Diary of a Private Pilot

In the end my decision was made easy by the fact that the plane was grounded due to a large oil leak and no other plane was available. It also would have been easy on the day, too: driving last night I was caught in a huge downpour which I clearly would not have flown through and on the other side the clouds were low enough that there was no way I could have flown VFR over the mountains.

Friday lunchtime my wife needs to be here in San Diego to take me to a minor surgical procedure and then back home to Brawley. Rather than have two cars in town this seems like a perfect reason to use the privilege of being a pilot: I’ll go out Thursday night and pick her up.

I read about people flying to Oshkosh this week, or from here to Texas and the idea of trying to predict the weather on such a long trip boggles my mind. So here I am working out possibilities for the flight from MYF to BWC and I am already struggling.

• The mid-afternoon and desert cumulus are here, last two days there has been towering cumulus at 6000 feet a couple of miles north of the route I would take. I get nervous around cumulus.
• I can probably avoid them by leaving at 7 or 8pm but that means we wouldn’t get back to San Diego until 10pm or so, and that’s discounting dinner.
• The forecast for the next two days is for “isolated thunderstorms” in the desert in the afternoons. 99 times out of 100 they are edging their bets and there will be none but the bulk of the route has no reporting stations
• Finally, the runway lights are NOTAM’d out of service at BWC until further notice. I’ve landed no lights at MYF before and it was ok, never taken off with no lights. It’s probably no big deal but if the desert winds are up that all adds to the mix, and potential for trouble.

So it looks like I’ve already decided it’s a no-go though that won’t be decided until Thursday for sure; we’ll work out an alternate plan tomorrow. I tend to be over-cautious and perhaps all of you reading are shaking your heads wondering what is stopping me. A few long distance cross-countries will help me out but until then I will stay on the side of caution.

Thanks to everyone who gave their advice on my earlier post about what to buy. After much online research I went for the Halo from Quiet Technologies and they arrived yesterday. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.

  

My decision was based largely on price and comfort, the idea of in-ear phones was appealing but I had read some reports that microphone placement could be tough so the small headband (that can go around the neck) that comes with the Halo seemed like a good compromise.

I have my club-mandated annual flight review on Monday and will hopefully get to try them out then. In the meantime I have to experiment with how best to wear them.

Got my annual bonus last month, some of it will cover my COM rating (slated to start mid-September when my CFI has space in his schedule) but I was thinking of getting an active noise reducing headset. But I wonder whether it’s worth the extra $ ? I’m not buying the Bose (too expensive and it’s almost a religion for me never to buy anything they make) but is there a unit people think is worth it? Part of me worries that it will be too quiet, there is something reassuring about hearing the engine. But it would be nice to buy myself a present. What do you think? And any recommendations?

Its been an occasional whine of mine that people don’t seem to obey the full stop rule in night currency, instead choosing to do touch and goes and saying that counts. Now I’ll admit that perhaps I am being too sticky but rules is rules and all that. Anyway, tonight I was pleased to be sharing various patterns with many different pilots, all of whom were doing stop and taxi backs.

It was a beautiful evening tonight, light mist sitting in the valleys north of Escondido, the sun setting over the coastline to the west; too bad I didn’t have my camera. Winds were almost calm, a perfect night for flying.

Elevator stuck? Or just another typical day in the pattern for me after a month out of the cockpit?

Was reading my AOPA Pilot magazine and found the article on the proposed Part 61 changes. Along with AOPA, I find a couple of the ones relating to IFR currency to be a little odd:

• Add one hour of simulated cross-country practice to instrument currency - here in SoCal, at least, you are mostly going to get your currency by simulation, either under the hood or on a sim. In either case you probably already get this as there aren’t many places you can do both a precision and a non-precision approach without flying “in the system”.
• Require pilots to wear a “view-limiting device” while training on a personal computer-based aviation training device (PCATD) - this one really confuses me. What benefit does it give to wear a hood in the sim? In actual IFR I don’t wear foggles and the experience is much much better as my head is free to move around. The weak point with the sim is the lack of turbulence - perhaps a better suggestion is to force the CFI to shake your chair from time to time??

Yes, I passed with a 91%!! Many questions I had not seen during my practice runs so I was anticipating a mid-80s score when I walked out, so I’m pretty happy. I had 9 subject codes on the sheet:

• A20 Part 61 Certification - can only think of a SIC question but surely I got that right?
• H912 Aerodynamics Forces Acting on a Plane - can only think this was about ground effect
• H928 Powerplant - possibly to do with the geometric pitch of the prop
• H948 Performance Charts - ack, what a waste, they should be easy!
• H989 Radio Navigation - bet that was an HSI question
• I22 Atmospheric Pressure - probably a density altitude question, I forgot the formula
• I31 Common IFR Producers - damn advection fog question grrr
• I32 High Altitude Weather - jet stream question, I knew where it was but not if it was weaker or stronger
• J29 Potential Flight Hazards

All my pre-reqs are complete save for the most important one - flying to PTS standards.

One more practice over lunch today and then time for the real thing at 1pm tomorrow. Look for my score (if its not embarrassingly low) in the next post.

I’m still doing my near-daily practice tests over lunch, had a couple of 96% scores and most recently settled in the high 80s so I think I am ready. Just need to find the time to get to the test centre. Things that always stump me, no matter how much I try to remember:

• location and effect of the jet stream in summer
• glider towing currency requirements
• fog types and effects

In some good news, some stock options I had in my previous company are being purchased and are enough to pay off my current car loan, thereby opening up the possibility of a few hours of extra flight time each month.