate occasions, I showed up for an after hours flight and the logbook wasn't in the lockbox due to various mistakes when printing the schedule and putting the keys in the lockbox.

Luckily, each time I was eventually able to find a CFI who happened to come back to the club, had keys, and was able to get me the logbook.
What I learned: nothing really useful. Just be prepared that you may not get to where you were planning on going if the keys are missing, or your plane fails preflight and you have no way to get keys to another free plane.

Airliner Pictures

2009-03-02T16:00:00Z

After a quick chat with some fellow pilots, we were talking about pictures from airliners.
I have those from contrails:

A different one where you can see the new road that is supposed to go to the bridge that bypasses the hoover dam:

(I only knew to shoot this because I had my GPS and a waypoint there since I had flown to the exact same point in a C182 :) )

I also got lucky on this flight, pictures of the Sierras to Grand Canyon in the following pictures:

I also got these lucky shots of a 747-400:

Or those nice sunsets:

Bay Tour with Jennifer's Family

2008-11-29T16:00:00Z

Since Jennifer's parents were over, that was an excuse for another bay tour. No frills, same as usual, but still nice pictures

Windmill from Golden Gate Park

Half Moon Bay

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AOPA Expo San Jose

2008-11-07T16:00:00Z

AOPA expo coming to our backyard was just not something I could miss, so I spent a couple of days at the San Jose convention center to see the expo, listen to some talks (quite good), and went to SJC to see the static plane displays.

I specifically enjoyed the talk from John & Martha King about flight safety, giving their own experience of stupid things they did and how it could have cost their life, so that we don't make the same mistakes.
"experience is a tough teacher: she gives the test first, and if you survive, then you get the lesson"

nice little plane to get around

always a nice picture to have :)

Anyway, I'm not sure this was a show to come from around the world to see, but it was still quite a good show, and something not attend if you are somewhat local. See more images for AOPA Expo San Jose

Oshkosh/EAA Airventure 2008 Report

2008-08-04T14:51:00Z

First, you should likely look at my report from last year for more details on the conference as I'll only mention new things.
Just like last year, trying to see everything was of course not possible, but knowing what to expect gave me a better chance to manage my time and plan for all the talks I wanted to see. This year I was able to attend several talks from pioneers in aviation, pilots who flew the U2, the SR71, as well as talks on night flying, and thunderstorms, and legendary pilots like Bob Hoover ( see video of what he can do ), or how Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew Voyager, the first and only unrefueled flight around the world .

Slides from the talk on thunderstorms

Bob Hoover

Those talks were definitely worth it, and I'm quite happy to got to hear from pioneers in aviation before they're not around to tell their stories anymore.

For the rest, I went through all the expos in the hangars, spent some time with the nice folks from Seattle Avionics who've been hearing a lot from me on bug reports or feature improvements :) and I also went to check out the other moving map/flight planner/EFB solutions, and from what I saw, Voyager is still the winner (Vistanav of course has nice synthetic vision, but they were lacking on the flight planning and EFB sides last year, and didn't show up at Oshkosh this year from what I could see).
A few notable things I saw this year outside of the great airshows, and finally being able to see the F22 perform, were unexpected things like a working jetpack (with a projected flight time of 30mn) and the first prototype of the terrafugia flying car.

Frasca had a very convincing SR22 simulator

Some exhibit was using a corvette LS1 engine with a gear reduction ratio as a plane engine

Impressive little plane (the biggest cargo lifter)

How Virgin Galactic will take you to space for a mere $200,000

Trainer U2

The first terrafugia car/plane prototype (should drive and fly this year)

Yes, yes, a working jetpack from Martin (not for sale yet, still being tested)

F

20

2 :)

Nice planes brought by attendees in the warbird section

this guy was looked like he was barely able to take off :)

Rocket Racers

I have many more pictures, you can find them in the EAA Airventure 2008 pictures and videos ( especially the airshow )

Flight to Oshkosh and Back in Turbo SR22 G3 Perspective

2008-08-04T13:37:00Z

After my trip to Oshkosh last year, I wanted to go back this year, especially as I found an even better plane to fly in: a brand new Cirrus Turbo SR22 G3 perspective (i.e. with G1000 and synthetic vision).
The turbo gave us the option to fly at 25,000ft (FL250) while perspective fixed my long dislike of avidyne in what is otherwise a fairly good plane, by replacing the avionics with a nice G1000 with G700 autopilot and synthetic vision, which was the first time I got to fly the last 2.
It is pretty cool to know that I'm probably the first person to ever rent and fly a Cirrus Perspective for such a trip :)

My CFI Dave and I went to San Carlos airport to get the plane ready, and figure out how to connect our O2 masks to the plane's O2 system, adn by the time that was done, we headed out, IFR, around 11:00 and climbed to FL250.
Unfortunately, I soon found out that the plane's 12V supply did not actually work and that my fancy new EFB (samsung Q1U tablet running Seattle Avionics Voyager), was running out of batteries. Unfortunately, I had to turn it off until our first scheduled stop (KRWL) where I was able to recharge it a bit. Luckily, we got such a tailwind (20-30kts) that we easily made the fuelstop I had scheduled, so I didn't have to use my EFB to look up other options in flight.

A brand new 40h plane

FL250 required O2 masks

Once we were cruising at altitude, I gave my CFI control of the plane so that I was legally only a passenger, and I tried to use the nose canula for O2 instead of the mask. According to the oxymetre we were using, my O2 saturation was in the 90%+ range the entire time, and while it's not legal to be pilot in command with a canula at that altitude, it worked much better for me, especially compared to a mask where you lose O2 when you have to remove it to talk to ATC. From my research, and asking, canulas don't work as well for everyone at that altitude, which is why masks are required. That means I have to go with the less efficient solution and use the mask when I'm sole pilot in command.
Then, I tried to see what would happen if I didn't use oxygen at 25,000ft (8000 metres, or around the altitude at the top of everest), and I got intense tingling in my body first for the first minute, tried to plug my oxygen back in during the second minute, and passed out after that. My CFI who was also the pilot at the time then plugged me back in and I came back to in less than one minute. This was a good way to see how important supplemental oxygen is at that altitude, and how quickly you become incapacitated without it (I remember trying to plug my oxygen back in, but I never actually managed to do so on my own before passing out). This was the best way to see how little effective time of useful consciousness (TUC), you may have that high, and how important O2 and checking your oxymetre, are.

We got some interesting weather on the way

Nice Avionics shots

Our fuel stop also required an O2 fill

Now is a time to mention my two rants on the plane (I love just about everything else): with two 170lbs people in it, and a mere 80lbs of luggage, we were not even able to fill the tanks and had to settle for 86 gallons instead of 92 gallons. In other words, the payload is pretty poor with full fuel. While I had planned that we could actually do the whole trip with just one fuel stop, flying with 6 gallons missing made that a bit more dicy, and we had decided to cut the trip in two anyway since 10 hours of flying is a long stretch.
The second part is that it's pretty annoying how Cirrus couldn't get their doors right from the start. The old ones, you were supposed to close gently so as not to damage them, and the new ones have to be slammed shut pretty vigorously, to the point that I had just slammed mine a little after the first fuel stop, and we had to turn back after takeoff and land at KRWL again to shut my door properly because it wasn't secure.
Then, just to make things fun, as we climbed out the second time, we hit some icing on the way up, which thankfully we got out of quickly, and TKS was able to get rid of.
But the weather just got worse as we went more east, and we had to divert north and eventually land at KPIR, as the weather just wasn't good east of us.

Soon after takeoff, we hit some weather and got light icing while climbing to FL250. Thankfully we got out of it quickly and TKS took are of it

Weather got bad, we had to divert and go north. We even elected to land early at KPIR

The next morning, we finished the flight to Oshkosh, in time for half a day of show left.

Oshkosh, Finally!

Thankfully, the nice folks from Cirrus as Oshkosh were able to find someone who fixed the electrical problem on our plane, and allowed us to have 12V power on the way back home. Yeah!
For the flight home, I had initially planned to get out early Sunday morning and do a one day flight (timezones and daylight being on our side), but I figured out that by saturday noon I'd have seen what there was to see, so we were able to get out in time before they closed the runways around 14:30, and while we could have gone a bit further, our goal was to reach Rapid City and use the extra daylight to drive to the Mt Rushmore Monument.

Mississippi river

My Voyager EFB, finally working on the way back

We had a few hours to kill in Rapid City and used the time to go to Mt Rushmore

The next morning, I had a flight plan going a bit north, over Yellowstone, and flew by Jackson Hole, which my CFI recommended, and we saw portion of the national park, including Grand Téton :)

Grand Téton in Yellowstone

A nice demo of the synthetic vision showing the runway on an ILS approach

After a stop in Elko for fuel and lunch (no O2 because headwinds forced us to fly much lower, around 10,000ft which doesn't require oxygen. In return, we got a better view of what we were overflying), we finished the flight by shooting a quick approach at Stockton to check out the synthetic vision system (if you look at the picture above closely, you'll see the runway, aligned on the screen), and landed uneventfully at San Carlos.
The google maps track above shows the flight, but you can also download the GPX track of the flight .
Of course, I have plenty of other pictures. One good idea is to open the the map and you'll be able to click on the google maps links by the pictures in the library to see where they were taken, and open the picture links in a new window (right click, open link in new window). That way, by clicking on google maps link, you'll see where the picture was taken, on the SQL LVW PIR OSH flight and the OSH RAP EKO SQL flight .

Flight from Palo Alto to foggy Shelter Cove and back

2008-07-05T14:50:00Z

In order to save up to 10 hours of driving to Shelter Cove for our Lost Coast Trail hike, I looked into flying there.
The flight to Shelter Cove was going to be interesting. After checking the aviation maps, I confirmed that they had no weather reporting, and neither did anyone closeby outside of Arcata/KACV many miles North .
When preparing the flight, I knew from a few phone calls that the area was very frequently fogged in during the summer, and that my odds of landing were not that good. Checking weather at KACV seemed to confirm that even if they were far enough to not have to share the same overcast.
Eventually, I chose Garberville (O16) as my alternate because I found out after some phone calls that it was usually always VFR when Shelter Cove was IFR. Satellite Pictures confirmed that the clouds pretty much stopped at the mountains right after Shelter Cove.
Given that, and a guess of when Shelter Cove might not be under a thick cloud layer (i.e. around 18:30), we headed out from Palo Alto. From the beginning it didn't look good because San Francisco and the entire coast here was covered with clouds too.
When we arrived, it did look carpetted, but when I came down to have a look, I realized it was actually fog at 200ft, so I checked out the airport and as I flew over it, I could get glimpses of it between the fog pockets. I pretended to fly a GPS approach (fully in VFR from my altitude) into it from each side a couple of times, but the first two times, I just didn't have a good enough picture of the runway.
The 3rd time, things opened up and I was able to clearly see the runway numbers and was able to land. Soon after things closed up again and I was not even able to see the other side of the runway. It was indeed a close one and I'm happy we didn't have to use our alternate.

SFO was under that

Approaching Shelter Cove, we had a seemingly solid overcast plus fires

From here, it just didn't look like I'd be able to land

and yet...

Visibility was not good, but on my 3rd pass I was able to keep the runway numbers in view and land

Departure was IFR, but was trivial. I left around 16:30 and the cover was thick enough that I would never have been able to land.

Solid overcast on departure

Shelter Cove was just under that :)

The Bay Area was barely better

Here are the rest of the pictures from Palo Alto to Shelter Cove 0Q5

Passed 400 hours of flight

2008-07-04T15:00:00Z

My flying has slowed down a little bit, but 400H still...

Flight Hours: 409.8
Landings: 882
Night Landings: 79
High Perf Aircraft Hours: 208.7
Complex Aircraft: 74.8
Night hours: 27.7
Cross Country: 180.1

To fly, or not to fly: crossing the Sierras to and from Reno-Fernley

2008-05-23T23:59:00Z

Flying to Reno-Fernley went fine. I had been watching the weather since there would be chances of thunderstorms there, and the weather was overall cloudy. That aid, the ceiling was forecast to be broken around 8000ft MSL (4000 AGL) there, and it only showed mild precipitation here and virtually no winds over the Sierras (although with a cloud cover).
I figured I'd give it a shot head over there and see how things were. Since it wasn't overcast but just broken, I figured I wouldn't get stuck above high ceilings and crossing wouldn't be that bad.
Turned out to be right, there were some extended stratus like clouds, nothing convective looking and I was able to cross Tahoe without problems between a couple of cloud layers (avoiding precipitation). While the temperatures were definitely freezing at the 14,500ft I climbed to for a nice smooth ride between cloud layers.

It was a good time to use the Samsung Q1U I had just bought, with Seattle Avionics Voyager , my new Electronic Flight Book solution. It definitely has potential, but I ran into connectivity bugs, software bugs, and I'm still learning to use it. Nonetheless, when I get everything ironned out, and after a few missing features get added, it should be a very nice replacement for my Garmin 496.

Once on the other side, I was ready to shoot an ILS into Reno to get under the cloud layer, and then fly under the ceiling to Fernley. Turns out the broken ceiling was still half broken and not overcast, so I was able to get down with no problems and finish on to Fernley and land by the race track.
While I had the de-icing just in case, I never had to use it.

After a so so weekend at the Fernley raceway (due to weather), I was supposed to fly home, but the current and forecast weather were just horrible: widespread mountain obscuration, thunderstorms, and icing as low as 7000ft. Oh, and flying on top was not really an option as the tops were forecast to be over 20,000ft. It's kind of an ever changing 3D maze for which you don't have the map, and where the maze might close in front of you and behind you.
I kept looking at my weather displays and forecast to see if I could make it. I think I found a plan that could have worked, but with possibly changing weather, but quite frankly "could have worked" wasn't good enough.

this is an idea of what the weather looked like over the Sierras the previous evening

and the time of intended departure (red arrows shows the one spot of sun I was in (greyed out = clouds over the Sierras), and where I was supposed to go back to)

First, I was thinking about spending one more night in Fernley and just fly back the next day, but forecast for the following days weren't that good either, so I ended up cutting my losses and riding back with a fellow coworker who was also at the track and will pay the club to get the plane back when they can.
Just for fun, I played the "what if" game and pretended to be flying over Hwy 80, following the road under the clouds, and in some places it would have been really dicy as I would had to fly 100ft over the road, or fewer...
Needless to say that I'm happy to come back by car, although now I'm trying to get the plane back...
The other pictures ...

A weekend in Mammoth for spring skiing.

2008-04-18T00:31:00Z

Jennifer and I had only gotten a short stay in Mammoth when we were able to fly there for a half day 2 days ago. I had really wanted to go back since then, and in a faster plane this time. In a Cirrus SR22, it took 1.2h of flight time in each direction.
We flew there saturday morning, picked up the rental car in Mammoth, and were on the slopes by 10:30, in time for the icy snow to be nice corn snow.

my trusty copilot, at work :)

Hello Mammoth, we're landing and we'll be back in a minute

The snow coverage was still pretty good considering, although considering the warm temperatures, it's probably going to melt fast now.
I took Jennifer around all the lifts and the entire mountain over the two days we were there. As long as we stuck with the sun during the day, the snow was actually fairly decent.

The weather was so nice, that a bunch of college students crowded the mountain in bikinis and swimmers, even at 11,000ft (3000m), which was definitely fun to see. I don't even think they got too cold :)

For the first day, we ended up doing the side of the mountain on the side
of Canyon Lodge.

While the base lodge is a clusterfuck to park at (their parking lot is a joke, and you have to park down the street, quite a ways away), the main lodge itself was nice, and it had the famous Mammoth of course.

We ended up not parking by the main lodge, and by Mill's Café, which is midway on the mountain, and by the Stump Alley/Gold Rush Express lifts going on both sides of the mountain. When the sun allowed, we checked out the other side of the mountain and the back side for our second day.

