Date: Friday, March 21, 2003, 5:23:45 PM Subject: Two GREAT flights: to SQL and back Howdy all, Last Sunday, March 16, for reasons incidental to my business activity, I flew to San Carlos, in order to attend the IETF conference in San Francisco. That flight was IFR, through and above the clouds (mostly), and then an ATC-controlled descent below the clouds, until I made visual contact with SQL. I let my untrained copilot fly the plane for a little bit. He had difficulty, at first, in keeping a heading. After a few minutes, he finally managed to hold a heading. Then he had difficulty in holding an altitude, but finally was able to pay attention to both the altimeter, the VSI, and keep looking outside. He could manage one or the other, but really had trouble doing both. It made him realize how much coordination I was doing as I was flying, apparently without thinking, while talking with him at the same time, showing off the GPSes, etc. Then, I showed him the S-Tec S55 auto-pilot, and how it could hold both the heading and altitude -- and had been while I had been pretending to fly the plane and talk with him. :^) "So that's how you made it look so easy." So I told him that, even though I had tricked him about the auto-pilot, I had only done so about halfway through the little demo I was giving him. Then, to prove it -- I hit the "cancel A/P" yoke button, and he wondered what those three loud beeps were about. I told him that was the auto-pilot warning the passengers that a human was now flying the plane! ;^) So, I held a course and altitude -- by hand -- while chatting with him, and showing how the GPSes can determine our cross- and head-/tail-wind factor. I had no problem, of course, holding either heading or altitude, while chatting with him. It actually had become fairly automatic for me. (Though I remember my earlier days when it was *work*). I then showed him why the auto-pilot is a very useful tool. I described to him what it would be like if we were in clouds -- that there would be no horizon for reference. I then intentionally knocked my pen loose from my kneeboard, and told him to not worry but I was going to show him what happens when people don't pay attention for even a little bit. I bent down to pick up the pen, which had fallen down between my seat and the side of the trim-wheel housing. As I bent down, I actually tried to keep the plane straight and level, but was pretty sure that *some* kind of deviation was about to occur. As I straightened back up, and put the pen back into its holder on my kneeboard, I scanned the panel to see that I was now in a gentle 10-degree bank to the right, and descending at about 300 FPM. I pointed this out to him, and explained that *especially* without an outside reference, that unless I'm alert to this kind of feedback from the instruments, it's very easy to get into a predicament from which recovery might be really challenging. Then, I got us back on course, and at our assigned altitude, and re-engaged the auto-pilot. He fully understood why it is useful and sometimes important to invest in certain tools that help a pilot manage their flight. The auto-pilot is not just a tool of convenience -- it can actually help improve safety, as long as the pilot uses it correctly. -------------------- Thursday night, my two colleagues and I returned home from San Carlos on an IFR flight which could just as well have been a VFR flight -- because the clouds were not a factor: scattered tops at maybe 1500 over Salinas, and broken bases at 12,000 ft. It was a beautiful, moonlit night, and cruising at 7000 ft. down the California coast from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, with an average tailwind of about 25 kts, without turbulence -- made for a wonderful flight. The tailwinds were awesome! Our groundspeed varied between 145 kts and 165 kts! What was normally a 2 hour flight became a 1:35 hr flight! We were *moving*! The moonlit landscape was stupendous, too. The only hitch in the night was that I forgot to inform SoCal ATC that I had made visual contact with Santa Barbara airport before I started my visual approach. It was about 11:10pm at night, SBA TWR and APC/DEP controllers had gone home, and I was pretty much on my own. Except that ATC didn't like it -- and chastised me for starting my descent. So, I apologized, and cancelled IFR and made an approach on the ILS 7. At about 100 ft., the winds were shifting quite a bit, and I had to work some to keep the wings level. I noticed that my inexperienced right-seat passenger was starting to grip his pants (I brought home two co-workers with me on the return flight). But, keeping the wings level and pulling the yoke back further and further, I held the plane off as long as I could letting both altitude and speed slowly decrease together, and I rolled the plane right on to the runway. The right-seat passenger said "wow! that was a really smooth landing -- especially with how the wings were going up and down. Next time tell me when we actually touch down." The backseat passenger woke up after we had landed and we were taxing down the runway. He was surprised that we had already landed. In the future, I'm sure that the Cosmic Balance of All Life will inflict on me a Captain Kangaroo three-in-one landing (again), but I'm pretty happy with that one.