Marc's Public Blog - Flying

Pictures from CDG-SFO Flight

2012-01-09T16:00:00Z

On my flight back from Paris, we had an interesting flight path that was just at the edge of the sun coverage of the earth. As a result we skirted the line of sunrise for about 30mn over very northern canada, and it yielded some great pictures, even if they were a bit hard to catch through a plane window:

Back in SFO:

See more images for Pictures from CDG-SFO Flight

Miracle on Hudson with Captain "Sully" Sullenberger

2011-11-30T16:00:00Z

Captain Sullenberger came to google to tell us about his famous flight where both engines of his plane died after they hit a flock of 7lbs canadian geeze, and he had to land in the water. The crew performed admirably and the captain demonstrated superior airmanship.
It was a pleasure to have him talk to google about that day and his general thoughts, and he answered my questions on why can't you just put grills in front of jet engines to prevent big objects from getting sucked in (apparently it spoils the airflow going to the fan) and what he thought of the airvbus fly by wire system in that situation (in his opinion it prevented him from putting a bit more nose up before touching water, but otherwise it worked ok in that unexpected siutation).

What was interesting in his story was when he said his resting heart rate stayed at 100 bpm and his blood pressure at 160 for quite a while after the accident day. Also, he had terrible time sleeping for a long time after, despite how well everything went.

But if you go to the video below, you'll see how much they went through in barely 2mn, they went through their checklists, tried to restart the engines, looked at what they could glide to and then made the best choice to end up in the water. All pilots still applaud the crew's superior performance.

This is the best video showing what happened, an NTSB reconstruction with the inside cockpit conversations and warning annunciations from the plane computers (they were kept running by the APU, backup generator, they started right away when both engines died:

If while it's less accurate, someone made a simulation of the flight. It's still nice to see:

See more images for Miracle on Hudson with Captain "Sully" Sullenberger

Quick tour of Eaa/Oshkosh Airventure 2011

2011-07-29T15:00:00Z

Due to a badly scheduled track day on thursday in the middle of Airventure, I ended up taking a hellish red eye from SFO to Chicago (arriving at 03:15 my time) and then a connection to nearby Appletown. I ended up arriving on friday morning at 09:30 and 10:30 at the door due to horrible traffic with very little sleep, and went around the grounds as quickly as I could to see as much as I could before sunday afternoon, where everything would be over.

Considering the tough trip and little time on hand, thanks to having been there before and knowing where things were and how to best optimize, I managed to see several interesting talks, see virtually every exhibit, and most of an air show (unfortunately it was stopped half way due to weather). I also had a lovely dinner with my friends at Seattle Avionics (food was kind of opportunistic since I had neither the time to get proper food, not that there is much proper food on the EAA grounds anyway. I had the worst cheeseburger in my life ever).

Anyway, let's get to the pictures:

new avionics

nice to see a full size turbocharged engine

there were lots of nice sims to try

Lots of planes to be seen as always:

the 787 was here for display and visits, line was way too long though

burt's boomrang

harrier

rotocopters

you don't want to be probed by this guy :)

huge engines, payload capacity, and fuel tanks

Terrafugia was back with their V2 design:

It's a bit of an improvement over the areocar :)

Visiting the insides of the B29 Superfortress was cool too:

Someone also tried to sell me a pipistrel. Nice little plane to fly around, but eh I'm used to slightly faster planes with nice things like autopilots :)

Like every year lots of collectors bring their own fighter planes:

The other half of Oshkosh, is the aviation museum. Its displays are still good, but the best part is the talks that some world famous aviators give there:

new section on RC planes

voyager, the plane that flew around the world non stop

kind of cramped inside

But the best part is Dick Rutan telling the story of his flight around the world in Voyager built by his brother, Burt. It's a thrilling story:

Saturday evening, while waiting for the night show, Ford had a nice Blues Brothers Show:

they were actually quite good

And this leaves us with the pieces of airshow I caught:

weather turned bad quickly, rest of airshow was cancelled for that day

And just to make things interesting, they started doing a night airshow the previous year:

And that was it. after 3 days of mostly bad food and running around to make it with the time I did have, it worked out pretty well in the end. At the Appletown airport, before leaving, I tried the heart attack food they do there, fried cheese curds, and fries smoltered with cheese and bacon :)