More pictures of Mammoth Mountain
By sunday late afternoon, we had covered a combined 80 miles of terrain (120km) and used all the lifts that went to terrain (we skipped a few baby lifts).
I was pooped, so we drove back to the airport around 15:30, and had another 1.2h flight with a few nice views of Mammoth on the way home. We were back home after 2h45 from when we left Mammoth (which included rental car return, loading/unloading the plane, and driving to and from the airport), so it wasn't too bad considering, and definitely beat the otherwise 6.5h drive.
And if you'd like it, here's the GPS track of the two days in Mammoth .

More pictures of the flight to and from mammoth .

Bay Tour + Flight to Castle

2007-12-09T08:30:00Z

Michel and Xav met us at PAO for a quick flight north for a bay tour

(more photos of that bay tour )
We then turned around towards Castle Airport, former airforce base with one of the best outdoors display museums of war planes in the US.

See more photos of Castle

2007 Reno Air Races

2007-09-16T10:23:00Z

It was time for another Reno Air Races. This time I brought Jennifer with me, and we flew in the previous evening. It was an interesting flight for me, because it was my first night flight on a moon-less night, and over the Sierras. I took that flight seriously since I had to be very aware of where I was, and how high I was over the pointy bits. The garmin GPSes with terrain warning I had came in quite handy as a triple confirmation that I was well clear of the terrain (which was mostly an issue when I had crossed and had to get down in a hurry to make the runway, it would suck the clip a pointy bit on the way down).
We made it safe and sound in Reno in about 90mn from start to shutdown, and my friend Brian, came to pick us up for dinner.

The next morning, Brian took us to Reno Stead for the air show. In the morning, we first went to see the planes on display, and spent the rest of the day watching the planes racing, and a very impressive 9 plane formation from the Canadian Snowbirds. It was pretty cool when they flew in a maple leaf formation.
We were also relieved that there were no crashes that day (as opposed to the several mid air collisions and 3 fatalities earlier in that week)

Here's a link to the rest of the pictures or the reno air races, air show, and static displays , and another link to the upcoming Thunder Over Reno Movie

Oshkosh/EAA Airventure 2007 report

2007-07-28T14:18:00Z

One of the few things you're likely to notice when you get there, is the amount of planes parked everywhere. It's pretty amazing.

Then, you get through the main gate, and go look around at all the vendors and displays. If you're thorough, it can take 2-3 days (especially if you account for pretty much guaranteed times of bad weather where you'll be hiding in vendor tents).
Seeing the vendors in the big hangars was definitely useful, I learned about a nice Angle of Attack (or reserve lift) indicator which should be on all planes in my opinion, as well as saw the Vista Nav 3D synthetic vision device, and got to meet the nice folks from Seattle Avionics I had corresponded with many times.
I also learned in the process that Garmin were actually a bunch of bastards who managed to get near exclusive rights to all XM weather hardware, preventing innovation or competition among XM weather receivers for PC tablets, which is a damn shame considering that XM weather should be available to all due to the extra safety it brings to pilots. Anyway, I'm personally hoping for a combined PC tablet with solid state hard drive, a small XM weather receiver/GPS combo and vistanav + voyager on it. We're close, but not quite there yet.

The Xwind trainer is a great idea, I paid for a session and it was quite useful

What's also cool is some of the formation flights over the expo. Likely more planes than you'll have seen anywhere else.

There was so much to see and do. In 3.5 days, I only got to see a portion of it (and missed a few evening movies and talks due to being a bit too far and too tired to come back just for them). It was nice to be able to see and hear historic people like Chuck Yeager recounting his war stories and talking about how he broke the sound barrier.

Of course, a good portion of your day is likely to be taken by the airshow performances, some of which are quite good. Unfortunately, the F22 performance got cancelled two days in a row (the second day, due to a fatality during the air show unfortunately), so I never got to see them perform outside of their arrival from a distance. Seeing a couple of Harriers doing hovering up close was pretty ool though.

Outside of the main conference location, about a 15mn walk way, the air museum was nice to visit, and across from the museum, they were selling cheap 7mn heli rides above the whole place. Nice to get a bird's view if you were too busy flying the plane when you got in (as you should have been :) )

Before heading home, at the recommendation of Dave, my CFI, I got a real live briefing at a flight service station, probably something I won't get to do again in the future. It was nice to see one of the guys who picks up when you call WXBRIEF

I was a bit apprehensive about landing at Oshkosh, mostly due to some horror stories I heard about very long wait times to get out. I didn't quite figure it out, but on wednesday morning, I walked to the entrance instead of taking the bus (not very smart: 2.5miles/45mn), but I got to see a scary line of people waiting to get out:

Luckily, when we left on saturday morning around 09:00, they were sending planes out 2 at a time and we got out in less than 15mn.

I obviously have many many more pictures. You can following this link for the pictures of EAA/Oshkosh 2007 including the 10H flight from and to Oshkosh.
It was definitely worth attending and made for an interesting cross country flight.

Long cross country flight to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and back

2007-07-24T02:59:00Z

I hadn't been able to go to Oshkosh last year because it conflicted with OLS, which in turn conflicted with my Birthday. This year, I only had a double conflict (my BD), so I figured I'd give it a shot.
I used the flight to make more serious use of Seattle Avionics, my flight planning software, and it did a good job. My main problem was to have to print all those pages of airports I might stop at, or not, just because I couldn't use my laptop at altitude in the plane. I think I'll be getting a custom laptop/EFB with a solid state hard drive (i.e. Flash Ram) so that I can just use that in flight and not have to worry.

I was first hoping to rent a Mooney 231 for the flight so as to get a good cruising speed (190kts), but unfortunately, it was already rented, so I had to select another aircraft. I had to settle for a Cirrus SR22 :) (well, it was settle because it did cost a fair amount more and was somewhat slower. That said, we got slightly better avionics in return)

The trip was nice for my getting used to the plane, There is no better than a 22H/3200NM cross country to get used to a plane :) but it confirmed that I don't like Avydine avionics. They have too many quirks and just aren't well integrated. We had several bad behaviours from the STEC 55x autopilot (going left and right on an ILS without staying on centerline, or pitching wildly down), a total localizer heading failure on NAV 1 (Garmin 430) where it went on a completely incorrect centerline, and weird communication problems between the PFD, MFD, and Garmin 430s. Stuff that's just unacceptable for a $400k plane.
Apart from those issues, the plane itself flew well though, and we ended up averaging 160kts ground speed on the way there, and 170kts+ on the way back (yes, I know it's opposite from the typical prevailing winds), and I did the flight with one of my CFIs, both to learn from his experience in flying around or close to thunderstorms, as a copilot to help out if I got too tired, and because I wasn't fully checked out to solo in the SR22 yet.

Let's now look at the legs:

Flight from Palo Alto to Oshkosh

The flight was about 1900NM (3060km) in 10.9H of hobbs time and 3 legs. We left a bit after 09:30 and first stopped at Evanston, Wyoming to refuel. In hindsight, we had enough fuel to go a bit further and we should have because we almost got pinned in the airport by a thunderstorm. Luckily, it was only a big rain and thunderstorm cloud, and it blew over while we waited on the runway.
After that, we went to Sioux City and we had to traverse a line of thunderstorm sigmet to get there. Luckily, it was rather mild, and thanks to XM weather and looking out the window, we were able to find a reasonable hole in that line of thunderstorms to get through.
The next morning, we left for Oshkosh by first finding a hole in the low broken clouds at Sioux City, and we got to Oshkosh under lowering overcasts 'on the green dot' of runway 27 thanks to Dave's help feeding me the instructions on how to fly there while I was doing the flying.

Our plane at Palo Alto

I brought in a good bottle of Oxygen so that we could climb at higher altitudes (low fuel flow/high speed cruise at 12500 to 14500)

Departure at Palo Alto was almost IFR but we got out

Salt Lake City

Approaching Evanston, NV for landing

By the time it took to refuel, weather had caught up with us: thunderstorms with lightening on upwind. Luckily we were able to get out

I went through my first convective sigmet, a line of thunderstorms, that was exicting (even if they were mild)

Arrived in time at Sioux City (KSUX) before sunset and before the fuel tank ran dry :)

Flight to Oshkosh was medium to low-ish ceilings

Landing at KOSH on runway 27

The pictures from this flight are here

Return flight from Oshkosh to Palo Alto

The return flight was easier to do in a day since we had 2 hours additional in that day instead of two hours fewer (or a 4 hour differential).
I had planned the flight a bit more to the north to stop at Rapid City, South Dakota for refueling and a quick lunch, and then to fly by Mount Rushmore before flying north of Salt Lake city towards Elko, Nevada. We did a quick refuel in Elko and got to Palo Alto "soon" after that.
Turns out that by sheer luck, my alternate routing mostly kept us out of thunderstorms, which made the flight pretty uneventful.
We got home a bit quicker, but I still recorded 10.9H hobbs on the way back since I shot some approaches for each of the 3 landings, including an ILS approach into Moffett, which was a bit of a detour.

Waiting in line for takeoff (thankfully a short wait)

People were leaving let and right, and those were only the ones that had their transponders on (they were supposed to be left off for about 30NM)

Some light thunderstorms on the way back too

Crossing the Mississippi

Our lunch stop in rapid city, mixed with a few airliners

Mount Rushmore

There were some thunderstorms on the way, but by luck, my flight plan managed to skirt the edges of them without having to worry about them much

Salt Lake City seen from the North this time

A quick fuel stop in Elko, NV for fuel (KEKO)

The pictures from this flight are here

Conclusion

All in all, it took about 20H of flying (plus ground run time), 3800NM (7000km) of distance covered, nice landscapes along the way, and weather that was interesting enough to learn from, but never a thread to the flight.
It was definitely a nice experience, in addition to the time at EEA itself (see separate entry for that)

Recent Flying

2007-07-23T10:53:00Z

After some trouble with paperwork and getting the phase check to happen, I got checked out in the Mooney 231, my first turbo plane. I'm exited, it'll be the perfect plane to fly across the Sierras to Lonepine for our John Muir Trail hike.
The Mooney 231 is a very capable plane, but it does require some special handling (risks of overboost, and crappy flaps actuator). Yet, it can easily get to FL 240.

The rest of my time, I've been working on learning the Cirrus SR22. It took a while to learn the avionics and the specificities of the plane, but it is our most advanced plane up for rental right now, and it looked like a good choice for my upcoming flight to Oshkosh (the mooney 231 being already taken), so while I really don't like the avidyne avionics, it'll be useful for most destinations (and will get me there faster than the other planes I've been flying so far).

Last, but not least, I've been studying the flight to Oshkosh, some 1700 miles (about the same as SJC -> Chicago). I used Seatlle Avionics' Voyager to make a few routings and spit out some flight plans and plates. It's very good software for such uses, I just wish I had a laptop with a solid state drive to use it inside the plane to view my real time routing and approach plates if/as I need them

Flight to Tiger (N58) by Fernley in Nevada

2007-06-23T14:32:00Z

Since I had a track day close to Reno, I made plans to fly to the track instead of driving there (thanks to Samer from Tailored Relocation Services for trucking my car there).
The flight to Tiger was uneventful. I climbed a bit high above Tahoe due to winds past 25knots, which means more than 50knots over the mountain ridge, and possible downdrafts on the other side.
Anyway, we were high enough not to have to worry about any of this, and got over 200knots (240mph) of ground speed on the way down.
Landing was a bit tough due to a pretty mighty crosswind, but we got down ok.
Once on a ground, though, I had a hard time finding tiedowns, so I ended up shutting the plane down, and it's only later that the cab driver drove us around the airfield and we found one set of tiedowns.
The funny part comes in then; I was not able to restart the plane due to vapour lock, so we ended up using the cab to toe it to the tiedown spot :)

Lake Tahoe

Heavenly

Tiger Field and the Reno Fernley raceway

The best way to taxi a plane is a taxi tow :)

We got the plane back in the air thanks to a NASCAR 200amp peak charger/booster

Check out the VSI: almost 2000fpm sustained for a while at altitude, thanks to a nice updraft

Northstar ski resort, by truckee airport

On the way back, I was first a bit apprehensive due to the 20knot+ crosswindws that we had been getting the previous day, but in the end, we got lucky: the next day had almost no winds in the valley that the airport was in (at altitude, it was a different matter though).
Just to make things interesting, the plane's battery died when I tried to crank it. Luckily, I was able to get the semi private airport's owner's son over, and he very nicely helded us out with a nascar high amperage charger.
It wasn't meant for airplane use, so it didn't have the ground power receptacle, but after taking a couple of panesl apart in the plane, I was able to hook it up directly to the battery. Turns out that it didn't charge the battery at all, but it had enough amperge to allow for the plane to start and for us to get out of there (thanks Jeremy).
Once in the air, I went towards Reno to pick up some altitude before crossing the pointy bits: I was worrying about the headwinds, probably in combination with some downdrafts that gave us a resulting 90knots of ground speed in level flight instead of the normal 150knots. I was happy to have a powerful plane at that time. Despite the winds, in a few places, we picked up some nice updrafts of 2000ft per minute. This came in pretty handy because climbing was otherwise pretty excruciatingly slow.
And here's a link to see many other pictures of the flight, including Tahoe from the sky

Passed 300 hours of flight

2007-06-16T12:00:00Z

I just updated the latest page of my logbook, and passed 300 hours of flight. This is good as it opens me up to the remaining few planes that I couldn't yet rent (after WV adjusted the minimum hour requirements for some of their higher perf planes)

Flight Hours: 306.7
Landings: 699
Night Landings: 64
High Perf Aircraft Hours: 106.6
Complex Aircraft: 54.2
Night hours: 21.5
Cross Country: 101.3

Mooney 231, and welcome to class A (FL200)

2007-06-13T08:46:00Z

I spent 3 days learning and flying the Mooney 231 with a West Valley CFI who also happens to be a pilot for American Airlines (he gave me a few tips on flying to the midwest in overbooked planes and bad weather).
The mooney is an interesting plane as it uses a reasonably frugal engine but gets high performance out of it by adding a turbo and making the airframe very efficient. The Mooney is a so efficient as a result that you have to plan your descent and speed way early, or you'd come in too fast and too high and miss the airport (it does have speed brakes that help with that though).
It is however a delicate airplane that requires specific handling, and it also requires a fair amount of runway for takeoff and landing (compared to a typical cessna)
On our second day of the checkout, we decided to do a high altitude checkout, and go visit class A for my first time (i.e. more than 18,000ft of pressure altitude for the US). I suggested we fly to Mammoth since I was curious to check out the snow levels and I was hoping to fly back there for an upcoming hiking trip.
Flying up took a while because the POH didn't make it very clear that you could climb for 30mn at full boost (40 inches) and my CFI suggested we stick to the more conservative 33 inches instead. I found out later that 40 inches all the way up is actually ok in that plane (too bad it was a few hours after the flight, and not before :) )
Anyway, it was nice for me to do my first flight in class A (we were both breathing O2 from my backup bottle which ended up being enough for the trip), but it was however uncomfortable for me since we climbed to FL200, the true (GPS) altitude turned out to be 21,000ft, and the density altitude was actually around 25,000ft: I apparently had some gas in my stomach due to some digestion issues, and that gas more than doubled in volume due to the pressure change, causing somewhat painful stomach spasms.
Things got better when we came down towards Mammoth (with a few minutes in IMC through the clouds that were over the mountain, and we picked up traces of ice).
The flight back was VFR and 30mn faster since we got a more direct route and didn't have to climb nearly that high :)

FL200 baby!

