One Winter dad and I were flying the Skyhawk from WJF to MFD. I was left-seat, and dad was right-seat. Since we were going that way anyway, we took our next-door neighbour’s 14-year old daughter with us so she could stay with her mom for a week or two. She was curled up, sound asleep in the back seat. I guess it was around Mt. Shasta at about ten-five when the air suddenly became unbreathable. See, Louise had had chili for breakfast. The OAT was 15º below zero (Fahrenheit), but there was nothing else to do. I pulled out the ‘soup can’ air vent at the front of the wing root and directed flow to my face until the cockpit aired out. Man, it was cold! But at least we could breathe.
Sorry for slow reply; somehow I missed that this thread had new posts. Anyhow …
In pro aviation we accept that not everybody gets along with everyone else. And that different students need different instructors. Asking for a change is commonplace and no-threat in our world.
You can be a pro about this. The only challenge, minor though it it, is he might not be as pro as you are. Also, do not assume he hasn’t already figured this out or hasn’t already talked with by your new instructor about you. Regardless of which of them initiated that conversation, none of it matters.
Next time you see the prior instructor and it’s a reasonable time to interrupt him just walk up, stick out your hand and say “Hi Bob. You might have noticed I’d been gone awhile. I’d decided to try other glider ports and other instructors. Now I’m hitting it off well with Sam back here at this gliderport. Thanks for all you’ve done for me over the last year /(whatever timespan).”
Then Shut Up. Do not keep babbling about why, etc. Be polite, let him make whatever response, thank him again, disengage from the convo, and go about your business in peace.
@LSLGuy, thank you for the advice. I’ve been off these boards since the latest upgrade and will probably remain mostly so because my old browser will no longer open SDMB pages. I have to go use the library computer to do this now.
I haven’t had that conversation with Instructor #1 yet, and it’s not even clear if I will even need to say as much as you suggested. We’ve all been out there at the same time one or more times since then (we had a hanger-cleaning work party last Saturday) and I’ve talked to him about other unrelated stuff.
I suppose I’ll continue scheduling with Instructor #3 and remain on amicable terms with #1 (this was NOT a matter of personality conflict, only that I thought he isn’t a really well-organized instructor). I certainly won’t outrightly tell him THAT, and I guess I just won’t mention anything about it unless he asks. Sound about right?
In other news: At my first club, we finally got our tow plane back after being down for repairs for two months (leaky gas tank). Saturday flying scrubbed due to really high-speed] winds. Sunday, a pilot and a solo student flew together and caught the Diablo wave. Up about 3 hours, got to 10000 ft! I was honored just to be their wing-runner for that.
In still other news: Got to fly (as a back-seat passenger only) from Concord to Auburn for lunch in a Beechcraft Sierra. I seem to have acquired, independently, two friends who are friends with each other and also with an older pilot who lost her license for medical reasons, but loves to fly even as a passenger and has her own Beechcraft Sierra, go these guys get to fly about as much as they want with her for only the cost of gas, and I’m invited to go along rather regularly.
On the way back (this was just last Friday), just for added fun and excitement, the engine quit! Okay, it was after we landed at Concord and had just cleared off the runway. I guess if your engine is going to quit, best for it to happen after you’ve landed. Still, that’s a bit scary. Now I wonder if I should be comfortable to fly in this aircraft again. (Yes, need answer fast!)
ETA: Oh, and the pilot remarked that this particular plane has an abysmally bad glide ratio, so if your engine quits en-route, you go down fast. IIRC, the POH says glide ratio is 8:1 but that’s with gear up. Pilot told me, with gear down, best glide is more like 3:1. Yikes.
The airplane should not be flown again until the cause is understood and corrected. It might be as simple as they damn near ran it out of fuel. It might be something more intricate. Like crud in the fuel tanks, or a loose mixture linkage or anything else.
No 4-place lightplane glides for shit loaded. Further, escape from the back seats after a poorly done forced landing is not easy.
We’d like you to keep posting. If you go silent forever I’ll be checking NTSB for Sierra accidents out West.