See more images for Quick tour of Eaa/Oshkosh Airventure 2011

Flight to Pine Mountain Lake (E45) and over Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

2011-07-04T15:00:00Z

As a way to spend a few days in the Sierras over July 4th, I looked into options and heard that would could fly into Pine Mountain Lake. After checking on airnav, I found the very well reviewed Cub Inn Bed and Breakfast, owned by two pilots.
The great thing for pilots is that the very nice owners will pick you up at the airport and lend you their jeep so that you can get around and get to see a little bit more than just Pine Mountain Lake itself (which is actually a nice place, but there is more to see in the Sierras than just that).

The flight to Pine Mountain Lake was uneventful:

I put my usually very sleepy co-pilot to work :)

Pine Mountain Lake Airport

Pine Mountain Lake

and after overflying the airport, we pushed to Hetch Hetchy to get some air pictures before going back the next day on the ground:

flow was strong obviously

some hikers got swept off that bridge a few days prior

nearby reservoir

It was a nice little flight, weather was perfect and it was good to see Hetch Hetchy waterfalls that we ended up never being allowed to hike to the next day. See more images for Flight to Pine Mountain Lake (E45) and over Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

Flight to Willows and Overfly of Thunderhill

2011-04-28T15:00:00Z

I'll put aside the sad story of what happened at WVFC, but long story short is I had to join Advantage Aviation for now. Plane selection is somewhat lesser, but they have a nicely automated billing and renting system that works day and night.
After getting recurrent, I went to Thunderhill for a track day:

Some nice houses in the oakland hills

Mormon temple

Oakland Colliseum

Caught a Southwest flight landing

On the way back before leaving I took a few pictures of Thunderhill:

See more images for Flight to Willows and Overfly of Thunderhill

Oakland Center Tour

2011-03-10T16:00:00Z

Dan Dyer was nice enough to organize a tour of Oakland Center for us.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from inside as cameras were forbidden and we got to go through a metal detector. That said, I got to sit with a controller who worked transatlantic flights (from anywhere on the west coast and between Canada, Japan, and Hawaii).
It was quite informative to see one controller working with a vast array of planes, all on the same 'rails' (airways) with planes negotiating altitudes back and forth. Some pilots would talk to controllers over the radio which would relay the request via computer to the Oakland controller for review and approval or rejection depending on his own judgement and conflict resolution computer.

What was more enlightening was the technology gap between planes that had real time GPS location reporting capability via satellite link, and could directly request altitudes from the oakland controller via keyboard, while older planes' positions were interpolated via their last reported position and ground speed. The mix of technology was almost frightening in some ways.

I then got to spend a bit of time with a controller working the upper portion of northern CA airspace spilling into LA. That one was what I was more familiar with, but nonetheless it was useful to be able to talk to a controller and see how they do their job.

Flight Las Vegas back to Palo Alto

2010-11-30T16:00:00Z

After 3 days in Vegas, it was time to go home. It was an uneventful flight with pretty nice views.

Takeoff from McCarran was pretty simple, go up, turn right and get out of their airspace :)
This allowed for some nice lower altitude pictures though :)

This airliner had to hold for me to take off. I got out as quickly as I could :)

See more images for Flight Las Vegas back to Palo Alto

Google Earth Render of Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon Flight

2010-11-30T16:00:00Z

I made a few shots of the GPS track with Google Earth. The Las Vegas ones are very nice, although it's interesting to see the absence of smoothing of the GPS data and resulting staircase effect (they should probably fix this).

overall view of full flight

overall view of Las Vegas to Grand Canyon

Las Vegas McCarran takeoff (blue) and landing (red)

Other shot from the strip showing the first overfly on the way to GCN in pink

interesting staircase effect (I wasn't flying that way :-D)

Grand Canyon Airport and South Rim

A quick loop around Grand Canyon West and the Skywalk

Hoover Dam with newly constructed bridge

Here is the gps track and Google Earth kml track. See more images for Google Earth Render of Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon Flight

Flight from Grand Canyon to Las Vegas

2010-11-27T16:00:00Z

After getting up around 06:00, packing tent, hiking up 11 miles and 4500ft up back to the top of the Grand Canyon, and waiting for a stupid taxi for almost 1H, we left the airport just in time to get some nice before sunset views on our more direct and faster flight to Vegas, escaping the bad weather that was coming the next morning.