Crossing the Mammoth Mountains at 20,000ft makes it much easier to cross without worrying about the pointy bits :)

The trip back was VFR and we only climbed to 12,500ft, and due to the density al titude, it took us some time to climb high enough to clear the mountain

All in all, I like that plane. While I wish its autopilot had an altitude preselect, and while it's a bit cramped inside, it's a very capable plane which is frugal on fuel at the same time (and here's a link to the rest of the pictures to FL200 to KMMH )
We also scored a top speed of 205knots at altitude, which sure isn't too shabby :) (you can download the GPS track or google earth kml )

Nice Takeoff and Landing with minimag

2007-06-10T10:58:00Z

I did a few flights next to work, first in heavy gusts. Let's just say that I had a few bad landings, it was almost unflyable (15-20knots).
I did a later flight around 20:00 when the wind had died down, and things were much better then. One of my coworkers took a video for me, and I actually did a good job for a change :)

Flight to Santa Monica and Catalina

2007-05-30T00:39:00Z

I went to work there for a few days and flew to Santa Monica airport with a coworker and my boss. I wasn't able to rent the Trinidad TB20 I like to fly (cheap and fast), but I got a C182 G1000 instead, which while expensive got us there and back in a bit less than 2.5H each way.

Since I was feeling a bit weak/tired during the flight, I used the O2 bottle I had when we climbed at 12500ft, to stay focussed. This turned out to be a little hard because for some strange reason, I had a very bad need to go pee, even though I had gone right before the flight, and hadn't drunk much of anything at home. Before some of you ask, I had the pilot pee bags in my flight bag, but unless it was an absolute necessity (which it got close to in the end :), I wanted to avoid doing #1 in front of my manager in the right seat :)

This flight was nice for me as it was the first flight where I was able to use my IFR rating solo: LA was still mostly overcast at 2200ft when we arrived around 12:30.
The only little problem was when I messed up my last radio handoff where I got two frequency digits swapped and lost radio comm for a little while. I've always wondered if I'm slightly dyslexic sometimes or if it's just the occasional brainfart... Anyway LA Center got worried a bit when they lost me for a few minutes, and they were glad to have me back when I checked back in on the old frequency and got the correct frequency instead.
Flying IFR over LA can always be challenging when they give you a victor airway to find and join, and the map is full of them, but I eventually found it and got on it.
It was a soft IFR day, just the usual overcast over LA and I wasn't in the clouds long, but I shot the VOR/GPS alpha into Santa Monica, went through the layer and was nicely pointed at the runway, and managed a nice and soft uneventful landing even though I had to pee so badly by then that I could barely raise my legs to put them on the rudder pedals.
Once the plane was parked, I barely managed to make it out the plane to the FBO's restrooms, my kidneys were hurting by then, but all was well a few minutes later :)

A few days later, we flew to Catalina, which I wanted to do VFR because there's no reason to fly IFR if it's going to be a scenic flight, but we had to wait past 13:00 to have reasonable VFR conditions over overcast/smoky/foggy LA.
We headed for Catalina via the special VFR corridor over LAX, but we weren't able to circle the Island because one half of Catalina was still low IFR.
That said from what we were able to see of the Island on the flight out (after the obligatory Buffalo burger at the restaurant there), there were more obvious signs of the fire that raged over the Island a few weeks prior (although the Island's vegetation did look a bit sparse like I'm pretty sure it was before)

The flight back to SMO was uneventful, and so was the flight back to PAO, in nice VFR conditions each time. Oh, and Rob did a great job flying the plane on the way back (and he gets credit for the a few of the pictures)

The rest of the pictures are here

Nice view

2007-04-01T13:03:00Z

On the flight back from Dallas, the day after the worst weather ever, the next day, the weather was quite nice, and I noticed on my GPS (never mind the fact that AA seems not to want you to know where you are) that we were flying over the Grand Canyon. I also shot the Hoover Dam, where you can see new pillars having been built and the upcoming bridge due for some time 2008.

Hit some kind of bird while flying at night

2007-03-16T05:51:00Z

Current Music: Markus Schultz, Global DJ Broadcast 2006-03-23
Current Mood: Good

So, monday night, I went for a practice IFR flight, and while I was flying with a hood on (i.e. I could see nothing outside, the instructor was the safety pilot who could see, except it was dark), we apparently hit a bird 10mn before landing.
Neither of us realized and the plane flew fine, but now the club wants to charge me up to the full not at fault deductible for the accident, or $3500.
I am now disputing this because I think it's bullshit that they don't cover this on the intructor's policy when the instructor was responsible for looking outside, even if it was dark.
It's going to be a fun one, two pilot situations can be tricky when you try to determine fault...
(not that I blame the instructor, I don't think it ought to be for him to pay out of pocket either, the club should have insurance to cover cases like this, but it looks like they don't...)

Night IFR training

2007-02-02T11:57:00Z

After coming back from Australia, I had of course lost my local club currency for both Cessna C182 G1000 and down, and Trinidad TB20. Since I had promised to take my friend Markus for a bay tour in a TAA (technically advanced aircraft), I decided to kill a few birds with one stone, and regain my C182 currency, night currency, and keep my IFR currency while practising on a new plane.
We went to livermore in actual IFR (ceiling was around 2600ft), almost let the plane land itself on the ILS approach, and come back IFR to PAO on the GPS approach, and added another landing for my 3 night landings.
This was time well spent, and it was cool to fly over a layer of clouds lit by the moon, as well as see planes lined up at a distance for San Jose, enter and disappear into the sea of clouds as they were approaching for landing at SJC

Great Barrier Reef Flight, take 2

2007-01-23T07:46:00Z

Last year, I had planned on flying over the great barrier reef in a small rented plane, but unfortunately, we hit some bad weather as soon as we took off, and had to do an immediate U-Turn and land back at the Cairns airport.
This year, the weather looked quite suspect too, especially with the bad rain the previous day, but we got lucky: there was a ceiling of 1600ft, which was high enough for a flight over the ocean.
I ended up renting a C172S, along with a commercial pilot/CFI to be responsible for air traffic control and radio in general (I'm not licensed to fly an Australian plane), and flew with Jennifer towards Green Island and towards Port Douglas, before heading back to the Cairns airport.
The views of the reef were quite nice, and flying just 100 feet under the clouds in VFR conditions with no traffic separation from other traffic (including IFR) felt quite wrong, but that's apparently the Australian way from what I'm told.

You can look at more pictures of the flight from Cairns over the Great Barrier Reef

IFR flight/training

2006-11-23T13:58:00Z

After a 2-3 week break to rest from my IFR training, I scheduled my first training flight in a Trinidad TB20 in light IFR conditions.
The idea was to transition to a different plane, and learn the avionics. Unfortunately, the GPS screen didn't work that well so it was hard to learn from it. I'll likely need at least another time to get things right, but still, it was an interesting flight, except for the almost one hour spent on the ground in Santa Rosa while waiting for an IFR clearance to go back.

A few more pictures from the TB20 IFR flight .
The next day, I also got some training in a G1000 simulator to get used to the avionics, in preparation for C182/G1000 IFR training later.

I'm an instrument rated pilot

2006-11-05T22:28:00Z

After about 3 weeks of hard work, I finally got my instrument rating on my first take. It was unfortunately delayed by a couple of days due to IFR weather on my check ride day (yes, it's a bit ironic, I know, but it comes down to the fact that an examiner would rather not fly in real IFR conditions with a student who could make mistakes that could then be fatal).
Turns out that on the friday I was supposed to take my check ride on, I wasn't feeling that great anyway, due to a bad night, so while I felt adequately trained, I wasn't really looking forward to the flying portion that day anyway. The oral/ground portion was a breeze though, as I had studied more than enough for it :)
The check ride ended up happening on a sunday morning (which is unusal, but Mike Shiflett was nice enough to accommodate me, since my PIC instructor was due to fly back to Southern California that day), and it went well.
I think I was about as focussed as I have ever been, and flying was barely 1.4H (Localizer at hayward on backcourse for a hold, vectors back to localizer, down to minimums, vectors to Moffett ILS, ILS with GPS turned off (not that I cared, I didn't need it) down to minimums and missed approach/left turn by 101, ending with unusual attitudes (which were mild in my opinion), partial panel navigation and vectors back to PAO GPS 31.
I have to give it to Mike for having his check ride routing down to a science and the shortest you can do while still remaining legal. In the end, I made one major mistake, which was to not triple check the ever varying throttle position on the ILS approach, which ended with me doing the approach at over 100knots instead of 90knots. That said, I kept the needles where they were supposed to be for long enough, so it worked out anyway.
In the end, I just passed my Instrument Rating with 40H instrument time, 0.3H actual, and 9H ground trainer. It took about 10 days of reading the books and preparing for the test and another 10 days for the flight training.
If some of you are looking for a DPE and don't know, Mike Shiflett is not only an all around nice guy, but he will really try to give you the quickest and therefore most painless check ride while fulfilling the FAA requirements.

Yes, I got nine hours of flying on this, but it actually works if you're not going to see anything outside anyway

doh, I really wanted to take a picture with my instructor, and DPE, but that's all I got

Instrument Pilot Cross Country

2006-10-30T13:42:00Z

Since the IFR training includes a 250NM X-Country flight, I used the opportunity to combine this with a flight to Santa Monica to see Monster Massive 2006 in Los Angeles.
The flight was Palo Alto, Salinas (ILS), Paso Robles (GPS), Santa Monica (VOR/DME). It was just a long ass flight with an average groundspeed of 90 knots in a C172. My thoughts to go the patient and understanding passenger in the back of the plane :)
Landing in Santa Monica and parking between Citation Jets was kind of fun, and as for the flight itself, it was good training, but I really really wish the plane had had an autopilot. Flying by hand the entire way was quite tiresome.

A few more pictures of that cross countries here

Sport Pilot Planes

2006-10-26T12:07:00Z

West Valley Flying club had a sport pilot day, showcasing the new sport pilot planes. While I don't quite get the point of the sport pilot rating, the sport pilot planes are quite nice as cheap trainers.
What was interesting, was that these new planes were using Garmin 296 portable units as mounted panel units, because they're a lot better and the old panel units you'd find on existing planes.
Here are a few pictures of the said planes

IFR training...

2006-10-24T10:29:00Z

That's it, my class started today: 5-6H of ground time, and 2H of flying.
10 more days to go :)

(i.e. this means that I will be mostly unavailable for the next 2 weeks)

Passed my Instrument Written exam

2006-10-19T07:32:00Z

After 7 to 10 days of heavy studying, I took the test and passed it with 90%.
On one side, I got lucky for not getting too many tricky or very hard questions.
That said, it took that long because I just didn't cram for the test, I read the PIC instrument book twice, all the relevant FARs, Aviation weather, portions of AIM (I have to read the rest now), studied charts, and took an 8 week IFR ground school in 12 hours :)

The only question I got and that sucked was the one where you have to build an entire flight plan leg by leg, computing time, cross wind, fuel burn, and in both directions, just to answer a single question of how many minutes you can stay in the air before you have to turn around for fuel. The question wouldn't be that bad if the answers weren't spaced out by just 3 to 5mn, making it very easy to pick the wrong answer if you try to do a reasonable approximation instead of the whole 30 to 60mn of computing.
That's just silly in my opinion, and I told the FAA so much in my feedback. In the end, I just didn't feel like doing all this silly paper math in the day and age of electronic flight plans and computers (I've done it on paper more than once for my private, that was enough), and I just put answer at random.

The other problem is that it's frustrating that they don't tell you which specific questions you made errors on. They only give error codes which could refer to one to 20 or more questions.
I looked mine up in the Gleim book, and for at least 3 of them (one is a 1-1 mapping: H945), and I can't see how I made a mistake on them, especially on H945 aka 11-10 which had an answer of 139KCAS or (B). I know I computed and answered that, and my E6-B computer still has the correct answer dialed in. Yet, I still got the answer wrong according to their report :(
It might be that somehow I clicked on the wrong button, and really made a mistake on the 2 other questions I think I most likely got right too, but none of this would be happening if they were more transparent and gave you the exact questions you got wrong along with what answer you gave.
At least, it's not as bad as my private, where I could swear I knew almost every single question and answer, and somehow managed a 88% (in this case, I felt a bit more shaky on some stuff, despite much studying, and did better comparatively)

Anyway, despite all those little details, even if vexing, 90% is a passing grade. I'll be taking the rest of the day off, and go back to the books to finish up what I haven't read entirely (aviation weather services explained, and all of AIM)

IFR training with PIC

2006-10-12T14:09:00Z

I decided to get my instrument rating and go with Professional Instrument Courses . Most people are dubious of a 10 day course that can teach you everything that people learn in 6 months on average, and their pass rate is 93% instead of the average of 40%.
So far, I have spent about 4-5 days studying the books intensely, and one day with a CFI to review the ground info. I'm planning on taking the written test next week, a few days before the CFI from PIC flies over to Palo Alto and spends 10 days with me to train me.
While I'm not sure I'll get all the training I'd like to get in 10 days, if that's enough to pass the checkride, it'll be nice to get it out of the way and get my rating. I can then worry about doing additional training in other planes at my leisure (like G1000 training)

Online logbook

2006-10-12T14:02:00Z

In case, I ever lose my logbook, I've taken pictures of all its pages, and will keep doing so as they fill up, so that I have some kind of backup should I ever lose my logbook, or when I need to get info on flights or hours without having the logbook on hand

All the pages of my logbook are here

Red Bull Air Races, Fleet Week, Blue Angels

2006-10-08T13:44:00Z

Jennifer and I went to San Francisco for the Red Bull Air Races, and Feel Week Airshow. The plan was to park far out, and rollerblade to the Marina.
The Red Bull races were pretty impressive, the pilots had to negotiate a very tight course between inflated pylons. Not only that, but they also had to be crossing them with a 90 degree attitude, pulling up to 10Gs in the process.
You can see a video of the winner

The Airshow and the Blue Angels were quite nice too.

If you'd like more, see the rest of the pictures of the Red Bull Air Races and Fleet Week Airshow

Flight to Catalina (KAVX) and back

2006-09-28T14:06:00Z

I hadn't gone diving in a while, and Jennifer never got her diver's certification, so I thought it would be a good idea to realize another plan of mine, and fly from Palo Alto directly to Catalina Island (which beats flying commercial, going to the ferry terminal, and taking the ferry by several hours when you compare it to a 2-2.5H flight in a trinidad TB20)

This flight to Catalina was however a perfect justification for the IFR training that I had decided to get, but barely started: we ended up leaving about 2H late due to a persistent overcast in Palo Alto, but ultimately still got to Catalina faster than if we had flown commercial, and no worries about swiss army knifes, baggage at the carrousel, and a potential missed ferry connection :)
By 12:00, PAO had enough of a hole in the clouds that I was able to climb over the top on upwind to the crosswind turn, and was already over the top by the time I ended back on downwind and towards Moffett. The Garmin 496 ended up being quite useful the tops rose increasingly when going south, and I was able to get real time top information, and find a course change that allowed me to leave the bad tops that were over LA when I had climbed to 14,000 feet and the tops were still rising somewhat. I was also able to use my brand new emergency bottle of oxygen that fits in my flight bag.
While climbing higher, I often found myself where I could technically still see some distand ahead of me, and even see the ground somewhat (when looking under the plane, not ahead), but the horizon was gone, so it was a good excercise in soft IFR while still being in technically legal VFR conditions (I did however get out of itby climbing and finding the edge of the clouds on the Garmin, and headind away from there).
The arrival at Catalina was uneventful as it had been VFR all day, with unlimited ceilings, and I got there in time to see the DC-3 air taxi take off soon after I landed. Landing fees, overnight for 4 days, and a return shuttle for two was $75, which all in all was quite reasonable, especially with the brand new paved runway that had just been renovated.

the bad clouds were now on my left, looming over LA

The flight back was even more "interesting", as being October first, we were out of the June-September period of time where it is illegal for rain to occur, and sure enough, by the time we biked up to the airport, we were greeted by IFR conditions with fog to the ground.

