Some of the worst dilemnas in flying involve weather decisions.
A lot of times you get no-brainers. A perfect sky, calm air, cool temperatures - hey, that’s a good day, go fly. Thunderstorms, pouring rain, strong gusts, hailstones as big as your first - time to go hide under the bed. Those are easy decisions.
A hard one is when the weather is sitting on the fence between good and bad. On the day in question, there was a high overcast with good visibility beneath (good), calm air (good), and nearby, at least on weather radar, lots of yellow, orange, and red (bad). There were some powerful storms not too far off from Morris airport.
I called the airport. C was leaning pessimistic about the weather. “It’s raining here” she said, which launched a discussion about how heavy the rain was or wasn’t (in this case very light, sort of “spitting”) and prospects for more or less of the same. It was deemed very flyable rain, but that didn’t mean circumstances were particularly good otherwise.
My information was that the wind in the southern half of the broader region was from the southeast and in the northern half from the northwest - and in neither case very strong at all. Morris sat right where the two systems met, and its air wasn’t moving at all. My call was that the weather would be stable over Morris all day, the bad stuff would stay north, and it would start to improve around 3-4 pm. If I was right, I should be able to get some decent flight time in. If I was wrong I was about to make a 140 mile round trip for nothing more than a tuna salad sandwhich lunch. (Yes, I was still having tuna cravings.)
I drove out there, fretting most of the way which isn’t terribly good because a two-hour fret can wear you out. It started raining about 15 minutes into the trip, a good honest rain, a downpour and I almost turned around then, but in another 10 minutes of driving I was in dissapating clouds and weak sunshine. Halfway there timewise, I called C again, who reported no change, it was still light misty rain. OK, keep going. And most of the way there it was high overcast with an occassional glimpse of sun. At least until Minooka (gotta love these small town names), where it clouded up and got a little wet again.
I pulled into Morris and got out of the pickup (I brought the pickup because it has better air conditioning than the car, and at 9 am it was already hot). I looked up. High overcast. Little bitty spitty rain on my glasses. No wind. It didn’t seem too bad in the immediate vicinity, but airplanes don’t stay put, right? I spent a few minutes getting a look at the whole horizon. South and east the clouds were lighter grey, to the northwest things looked darker, but only a little bit. There were airplanes flying overhead but were they conducting business as usual or all coming in to get out of the weather?
There did seem to be a few more airplanes than usual on the ramp.
I went in to the office and checked out the weather on the computer. Yep, big nasty scary stuff still hanging out to the northwest, it hadn’t moved in the two hours it had taken me to come out. Question was - was it going to continue to stand still, or was it going to move? And if it moved, which direction would it go? This was not weather you would want to be caught in if you were flying a small airplane. Or even a medium sized one. I still thought the storms would stay put or stay north but … well, making a mistake with the weather can result in Bad Things. I had a brief mental image of being forced down in a bean field, attempting to run for cover under pounding rain and hail, and being hit by lightning 'cause I was the tallest thing for a mile around. Yeah, that kind of violent weather.
Briefly, I wondered if the Citabria was struck by lightning while aloft if it would burn. Maybe. If it ignited the wood and cloth probably would burn quite nicely. What a cheerful thought. And another reason not to play in thunderstorms with small airplanes.
I looked out the window. Dead air. The rain had stopped. Light grey clouds high above. It looked… peaceful. Almost. If you didn’t know what lay just beyond the horizon.
I said hi to C and collected the clipboard and the key to the hangar. She cheerfully told me J was still flying but go pre-flight the airplane and when that was done and J back on the ground we’d all look at the weather again.
When I caught up with him I could tell J was skeptical about the weather. Although pilots often come to the same conclusions based on the same information, this was a situation with no clear-cut answer and thus we were getting as many opinions as there were pilots. J and I had both looked at the weather on the same computer using the same services. He wasn’t thrilled at the idea of going up, and mentioned seeing lighting strikes to the northwest. I could tell it was a definite concern on his part. I went back to my argument about slow moving systems and southeast winds pushing the big stuff away from us, but added if he knew something I didn’t please speak up, I mean, he was the one who’d actually been up in the air already. Finally, I said “I think if we stay here, at our airport, we’ll be OK. If we see something nasty start to roll in we’ll just get our butts on the ground. Gravity works regardless of the weather, we can always land.”
J agreed to that so we went and got into the airplane. Let me back that up just a fraction. We went out to the airplane and J doublechecked to make sure we had ample fuel on board, a full load. “Just in case we have to divert somewhere. Or something.” Just in case the weather moved in and we had to make a run for it to somewhere else. No, we didn’t think that would actually happen or we wouldn’t be strapping into this machine but both of us had been flying long enough to know that no one controls the weather or completely understands it. We were just being prudent.