We got out just in time, and landed at McCarran with sunset. The approach in McCarran was a piece of cake except for the part where I couldn't see Vegas or the runway for the longest time because the sunset was blinding me. I was vectored to the Stratosphere above 3500ft, and then right turn straight in to 19R, and right turn right into Atlantic Aviation. It couldn't have gotten any easier.

The views on that flight were really nice with the sun setting, although it was a bit harder to take nice pictures without an SLR camera.

follow me van from Atlantic Aviation

Landing on runway 19R with taxi to Atlantic Aviation

See more images for Flight from Grand Canyon to Las Vegas

Flight To Grand Canyon Through Las Vegas

2010-11-25T16:00:00Z

Jennifer setup a backpacking trip for us over thanksgiving, and going there by "regular means" would have been a flight to Vegas or Pheonix, and a 5-6 hour drive after that (probably 10 hours door to door). A less than 4H direct flight to Grand Canyon airport sounded like a much better idea (not counting much more scenic when overflying Vegas, the Hoover Dam, and the Grand Canyon, so there we went.

You can see this page to read about the trip to Vegas and the backpacking to the bottom of Grand Canyon.

I was able to rent a very nice turbo SR22, which gave us more options to cross the Sierras at high altitude if need be, de-icing just in case, and a chute in case things really went wrong (not that I would plan for that, but it doesn't hurt to have).

Thankfully the weather was actually perfect that day, which was far from being a given over thanksgiving.

The Sierras were already quite nice and snowy:

almost crossed to hwy 395

Bishop Pass trail to John Muir Trail?

The flight is in pink

Eventually we made it to Vegas:

Vegas Suburbs, including a new one being built

McCarran Airport

Then, I went for the Hoover Dam:

the new bridge is completed

Google Earth already added the new bypass bridge

And finally I had a GPS plotted route through the Grand Canyon (which is actually fairly tricky since it's filled with no fly zones if you're below 14,500ft).

The flight is in pink

Grand Canyon West with the Grand Canyon Skywalk

Skywalk

Flight over The Skywalk

I had a follow the magenta line GPS track plotted to get in the hard to follow corridors

I then crossed to the higher altitude North Rim which was snowed in

North Rim road was snowed in

Grand Canyon Airport

It was a great flight, fantastic views and weather for November. See more images for Flight To Grand Canyon Through Las Vegas

FOG Tour of San Francisco Tower

2010-11-15T16:00:00Z

Dan Dyer nicely organized a tour of the SFO tower for a small group of us (limited by space in the tower itself), and I was able to get a spot. It was kind of weird to drive to SFO, find myself among travellers, go through 'secret doors' and find myself within the FAA facility and then the SFO tower, which hardly anyone else gets to see otherwise.

Greg, who was our host, took some time to introduce us to the workflow at SFO, and answer some of our questions for almost an hour, and then took us to the tower itself.
If you've never seen the SFO runway configuration, below is what it looks like. There are 2 long runways (NW-SE) for heavy takeoffs and landings, and two shorter runways for takeoffs. In the ideal configuration, winds permitting, planes land from the water and take off towards the water for noise abatement.

On a normal day, it works with just 4 people, and one is a supervisor who looks over everyone else to make sure nothing gets missed. It's also a lot more quiet than one would imagine, no people running around and screaming :)

The view is pretty fantastic and the job can be very challenging in days of bad weather. The day we came was an easy day where they were running all 4 runways at once in their usual configuration: the long runways for landings and the occasional heavy takeoff, and the shorter runways for takeoffs towards the bay.

note a bad office view :)

this is a clearance takeoff strip with assigned runway and initial altitude restriction

the weather computer runs linux

planes and arrival scope

planes arriving almost side to side

the taxi map tracking planes landing and ready for takeoff

solar panels

See more images for FOG Tour of San Francisco Tower

Flight Around Hawaii's Maui, Molokai, and Lanai

2010-09-06T15:00:00Z

(If you do not see any track on the map, click on '07 Day 05: Maui Flight' in the upper right corner twice).