This was not a great sign, and weather forecasts showed rain on the route and low ceilings in the Silicon Valley (less than 4000 feet), so we aborted the rest of the bike ride (which wasn't much fun in dense fog), and planned on leaving a bit earlier than planned (15:00 instead of 17:00), especially so as to ensure a landing during daylight (night + low clouds + mountains in VFR = no good).
On the way back the Garmin 496 with real time XM weather showed the heavier parts of rainstorm, which way it was heading, and showed terrain avoidance making navigation with restricted ceilings easier. The flight back was barely 2H with light rain, smooth air, and outside of a somewhat dicy pass by Salinas which had a TFR that blocked most of the useable route for VFR people who couldn't climb, nor hit the mountains on the east, I was able to fly at 7,500 feet the entire way back until Salinas where I had to duck under the cloud cover below 3000 feet, and was able to navigate safely between mountains back to San Jose and Palo Alto.
All in all, it wasn't a hard flight, but it could have been, and the Garmin 496 is what made me confident enough in knowing where I was heading, and that ahead was going to be ok (of course, that's what flightwatch is for, but they were quite busy).

with weather like this, it was nice to have cloud tops, areas with rain, and TFRs all on the same screen

The SNS TFR, I could have done without... but check out the ground speed :)

Flight in North American T-6

2006-09-25T09:03:00Z

My friend Pablo nicely offered for me to ride shotgun in his partially owned T-6, and we went for a flight in the East Bay. It's definitely an impressive plane, and it's cool to be able to open the canopy while in flight.
Pablo give me the stick for a little while, but I was a bit apprehensive piloting from the back, and a 600HP plane I didn't really know too well, while being not too awake due to the Techno party I had gone to the previous night, but it was still fun to do a steep turn and see how it handled while Pablo showed me a few manoeuvres (chandelles, lazy-8...), which I was happy to watch instead of having to initiate them :)
All in all, despite the fact that preflight and postflight take about as long as the flight itself, and that it sucks about as much oil as gas :), it was quite cool to ride in an authentic warbird
You can see the rest of the T-6G pictures , and download the GPS track of the flight

Passed 200H of flight

2006-09-22T17:10:00Z

I just updated the latest page of my logbook, and got:

Flight Hours: 216.2
Landings: 628
Night Landings: 44
High Perf Aircraft Hours: 62.7
Complex Aircraft: 27.3
Night hours: 12.0
Cross Country: 56.6

Now that I'm past the insurance required 200H, I've been enjoying flying the Trinidad TB-20. Nice and affordable plane.

Bought a Garmin 496

2006-09-18T14:15:00Z

I was reading some NTSB reports (i.e. plane accident reports), and read about yet another instance when a plane had been vectored into a mountain, or a plane heading right for a mountain in VFR but with quite poor visibility, never got a call from the air controller who got collision alerts on his radar, because the controller felt the pilot didn't need the help because he was flying VFR (that turned out to be incorrect, but his call cost several lifes).
Anyway, I came to the conclusion that since I had decided that I was going to get my instrument rating (IFR), I would not want to rely on just a few old instruments in the plane, and a controller who after all is human, and could make a fatal mistake one day. It did not seem to make sense to fly without visibility, at night, or in instrument conditions, without a GPS with terrain awareness (i.e. a map showing you terrain around you that is close to your altitude, or above you)

Given that, since I was going to get some new piece of handheld equipment, I decided to go all out and just get the best available today: A Garmin 496 with XM weather. I ordered it overnight on thursday and got it on friday in time for my saturday flight to Reno.
I've then spent most of my Sunday reading the manual and playing with it.
My impressions are:

It's really a full IFR GPS except that because Garmin can't get it certified, it says everywhere "not for use for IFR", but it seems much better than most IFR certified GPSes out there
It has high resolution terrain awareness, just what I wanted
XM weather is quite nice. Ok, it's a $50/month XM satellite radio/weather subscription, but I think that's well worth it if it can help you avoid a mountain wave, or "controlled flight into terrain" (that you couldn't otherwise see)
Real Time TFR information is even better. Nowadays, TFRs can pop up anywhere, even while you are in flight, and you are somehow responsible for avoiding all of them. Graphical TFR zones that show up on my moveable map screen just seem essential. Now, if you're sold on that, try up to date AIRMETs, and SIGMETs. That too, is essential in my opinion.
XM radio is a nice added touch. I didn't have XM radio at home, and now I do :)
It's also a very good car GPS, and even a marine GPS with sonar capability.
My first down point on it is that you can't use its internal memory to upload new maps. You have to buy some custom Garmin memory that is huge in size and price. They really should have used an existing format like CF or SD/MMC
My other problem with it is that the connectivity it's supposed to have with other Garmin equipment that's already in planes, is effectively useless: you need an aviation shop to do custom wiring work beforehand, which means that as a renter, you can't hope to use TIS (which would have been useful), or exchange data with other avionics inside the plane (A Garmin guy told me that the FAA prevents them from uploading a route or flightplan to an IFR GPS anyway, because their equipment isn't IFR certified, so it can't upload data to IFR equipment. Swell...)

In a nutshell, while it's not cheap, neither is renting a glass cockpit equipped aircraft, and flying with a Garmin 496 comes close, but you can do it in an older plane with antiquated avionics that you can then proceed to mostly ignore.

Unfortunately, the GPS doesn't have RAIM, but still has very good accuracy through tracking up to 12 satellites. I guess you just have to be careful to have a track on enough satellites + WAAS to know that you are getting reliable position data

Two essential features for me were real time TFR info, as well as terrain awareness when you can't see what's around you

Winds are both essential to know which altitude you'll get the best winds at, but also when you're thinking about crossing a mountain ridge

If you lose your instruments, a GPS derived backup might still come in handy

It's not a Garmin 1000 (for one it won't talk to your autopilot), but it gets close

Flight to the Reno Air Races

2006-09-17T14:10:00Z

I had planned to do a flight in the trinidad TB20 I just got checked out in, to
see how it behaved on a cross country, and check its typical fuel burn, and when I found out that that weekend happened to be the reno air races, it was a perfect excuse for a flight.
The flight there was barely 90mn thanks to the trinidad's superior speed and no head winds, and after taxing to a very full parking area, we got a quick cab ride to Reno Stead Airport.

I had never seen airplane races, and I had no idea that they do fly next to one another around pilons, although in most cases, they do spread out due to noticeable performance differences between the different planes.
It was interesting to then see the same thing with jet airplanes too ( see more pictures and videos than the two samples below

The intermissions, which were mini air shows, were quite entertaining too, especially the USAF Thunderbirds, which still do an impressive job. A good example was landing a tailwheel on top of a moving RV ( more airshow pictures and videos , and more thunderbird pictures and videos )

Separately from the airshow, and races, there were lots of planes on display, old, and new ones.
The old planes on display were a nice touch (although no rival for what you'd see at the typical moffett air show), and while in the end we only spent about 5H there, it was nice to have been able to j ust pop up, watch a good portion of it, and fly back home afterwards (with record speeds of 160 knots GS and better due to tailwinds)
Below are a few pictures from the airplane display picture library

Anyway, all the pictures and videos are here (thanks much to Warren for his Canon SLR pictures)

Flight to Burning Man

2006-09-05T14:40:00Z

I was excited this year because I went from being a passenger in a small plane headed to BRC, and back, and thinking it would be cool to get my pilot's license, to getting the said license, and managing to rent a plane from the fine folks at Shoreline Flying Club at Palo Alto Airport

The flight was about 1H50 each way, although you have to add pre-flight, tying down the plane, and in my case taping every orifice in the plane to make sure playa dust wouldn't get in (playa dust is not very kind to mechanical hardware, which is why we were all surprised to see some rich folks who showed up just for 6 hours, paid $2000 cash at the gate, and flew in in a Cessna Citation Jet. That was more rich tourist spectator behaviour than in Burning Man spirit...)
Anyway, here's the gps info of the flight, and the city and you can also find more pictures from the flight from KPAO to BRC ).

The airport went over 100 planes this year

welcome home

Virtually all orifices were closed, and the wheel bearings/grease protected

If all customs agents were like this, flying wouldn't be that bad

The lovely black rock travel agency

cleaning the playa dust out of the engines in this planes must suck

A big thank you goes to all the people who made the airport possible yet again, be it setting it up and tearing it down, or manning unicom, to advise incoming pilots. You can see more of the pictures from the airport and The city seen from the sky

While I spent most of my Burning Man time outside of the airport, and in the event (you can read about it here ), but I was still able to see the formation flight that happened (7 planes flying in the shape of the man), as shown in the picture below or video of the formation flight

On the way back, even if going to the airport is a bit of a trek (thanks so much again to Ranger Fixit for the ride there), and factoring in preflight time, as well as taking all the tape and plastic wrap off the plane, it wasn't as bad as the 1.5-2H it took people to get to the road.
I heard that on Monday, the wait time spiked to 4H. Egads! I guess despite the flight planning and pre/post-flight time, this is one of the times where flying makes sense.

All right, I guess there are many rows of cars trying to get onto one small road

The flight home was uneventful for us (a few pictures here ). Luckily I was more awake than my passengers :)

Zero-G Part Deux

2006-08-15T13:49:00Z

(title is only funny if you know the hot shots movie)

In a rare moment of scheduling luck, after having checked if their Las Vegas operation would be ready in time for my dad's visit (answer was no), Zero-G announced that they were doing another flight in San Jose, just during the 2 days that my dad would be visiting.
Long story short, it was another fun flight. A few pictures are below, and a shaky video here , and the rest of the pictures there

Grand Canyon Flight

2006-08-11T14:01:00Z

While I was in Vegas, the plan was to fly my dad and myself east, towards Hoover Dam. Unfortunately, checking the weather forecast every day showed low ceilings and on most days thunderstorms.
After delaying to the last possible day, without any weather improvements, I ended up flying on that last day, fully prepared with turning around eventually, as I knew we'd likely not make it to, and land at the Grand Canyon airport (KGCN).
Flying to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam was nice, and we got to see a good portion of the Grand Canyon, even if eventually we did have to turn around.
This is where the G1000 came in quite handy, as I was able to do real time checking of weather thanks to XM weather in the G1000. The one drawback is that the maps it had didn't show any of the no fly zones in the Grand Canyon area.

Anyway, even if I had to turn around, it was still a nice flight, and I was able to use the track saved by my backup handheld GPS to map the flight on google earth, and generate the nice pictures shown below.
You can look at the rest of the pictures of the flight to the Grand Canyon

You can also download the Garmin GDB GPS track , or the Google Earth KML file for viewing over satellite images

Flight to North Las Vegas

2006-08-07T14:42:00Z

Since I was going to meet my dad there, it felt like a great reason to fly there myself, and go visit the Grand Canyon while I was there.
I used the opportunity to try some new (for me) flight planning software: Voyager from Seattle Avionics

While I've been having a few problems with it, which their support folks are looking into, it looked kind of slick, and its main feature for me was to have a chart with restricted zones, MOAs, and allow me to plot a few waypoints and routes through that space. Similarly, I was planning on flying a couple of corridors in the grand canyon which aren't very wide and easy to fly without exact GPS coorrdinates. In this case, it's a lot easier to set all those waypoints on a computer beforehand, and upload them in a handheld GPS (Garmin Etrex Vista Cx in my case).
This was all nice and good, but unfortunately, my Garmin Etrex died soon after I landed in Vegas, so I was never able to use the navigation routes I planned for the Grand Canyon. For the rest of the flight, it didn't really matter because the charts in the G1000 that the C182T I was flying, had, were more than good enough for precise off-VOR flying.

Anyway, I selected North Las Vegas airport instead of the closer Mccarran which can sometimes be too busy and would have delayed both my takeoff and landing, possibly by hours (I've heard that some days they only handled IFR traffic, even in VFR conditions). Since I flew there on a sunday, I was able to cut through the MOAs, and restricted zones, and didn't even have to tip toe around the Trona corridor. In a C182T-G1000, the flight was still slightly over 3H due to 20 knot winds going the opposite way (and incidently, I also had winds against me on the way back).

I used the dead time during the flight to play with the G1000 avionics, setup waypoints on the map, and flight plans while listening to the XM radio :)

Below are the few of the pictures of flight from Palo Alto (KPAO) to North Las Vegas (KGVT)

The flight back, I did have to fly around the military and restricted zones as they were hot on a friday, and I don't feel too bad about it anyway because the shortcut area was having some mild precipitations, and 20 knot+ winds over the mountains, which would have made for a bumpy flight.
The entire flight was otherwise uneventful, and Garmin took care of doing pretty much all the flying :)

You can look at the few pictures of return flight from North Las Vegas (KGVT) to Palo Alto (KPAO)

Get-Home-A-Tis: Flying back from Visalia

2006-07-05T03:41:00Z

After a 3 day hike and dinner, we ended up at Visalia Airport on monday night (July 3rd) around 20:15. I went to preflight the plane after we had just dropped the rental car keys in the Enterprise lockbox.
Small problem: the motor would crank as soon as the master switch came on (key was not even in the dashboard).

I elected to start the engine, which went ok, and tried to see if by any chance it would disable the cranking.
I looked in the POH for the crank motor diagram and it doesn't show any fuse unfortunately (that's lame, you'd think that there would be a disable fuse for that)
The ammeter showed a charge, which is what I expected with the alternator running and I then came to guess that the crank motor had stopped, otherwise I would have gotten a discharge. I found out later that this assumption was incorrect and the ammeter didn't actually include the starter motor draw, so the alternator was likely charging the battery while the battery was discharging 10 times faster trying to keep the crank motor running (there as no good way to know that it was still actually running)
So, I continued preflight, but a short time later, the avionics go dead. Sure enough, the battery died and the crank motor must have still been running.

The engine was still running of course, and I'm now on a taxiway with no lights, no avionics, and thinking what will happen if I shut the engine down:

stuck in a deserted airport
no car since I just gave the keys back and there is no one from entreprise that could be called at this hour
even if I slept overnight, the next day, July 4th, didn't seem like a great day for getting a mechanic in a deserted place. Even enterprise where I dropped the keys would be closed too, so I couldn't drive home.
just to make matters better, I had a surgery scheduled 2 days later, and I really didn't want to miss it as I had been waiting for it for months

I also had with me:

one handheld GPS that was already setup to point towards PAO
2 handheld radios, one NAV capable
several battery powered lights

Against me:

I wasn't feeling my top
it was dark
no landing lights, nav lights, or flaps
no xpander for Charlie transition or ducking under Bravo towards PAO

Like any pilot, I have been trained in flapless landings and had just done a few a few days prior, and also had trained in light-less landings. So, if you add the additional handheld avionics I had (I was really only missing a transponder and navlights), it was very tempting to go instead of being stranded in BFE over July 4th and likely miss my surgery on the 5th.

The temptation to go home was strong, but in the end, just too many things were stacked up against me, and I especially did not like the fact that I had no engine gauges working (fuel / CHT / EGT / oil) to warn me of any separate problem that could have happened. I also really didn't like the idea of gliding to an emergency field at night with no lights and a handheld radio. And of course, doing that flight wouldn't have been legal anyway, so I taxied back to parking.