And then we completely stopped talking about the weather. Got in, started up, taxied out to the ramp, did the run up. As we headed out toward the runway there were three airplanes coming in to land, one of them another one of the school’s planes and two transients. We did seem to be getting a lot visitors. J informed me it was the start of the Great Oshkosh Pilgrimmage.
For those of you who might not know, “Oshkosh” is a town in northern Wisconsin. It is also the current home base of the Experimental Aviation Association (EAA), whose members range from folks who have never flown but are just fans of airshows and aircraft, through hang gliders, ultralighters, “real” airplane people (like me), guys who build airplanes, guys who build other things that fly, people who do fancy stunt flying (like J), on up through astronauts - NASA, Soviet, and Rutan launched.
Once a year, the EAA throws a big party. I mean HUGE. They’ve had everything from parachutes to the Concorde show up and fly, and this year SpaceShipOne is supposed to be coming. It’s supposed to be centered on Whitman field, but in reality spills over into two or three other local airports because there just not enough room to park all the airplanes that show up - last year it was about 12,000 of them. That’s just the aircraft. Plenty of folks drive in, too. It’s a fly in/drive in/airshow by pilots and for pilots, at least in theory.
The air traffic controllers who work there are all volunteers. Working the big EAA fly-in (they’re calling it “Airventure” these days) is quite a feather in their caps. During “Oshkosh Week” Whitman field becomes the busiest airport in the world handling more take-offs and landings per hours than any other place on the planet. Unlike an airport such as O’Hare or Heathrow, though, the traffic isn’t uniform in size or speed. Everything from 20 mph powered parasails to supersonic-capable aircraft shows up, so it’s as if the same road is being shared by skateboards and formula one race cars and the traffic controllers have to keep everybody moving and prevent them from occupying the same space at the same time.
Anyhow, this group of transients was the pre-fly-in crowd - people bringing their airplanes to display, volunteers planning to contribute with labor to making the whole thing work, and folks just showing up early to find a good parking spot. It’s a little different from some of the other big international airshows in that everyone, absolutely everyone, who flies is welcome to show up and yes, fly, provided you follow the rules (which are several pages long). At least in theory.
Such is the prominence of this event in aviation that pretty much anywhere in the world, when pilots gather and say “Oshkosh” they’re almost certainly referring to the Big Party and not the town itself. No, we don’t bow towards Whitman Field five times a day, but with some folks it gets pretty close to that. (To be fair, there are also aviators who despite the EAA and all their doings, too) Oshkosh attracts pilots from all over the world, and quite a few of them funnel through my home base area.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to do take offs and landings with all this going on.
We waited for the other guys to land, looked a couple more times for arriving aircraft, then pulled out onto the runway. I asked J what he wanted from me and he said a normal take off and a normal landing to start. So… full power and move your feet…
It was a nice take-off, which I say without a trace of smugness. Smooth, kept it on center the whole time, and a nice, gentle liftoff right into best climb attitude. Did a quick scan of the whole area, even turning around in my seat a bit to get a look out at the northwestern sky in my 5 o’clock. Area looked free of other aircraft and/or dangerous storms, though yes, to the northwest it did look threatening.
On climb-out J warned about the day’s temperature inversion - unlike most days, when it gets cooler as you go up today there was a layer of hot air over the “cool” (relatively speaking) air near the ground. Said it was a really sharp change and I’d know it when I hit it.
The boundary layer was 700 feet off the ground.
One second it’s moderate air blowing in through the vents and the next it was a hot, hot blast. I could feel it pouring into the cockpit near my shins (which are near the vent inlets), puddling on the floor, and rapidly rising up and through the cockpit. I started sweating instantly. Yuuuuuuuuck.
Pattern altitude is somewhat higher than 700 feet. With strangers in town, it wouldn’t be a good idea to cheat and stay low just for the sake of comfort. Especially in a highwing airplane.
Oh, yes, highwing vs. lowwing. Highwings have the wings on top. Lowwings have the wings below the fuselage (you can also have midwings, biplanes, triplanes, staggerwings, and during Oshkosh season just plain weird stuff) Just like your car has blind spots, so does an airplane. In a highwing, the wing itself blocks a significant portion of what’s above you. In a lowwing, the wing blocks your view of the ground and what’s immediately below. If a lowwing and a highwing are converging with the highwing at a lower altitude and the lowwing at a higher altitude they can easily be in each other’s blind spots. If they continue to converge they can meet, with the sort of disasterous results you’d expect. Definitely a Bad Thing. This is most likely to happen in the vicinity of an airport, where airplanes congregate.