As part of our vacation in Maui, I figured a good way to have another view of everything we visited, and a peek at what we couldn't visit like the neighbouring islands). It was nice to see the coastlines we had driven on, and especially the long sliding sands trail that we didn't hike all the way to the end :)
You can see many more pictures of our Maui Trip here.

Just like Hawaii last year, it made sense to rent a plane with a CFI and just do the scenic flight without the need to be checked out. On Maui, Maui Aviators was the place to go for renting a GA aircraft with a CFI if you don't get checked out. At a few times, it was also nice to hand out the controls to the CFI and let him fly while I was too busy taking pictures of a waterfall while we were in a steep turn close to the rocks :)

The flight started with the north of Maui, and its crappy one lane dirt road :)

the 'fun' one lane dirt road full of blind turns portion of Hwy 340

We then flew towards Molokai Island:

Molokai waterfalls

Molokai's Kalaupapa Airport

Molokai Leper Colony

Molokai Airport

Molokai reef

After that, we headed for the coast of Lanai:

The non pretty side of Lanai

Before heading back towards the main island of Maui on the Lahaina side:

Lahaina

Jet Skis

and transitionned to the other half of Maui, starting with the Kihei coast:

North Kihei

South Kihei

Kamaole Beach Park

South Kihei Boat Ramp we go diving from

Wailea

Makena

Little Beach, just north of Big Beach

Big Beach

We then did a little side step to Molokini which has such incredibly clear waters and good diving:

Molokini

and back to South Maui:

Big Beach

The other 'fun' dirt road, south Maui. At least this one is a 2 way road

We then 'climbed' to the top Haleakala a bit quicker than it takes to drive and hike :) and had a look at

The observatories at the top of Haleakala

Sliding Sands Trail

The Pu'uo we spent 1H to hike down to

The ambitious hiker can actually hike all the way down to the beach from 10,000ft

After that, we flew from South Maui (through the seven sacred pools), to West Maui/Hana, and Hana Airport (including the trike from Hand Gliding Maui), and back to Kahului:

yes, they have nice waterfalls

The big waterfall is the end of Pipiwai trail

Seven Sacred Pools

Hamoa Beach south of Hana

Hana's Red Sand Beach

Luana Spa where we stayed in Hana

Hana Airport with its Hand Gliding Trike Base

The Winding Road to Hana

More Wining Road to Hana

Back to Kahului Airport

The flight was just around 3H, a good way to see Maui and the nearby islands.

If you wish, here is a link to a big georeferenced map of the Maui Flight (you can turn on display of other gps tracks by clicking on their name in the upper right corner twice). See more images for Flight Around Hawaii's Maui, Molokai, and Lanai

Fly Out Group trip to Seattle and the San Juan Islands

2010-08-25T15:00:00Z

Dan Dyer organized another fly out group trip, this time ot the San Juan Islands. It was a nice trip.

Palo Alto to Boeing Field

Jennifer wasn't able to join due to work commitments, but I found a copilot to go with and share the flying. I did the first leg to KBFI (Boeing Field International) which was an easy 5H leg with nice weather.

good old thunderhill, I'll be back soon :)

argh, all this for junkmail I never asked for :(

viewing platform for Mt St Helens

Mt St Helens

KBFI/Boeing Field

Museum of Aviation visible on the left of the runway

Boeing Museum of Flight

Since we were there already, we went to visit the Boeing Museum of Flight at KBFI. It's actually one of the best flight museums I've seen so far: a full visit takes over 4H and even a quick one takes over 2H :)

I had no idea the concorde had an anti tailstrike tailwheel

Their warbird collection was quite good and well layed out

old vs new is fun to see :)

old french plane

a rare A12/M21 with D21 drone

the drone was supposed to launch with nukes in unfriendly territory

Seattle

I spent the rest of the afternoon visiting Seattle

the smith tower is a nice view open later than the BOA tower and better view than the space needle

BofA tower

underground bus system

monorail to space needle

lots of work to 'drive' it :)

Smith tower on the right

a seaplane was doing patterns with passengers on the nearby lake

Mt Rainier in the back

Dinner with FOG folks

Boeing Factory

The next morning, weather was bad, so we just drove to KPAE to visit the Boeing Museum. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any pictures of the factory floor. This is too bad since it was pretty cool to see 787s and 747s being built from scratch on huge floors.
We were able to take pictures of the static displays and planes seen from the outside though:

Flying Heritage Museum

On the way out, I had a look at Paul Allen's private Flying Heritate Museum. It's actually a pretty nice little collection with knowledgeable guides.

