A busy week

The past seven days have been busy, although I'd be happier if they were even busier.

All totalled, 14 hours for the week, 7 as an instructor (including 1.5 in the Elite which doesn't count as PIC), 7 hours of cross-country and 30 minutes of actual.

Or, to put it another way, 14 hours of pure fun.

Last Sunday I flew back from Cedar Rapids after watching the Ohio State – Iowa game in Iowa City with another couple. That afternoon it was back out to the airport to work on takeoffs and landings with my primary student.

He's getting the hang of landings, which has been great fun to watch. While I was pretty tired after an early wakeup and flight back from KCID I managed to find a second wind when it came time to do some instructing.

Wednesday was a two-lesson day, doing more takeoffs and landings with my primary student, heading home then out to Anoka for a simulator lesson with my instrument student.

That simulator lesson saw me get home around 8:30 and I was up at 5 a.m. the next morning to head down to Atlanta with a friend in his SR-22.

Our plan was to stop for fuel in Mount Vernon, Illinois then continue down to the Cobb County airport, just north of Atlanta. The trip turned out to be a great illustration of the value of datalink weather.

The forecast had been for 1,500 foot ceilings at KMVN but that turned out to be wrong, as forecasts often are. As we cruised along at 9,000 we watched the ceilings vary a bit between about 800 and 400 feet. Mount Vernon has an ILS but the glideslope was out of service, which meant the localizer-only minimums were 500 feet.

As we neared Springfield, Illinois Mount Vernon was showing 400-foot ceilings and 1-mile visibilities so we started looking for someplace else to go. The weather beyond Mount Vernon was still iffy however and Springfield was 1,200 foot overcast so I called ATC and asked to divert to Springfield.

They quickly started vectoring us for the ILS and I tried to offer some helpful CFII tips to the 20,000-hour airline captain in the left seat.

Of course, he'd flown a few thousand ILS approaches before so it was fun to watch a pro at work.

Datalink weather is one of those deals that once you fly with it once you never want to fly without it again. We had the big picture and were able to really study the problem and make a sound decision about our divert airport.

Without it, we would have motored along until we could pick up the AWOS at MVN and only then start working out an divert plan. Or, we could have contacted Flight Watch along the way and tried to work something out with them. The datalink route is just so much more efficient and gives the pilot an amazing amount of information and situational awareness. Used properly it's probably the biggest safety improvement on light airplanes since, well, I guess seat belts or attitude indicators.

The next leg was long but pretty simple. Again, datalink played a role as we could see some buildups about 100 miles ahead of us. The datalink showed only light rain and it looked like we might be able to clear the tops at 9,000 so I wasn't terribly concerned.

As we got closer the tops started rising, just as I expected so I tried to get higher from ATC. That didn't work out so well. We were working with Ft. Campbell approach at the time and he couldn't coordinate our request to climb to 11,000 but turned us over to Memphis Center.

Turns out the reason he couldn't coordinate with Memphis was because Memphis was busy working a Baron with a fuel emergency. The poor guy couldn't get on the ground, was lost and reporting he had but 15 minutes of fuel left.

Center was vectoring him toward better weather but he was so low they didn't have him on radar and could only communicate some of the time. Another aircraft in the sector was relaying the communication back and forth.

I thought about it for a bit then decided to just deal with whatever was inside the clouds up ahead. The frequency was so busy with the controller working the emergency it was a good 20 minutes before there was a break long-enough for us to check in.

Instead, we just flew along in silence listening to the increasingly frantic calls from the low-fuel Baron. We finally got an idea of his position and started scanning the datalink weather for a nearby airport with decent weather in case we could help out. As it turned out the weather was crappy all around him so there wasn't much we could do.

The clouds were tame, just as the datalink showed and we only got a few bumps along the way. We finally checked in with Center and he immediately cleared us up to 11,000. By that time we were in the middle of the buildups but the ride was fine.

My airline captain wanted to listen to the Baron drama even after we moved into another sector so we wound up switching the comm radios around. By now Atlanta was firing instructions fast and furious and the distraction of listening to two radios at once was driving me nuts.

The Garmin 340 audio panel has a nifty split comm feature that allows the left side pilot to communicate on the number one radio and the right side pilot to use the number two. The beauty is that you can't hear the communications on the other side, so I split the comms so I could concentrate on actually flying the airplane and talking to ATC.

My left-seater kept talking so I turned the intercom volume down on my side and flew along in relatively blissful silence, just me and every airplane going into the Atlanta area listening to a gravel-voiced controller rapid fire instructions.

I wasn't the only pilot having trouble understanding him. About every other airplane would respond to his instructions with “uh, say again please.”

Anyhow, the Baron guy finally got on the ground someplace, my left-seater decided to help out and run the radios so I could concentrate on flying. That worked out okay and we came screaming into the terminal area descending at 190 knots and 1,000 feet per minute trying to cross “BUNNI” at 5,000 feet. (It took three tries to understand the approach controller and I finally had to ask him to spell the damn thing. By the time we got it straightened out we needed to go down in a hurry.)

Approach kept us at 4,000 until we were nearly in the downwind for 27 at Cobb County so I had my work cut out trying to get the SR-22 to both slow down and come down while my left-seater kept reminding me to not shock-cool his big Continental.

Finally I'd had enough of easing off the power and pulled the power back to idle then cranked the Cirrus into a 45-degree break turn to lose some energy. It worked out better than I could have hoped and we rolled out on an extended base right at the Cirrus absurdly low flap-extension speed. I threw out half-flaps, turned final right at 100 knots, dropped full-flaps and the thing settled on 90 like magic.

I got the target 80 knots on short final and was starting to feel pretty good. Bad move.

The landing was ugly, when I started my round-out a little high. I hadn't landed a Cirrus since February and I didn't have the sight picture down. Basically, you fly the thing down at 80 knots until you think you're going to bury the nosewheel into the pavement then eek back a bit on the stick and it'll land beautifully.

I wasn't eager to bounce my friends pride and joy while he was sitting right there so I started eeking back a little sooner and the result was a goofy up-and-down dance.

Finally I added in just a touch of power and we touched down gently.

We headed back the next day and it was more of the same. We left Cobb County at 9:30 local and were on the ground in Minnesota by 1:30. Fast airplanes are very, very cool.

Saturday it was two lessons back-to-back. One with a primary student then on to my instrument student.

The weird thing is that as cool as it is flying a pretty Cirrus to Atlanta and back I would rather have been instructing. The teaching bit is always interesting and stimulating while the cross-country flying is at least 95% pure boredom.