I’m beginning to dread phone calls from Illinois area codes. It’s either work (This person can’t make it in - can you come in a half an hour early?) or the airport calling to tell me There Is a Problem.
Sure enough - phone call on Friday. It’s D. The Citabria is down - again. Magneto problems - again. Reschedule. She sounds a little disappointed herself, aplogizes for the inconvenience. We make sympathy noises at each other a few more minutes then hang up.
I called C. I observed that the Citabria seemed to be having more than its fair share of magento problems these last six months, what’s up with that? Apologies again - they thought they could fix the problem, but apparently not permanently. They’re replacing both magnetos and associated bits. The problem is, what with it being the holidays and all, the parts won’t arrive until Tuesday at the earliest, then they have to be installed. Then she offered me the Decathalon, another tailwheel airplane, because she felt bad (and maybe somewhat embarassed) at the delays and what not.
“Um, yeah?” I said. “But isn’t the Decathalon twice as much an hour as the Citabria?” (actually, it’s more than twice as much)
“Normally, yes - but for this I’ll let you have it at the Citabria price.”
That’s really hard to say no to. She said she had told D about the offer, but D hadn’t offered it to me. Oh. I called D back, said C had offered the Decathalon. Apparently D had been reluctant about the idea, wasn’t sure I’d want to jump to a different airplane. Well, maybe some folks wouldn’t, but I’ve flown 12 different types of airplanes in 10 years (and 23 actual airplanes) so no, I have no problem flying yet another. The Decathalon was different, but not that different and I should be able to display my tailwheel skills on it, which was the whole point.
So we scheduled in the Decathalon. Problem solved. Well, one problem solved.
There’s always the weather.
Ah, yes, the weather… In winter, as a general rule, colder is better (as long as you can get the engine started). Below a certain temperature the moisture is frozen out of the air and you generally get clear air and little danger of ice formation. The worst temperature is right around the freezing point, where water changes state from liquid to solid or vice versa quite readily. There is a tendency for the air to be saturated and/or precipitating, and what falls wet may freeze on contact, or what falls frozen to melt, and the melted to refreeze. Visibility is typically low and you worry about ice accumulating on your airplane.
Ice is hazardous for three main reasons. First, it adds weight to the airplane. Any given wing + engine combination is capable of generating only so much lift. If the lift required by the weight of the airplane (including any ice that latches on) exceeds the maximum that the airplane can lift you no longer stay up in the air. The speed of and controllability of the resulting descent is determined by a number of factors, very few of them under the pilot’s control.
And that brings us to the second main danger of ice: it changes the shape of the airfoil. Wings need to be of a certain shape to perform their jobs, and while very small deviations are not usually critical, the odds of a random coating of ice improving the efficiency of your wing aerodynamics are so very small that the word “impossible” starts to look appropriate. So, as the ice is adding weight, it’s also rapidly degrading the efficiency of your machine. Not only is the wing losing capability, but your propellor is also an airfoil and as it accumulates ice it, too, becomes less efficient at pulling you through the air. You’re getting heavy, your wings are losing lift, and your engine+prop combo isn’t working well… you are entering into serious territory here.
Finally - ice interferes with stuff. If it gets into the hinges of the control surfaces your steering mechanisms can, literally, freeze up. If you can’t steer the airplane you’re no longer a pilot, you’re a passenger in a ship adrift. Since the ship is a-drifting a relatively high speed, and will hit rocks sooner or later since you will eventually come down, the odds of happy outcome are pretty much nil. Add in a frosted over windshield and it’s possible you may not even see the end coming - whether that’s good or bad is debatable. (I have several pilot manuals that in all seriousness suggest that, in the event your windows ice over, you either open or break the side window - they suggest use of the fire extinguisher for window breakage - and use the edge of the metal gust lock to physically break up ice and/or scrape off part of the windshield to allow you the ability to see well enough to land. Reading pilot manual “emergency procedure” sections can be all sorts of morbid fun.)
While larger airplanes - such as big passenger jets - have all sorts of devices to cope with these conditions the airplanes I fly do not. The only way to get ice off one of the airplanes I fly is to use the same sort of tools you use to scrape the windshield of your car. For a variety of reasons, this is not something one can do while in actual flight. If you get ice forming on a small airplane of the sort I fly your only option is to find a place to land before your bird becomes unflyable.
Well, getting back to the main story – D calls me at 6:30 am on Christmas Eve. This is OK, as in our prior conversation we had agreed upon this as a time we’d both be up and getting ready to come out to the airport. In fact, I’d been just about to call her.