Flight to Friday Harbour

Weather still wasn't great, but it was VFR in Boeing field and Friday Harbour, so we figured we'd be able to link the two somehow. It wasn't a very straight line, but we ended up doing a safe, albeit a bit silly considering, VFR on top flight where we climbed over 10,000ft to clear the clouds and leave the cloud area around Seattle. An other flight was able to get there between layers but I didn't find such a path and just didn't wan tot be scud runnings with no so flat land around.

cool shadow of our plane in the clouds with a rainbow around it. Neat!

little island just next to Lopez Island, pretty cool.

Orcas Island

Friday Harbour

Visit of San Juan Island

I used the rest of the day to start visiting San Juan.

whale museum

recent whale sightings

another FOG dinner

Kayaking off San Juan

The second day, I went kayaking in case we could be lucky and see orca whales.

Looking for Orca Whales

Since kayaking didn't work, I went on a boat ride, which makes things easier since there are boats keeping track of orca whale sightings. We indeed found some Orcas just by the Canadian border.

they have a catalog of local orcas

we saw a few orcas after a long boat trip

Before leaving friday harbour, we biked around the island a bit:

Quick Flight to Orcas Island

After biking around the Island, we flew to Orcas Island for lunch:

Quick Flight to Orcas Island

And after a late lunch at Orcas Island, we flew back to Palo Alto.

looks like a fun track

Portland

more Portland

making sure my blood O2 saturation was still good at altitude

As predicted by my skypad with XM weather, weather got a worse as we were about to enter California and got closer to Mt Shasta. We had to make a sharp westbound turn and fly around it to stay VFR on top (I had no interest in getting under the cloud layer and being sandwiched between it, and the rising terrain, or ending up in a box canyon).

while in our way, the cloud made a nice wave, like surfing inside a crashing wave (this was just as we turned west)

we then got some nice VFR on top all the way back

and by Oakland, we got under the forming overcast that was starting to cover the bay (incidently, not Palo Alto yet)

See more images for Fly Out Group trip to Seattle and the San Juan Islands

500H Of Flight

2010-07-23T15:00:00Z

I haven't been flying nearly as many hours recently, but the last flight put me exactly at 500H of flight.

There was a while ago where I was pretty confident that I actually had more flying hours than driving hours over the last years. I wasn't sure if it was still true anymore. My commute puts me at 66H of driving per year give or take, and I do drive a little bit on top of that, but not for long distances. Given that I might actually still have driven less than 500H in the last 5 years where I flew 500H. That would be cool if it's still true :)

FOG Trip to Mohave and Tour of Edwards Air Force Base

2010-07-22T15:00:00Z

Dan Dyer organized another fly out group trip for us to visit Edwards Air Force Base. We flew to Mohave spaceport.

Wind Mill Farm by Mohave

Airliner Graveyard at Mohave Spaceport

The next morning, we drove in style to Edwards AFB (we couldn't get bus, so Dan got us some limos :) ).

We first got a tour of the NASA facility, and we then got to see the flightline (which we were not allowed to photograph) and ended with the base's museum, where we got a lecture on how to fly safely in the surrounding restricted and military training areas.

Nice picture of the dry lake by Edwards

this is the lift used to hoist the space shuttle on top of the 747 that would fly it back to Florida

It was a definitely an interesting trip, I was quite thankful that they allow us visit what is otherwise an active military base. We didn't quite get to see an F35, except a distant peak through a hangar (I guess we couldn't quite expect to show up while they were doing VTOL hover testing :) ), but what we did get to see closer was pretty cool.

The flight home was pretty uneventful, which I guess is a good thing :)

Thanks Dan for organizing this for us. See more images for FOG Trip to Mohave and Tour of Edwards Air Force Base

High Altitude Training at Beale AFB :)

2010-05-24T15:00:00Z

Our local flying group did a trip to Beale Air Force Base to take the FAA high altitude training.