Luckily, at least I had a bunch of hardware and toys with me, starting with a new cell phone battery, which allowed me to call a coworker, who nicely agreed to come pick us up the next day. Turns out however that I didn't have to call on this favour as I had even more luck: a pilot had just landed and was tying down his plane. He was nice enough to drive us to the closest hotel, pick us up the next morning, and fly us to PAO (he was too tired to do it that night, which was fine with me).
I got to fly a portion of the flight in his 180hp V-tail Beech B35. Weird beast to say the least (3 separate fuel tanks, one fuel gauge, and no electric fuel pump), but lots of payload apparently (4 people plus 120lbs of luggage in the back)
A few pictures are here

The faulty C172XP is still sitting at Visalia, waiting for a mechanic to fly over, or being looked at by a local mechanic, but at this point, it's not my problem anymore :)
Too bad this 172XP seems to have a few quirks like this, because it flies a great 130-135kt, had good payload, and is only $112/h (quirks = broken fuel and CHT gauges during my last 2 flights in it, although they have been fixed)

Tandem Jump in Lodi

2006-06-28T04:59:00Z

Well, since my local flight club had a fly in event to a drop zone, I decided to give it a shot, and flew to Lodi (1O3) with Jen to do tandem jumps out of a perectly good plane.
The flight to Lodi was somewhat interesting leaving out of Palo Alto as the ceilings were quite low (about 500 feet or less in some places) over the bay, but luckily, it cleared up when I reached Fremont. The rest of the flight was smooth sailing...

The tandem jump was easy, the jumpmaster does all the work for you, and just takes you along for the ride. His rig has two chutes as usual, and the backup chute is linked to an altimeter that auto-deploys it should he fall unconscious or be unable to deploy it himself.
Of course, those are the new sport chutes, not the round one like the army used ages ago. So, you have an airfoil that you can steer, and you can even flare at ground level so that if you're good, you can stop the decent and just put your feet down with no problems.
I brought my wrist garmin forerunner GPS for the ride, and got some nice graphs out of it, when plugged into Google Earth (the first color is the plane ride, and the second one is the end of the plane ride, the jump, and rest of the way down after the parachute has deployed).
Interestingly enough, despite severe agrophobia, I was not really afraid. It's just good that I didn't have to stay on the edge of the plane, and decide to jump myself: the jumpmaster did that for me :)
On the way down, the wind in your face is pretty extreme (well duh!, I guess, but still), and once the shute is deployed, you can steer pretty easily, and do loops (which are basically steep turns)
Kudos go to the cameraman/photographer that jumped with us, and did an amazing job of capturing the entire thing while freefalling himself.
In a nutshell, good time was had by all :)
I then got back to PAO just in time for a lesson in a 177RG :)

Here are the rest of the pictures of my first jump in Lodi , and don't miss the nicer and bigger Google Earth pictures at the end of the gallery

You can also download the garmin gps track of the jump , or the Google Earth kml equivalent (I used google earth linux and the kml was generated with gpsbabel. No windows were harmed in the making of those shots thanks to help from google :)

Recent Flying / G1000 vs fuel / Complex Rating

2006-06-23T03:02:00Z

I've been doing some flying again recently, working on my complex checkout (plane with retractable landing gear), joined a new (second) club to have access to more planes and be able to take one of their planes to burning man in August.
I've also worked on my night flying and landings, got a refresher in G1000 avionics and C182 flying, and flew to Harris Ranch two nights ago for dinner, trying out a brand new C172/G1000.

Hopefully I should get my complex rating this weekend, and also get checked out in a Cessna 177RG (cardinal) at Shoreline Flying club, sometime next week (the plane I'm planning to take to BRC)

The flight back from Harris was interesting as the G1000 indicated 19 gallons remaining, but there were only about 4-5 left in the wings when I checked with my dipstick... Check the G1000 picture below.

Today, I also got my complex rating (that means that I'm now licensed to fly just about any small plane, including those with retractible gear and high performance engines) and I passed my checkout in a Cessna Cutlass (172RG), although I've also flown a Socatta Trinidad, and I'm currently getting checked out in a Cessna Cardinal (177RG)

Flight Hours: 177.5
Landings: 532
Night Landings: 39
High Perf Aircraft Hours: 34.3
Complex Aircraft Hours: 18.2
Night Hours: 11.5

Zero Gravity Fun

2006-05-08T09:48:00Z

I was part of the lucky few to be on the ZeroG plane (see the link for details).
They came to San Jose for 3 days and 5-6 flights, and I was on the 3rd flight on Saturday, which happens to also be the first time they've done 3 flights in a single day (there is a fair amount of reset time between flight, as they are required to do intensive engine checks and maintenance between each flight).

We got a little excitement before the flight, as someone forgot a driver's license and when we got there, just on time, we had to go back, as an ID was unfortunately a TSA requirement. I somehow managed to drive back from SJC to mid-sunnyvale and back in 22mn, and be back in time for the flight :)

The staff was pretty incredible, they are indeed fully committed to making everyone's experience as enjoyable as possible, and as they jokingly advertise, the flight had the most legroom available of any flight I've been on :)
In a nutshell, they take you in a modified cargo airplane, where they added padding so that you don't hurt yourself too much when you bounce off the walls ;) and after taking off and going to an area of airspace where the pilots can play, they oscillate between 24000 and 34000 feet with a 45 degree nose up pitch (which technically qualifies as acrobatic flight per FAA rules), and stop the plane, which makes it go up and down a parabola during which the plane falls and accelerates down at the speed of earth gravity, making you weightless.

This is not a new method, it's been used for astronaut training for many years, but it was only approved very recently for use by the public. It's kind of funny how it is categorized as a passenger airplane per FAA regulations, and therefore you need an ID to get in, as you get searched with a wand by a TSA official.

The flight itself was obviously very fun. After getting to the right area and altitude (and that part is a big loud because the plane, being a cargo plane, is missing its sound insulation, so I couldn't even hear the announcements from the captain), they started to do parabolas, first leaving you a little perceived gravity left (simulating marsian and lunar gravity when you can do double backflips easily :), and then 0 gravity where you can just launch yourself sideways, bounce left and right, and up and down off the walls, and drink floating water for about 25 seconds or so.
Needless to say that it was super cool, and it was over way too quickly for me, although it was about right for other passengers who started getting some signs of motion sickness (that's one of the reasons why they limit the number of parabolas)
Long story short, if I could go back tomorrow, I would :) Now I can't wait for the videos that they took of us, to see the results. In the meantime, credits go to David T for a few pictures in addition to mine, as well as the videos, which you can all find here

Back to my roots: reunited with Mammoth

2006-05-01T14:14:00Z

It might not have seemed like much but going to Mammoth again is something I had wanted to do for a long time now (7 years) because it was the very first time I had gone to a ski resort, and the first time I had flow in a small plane too.
I thought both were cool, and I picked up snowboarding soon thereafter, and flyiing a few years later (better late than never ;) )
This day was my first time doing a solo flight to Mammoth and going to the resort to enjoy the snow. My last and first time there, I spent my entire day on a bunny slope, and kicked myself for it later considering how much there was to see in the mountain :) (not that I had a choice, I had no idea how to ski or board).
Turns out I have some pictures from that day, and even found the exact date and ex-coworker pilot I went with back then. All the pictures from back then are here

Anyway, this time it was my turn to go on my own.
The flight to Mammoth was mostly uneventful, due to nice weather, and a triply redundant navigation route: VORs (Merced/El Nido/HYP, Vector 023 off Friant VOR with a shortcut by the GPS intersection CAINS), and two GPSes: the built in Apollo GX60 in the plane, and my hand held hiking Garmin Etrex Vista Cx (used for the maps shown below).
My path, unbeknownst to me, actually went right over the ski slopes of Mammoth (pictures #3 and #4 below), so it was nice to get a glimpse from the sky.
The landing was uneventful, except for a not very square base to final turn which overshot the runway a bit, as I had a hard time turning. It's only later that I realized that I had forgotten to turn off the quite primitive 1 axis autopilot (don't laugh, in that plane, it's not actually that obvious that it's on as opposed to just feeling some wind resistance)

the ski slopes are tracks are easier to see on the full size pictures in the picture library

Turns out the my Etrex Vista would make quite a decent GPS for flying: it has routing capabilities, built in altimeter and compass (with magnetic and true heading) to backup the GPS data, and as a GPS (with WAAS built in), it's actually a better GPS than most GPSes in older planes. Unfortunately, according to FAA regulations, Garmin apparently cannot provide airnav maps for that GPS, so while it has most airports, it's missing all airnav GPS intersections (like CAINS here), and of course navaids like VORs (El Nido/HYP and Friant/RIU in my flight).
It's kind of a shame that airnav data can't be put easily on that GPS, because in some ways, it would be a more useful GPS to use than the one in many planes (many don't even have a real/usable moving map screen), and it can be conveniently loaded with a route at home, as opposed to in flight (on the ground is hard since you may run out the battery if you haven't started the engine, and if you are running the engine, you pay $100-$150/h just to program a GPS :-/ )

Anyway, I ended up trying a route southbound from KPAO towards the SJC class charlie, and crossed over 101 going east as soon as Norcal cleared me for crossing the approach into SJC, and go eastbound towards Merced. Looking at the route logged by my GPS, it seems to confirm that going a bit too far north via Sunol pass is just easier and quicker than trying to take a short cut under Charlie to SJCC and then trying to shoot up to clear the mountains in front of you. I'll know that for next time.

The flight looked like this (going there was the bottom line, and coming back was the top line).

You can notice that the top line (return trip) takes a different path than the way there because we had some very interesting clouds on the way back. They were so wild and high that I could not clear them at 14,000 feet, and barely clear them on the alternate path I took (after checking the map to make sure that I would be nowhere close to any obscured mountain top, and indeed I had at least 5000 feet clearance).
I took full advantage of my allowance to fly 30mn at 14,000 feet and I'm apparently lucky to have a body that doesn't mind that altitude much, as I felt fine. My passenger however reported mild altitude sickness, but thankfully nothing serious as flying lower would have likely meant aborting the flight and going back to Mammoth. All the cloud pictures below were taken while I was at 14k feet, it was interesting to plot a course between them, as if they were high mountains. I also paid close attention to my VSI to make sure I wouldn't somehow get into a downdraft, but the air was quite smooth.

clouds were going higher than 14k feet, I had to find a path between them where I wouldn't end up IFR, while not ending up totally out of course

Due to where I ended up once I had cleared the clouds and the mountains, I was north enough that it made more sense to come back via Livermore and Sunol pass, so I just did that.
What was a bit weird was that I was having a hard time setting the plane down at PAO: I had bounces on all 3 landings, despite an approach speed of 65knots, and wind that didn't seem gusty. The first two times, I just elected to go around and come back for another try, and was able to set the plane down the 3rd time, but I wish I knew exactly why I got those landing bounces and if I could have done something to avoid them as in more than 450 landings, I've never had this problem. I asked one of my CFIs, but didn't get anything conclusive. Oh well, a mystery for the day, and what matters is that I went through procedure and did proper go arounds when warranted.

You can look at the rest of the pictures from the flight to Mammoth (KMMH) and download a mapsource compatible gdb GPS file of the flight and the snowboarding

Anyway, enough about the flight, here is some info on the resort itself:
Driving to Mammoth from the airport is about 15-20mn and costs around $28 each way, which is close to what you'd pay for a rental car, without the hassle of renting a car that is.
The resort itself seems to have 4 different lodges that you can start from, and the peak is at 11,053 feet. While the snow wasn't too great by end of April, it still made for decent snowboarding, and even if we only had 4H of boarding before the resort closed, it was still enough to see most of it.

Jen was a bit tired, but did ok considering, and it was a good day. I was keeping an eye on the clouds that were coming down as the day progressed, and even if they worried me a bit, I figured I'd find out in the air whether there would be a path home, or not, and they were, so it made for a good exercise.

You can look at the rest of the pictures from Mammoth resort

Passed 150 hours of flying / KLVK training

2006-04-21T14:01:00Z

I hadn't been flying much (make that at all) for a while since it was snowboarding season, and weather pretty much sucked every weekend (well, good for snowboarding, but bad for flying)
Today, I finally went for a practise/refresher flight and boy was I rusty... Actually my landings were pretty good, but the procedures, checklists and all were tough. If it weren't for the checklist, I would most likely have been screwed.
I went to livermore (KLVK) for multiple kinds of take offs and landings in a high performance plane (172XP), and things went mostly ok, I just could tell the practise was well needed.

Oh, the cool thing is that thanks to my handheld GPS, I can record the flight, and replay it later

Oh, and here are my flight stats to this day:
Flight Hours: 153.4
Landings: 470
High Perf Aircraft Hours: 25.8
Complex Aircraft Hours: 8.1
Night Hours: 8.1
Night Landings: 21

Flying vs Sleep

2006-03-12T14:06:00Z

Current Music: AvB - ASOT 239 - Above & Beyond - Can't Sleep (sweet tune)
Current Mood: Bah...

Since I wasn't going to Tahoe this weekend, I scheduled a couple of flights. On one side I had already lost my currency in Skylanes (Cessna 182s), so I scheduled another flight with an instructor to regain my currency.
On the other side, I did another flight in a Cutlass (Cessna 172RG, i.e. retractable gear) in order to continue my work towards a complex rating (high performance and retractable gear).
We had a nice crosswind in the afternoon, which was nice for practise, but it also showed that my limited amount of alertness due to generally bad sleep definitely messed with my ability to "be on the ball" and respond quickly and accurately to changing winds and being blown off the runway.
It's a bit frustrating because I know that another 100 hours of training wouldn't help as much as having dependable sleep... I guess that's also supposed to be good news at the same time if I can fix the former.

Flying weekend / Mammoth Flight

2006-02-13T13:45:00Z

Since I hadn't gone flying in a while, and the conditions looked bad for snowboarding, I used the weekend to keep up my flighing skills.
Saturday, I did a couple of different flights in an Cutlass (Cessna 172RG) to work towards my complex rating (variable pitch propeller and retractible gear), and those went reasonably all right considering that I was not super awake and sharp.
For sunday, I had decided to go to the mountains anyway, and did my reconnaissance flight to Mammoth lakes. Getting there can be tricky since you really have to worry about winds and the direction they're blowing (since they can induce tumbling downdrafts and smack your airplane down the face of the mountain faster than you can climb out of it)
Turns out sunday had the best weather you could possibly get: calm and reasonably cold (cold = better plane performance).
I ended up landing at Mariposa-Yosemite/O68/KMPI , then crossed to the other side of Mammoth and landed close to the ski resort ( KMMH ), checked out the airport, and then went north for the scenic Mono lake which I hadn't seen in a while ( Lee Vining O24 )

The flight itself ended up being fairly easy and the only time I was slightly nervous was when heading up the closed HWY 120 from Mono Lake while still climbing to 12500 feet at a respectable 3-400 ft/mn: this was the first time that I was nervous seeing peaks around me instead of under me. I'll take that as a healthy fear :)
All in all, I was very happy to have Einar, our CFI, in the plane, as I felt it was good to have a second opinion or someone making sure I wasn't making any bad decisions. Outside of my so-so performance with radio calls, things went all right.
I should also mention the backup photographer in the back seat who took great pictures when not sleeping on the job or not too jittery due to too much caffeine or overindulging with a 10x zoom :)
(actually those pictures below are quite nice and steady)

Mammoth airport

Lee Vining airport

Mono Lake

Those peaks were high :)

Beautiful Yosemite, courtesy of Ms 10x zoom :)

Back at PAO just in time for sunset

You can also look at the rest of the Mammoth Flight Pictures

Got My Pilot's license

2006-02-02T12:20:00Z

Current Music: Armin Van Buuren vs Ferry Corsten - Godskitchen @ The Point Theatre in Dublin
Current Mood: Good

I just received my official pilot's license card. Yay!