Well, the pilot invited me to his club’s annual BBQ-style banquet tonight. Both him and his other pilot friend were there. Apparently (he says, if’n I heard him right) he’s already flown this plane again and seems to have lived to tell about it. His other pilot friend says he’d be nervous about it. The PIC thinks it was because he had throttle full aft with mixture full rich which can theoretically kill the engine ( :dubious: ) but I have doubts about that.
Anyway he’s already signed me up with the owner to fly Friday which I’m not vastly interested in doing, but I guess he really needs me to help pay for the gas :smack: – This dude doesn’t take no for an answer easily so I need to come up with some killer excuses.
It’s possible the plane’s engine has its idle point set too low, and/or the mixture control could be out of adjustment. I once had a flight very nearly come to grief because of this. They should check it out.
Try a helicopter. (Of course, helicopters don’t need a runway. )
On my Civil Air Patrol FB group, I read that a 70-year-old CAP member, and airport manager in North Carolina, went to retrieve a Cessna 150D that had made a forced landing in a field after a engine problem. He was going to fly the plane back to the airport, but fatally crashed shortly after takeoff.
IF the airplane is at a high density altitude, it’s possible that full rich mixture and idle will rich-foul the plugs, just get too rich to burn, or on normal to cool/cold days cause carb icing.
At low density altitude the first two don’t apply, but carb icing is always a risk.
So: at high density altitude, somebody who uses full-rich mixture for approach and landing has a hole in his training. That’s wrong unless the aircraft-specific POH demands it. At low density altitude something about the engine and controls is out of adjustment and dangerously so.
It’s not uncommon to fly an entire final approach and landing at idle. So the fact it quit at zero feet and not 500 feet is purely luck. Lots of people don’t understand that luck is not a plan.
At that BBQ party last night (a room full of about 75 pilots) he was talking to people about it. Several other people likewise suggested maybe idle rpm or throttle or mixture linkage needs another look. (More food than they knew what to do with, BTW, so I hope nobody went home hungry. I sure didn’t.)
I think plane was at or near full idle on rollout, but definitely NOT idle on final. I learned to land C-172 at idle glide, but obviously that isn’t going to work with a plane with alleged 3:1 glide ratio with gear down.
Cool late afternoon in Bay Area, bordering on chilly, airport at 25’ MSL (KCCR), high light overcast, so no problem with density altitude, but carb ice maybe. No idea what PIC was doing with carb heat. (Is carb heat sufficient to control ice in all circumstances?) Definitely had plenty fuel.
PIC and owner didn’t seem terribly concerned, is what bothers me. No idea if owner is, in fact, getting this looked at. Anyway, I’m not going to fly with them Friday. Not my airplane, not my monkeys flying it.
Gee, why don’t we just all fly gliders, where this stuff doesn’t happen, and we always land at full idle?
Can’t resist posting this here for all the SDMB aviation fans to see!
If you’re in the SF Bay Area, you’ll recall we had some mighty winds last Friday and Saturday.
Saturday soaring was scrubbed at Byron and Avenal (the two places I would most likely have tried to fly). But they didn’t scrub the day at Hollister! There was great wave forecast for Saturday, and some of them were bound and determined to check it out.
See this blog page:
TL;DR: They flew their club’s DG-1000 (a real Cadillac of a glider with 18m span!) in wave to 17,999 ft over Watsonville!
Remember that video I linked about a year ago, with me (in the multi-colored floppy hat) flying the glider with an off-camera co-pilot coaching me from the back seat? This was the same guy here who wrote this blog. And remember one of my over-excited posts from the summer, in which I got to ride along (and partly fly) a glider over Truckee, during which we witnessed a lightning bolt over the airport from 12000 ft? This was the same glider (different pilot though).
I get all vicariously excited just reading blogs like this, especially featuring people I know and gliders I’ve flown.
On a deliberate attempt like that, how much oxygen would/did they take along?
I have worked many times at 18,000 or 17,500 without out oxygen on short mapping flight lines but if you are not used to it, it can be pretty risky if you have no history working up to it slow over many flights and do so regularly, or you get excited or apprehensive and so start needing more oxygen than your lungs can provide.
Also, can’t a storm updraft suck you higher than you want to go and be hard to get out of? I have heard stories but have no experience with sailplanes in the West and what is considered normal for the pilots in the high country.