At the time I was sitting in front of my computer, looking at several separate weather and airport websites and had just gotten off the phone with Flight Service. Clouds were at 2600 feet/790 m, which was marginal weather, and the cloud base had been descending at 200 feet/60 m per hour since 4 am. West of Morris, the clouds were even lower and since the weather system was slowly moving west to east that wasn’t a good sign. Visibility was 5 miles/8 km in mist - mist, of course, being moisture suspended in the air - and down from 7 miles/11 km earlier in the morning. Temperature – just above freezing. The “freeze line”, the point where the air temperature reaches 32F/0C was at 4000 feet/1220 m and, like the clouds, coming down. Needless to say, if you take a damp airplane (inevitable when flying in mist) up through the freeze line that moisture will - duh - freeze into ice. You’ll get supercooled water in the air, too - liquid water that’s actually sub-freezing in temperature that, on contact with any surface, freezes solid. There were “airmets” (consider them small aircraft warnings) for light and moderate rime ice in the clouds. In other words, present conditions were nothing I’d want to fool with, and the trend was for things to get worse.
Merry Christmas my sweet patootie.
D and I exchanged greetings over the phone and promptly moved to discussion of just how crappy the weather was. It, was, basically, “instrument meterological conditions”. Although D is trained to fly safely in such circumstances, such skills would be useless in the Decathalon as it lacked the instruments with which do that. Even if it had had such instruments, I sit in front of D in that airplane, and I’m not transparent - she wouldn’t be able to see the necessary instruments because I’d be blocking her view.
In other words, neither of us wanted to fly that morning. The prospect was just too scary. So we rescheduled for New Year’s Eve.
And here I sit, on New Year’s Eve morning, typing instead of flying. Now, why is that? The good news is that the Citabria is fixed and flying again (Yippee! Except I really would have liked to try out the Decathalon for cheap…). The bad news…? The clouds are hovering at 900 feet/275 m - even lower than last week - the temperature is just above freezing, the visibility 4 miles/6 km, in mist… it’s even worse than last week. And, oh yes, the winds are a bit high for my skill level/airplane’s capability. And a direct crosswind. No, I don’t want to go flying in that. Icky-poo!
But - even if the weather wasn’t total crap - I still wouldn’t be flying today. I have been battling a nasty headcold all week. It’s not smart to fly an unpressurized airplane with a head full of goo. Beyond just the agony of clogged sinuses and ears during pressure changes, it can also make you more vulnerable to things like dizziness and vertigo which don’t mix well with being a pilot. Granted there are some decent pharmaceuticals allowing for symptom relief - I am, in fact, making use of such at this very moment to improve my comfort - most of those aren’t compatible with flying, either (again) affecting one’s balance or one’s reaction time. Not good. We won’t even get to the stupidity of spending hours in damp, freezing air while suffering an illness, even a minor one. Nope, not gonna do it.
(Probably a tiny evil on my part, but there is a small gleefulness that while I’m sitting here sneezing, coughing, and dripping no one else is getting to fly either. Hey, I’m human.)
Wow, it’s been a bit of bad luck for a couple months, hasn’t it? I’ve flown exactly once since the end of October. >sigh< It happens that way sometimes. I’m almost at the end of my training program and circumstances conspire against me. How annoying! It’s quite discouraging on a certain level, but I’m doing my best to keep my spirits up. Part of the weekend plans are to finally plot out the route from my local airport to Morris through the air, so this coming summer I can do a 30 minute flight instead of a 2 hour drive. (I have to avoid Chicago’s Midway airspace to do this, among other things - it’s not as straightforward as drawing a straight line on a map and just going). There’s some on-line information and training programs I’ve been meaning to check out, so here’s my opportunity, right? I’ve got to buy a new log book (my current one is almost full), schedule my FAA flight physical (my medical expires the end of January), fix that worn spot on my headset wires, replace/recharge the batteries in the various electronic gizmos in my flight bag, make sure the expired navigation chart is out of the flight bag and maybe pick up a current one, review the pilot’s manual on the Citabria to make sure I’m not forgetting anything needful or useful to know… there’s always a bunch of stuff to do on the ground.
The husband has made plans to drag me out to a couple radio control model aircraft get-togethers this weekend. No, it’s not my kind of flying, but it is his, and I do enjoy watching. Especially since these will be indoor events and therefore out of the damp, cold air. Wouldn’t kill me to take it easy and relax for a couple days.
So… maybe next week it will all come together again and I’ll have another adventure to relate. I sure hope so. It’s a lot easier to write about flying than not-flying.
Perhaps I should have been more specific and said “airframe icing”