First Helicopter Ride (in Dunedin, NZ)

2006-01-30T02:43:00Z

After speaking at linux.conf.au, the organizers were nice enough to treat us to a helicopter ride around the city. Incidently, it was my first helicopter ride ever, and I was lucky enough to get shotgun.
I was actually impressed by the payload the helicopter could lift (5 people with fuel compared to 3 people with fuel for a cessna 172). Fuel consumption is a bit higher though, 22gph instead of around 10gph for a 172.
While it was a fun flight, I'm still not too sure how I feel about helicopter safety, those things just don't feel that safe to me, even with autorotation, but maybe I'm wrong.
A few pictures are below, and you can also look at the rest of the pictures of the helicopter ride over Dunedin

Flight in Dunedin, New Zealand

2006-01-28T13:57:00Z

One of the linux.conf.au organizers (conference I'm attending and where I'm speaking) happened to know the local flight club, and set ourselves up for a flight with a CFI there.
Unfortunately, someone had just wrecked their Cessna 172, so we took an ancient Cherokee 140E, which was all in all scary for me :)

I had never formally taken off in or landed a low wing airplane (different ground effect)
I didn't really know the fuel management procedures in detail (when to run with the fuel pump on and when not to, in addition to switching tanks every so often)
The stall indicator is a small light on the dashboard. That's useless and dangerous in my opinion (it should be a loud horn)
The elevator trim was a car window pull down lever, on the roof
There were no foot brakes, it was a hand lever (hard to get used to)
The flaps were different too: it was a hand brake lever (that was weird too)
The plane felt underpowered for 3 people and I didn't feel like we were clearing the trees by a whole lot
and the runway wasn't that long, and was grass (meaning more drag and more room required to takeoff, requiring a weird mix of short field and soft field takeoff and landing)

All this to say that I was very happy the CFI was there to help :)

and the rest of the pictures of that flight in Dunedin

Passenger Flight from Cairns to Cooktown over the Great Barrier Reef

2006-01-26T16:00:00Z

I was a passenger in that interesting turboprop plane. while going to a boat for a week long dive trip, we got a scenic flight to Cooktown. Unfortunately, the weather was very overcast with tops of 1500 feet or less in some places, but the pilots did a good job of trying to give us as much of a scenic flight as possible despite the iffy conditions (they flew some portions of the flight in IFR conditions). It was doubly interesting for me as I was in the first row of seats, right behind the pilots, and got to see the avionics up close, and chat with them, about how it's like to fly cool planes like theirs (a twin turboprop).

You can see other pictures I took from that plane of the great barrier reef

First flight in Australia (although short)

2006-01-25T10:07:00Z

Since I had a few hours to burn on Monday morning after boating back into Cairns, and before taking one of my 3 flights to reach Dunedin New Zealand. So, I thought I would drop by the general aviation area and do a quick flight with an instructor in a Cessna.
Turns out that it was indeed possible, and I found an instructor who was able to take me. After a few questions from me on how flying in Australia was different from flying in the US procedure-wise, we headed out for the great barrier reef as my plan was both to do a quick fun flight, and sightseeing.
Unfortunately, a few minutes after takeoff, it became quite clear that the weather was quickly turning for a worse, and a huge front of rain with overcast down to a few hundred feet was heading right for us

turning on a far away base, you can see the bad weather we were getting away from

and on a (very long) final, which was more a straight in, very low tops were also coming from the left (I was at just 1000ft)

mmmh, this runway looks short, I'm not sure I'm going to make it :)

The sectional looked a bit different to what I'm used to, interestingly enough, Australia has no Bravo classes, but that Charlie extends to 36 nautical miles

Ok, it was a very short flight, but it was still fun to have done it, including my first landing at an international airport with a runway that was 3.2km long :)
(although that doesn't beat my landings at Castle: Castle/Atwater was 11802ft (KMER) whereas Cairns International (YBCS/CNS) is 10488ft (3.2km))

The few other pictures from that flight are here

Do I still know how to fly?

2006-01-13T15:48:00Z

Since I had a half decent night, and only woke up at 06:45, I thought I would go for a quick refresher flight today.
The reasons were twofold:
1) I needed to do a few night landings for training, and more generally make sure I was still up to par
2) A coworker had been asking to go fly with me for a while, as she was interested in learning herself. We tried to go in december just before I left, but the flight club office left early, and we never go the keys to the plane I had scheduled

I was slighly worried to see how much I had retained after not flying for a month or so, but while I was happy to have the checklist to help jog my memory, in the end I wasn't too rusty. The only stupid thing I did was to ask for a left crosswind departure at Palo Alto, which you can't do for noise abbatement reasons (I knew that), and is called a "left dumbarton departure" instead.
Emily got a variety of take offs and landings (short and soft), as well as a couple of power off landings, one at night. I also checked if I could still do half decent steep turns, and did a stall. This all worked out all right. She was just a bit scared when I gave her the stick, since afterall she'd have to take it sooner or later if she was going to learn :)
I was actually surprised by how smooth my landings were, they actually felt better than usual :)

A car-less week in Santa Monica

2005-12-12T12:15:00Z

My goal was to fly to the Google Santa Monica office, and spend a week in LA without a car. Since the office was across the runway, I just took my skateboard and flew there. It was cool to have actually spent an entire week without renting a car in LA :)

Monday:
Weather was good, and despite a not very good night, I felt that it might be the first day of me not being sick anymore (which considering how much I pushed things the previous day, is nothing but amazing).

The flight went fine, and was scenic. I got in Santa Monica airport 2H20 later, but I never had to go through security, didn't have to check my luggage in, go back to the carousel, and hope it was there for me, I just tied the plane down, took my stuff and my skateboard, and skated to work, almost across the street (it was slightly more complicated than that as it was also across the runway)
My landing was a bit rought, I flared high even though I know better (while I was fine when I started the flight, I did get a bit tired by the end), and dropped a bit when the plane settled on the runway (no bounce though)

161 knots ground speed (185mph/300kph), sweet!

The rest of the pictures from that flight are here

Tuesday:
By then I was doing fine, maybe LA weather cured me :)
I just worked and gave the first one of my 3 talks.
Commute to work from the hotel was a 5mn skateboard ride. Sweet!

Wednesday:
That evening, I biked to Santa Monica promenade for some sightseeing and a couple of crèpes à Café crèpe, while watching some new episodes of Top Gear and Fifth Gear on my laptop

Thursday:
Before going to work to give my 3rd talk, I took the bike that one of my coworkers nicely lent me, and went biking the Santa Monica boardwalk end to end.
It was nice and quiet.

The pictures from that ride are here

Friday:
I used the morning time to do a flight to Santa Catalina. Since I heard that one needed a checkout to go there, and flying through LA and over LAX could be tricky if not done exactly right, I elected to go there with a local instructor.
I figured it was cheap insurance, and I don't regret it.
I flew right over the LAX runways, made it to Catalina, and had a buffalo burger at the restaurant by the airport, and did a few patterns there. It was interesting practising there due to the crosswind, downdraft on final, and holes in the runway :)

The rest of the pictures from that flight are here

Saturday:
Since I got invited for the Santa Monica Google christmas party, I had saturday to kill, so I figured I would go to Universal Studios again, since I hadn't gone in quite a while (about 8 years).
I found a coworker to go with, which came in handy since I didn't have a car, and we showed up there around 09:45, about 45mn after opening time, which wasn't too bad (I'm a being there a 09:00 sharp to take advantage of the whole park, guy, but it's about being a bit flexible).
Well, my resolve was going to be tested further, my friend forgot his pre-printed ticket in the car before walking to the park, so he had to go back to get it.
Since it had taken us a while to walk to the park, I knew it was going to take a while, but I figured I'll just let him go fetch the ticket while looking around the universal city boardwalk. I figured, no reason for me to trail him back to the car. Problem is that he had no idea where he had parked the car (as in what parking complex it was in), and he kind of neglected to tell me that. Long story short, another 45mn later we were in the park after he came back a long time after he left, telling me he was lost, and I took him back to were we were parked to fetch the ticket.
On one side, I was a bit peeved to have lost about 2H of park time by the time we got in because I decided to be social, but in the other hand it was a good excercise in testing my cool and putting things back in perspective. In the end, due to the park not being too crowded (december), and "front of the line" passes, we got to see all of it anyway.
My rating of universal is ok. A couple of attractions were a little lame, while most others were decent to good (I was also somewhat partial to the blues brothers revival since I'm a big fan, see the video clips in the picture library)

The Mitsubishi Eclipse from the Fast and the Furious

The rest of the pictures and videos from Universal Studios are here

Saturday Night:

Then, that evening I went to the local google christmas party at the silent movie theatre in Hollywood. It was my first time seeing a black and white cartoon and a Laurel and Hardy movie in a theatre with a real pianist playing to the pictures. Quite nice...
Some of my coworkers also made a few short movies reacting well known movie scenes, but changing the topic on the lack of swag that they get. That was quite funny.

The other pictures, and video are here

Sunday:
Sunday was time to fly back to Palo Alto.
I snuck in the airport from the main entrance (on the wrong side of the runway) so that I could skateboard around the vehicle taxiway (not the plane taxiway) around the airport so that I didn't have to do the much longer loop outside the airport (especially as it went way downhill and uphill, which with a big backpack and a skateboard wasn't something I wanted to do).
When I was almost all the way around, I could see an airport vehicle, probably alerted by the tower guys, who was driving towards me, probably to find out why a wacko was skateboarding around the airport :)
He did go away when he saw that I reached my plane, and was loading and preflighting.

The flight was interesting since there were a few different things wrong with the airplane that I found during preflight, or found out about during flight, some more minor than others:

one of the fuel gauges didn't seem to work and always showed full (I just had to make sure I knew how much fuel I was using, how much I had, and rely on the other tank's gauge for computation)
The CHT (cylinder head temperature) gauge looked like it didn't work (not too important as long as I made sure to keep track of oil temperature, and EGT)
One of the doors had a tendency to half unlatch during flight, but thankfully not to the point that it would open
The front landing gear strut was very low and didn't look like it would absorb anything but a fairly soft landing
The engine seemed to burn a quart of oil per flight (ok, I made sure I had extra oil to carry and would top up/check the level each time)
The airspeed indicator was acting up a bit. This one is touchy as it is a reason it itself not to fly the plane. Luckily, it was only sluggish on takeoff and would show 0 speed until I hit 40-50 knots, but it worked fine in flight and slower speed on landing. Otherwise, I had the backups of using the GPS indicated ground speed, and my eyes (which I'm ok with during the day)

While I would regularly have made the return flight at night, with the above list of things not quite working, it was just not a good idea.
For instance:

even with GPS backup and lights, losing your airspeed indicator at night just isn't that great
Having a fuel gauge go bad, and maybe have the other one get stuck mid way, and then the engine use twice as much fuel as you had planned, would have dire consequences. Sure, I'm reaching a bit here, but doing a forced landing at night because you ran out of fuel is not something you every want to have to do.

The flight itself went fine, it was a little less than 2H30. When I arrived in Palo Alto, I knew I had to be very gentle on the front gear, so I did a low approach at short field speeds (60 knots), full flaps, and landed with power to do the softest soft field landing I could, and indeed, it was probably one of my best soft field landings, which made sure I would not abuse the little travel left in the gear strut.
(this is another one where if the winds hadn't be calm, I would have had to cancel the flight, or redirect the landing destination elsewhere instead of chancing a possibly very rough landing on a possibly not well working strut)

The rest of the pictures from that flight are here

Sunday: Harris Ranch in C182 G1000

2005-12-05T10:49:00Z

Flying Hours: around 135

Since I also had just gotten checked out in a G1000, I had also promised to take a few other people to Harris Ranch, so I did so, entirely at night, using the awesome G1000 avionics (among other things, they show you Mountain proximity, and how close you are from the terrain (very nice to see how close you are from mountain tops you can't see).
I was still not in great shape, so I had a judgement call to make, and in the end I figured that with suitable rest (i.e another nap before the flight), I'd be ok (since that had been the case for the rest of the week).
My landing at Harris wasn't stellar, mostly because it was hard to see the ground, and my soft field landing flare was started just a little bit too late. I'll know better for next time...
Dinner was good, and the flight back without issues

Viktor carried a GPS and made some great graphics with Google Earth, showing our route

The remaining pictures are here

Sunday: 172XP checkout

2005-12-05T10:38:00Z

Believe or not, my second backup instructor also fell sick, and had to cancel too.
This was getting a bit unnerving as I had to have an instructor fly with me to check me out in that plane if I wanted to have any chance to fly that plane to Santa Monica the next morning for my week trip there.
Somehow, I did manage to find the last instructor available, and he did have a 2H slot right at the only time I could go with him.
We did a few patterns (3-4 I think), and he checked me out. Sweet!

Sunday: Bay Tour in Socata Trinidad

2005-12-05T10:30:00Z

Next morning, just so happened to be the day, my other coworker and fellow pilot, Jim, showed me his plane, a French Socata Trinidad, and took us for a bay tour ride. It was quite nice indeed, and a quite interesting plane to fly (not right away for me, though, as WVFC requires 200 hours before you can take that one)
Thanks much to Jim for the ride

The rest of the pictures from that flight (including a fair amount of the golden gate), are here

Saturday: Safety Pilot

2005-12-04T10:20:00Z

Right after the Google Party, which I left a bit early to get a little sleep, I offered to be safety pilot to my coworker, fellow pilot, and charter pilot to burning man :), Pablo.
Pablo did his flight to Salinas under the hood (i.e. without seeing anything outside), while I sat in the copilot seat to make sure he wasn't going to hit anything, or anyone ;)

After that, I was supposed to meet an instructor at WVFC to be checked out in the Cessna 172XP I was planning to fly to Santa Monica monday, but that got cancelled due to her falling sick too (I was still under the weather at that time, but capable of some things as long as I had rest in between).
I spent the hour after that trying to find an instructor who could check me out in that 172XP, but it was hard as few had ever flown that plane (that's why I want it, it's always available)

The other pictures from that flight are here

3 endorsements for the price of one

2005-12-02T15:23:00Z

Flying Hours: about 130

I went back to PAO today to see my mountain checkout/182 instructor before he left on an extended vacation. Despite the conditions, I managed to do the required flight, landings, and all the ground paperwork to be checked out that new plane.

In return, I received:

mountain checkout
high perf (in C182T)
G1000 avionics

The pattern work and landings, in rain, gusts, and SJC traffic flighing over my head (Runway 13 at PAO) was fun
Eh, at least I now have one of my two cars that has almost less HP than the plane I fly :) (235hp for the 182T)

The good news is that after finishing my complex rating (I have enough hours for that), I'll then get to build a lot more hours before I do anything else.
This is just as well since I can definitely use more time away from the dashboard and dials, and more time looking outside, and developing a good feel for what the plane is doing without having to look at the instruments (sooo tempting with the G1000 :) )
I'll be celebrating by flying to our SMO office to work there next week (in a 172XP)

Thanksgiving Flying Weekend

2005-11-28T15:19:00Z

Because I fell sick half way through, the end of the 4 day weekend wasn't as productive as a result. Yet, while I had to cancel my flight to Sunday to Harris Ranch sunday, I flew every other day, including some more complex practise in a 172RG (plane with retractible gear) on thursday, and more practise in a 235HP Cessna 182 G1000 which can comfortably sit 4 people while having about 4H of fuel.

Thursday afternoon, after my first flight, I spent the thanksgiving lunch, afternoon and dinner at JBQ and Eugenia's who were nice enough to invite us.

Friday, I got really close to getting a C182 and high perf checkout, but didn't quite make it due to lack of time from the instructor. I'll have to finish next week.
Then, I went to meet Jennifer at Starbucks/Jamba Juice and had quite a nice and refreshing chat. More to come...

By saturday, after my morning flight, where I got fairly close to getting my C182 and high perf rating, I started getting rather sick with a cold.

Sunday, incidently, I got to spend a fair amount of time in my new bed, and cancelled my flight to Harris Ranch, I just wasn't up to it.