So we’re taking the whole see-and-avoid, look-for-traffic thing pretty seriously. The Citabria has a clear panel directly above the cockpit, which helps cut down on the blind spot problem (though it does not eliminate it) and we both keeping looking up as well as to the sides and forward, even at times twisting around to look backward as much as possible. We’re in a relatively slow airplane and some of the stuff flying in to Morris could easily overtake us and run us over if folks aren’t looking where they’re going. We spend the whole rest of the day doing that sort of traffic watch, along with training and flying.
Anyhow, there I am, sweating and flying and looking around and adjusting the throttle and the trim and judging our distance from the runway and the effects of wind on our flight path (none at the moment) and looking for traffic and sweating and flying… Just a normal day in the sky, really. No big deal, we even have time for a little chatting: “So, does a school superintendent get the whole summer off just like the kids, or do they make you work?”, “Well, no, I just get a couple weeks off a year and I usually take it around this time.” “Oh, sure, no particular reason, just a couple weeks off, right? - going to Wisconsin in the near future?” “As a matter of fact, yes. Yes I am. For a week. For no particular reason. Ha-ha.”
(Let me interrupt here for moment. J wasn’t supposed to be around Morris on the day I’m writing about. A bunch of us were supposed to be flying with someone else I’ll call “S” this particular weekend because J was already supposed to be up at Oshkosh, but S … well, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but somehow he ended up in New York City and would not be able to get back. So presumably J had interrupted his plans to come back to Morris for the day so a bunch of us could continue our training uninterrupted. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?)
(Yeah, yeah, all very interesting - just get back to the flying stuff, already, right.)
Well, here we are abeam the touchdown point (that means the end of the runway is more or less directly off my left shoulder). Reduce power, trim for the proper airspeed, and start the slide back down to the ground. Bring it around nice and easy, tweak it a bit more, sit back, relax, and let gravity do the work. We passed back down through the inversion boundary layer - ah! nice cool air chasing all the hot nasty stuff out of the cockpit! We come in nicely lined up, proper airspeed, approach and rate of descent looks good, check the rudder and stick action, move that rudder back and forth to feel how much force is needed and how the air currents are affecting things… over the fence, over the grass, over the pavement edge, over the numbers… ease back on the stick, nice and gentle, and just wait. The airplane settled and touched with a light >-b-b-bump< as the three wheels came down almost simultaneously. Ah! Don’t get lazy - you’re still flying! Move those feet, move those feet, move those feet…
That felt good!
“Full power, go back up.”
“Ha! That was a great landing - I don’t need anyone to tell me that.”
“You’re right. Now show me a wheel landing just as good.”
We go through the whole sequence again - up, into the hot, around, look for traffic, two-minute chat, look for traffic, carb heat up/power down/adjust speed, look for traffic, (relatively) cool air back into the airplane, down, around, and wheels on the pavement. No, the wheel landing wasn’t quite as good, they are a shade harder.
The next time around J had me pull the power not just partly back but all the way back when we were abeam the touchdown. This is an engine-out simulation - pulling the airplane engine back to idle is a lot like putting your car into neutral. Then engine bits may still be moving but they aren’t providing power to the wheels in the car of your car, or the prop in the case of the airplane. You’re coasting.
The Citabria glides pretty well once you get it adjusted to best glide speed, which isn’t that different from what we normally use on landing so going to that speed is almost automatic already. In straight and level flight the rate of descent is not alarming - it’s when you turn that you start going down with more speed.
Why is that, you ask?
Remember, it’s lift that holds the airplane up in the sky. With the power at idle it’s gravity pulling you along that generates sufficient lift to allow you to control your descent. At best glide speed you’re extracting the potential energy that you get from being above the ground in the manner that will hold you up the longest. This is generally seen as a good thing, especially if it’s not a simulation and your engine really has stopped.
Now, in order to turn an airplane some force of some sort is needed to change its course through the air - remember, one of Newton’s laws says that objects in motion not only tend to stay in motion, they tend to keep going in a straight line as well. The force you use to turn an airplane is, again, lift - but any lift you’re using to alter course can’t be used to hold you up in the air. Less lift to hold you up means you descend faster. As soon as you level out again your rate of descent slows, but by then you’re much lower and closer to the ground.
Engine-out landings aren’t difficult in theory… in practice they do require you to manage finite resources (altitude and time) in an efficient manner.
As we came in over the airport fence J had me nudge the power back up - no need to get carried away with this.
The rest of the morning consisted of lots more “engine-out” appraoches, refining techniques, including adjusting my grip on the throttle for better control, and lots of “move your feet” although truthfully by this point I was probably hearing it whether J was saying it or not - they really do program you like that. Students on first solo frequently report hearing a running commentary from the empty seat beside them. Sitting in the front seat of a tandem airplane is almost like that anyway since you can’t see your partner. If J hadn’t been giving me strategic taps on the shoulder now and again the experience wouldn’t have been much different if he had been on the ground talking to me on the radio. Usually.