Everyone reading this thread knows that Oxygen is required after 30 minutes above 12500 and immediately above 14000. Flying up to 17500 or 18000 without oxygen seems eminently foolhardy, unless maybe you grew up in the Andes. I haven’t heard that this is something you can slowly work up to.
(ETA: High-performance gliders do carry oxygen, and we do use it. My highest flight to date went to 16500 over Truckee/Tahoe, and I also had a few other flights over 12000 at Truckee, including one in that same glider. It has the kind of oxygen system that auto-adjusts for the altitude, and squirts a puff of oxygen every time you inhale.)
Hypoxia makes one real stupid even before it makes one unconscious and dead, and bad decision-making ensues. Here is a story of a guy who flew a Cessna 150 to 18300 just because … well, just because the higher he went, the stupider he got. (The service ceiling for a C-150 is in the neighborhood of 12000 to 15000 ft, depending on the model.) After-the-fact, this guy noticed:
Yes, I’ve heard stories of gliders getting into such rising air that they had difficulty getting down. This gets especially, uh, interesting considering that gliders like to play underneath cumulus clouds and sometimes get sucked up into them. (My instructor demonstrated this once. Guess what. Clouds are utterly opaque on the inside!) The first response, I suppose, is to simply fly laterally (horizontally) in any direction that you think will get you out of the lift. If that doesn’t work, deploy full spoilers. That usually does it. If even that doesn’t work (and I’ve heard such stories), try slipping. That always turns gliders into anvils. If you needs to get way down in a real big hurry (like, you’re about to get stuck on top and the last little hole is closing), spinning down is your final desperation move.
Oh, wait a minute… They don’t even like to teach spins anymore. No worries, I’ve been saving up some bribe money for the day when I want to motivate some CFI-G to teach me!
And, failing even that, well, I hope you have the good sense to always wear your parachute when playing around way up there.
Here’s an amazing blog by an unnamed co-pilot (funny how bloggers never mention their own names, figuring anyone reading it will know who they are) who flew an epic 8.6-hour flight of 859 km (534 miles) with Kempton Izuno (one of our other epic pilots in this region) over the Mendocino mountains north of the S. F. Bay Area. Later in the flight, they almost did get stuck on top as the clouds filled in below them:
I looked a bit more at that guy’s blog to see if I could find his name somewhere. He only identifies himself as “Duo Discus Driver”. He does, however, link to a separate blog he has of his soaring adventures at Minden, Nevada, where I found this page from June/July/August 2012. On this page, he blogs his wave flight to 25000 feet over Minden area! Again, oodles of beautiful photos.
One of his photos is this one, of which he writes:
Well, can you?
It’s in front of a white cloud background. Look half-way from the bottom of the photo to the top, and about one fourth of the way from the left edge of the photo to the right. See it?Yeah, it took me a while to find it too.
I wonder if this guy is still active. His latest blogs seem to be from 2014.
Not really GA, but you’re the only bunch who’d be half interested.
Our company finally moved into the 21st century and has started providing tablet mounts, hoorah! Technically we still have to have paper charts for the route but I’m thinking I could print them 16 to a page to meet the requirement ;).
On a more GA note, you will see many Aero Commanders in the background, a wonderful pilot’s airplane that will forever be one of my favourites.
As for spotting planes / gliders in flight, it’s always easier if there’s lateral movement, problem is, the ones on a collision course don’t have lateral movement, they just get bigger in the windscreen!
It took FAA about 2 years after we started using tablets for our Jepp plates before we were allowed to stop carrying paper enroute charts too. But we’re now in totally paperless nirvana as far as Jepps go.
We’ve also gotten clearance to have all the flight paperwork electronic. So the only paper in my kit is a QRH and one sheet of cardstock with the normal procedures checklist. Those two plus whatever dribbles out of the ACARS printer is the only paper we have in the cockpit. Maintenance maintains a few laminated quickref cards we rarely look at. Those too are migrating into the iPads.
Mostly they just get bigger behind the windshield post. :eek:
:dubious: ) but I have doubts about that.
(Of course, helicopters don’t need a runway. 
)