Mountain Checkout

2005-11-21T15:12:00Z

After training in a Cessna 182, I decided to use the plane to get my mountain checkout. Not only it has more power, but also it was a good chance to learn to use the avionics (G1000) in that plane on a longer trip

I went to Tahoe via Bear Valley, practised at a small mountain airfield (a bit scary actually), and landed at South Lake Tahoe where I had a late lunch. The airport staff was quite nice and lent us a car so that we can drive a few minutes to Lake Boulevard, and have lunch there. It was weird to find myself in South Lake with no snow whatsoever, not have my snowboard with me, and only be wearing a T-Shirt...

Anyway, it made for some nice pictures.
On the way back, it was a night flight for the most part after flying past Truckee airport (visible in the picture list ), so I got to play furter with the avionics, ans the XM radio stations :)

South Lake Tahoe airport, and the lake

The primary function display (PFD), showing basic flight characteristics

The multiple function display (MFD), showing engine stats, real time map with altitude and airspace info, as well as weather

onboard XM radio was cool, I was able to listen to some good trance on the way back (Markus Shultz mix here)

Pictures here

Harris Ranch

2005-11-14T15:43:00Z

This was actually my very first leisure flight with passengers since I got my private pilot license. However, this is not like it sounds, the passengers weren't at risk since I had racked up about 115 hours of flighing and more than 350 landings by then :)

Harris Ranch is a good restaurant in the middle of California by Hwy 5 (between L.A. and San Francisco), that is well known by pilots since it has a runway right next to it. Quite frankly, I would never have gone there had I had to drive (2.5 to 3H), but it was a 1H flight, bypassing cops and slow roads, so that was all right.

The runway is known for being very narrow, but we had perfect weather and no cross wind, so it wasn't a problem. You can see what it looks like on google maps

I ended up with a slightly crappy plane to go there (172 upgraded to 172SP with no MFD, and a GPS that was missing half the airports I needed), so it forced me to make use of the skills I learned to navigate and find the airport (it's small, in the middle of nowhere, with no nearby navigation aids, and along a very very long highway 5). I had planned the flight so that I would arrive there before sunset (well, during twilight, i.e. after sunset, but with still enough light to see).
I got slightly distracted by a strip along hwy 5 that looked a lot like the runway I was looking for, but since it didn't match what my VORs (navigation aid) said: even without a useful GPS, crosschecking my map seemed to indicate the runway was still further down. I did a quick call to ATC (air traffic controllers) who were tracking my flight, and they confirmed that the runway was indeed a bit further. It's always nice to be tracked on radar and have confirmation.
We landed at Harris with a little bit if daylight left, as planned, by 17:00 or so and went to the restaurant.

I was a little off course on the way back, mostly because of the wind, a heading indicator gyro that went way off, even after I reset it, and the difficulty of seeing landmarks on terrain at night when you're just along 5 and then crossing a big mountain, but the good news is that outside of having crossed from 5 to 101 a bit early, I was on track and only 3-5 minutes behind schedule when I landed in Palo Alto.
The landing at Palo Alto wasn't as flawless than Harris as it was a night landing and I flared just a tad early (small drop and one bounce), but it was safe (i.e. landed in the center of the runway, proper nose up attitude, and no multiple bounces or anything close to purpoising).

Night landing at Palo Alto Airport, courtesy of Markus and his great camera

The rest of the pictures are here

Cessna 182 and G1000 avionics

2005-11-13T15:34:00Z

Cessna 182 and G1000 avionics

Saturday, I went for my second flight to practise in a Cessna 182 (bigger
plane & more horsepower), and I picked up one with brand new Garmin
1000 avionics (aka glass cockpit), which is basically the fanciest instruments
you can get in a small airplane nowadays.
I started with a 2H class explaining the new avionics and giving
demonstrations, and then got to sit in a cessna on the ground to play
with all the buttons without having to worry about flying the plane.
I did got about 45mn ground time with the avionics and buttons, plus
the time in flight (2.8H).
My take is that some interface things are still quite non intuitive
on it, like some buttons from the left screen affecting the right
(nav/com), but not all, and not consistently like switching the nav/com
focus.
All in all, the learning curve is fairly high and there is a clear risk of
the pilot spending too much time looking at the screens instead of focussing
on the rest of the flight.
Also, the C182 had a separate auto pilot, which was mostly coupled but
not quite, so each time you got atis, you had to reset the baro on

the backup altimeter
the G1000
the autopilot

All in all, despite an experienced CFI (probably one of the ones with
the most G1000 time at my club), some quirks were hard to figure out and
quite distracting in flight.

However, for the rest, I was impressed:

the 2 screens were awesome, quality wise
they back each other up and you can get a combined screen if one fails
they have their own battery backup in case main power fails
soft keys all over make the interface much more liveable than the G530
the real time weather maps, along with XM radio, are cool
real time terrain distance under you is also quite useful

All in all, while the garmin folks still need some better UI/usability
people, the G1000 is well designed inside and quite interesting to use.

I'm a Private Pilot

2005-11-04T14:16:00Z

Yes, I'm finally a private pilot. The short version is that the test was almost too easy, and the examinator very nice with me (i.e. he asked me to do the bare minimum required to pass)

Today was an interesting day weather-wise (as I look outside and see the big cloud cover that's just arrived above us).

Anyway, I planned my cross country just for the diversion piece, to KRBL, and it was interesting to learn all the java flight tools on adds.aviationweather.gov, on something concrete: real interesting weather, worrying about 2 overcast layers, rain (-RA) and icing problems starting at 6500, while 4500 being too low for some other cloud issues, turbulence reports.
Ultimately, the flight that was possible, but pretty iffy, and I certainly wouldn't have done it without a CFII in the right seat, for both instrument bailing out if needed, and a second opinion on judgement calls from someone who has more experience than me

That said, this work (which was actually useful to me as an exercise), and the extra work I went through again to get all the airplane paperwork and prove that it was indeed airworthy, was never used during the check ride as Mike (the examiner) just wanted (for my sake) to go flying as quickly as possible before the weather got worse.

During my preflight, I heard some local PIREP of turbulence on final, and as Mike was saying on my takeoff that things seemed pretty smooth, and I was replying that it probably wouldn't last, it got bumpy right away.
The flight was actually less than 30mn.
Mike had me go to stanford, i.e. a 3mn flight, redirected me to SQL. That time I did properly circle stanford while computing the new heading, fuel, distance, ATIS, and SQL tower, and got all the work done without going anywhere, and busting any airspace :)
At that time, Mike had me go towards Slac, I did an interesting steep turn, which was challenging due to wind and turbulence, but I mostly kept it within the numbers, and we then did slow flight at 60 knots due to the conditions (and the horn did go on and off at 60)
At that point Mike said "so, if you pass, Sergey did promise that he'd stop smoking, right?" (which was indeed what Sergey, one of my WVFC CFIs, had committed to doing), so he said "my plane" and flew it back down to PAO.
"you're done with what you had to pass, that way you can screw anything up on the way back"
Obviously, at that time it was difficult for me to not pass. I was actually awake due to an almost proper night of sleep for a change, but it just didn't seem wise to say "let me do it", when he offered to help.
On one side, I don't really have great satisfaction due to how easy it was, but on the other side I can't blame Mike for trying to make it as easy as he could on me, and the landing conditions indeed turned out to be mildly interesting due to wind shear.
Anyway, I'm a private pilot now, yeah! and I'll settle with the satisfaction of what I actually learned during my now about 110H of flying, and what I'll keep learning with instructors and by myself, as opposed to the one of having nailed the check ride, which I didn't quite get to do.
A big thank you goes to my instructors: Ali and Sergey

Ali, my main instructor

Weather, while turbulent, made for some pretty clouds at sunset

San Francisco Bay Tour Flight

2005-10-31T13:50:00Z

I didn't get to fly Saturday due to bad weather (very low ceiling, which means that the clouds were way too low and that I would have needed a special authorization and a rated instructor to fly through the clouds and end up on top).
But sunday was a lot better, so I went for my bay tour flight, which is really a flight into class bravo (San Francisco airspace) to San Francisco, the golden gate and so forth. While I learn from each flight of course, this was more a leisure and sightseeing flight.

No complaints on the sightseeing, I got to fly around the golden gate itself, and then through oakland airport (well above), and back to San Carlos and Palo Alto.
I used the rest of the flight to do some training (steep turns and navigation).
See the rest of the pictures there (in higher resolution)

The plane waiting to takeoff on Runway 19L is doing an engine runup test (see the water)

Didn't make it

2005-10-20T13:48:00Z

So, not very surprisingly, I failed today. I could not get decent sleep last night and have been feeling like shit and quite tired all day.
As a result, after doing the basic stuff, the examiner left me close to an airport, and gave me a bunch of things to do to overload me (which is expected and part of the exercise). The point was to redirect me to a nearby airport but I was about 30 seconds late getting everything done and calling the tower, so in the end, I had just penetrated their airspace by the time I called them (i.e. too late). If I had been awake, I would
- have been just a bit faster and would have had had the problem, or
- realized that I was just a bit too close and turned around until I had time to call

Well, I did pass ground (i.e. required knowledge) with flying colors actually and I still passed a bunch of things in the flying exam, so I won't have to take those again.

Basically, I know that while I can be very smart, my mental abilities are very uneven, and go way down with lack of sleep (much faster than others) or other physical reasons. I failed to be in the top 1/10,000 students in France and had to settle with 1/1,000-ish mostly because of costly and punctual brain farts. This has plagued me my entire life, and obviously it comes up in flying.
My goal however is to have my skill level be high enough that I will manage to do the right thing even if I suddenly become very tired or otherwise start losing mental "sharpness" while in flight (I shouldn't have left otherwise) and get overloaded with bad situations on top of that.
I have achieved that for driving since I do an instruct for high performance and track driving: I can manoeuvre at high speed and in dicy conditions (like opposite lock countersteering if I oversteer in a turn due to water or oil), even if I'm not much awake, because I've trained enough that I can do it out cold. I have to reach the same level for flying.

In the meantime, I'm just frustrated because I learned nothing that I didn't already know today, nor will this piece of the test really help me in real life, nor will another 20 or 50 hours of training really help with what happened today.
Now, I'll just take the missing pieces until I pass them, which is mostly until I either get lucky or a decent night of sleep the prior night, but that kind of defeats the purpose of additional training when the training is already enough, and additional training will not really help improve my odds of passing next time.

Anyway, I should be able to try again in a couple of weeks and in the meantime, I Emailed the controller at Livermore Airport to explain what happened (not required, just a curtesy), and filed an FAA form about the airspace incursion (not requested, but it's good practise).
If you are curious, here's the form, ( NASA 277B PDF header and report ), which is just an excerpt of the report I sent to my instructors , although that's more technical and mostly for pilots

Damn, I'm a bit stressed

2005-10-18T08:48:00Z

Current Music: Dave 202 Presents Powerface - Abyss
Current Mood: See subject :)

Two more days before my flight test, so much I've learned, and so much I feel I still don't know (then again, with about 2000 pages of knowledge, rules and regulations, I guess that's normal).
The worst part is that if I fail, it will most likely be on some stupid brain fart mistake (i.e. something I otherwise know how to do).... I guess we'll see, more studying for the next 2 nights, and I have another flight scheduled tomorrow morning.
Right now, I currently estimate my chances of passing the first time, at 40%, at best. That's the perfect state of mind for taking an exam :)

I've been studying my butt off

2005-10-16T14:56:00Z

Current Music: Matt Darey - Pure Trance - 2005-07-12
Current Mood: Ok

I've been studying my butt off and training quite a bit this week, it's the last stretch before my final flight test with an FAA examiner next wednesday.
I did a test flight thursday, and it was actually fairly bad. I made stupid and compounded mistakes because I was tired....
I flew again today and did better, including a power off landing (simulated engine failure) including a split to landing, all a night, with a resulting smooth landing.
I think I also finally learned to do steep turns properly today so that I hopefully won't fail that on my check ride :)
Now, I'm back to studying, studying and more studying. Reminds me of school :)
(it is a lot of shit to know actually, and a lot of it is even important ;-p )

Written test

2005-10-05T04:05:00Z

Tuesday morning, I showed up for my pilot written test at West Valley Flying Club.
I had studied a fair amount, but had had a pretty bad night due to being oncall.
Long story short, I only scored 88%, due to a mix of stupid mistakes (most likely), evil weather and what's that cloud's name questions, and I think an error in the test question and answers (which I reported)

Of course, I still passed, but with less than I was hoping for (at least 90%). Damn...

Longer Solo

2005-10-03T15:13:00Z

After my first solo cross-country, which was a bit botched (I found out after the fact that I did it in 1.4H, which is probably some kind of record in a Cessna 172SP :) ), so I had to make sure my next X-country lasted long enough (I had to have a combined time of 5H minimum).
My co-instructor, Sergey, recommended Visalia , which was not all that exciting, but was far enough :) The exciting part was when I saw a jet airplane take off soon after I landed, and wondered why I never heard about him on CTAF, the frequency I announced myself on when approaching the airport and landing. When on the ground, I found out that I had messed up when picking up the airport info from the FAA airport list I had, and picked up Visalia Sequoia Fld (D86) instead of Visalia Muni (KVIS) . Doh!
Anyway, after checking on the ground that my right fuel tank was indeed emptying too (my plane was mostly emptying the left wing, and the right wing gauge was pretty flaky), I headed for the next point: Castle Atwater Airport (KMER) . That was a more fun destination due to the 11802 foot (3.5 kilometres) runway. This runway was about as long as my plane could climb in altitude, which is also close to the altitude where you need extra oxygen if you stay too long.
What was almost funny is the amount of time I had to taxi on the runway before I found the first taxiway that let me exit :)

at Visalia

Almost VFR on top over fresno (one could actually see through the clouds and they didn't go too far)

I landed and stopped the plane in the clear/whitish portion at the beginning of the runway

this is the runway left on takeoff, I could have landed and taken off another two times in that amount of runway

Wind turbine generators

The nice salt lakes over the Bay

The funny thing is that as soon as I landed, I recognized the sound of autocrossing, and indeed, American Auto-X was having an autocross on the other side of the runway. First I thought about walking there after tying the plane down, and then I realized that it would have taken more than 30mn to walk there :)
I ended up taxiing the plane there (which even at a "fair" taxiing speed, took a while :-D), and I wasted the rest of the Autocross ( picts here )

The fun part of being at Castle/Atwater was the aviation museum, and its walking tour narrated on tape. That made the trip well worth it. I even got to talk to a former pilot during the war, who showed me some cool stuff in the cockpit of an old bomber. All the pictures are here .

Eventually, it was time to head back. I wrestled with the auto pilot for practise instead of flying straight pilotage (I did the rest of the trip without GPS, just using landmarks, and one VOR for verification), and got nowhere with the auto-pilot (either it didn't work, or I was not able to couple it to either a VOR or the programmed GPS heading: it kept wanting to go somewhere completely different).
After a few landings at Livermore (KLVK) to burn some time, and not very fruitful steep turn practise, I got back at Palo Alto (KPAO) with more than 4.2H of flight, which is perfect for what I needed.