13 days without any DUIs, good job guys!

in class

After several hours of ground review and classes, we went into the actual chamber where they lean the air to 25,000ft (that was after 30mn of breathing pure O2 to prevent decompression sickness).

getting ready

I actually felt ok, but didn't look so fresh on some pictures :)

that was after about 5mn at 25,000ft without any oxygen

The time was interesting, but too short. I obviously seemed to be suffering from the lack of air a little bit, but didn't feel I was doing too badly. I'm still curious how far I was from passing out or being able to turn my own O2 back on.

On the way back, we got to see some U2 flying patterns:

and a few shots from the flight back:

See more images for High Altitude Training at Beale AFB :)

Flight and Snowboarding weekend Mammoth

2010-03-20T15:00:00Z

We had a nice early spring weekend coming up and while I was pissed off for not being at kirkwood enjoying the fresh powder last weekend, I made plans for flying to Mammoth this weekend.
I owed Arturo a flight there since he had never gone, so that was a good time to make good on my promise, and thankfully he was able to come that weekend, so it was a plan.

plane was quite loaded, getting the snowboards in was 'fun' :)

Mammoth 1

Mammoth 2

Mammoth 3

Mammoth 4

Mammoth 5

The conditions at Mammoth were typical spring: a mix of icy, corn, and slush. The second day was actually pretty icy due to some pretty strong winds which kept the temperatures low and prevented much the ice from melting.

Honestly, the conditions weren't great and Mammoth would totally rock on a powder day. It's however unlikely that I could fly there just around a storm without getting stuck there, but I plan to try one day :)

Anyway, Arturo had a great time discovering Mammoth with snow, and as a piece of advise don't play the "name this peak" game with him: you will lose flat out :)

We covered most of the mountain, except some really boring/icy parts (although we did do some other very icy parts too :) ).

All pictures are georeferrenced. You can just click on them to see their location on a map.

we saw the Mammoth skiing later :)

nice view, but a sucky icy ride down

Cloud 9 Express was shut down but we got on top of it

Here are the snow days stats for Day1 and Day2.

Here are a couple of runs off chair 23:

The flight back was interesting: we had 50mph winds on the peak of Mammoth and wind was due east, which meant potentially sizeable mountain waves over the Sierras and we were on the wrong side of them (mountain waves can smack your plane down much faster than you can fly out of them).
Mountain Waves, how to recognize and deal with them are subjects of entire books, but on that day they were hard to see due to low moisture (no clouds to give clues) and the wind was strong enough that they could potentially cause up and downdrafts of 1000fpm or more (note that in our case we were flying against the wind, which is much harder).

Anyway, I called the FSS folks (flight weather forecast), and watched a few planes crossing the Sierras without being smacked on the ground, so I felt confident enough to go up and try crossing back to go home (with a backup plan of coming back if things looked bad).
We first headed north towards Mono lake for a scenic flight and so that we could come back via Yosemite and lose the "name the peak" game with Arturo :)
I was able to pick up some nice updrafts from the mountain wave while flying up hwy 395 and with 15,000ft of altitude in the bank, it felt reasonable to start crossing. I basically was pitched up flying at 90kts and the downdraft was gentle enough that it allowed us to mostly maintain altitude (it would go up and down 500ft, which was reasonable).

The flight back made for some nice pictures:

the nice crater by mono lake, much nicer as seen from the sky

lenticular/rotor cloud visible on the leeward side of Tahoe

not quite maintaining altitude with a good pitch up and 45kt headwind

Despite the strong headwind over the Sierras and the scenic detour, the flight was 1h45. It was quite nice to be on my couch, stuff unpacked, having dinner and looking at my pictures a mere 3 hours after we left the slopes. See more images for Flight and Snowboarding weekend Mammoth

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! :)

See more images for Wings History Aircraft Museum

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 :-
See more images for Trike Flight with Birds of Paradise in Kauai

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

See more images for Flight Around Hawaii's Big Island

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 ;)

See more images for Bay Tour with François

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

See more images for Oshkosh/EAA Airventure 2009 Flight and Report

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

See more images for Flight Out Group Trip To Yellowstone, Glacier Park and Portland / Evergreen Museum

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

See more images for Flight to Norcal TRACON

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

See more images for Flight to Willows/Thunderhill and Back

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

See more images for Bay Tour with Jennifer's Family

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