Vectors To Final

Today Tom and I hopped into his airplane to make the short hop over to PHF from JGG. The plan was to grab 99A out at PHF so that I could fly some approaches it in. Flying over in Tom's plane let us avoid rush hour on the interstate and let Tom get some approaches in while I watched out for traffic going into Camp Perry and West Point and other various and sundry runway destinations. We managed to pick yet another severe clear day for the flights though had to deal with the wrath of unstable air giving us the occasional jolt of turbulence. Tom did the ILS 25 approach into PHF and made it a full stop landing. While he was tying the airplane down I ran into Mercury Aviation to get the logbook and keys to 99A. Tom joined me at 99A mid-preflight as I was discovering that the left flap was a little sticky. It seemed to deploy fully but was unhappy about it. I decided I’d just fly without the use of flaps today – not a big deal since the gusty winds would keep me from using more t...

Today the sun was shining, the wind was light, and the temperature mild - the PHF airport was calling me. Luckily I had my old steed, 5199A, scheduled for 1PM. I asked my wife to tag along as I had a special job for her on this flight. We took off from work at noon and headed to the Newport News Schlotsky's for some sandwiches. I felt a little rushed during lunch since I knew we had a date with the airplane coming up. Over the meal we chatted a little bit about my game plan. Today I wanted to take some aerial photos of different areas in Williamsburg with the camera pointing straight down. The goal was to create overlay images that I could place in Google Earth. Since most of Williamsburg is low-resolution in Google Earth our photos would add a nice amount of detail to the application – at least for the limited area that we would photograph. Shooting overlay images requires a special technique. Ours was this: Use a high-wing airplane – a requirement to look straight down Op...

Today Tom and I took his C-172 up for some practice instrument approaches. I was safety pilot for the first half of the trip. Tom shot a couple of VOR-based approaches at Franklin, KFKN, and then the NDB approach into Wakefield. During this time I was busy looking for traffic and admiring the severe clear air. We had thunderstorms that morning, but they were out of the way for out 10:15 AM lift off time. I expected them to leave behind some choppiness in the air - instead they just took the haze away. There was some haze to be found though, well, really it was smog I guess. Franklin has some sort of processing plant just east of the airport. It was churning a nice cloud of white up into the westerly wind. From there the smog was drifting across the 9/27 runway. It didn't affect visibility too badly but the smell was quite noticeable each time we made a low pass of the field. After Tom landed us at Wakefield we switched drivers and it was my chance to get some time in u...

The president looks to be getting a new chopper before too long, says a Popular Science article . Only $110,000,000 a piece! On the other end of the aviation spectrum I have plans to start flying 99A again. The solo-pilot insurance has been worked out so I will get to hop into the same bird I did my instrument training in. Still flying out of PHF, but that's fine with me if maintenance issues don't mess up as many of my flights as it has recently at Rick Aviation.

Today I took a break from programming ForeFlight Desktop 2.0 to get some time aloft. I went out with no plan (after checking for TFRs, of course). I preflighted and hopped in. I flooded the engine at start, but once she belched out the excess gas she ran just fine. I had to clear the right mag again, but that was easy enough. I practiced a new taxi leaning technique I read in a magazine recently: lean at 1500 RPM until the engine starts to sputter, then richen it just enough to smooth it out. That's it. It has two benefits - 1) you save gas/plugs 2) if you forget to go full rich on takeoff the engine will tell you immediately as you throttle up by threatening to cut off. I took off and did a few figure 8s over my house and office - simple goofing off. I put some positive Gs in and a few negatives. I kept hearing this sound like the stall horn coming on momentarily. Eventually I realized it was the tachometer freaking out and making the high pitch grinding sound we noti...

Last Thursday I went out to the airport, a 30 minute drive, expecting to hop into 3RV and go for a little flight in order to get current to carry passengers at night. However, as we drove out in the courtesy van to go to the airplane, we had trouble finding it. Well, until we looked in the maintenance hangar. Seems it was getting its intercom worked on and nobody bothered to tell the front desk. With no other planes available, I drove the 30 minutes back home. Today I went for round 2. I made sure the airplane was out of maintenance and booked it for 6pm. This time I got as far as the end of runway 7, where a engine run-up showed some roughness on the left magnetos. No problem, I’ll just clear them by running at higher RPMs with a lean mixture for a bit. I tried that technique (which has worked a few times for me before) about 3 or 4 times with no improvement in the performance of the left mag. I would see a 200-250 RPM drop when using just the left mag (no more than 150 RPM dr...

This weekend we flew 250 nm away to visit with family. We left early Saturday morning in an attempt to get to the destination before the winds cranked up. Unfortunately the cold weather caused delays - we needed to remove a little frost but more time consuming than that was the fact that the fuel cap on the left wing was frozen shut. The 1968 C-172i we fly has a terrible design for the fuel cap - it has what amounts to a mote around it that catches and holds water. Not only is it very helpful for getting water in the tanks (that's a BAD thing) but in this case the water in the mote had frozen solid, trapping the cap in the process. K ran back to the terminal to get some hot water from the tap. Using that I was able to finally free the cap, allowing me to verify the amount of fuel. Here it is with no water in it: After nearly running the battery out of juice we were able to crank up the engine. We taxied out to the runway and during the run-up found that the right mag was runnin...