The pictures from the flight are here

First (short) cross country

2005-09-30T13:41:00Z

Today, I was woken up a bit too early and showed up at the airport for my solo cross country flight, while being quite tired. I knew it was not going to be a piece of cake because I started by forgetting my plane headset and microphone at work, walked to the plane without the book and keys, and then proceeded to break the class bravo shelf by 200 feet before I realized that the plane was creeping up (i.e. close to 0 multitasking skills, and just a general hard time to think ahead and clearly). However, I managed to do the flight, talk to norcal air controllers along the route, do a perfect approach to modesto airport, and a very smooth landing, just like the one I did in palo alto on the way back, where I was totally hauling ass and cutting corners to get back as quickly as possible since I had left quite late and the plane was due back for another pilot).
I guess this served as a useful excercise to prove that I could fly reasonably well, even while fairly tired, and without having flown once for the 3 prior weeks. All in all, not too bad :)
Oh this makes me think that I totally forgot to log the flight in my logbook :)

First night flight

2005-08-06T14:58:00Z

Friday night, I did my first night flight. That was definitely interesting, and a very different perspective, trying to recognize things at night, with just about 0 lighting from the moon.
I found my way to the livermore airport but I couldn't see it because I thought the runway lights would be visible from any angle. Turns out they are only visible from the direction of landing.
I then proceeded to do 7 landings, with the landing lights or inside dashboard lights on or off. An all light off landing was "interesting": you aim between the runway lights but because of perspective you have no idea how far you are from the ground...
Got back to Palo Alto around 23:30 (which I couldn't really see either when crossing the bay), and got home a bit wiser... (the only scary thing is that if the engine quits, you are supposed to aim away from lights, and hope for the best. In real life, you have a good chance to be screwed compared to the day where you can pick a suitable landing site from the sky, aim for it, and safely land there)

Spinning...

2005-08-01T23:37:00Z

No, no, not the aerobic kind on a bike :)
I didn't have any flying classes on sunday, so I scheduled a free instructor, we took a Cessna 152, and went to practise induced spins and recovery. Spinning is basically the spiral dive that happens after the plane stalls sideways, causing the plane to fall in a spiral fashion.
Recovering from it was actually pretty easy, but it was good practise.
The funny thing is that after 5 times or so, the instructor was feeling a bit sick, and wanted to go home :)
I'll have to go back though, and do fully developed spins, the instructor I was with was a little too squeemish for that ;)

More Flying

2005-07-25T14:47:00Z

Current Music: AvB - ASOT 206
Current Mood: All right

Tuesday and Thursday and Friday, I went to Palo Alto airport, hoping to go practise somewhere before going to work, but this week we've just had the morning haze, with a ceiling at 1000ft or so, preventing me from going anywhere away from the airport.
Not to worry, Saturday I went later and I flew to Monterrey with my instructor, and we practiced a class Charlie transition, talking to ATC along the way, and transitioning through the Moffett military airport, and San Jose international airspace.
I got a nice view of Santa Cruz on the way back.

Then, since it was my Birthday, they just happened to have acrobatic flight demos, I signed up for one. Since I was a student pilot with now more than 60 hours of seat time, I got to fly in front of the planes and the instructor was behind me (just two seats). It was my first tailwheel airplane, as well as the first plane I took that could fly upside down, or pull 5 positive Gs or 3 negative ones without sweating.
Of course, to put you in the mood, this starts with strapping on a parachute, and a quick introduction on how to use the said parachute should the need ever arise (my guess would be the plane snapping in the air due to over-stressing after some manoeuvre)
The plane was disconcerting to fly since it looked like was more than 50 years old, and all the "new" stuff like radio and intercom had been added in non intuitive places. Also, since the plane was designed for inverted flight and acrobatics, it was a lot more twitchy.
All that said, it was interesting to fly, and have the instructor demo acrobatics to me from the back (including full loops and hammerheads), and have me try to duplicate the manoeuvre.
To everyone who asked me if I was sick or puked, no I was fine, but thanks for asking :) (I did however not pull on the stick nearly as hard as my instructor on loops since 5Gs crushing you in your seat is indeed a bit disconcerting, and you tend to let the controls go a bit to lessen the impact)

Sunday, I did another cross country with lost procedure and find the airport while in flight (actually my bastard instructor made me fly with the hood on, i.e. without being able to see outside, made me descend to 1000ft, told me that I could look outside, and right as I did, cut out the engine to simulate an engine failure and emergency landing), and when we were back from that, I had to triangulate my position from radios with a map, and find my way to an airport of his choosing.
It actually went all right. More next week.

More pictures are here

Class Bravo transition / San Francisco in the fog

2005-07-17T14:45:00Z

Today, I went flying higher up north to practise navigation and short landing on a pretty small runway.
On the way back, I got my first class bravo transition (flying through SFO airspace), and flew by the golden gate and San Francisco. That was pretty cool :)

see the little piece of Golden Gate sticking out?

San Francisco Piers

The rest of the pictures are here (especially the original sized ones)

weekend misc flying

2005-07-12T14:38:00Z

Short story: went flying twice, did my first real solo (went to pick up the plane, flew it for 2H, did more than 10 landings, for a landing total of more than 180 now), studied the "become a pilot" books, went to play poker with friends on sat night, fixed an empeg, flew a 2nd time, and just worked on various things at home.

This was after my IFR flight, when I got to see outside, all I had was a see of clouds and the instructor said "figure out where you are and get us home"

Couple of picts from my own solo

First Solo

2005-07-06T12:42:00Z

Current Music: AvB - ASOT 203
Current Mood: Good

After one flight yesterday trying to remember HTH you fly and land an airplane aanyway (and doing mostly ok by the time I was done). Today, Ali (my instructor) and I went for a few more pattern landings, and then he stepped off the plane, and I went for my first Solo: 3 landings by myself.
Incidently, even though I knew what to do, I still was a little tense, and managed ok landings, although none were flawless (i.e. nice, tidy and short). Turns out that I was a bit worried about slowing down the plane further even though I should have since I had less weight in the plane, being by myself (this just means that I glided a bit longer over the runway and took a little more room to touch down and stop)

Ali, endorsing my first Solo on my log book

Anyway, this is good news, time to go back and practise more :)

Paris Air Show @ Le Bourget

2005-06-18T14:05:00Z

Current Music: Top Gear - 06x03
Current Mood: Good

When I landed in France and was driving back from Charles De Gaules to my Dad's we had somewhat worse traffic than usual (it sucks regardless), and I found out that it was because of the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget which happened to bethat week.
The best part was that the next day (Friday) was going to be opened to the public. So I got there bright and early around 09:40 (getting there was "interesting", so I ended up getting a cab that took the back roads and left me from some walking distance from the back entrance, but got me there in reasonable time). By then, the line to get in was already longer than 1h, swell....
Due to a small queueing misunderstanding, I got in a bit early :) and proceeded to see as much as I could before the air show started. The Airbus A380 (two decker, 800 people) was the show's star and the crowd favourite. I also got to see its first flight in front of spectators :)
As for the other planes and displays, it was quite nice to see other things than US planes, from Mirages, Rafales, Eurocopters (including one doing a backflip in the air, impressive)

There are lots more pictures, including a visit of the very nice Air Museum all here

This was really time well spent, I had never been to that Salon or the Museum and I don't regret having done so. The only thing was the mad crowds, but turns out that it was actually a piece of cake compared to people who went on Saturday and Sunday (more than half a million total)

Check ride

2005-06-15T11:21:00Z

Current Music: Rising Stars - April 2005 - DJ Chilli
Current Mood: Just tired.

So, after much work to try and find a CFI at the last minute to do my check ride this morning, I got scheduled for my check ride flight this morning.
It turned out to be harder than was I was hoping for, mostly because I had a bad night and showed up fairly non awake.
I was first quizzed on procedures and knowledge, and did fairly well there. For my flight, I did well enough, except steep turns, and I came out too early on a no engine landing (although I did land the plane anyway, but a bit too far on the runway due to my resulting speed on approach).
Outside of that, the check ride went well and the instructor said he was happy with my performance (I wasn't though, since I knew how to do the two things I screwed up, and was annoyed at struggling due to a bad night).
Oh well... Anyway, that's behind me for now, and I'll worry about the rest when I come back from Europe in July

Too high: stuck in clouds, too low: power lines :)

2005-06-10T14:51:00Z

Something weird happened the last two days: in total defiance of state regulations, we actually got rain after May. In June actually... WTF?

Anyway, that was good, it gave for a very sketchy day and very low clouds, rendering VFR flight impossible (1000 feet cloud base is required, and we had 800 with the first layers at 500 feet).
We got a special VFR clearance, which can be given to only one plane, and it was me since I was the first one. This allowed me to go practise and fly without instruments while being the only one in the pattern.
It was quite interesting as we got to fly very low (300 feet or so), and do a pattern from a pretty low altitude. At that point, I actually had to worry how close I was to the ground, power lines, and other fun stuff like that.
The weather gradually got better over the following hour until the field went VFR again soon before I came back in.
The other fun part was that the plane looked it had a bad oil leak, but turns out that it was actually graphite coming out of the engine. As a result, I had an aborted takeoff since another pilot reported me on runup, thinking that I had a bad engine leak. Another good practice for that day.

The power of state: 11 flawless landings

2005-05-27T02:17:00Z

Current Music: AvB - ASOT 198 - Live from di.fm
Current Mood: Good

So when I first woke up at 05:30 for no good reason whatsoever, I knew things weren't starting the right way (especially since I was starting with a slight sleep deficit).
I showed up bright and early at Palo Alto airport, and things didn't look so good either: ceiling was 1000 feet, the bare minimum for VFR flight (if the cloud base is below 1000 feet, you can only fly IFR, i.e. with instruments). We checked around and confirmed that we wouldn't be able to fly anywhere else (couldn't pick up enough altitude without being in the clouds) so we stayed in pattern to practise landings, 11 landings in about 1H to be exact.
We tried with and without flaps, with too much altitude, doing extrene slips to fall sideways and get rid of the extra altitude, and other fun stuff like that. The good news is that I forced myself to be awake and alert, and with (maybe) the help of an energy drink, did so. The landings were actually all good, and pretty much all nicely centered (no crosswind though).
I'll probably be crashing big time later today (as in dead tired), but this morning was cool

Comments:
Boy did I crash later in the day... Around 15:30, I couldn't take it anymore and had a 1H nap, and around 21:00 all I could think about was going to sleep, except that I couldn't sleep :)
posted by MM : 26 May, 2005 21:54

Piece of junk with wings vs cadillac with leather :)

2005-05-15T12:24:00Z

The piece of crap Cesna 150 I was supposed to fly today was again not working (it's the smallest crappiest cesna you can fly, I was just curious enough to try it once, but I haven't managed to get it in working condition yet :)
Anyway, as a result I ended up flying a cessna 172SP which was only a few years old (as opposed to about 30 :)
Man, that was light and day: it had leather seats, all kinds of nice instruments, was very stable in flight and was fast. It was also nice not to have to add my weight, the instructors, our backpacks and decide how much fule we could add to the plane while it still being able to take off :)
In return, the plane definitely felt a lot less nimble but that made it more stable even if it also felt heavier to pilot.
But for my first flight in a real plane, that was quite fun.

Playing chicken with a field

2005-05-11T04:23:00Z

Current Music: Markus Schulz - Global DJ Broadcast - 2004-11-15
Current Mood: Good

Just when I was finally getting used to doing intentional stalls without raising my heart beat too much, the next thing my instructors have found to toy with me is to cut power during flight and say "well, you have no more engine, I guess you gotta land somewhere now". This is in itself an interesting excercise which shows that from a reasonable altitude you actually have a fair amount of gliding time before you reach the ground (my instructor actually lost the engine and flew a plane more than 5 miles from stanford/woodside all the way down to palo alto airport, and barely made it to the runway purely on gliding from 3000 feet, impressive...)
Anyway, the second time around, we glided to less than 50 feet altitude from a field before he put the power back on. That was an interesting game of chicken...
No, I was alert, but I didn't freak out :)

Landing, landing, landing...

2005-05-04T13:37:00Z

Current Music: Belushi - Put Your Hands in the Air
Current Mood: Practise makes perfect

I had a couple of flight lessons this weekend and since it was with my now to be former teacher (he's moving to Texas), we just practised pattern flying and landing (take off turn in a rectangle and land). Saturday, I was just so not awake (don't ask :) and I just had a hard time getting it right at all (the crosswind didn't help).
Sunday wasn't stellar but it was starting to sink in slowly even though I was still having a hard time doing all the stuff at the same time, and I was overshooting my last 90 degree turn one mile off the runway, making landing both a sideways and up/down approach.
Let's just say that I admire my instructor for not having been too scared.

Today I flew with my new instructor, a much more seasonned guy, and after the excercises I pretty much did a perfect approach and landing. I was impressed and I'm wondering if it was luck or if I'll do just as well next time :)

I'm flying High...

2005-04-17T09:25:00Z

Current Music: The Thrillseekers - Synasthesia 2004 (ASOT 181 Top 20)
Current Mood: decent, you just don't sleep as well in coach. Funny that...

It was funny how people were telling me: "have a safe flight" when I was leaving for Australia (I'm speaking in Canberra at linux.conf.au ): I could just easily answer "oh, that'll be easy, I won't be the one flying the plane" :)

But anyway, during this crazy week, I managed to squeeze in a couple of more flights in a Cesna 152 with my instructor. Unfortunately, this will be the end of the Road for Justin and I as he is moving to Texas soon, so I'm switching instructors when I come back. I'll miss him actually, he was both a good teacher, and a smartass like me, so we got along great :)

My flight tuesday, we went accross the bay for my first time so that I could practise flying circles and rectangles around given points with a strong wind. I didn't expect it to be easy, and it wasn't :) The highlight is that I actually managed my first landing (i.e. without being rescued by the instructor)

As for my other flight (and last with Justin), that one was quite challenging too. First we went over skyline to the ocean where we usually train, but this time without me being able to see anything outside. I was flying instruments only with some kind of helmet on my head that prevented me from seeing outside the plane. It was interesting (i.e. 0 outside references) and I actually didn't do that badly.
After that, we went to my dreaded slow flight excercise (slow flight = stall warning on the entire time, flying at 40 knots or less (i.e. less than 65kph, which is very slow for a plane to still stay in the air). I think I got a bit better at keeping the plane coordinated (i.e. rudder vs ailerons). As for stall recovery practise, I was a bit less freaked out this time, and even recovered the plane stalling sideways, on its way to a spin with proper rudder. Yay! (the conquer your fear thing)

Well, I guess the next flight with me holding the stick won't be before a couple of weeks or so. I'll try to use the time to read the books.

Stalling sucks

2005-04-04T07:06:00Z

It does in a car, but even more in a plane.
This morning, after practising "flying" by going from Sunnyvale to the San Carlos airport (Redwood Shores, by Oracle) in about 10mn :) (kind of forgot about the DST switch), I got to the airport on time for my appointment.
Today was slow flight practise (down to 50knots, which is only a measly 95kph), which was ok until we turned it into stall inducing and recovery.
First, to stall the plane (Cessna 152) is hard, it just doesn't want to and you really have to push it (well pull on the stick) a *lot*. First, I was kind of failing because I was unconsciously not pulling enough, just because it didn't seem like a good thing to do :)
Recovery wasn't as much of a problem as creating a clean stall: I was getting the plane sideways at 40knots pointing up and got fairly close to inducing spins (well, maybe not, but it felt like it). By the end of practise, I was fairly nerve wracked (stalling and intentionally putting the plane out of control just sucked). Although on the way back I was half tuning out, I actually more or less managed the landing.

Anyway I noticed that my car shakes a bit around 110mph. One of my tires must be slightly out of balance. Damn... Oh well, that shouldn't matter too much for the track. I'm not above 110mph for too long on the circuit.
We'll see how it goes tomorrow.

You have been approved

2005-03-15T03:27:00Z

...and it's not even for a new credit card :)

All of the required information, including fingerprints, associated with the
following Request for Training has been received.  Based on information
available at this time, the Transportation Security Administration grants the
following candidate permission to initiate training for the following flight
training request:
Student: Marc Jacques Francois Merlin
Provider: West Valley Flying Club
Training Request ID#: 12939
Training Request Course Name: Private Pilot 101
Training Request Course Description: Private Pilot
Training Request Aircraft Type: Cesna 152
Training Request Category: 3
Training Request Date: 03-06-2005 to 10-31-2005