Touch and goes

The new run

My company inherited a new freight run and somehow I wound up scheduled to fly it for the inaugural week.

Our director of operations said he needed somebody who could just get the job done on his own without a lot of hand holding from above. I think nobody else wanted to get up at 2 a.m. to make the 0330 departure time and being the most junior guy, I got the call.

Regardless, the first week went smoothly with only a couple trivial issues to sort out. I sent in a report of what to expect, how to get to the hotel, some good spots for lunch, got extra keys made for our crew van and have only been back once or twice since.

The new airplane

Our new run required a new (to me at least) airplane. Normally we fly Cessna 310s, which are fast for what they are, have a decent useful load and a reasonable amount of space for cargo.

Due to the bulk, and somewhat due to the weights we carry, we operate a Cessna 402 a few days a week on our new run. The 402 has a significantly larger cabin and can carry an astonishing amount of weight.

That large cabin and lifting capacity saps the airplane's performance, however. After 18 months flying 310s the 402 felt a bit doggy.

It had been nearly three months since I'd flown the 402, and then it was only for an hour, so it took more than the usual amount of brainpower to fly the thing.

I grabbed the manual a day early to reacquaint myself with the differences between the 402 and 310, stumbled through the preflight in the dark, managed to get it up and running and blasted off into the pre-dawn darkness still trying to get a feel for the thing.

Luckily, everything came back pretty quickly and I remembered to hold the nosewheel off (it's easy to prang it because the long snout makes for a different sight picture than in the 310) and managed a decent second-ever 402 landing despite it being night, being half-blinded by the touchdown zone lighting and being half-asleep.

I have about 15 hours in the thing now and other than the so-so performance heavy it's a better airplane to fly than the 310 in nearly every regard.

Spring break

I picked the right week to go to Mexico, it seems. When we left, there was two feet of snow on the ground.

After 10 days spent drinking beer and eating fantastic food with the ocean literally just a few steps from the back door of our rented beach house, I returned to bare ground and balmy (for March in Minnesota) temperatures.

Turns out, it had been a terrible week for flying while I was gone. Quarter-mile visibilities in fog were the rule as the snow melted at an incredible rate. One of our runs, which normally arrives by 8:30, never got to their destination before noon the entire week. Another pilot, based in Oshkosh, spent two days waiting to get home due to the weather.

I was, of course, oblivious to all of this and returned sunburned, hungover and totally relaxed. It's has been virtually nothing but clear skies and good visibilities since then.

Rusty

The fallout from an incredible stretch o f clear weather is the inevitable buildup of rust on my instrument skills.

I never cease to marvel at just how quickly my scan starts to deteriorate. Just as quickly, I switch out of “winter mode” and expect clear skies and visual approaches instead of expecting day after day of clouds, ice and approaches to minimums.

It's not like I'm all over the sky on the rare occasions that call for an instrument approach, it's just that I'm not quite as sharp as I was just a few months ago.

Out of curiosity I checked my logbook for what I loosely defined as this “winter” period.

Between Nov. 1 and March 31, I flew 220 hours. 97 of those were at night and 45 were in instrument conditions. I also logged 59 instrument approaches, including 42 ILS approaches, 15 VOR approaches, 1 localizer-only approach and, incredibly, 1 localizer-backcourse approach. I'm sure that last one was a mess, since they happen so infrequently.

I do remember quite clearly that 30 of those 59 approaches took place within a 30-day span. Breaking it down even more, I actually only worked on 10 of those 30 days. So half of the approaches I flew last winter were compressed into 10 days, which in turn were compressed into a single month.

And I only worked part-time. Our full-time pilots flew probably twice as much, if not more.

Looking at those numbers, and keeping in mind that we rarely have an autopilot on board and even if we do we still have to hand-fly our approaches, it's easy to see why I felt as sharp as I ever had before I left on vacation and why I feel so rusty now.

I have no idea how a pilot who only flies a relatively few hours each year and rarely if ever flies an instrument approach can feel comfortable, much less safe, operating in actual instrument conditions.

My guess is they don't.

Missing Men

Two good friends died over the winter. One in a motorcycle accident and the other of an “aortic dissection” at his beloved cabin.

They couldn't have been more different personalities but I was struck by just how many people they both had influenced.

Eddie James is almost totally responsible for my love of long-distance motorcycle rallying. He was the long-time rallymaster for the Minnesota 1000 and ButtLite events. I've run both events multiple times, spent a lot of time with Ed and never ceased to be amazed by his energy and capacity for mischief.

Ed inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of people to ride places they otherwise might never have seen. To this day I can't ride by a lonely looking road without thinking, I wonder what's down there? More often than not I take a detour to find out. That was Ed in a nutshell, he was always willing to take a detour to see what was off the main path.

Jim Erickson was one of many pilots who have taken me under their wings and served as mentor, cheerleader, inspiration and friend.

I knew Jim was well known, but didn't realize how well known until his memorial service. It filled a corporate hangar and was standing room only.

It's a testament to Jim's character that he had the ability to make whomever he was talking to, myself included, feel like his closest and dearest friend when in fact he had thousands.

They will both be sorely missed but I am indeed fortunate to have known them.

More Flying

Luckily, my schedule has been picking up and there's been more flying. This is a good thing as more flying equates to more pay.

I was grabbing a quick dinner with our director of operations and he asked me if freight life was what I had expected.

I didn't have to think about the answer. It's fantastic flying and I love it.

Yes, I wish it paid more. And yes, I wish we flew turbine equipment with pressurization so we could get out of the worst of the weather. And yes, I wish we flew to more interesting places than where we go now.

But I know this: I'd fly a jet for a living in a heartbeat but it'll never be as interesting or challenging as what I'm fortunate enough to be paid to do right now.

Circles in the sky

The forecasts for the day were decent. Not great, but not poor enough to cause any serious concern.

Still, I was uneasy. The little corner of my brain that is on the lookout for trouble was making cautionary noises.

Why I did not, and still do not, know. It was just one of those things. What I was seeing out the window was enough to leave me with a deep mistrust of the forecast. Pure instinct, a hunch and nothing more.

Watertown, SD, had been clear when I passed by some 30 miles to the north on my way to Aberdeen. This was encouraging since Aberdeen was low enough than an ILS was called for and it was nice to know should things go totally cockeyed I could head for Watertown, a mere 60 miles away.

Even better, Watertown was my next stop. It might just be an easy day after all.

Still, something was nagging at me. I had seen large areas of low clouds, fog and mist on the 90-minute flight between Minneapolis and Aberdeen. There were also huge areas that were perfectly clear.

Normally those clear areas would have been welcome news, but it was the unevenness of it all, the randomness of the interplay between fog and cloud and clear that had me worried.

In Aberdeen the line guy looked mildly surprised when I asked him to top the airplane with fuel. Normally I don't bother refueling on this run. It is barely 3 hours of flight time in an airplane that holds 5 hours of fuel.

I checked the weather and liked what I saw. Watertown was still clear, although the visibility had dropped to 8 miles. Marshall, my next stop, was still consistent at 1,200 overcast and 3 miles, just as it had been for much of the day.

Thirty minutes later I was level at 5,000 feet for the short trip down to Watertown.

A quick check of the weather on my GPS and I let out a groan. The fog had moved in and Watertown, which only an hour earlier had been clear was now below ¼ mile visibility.

My day had just gotten complicated.

A quick call to Minneapolis Center and I was cleared to the outer marker to hold and wait for the weather to improve.

I was optimistic. I could easily see the ground perhaps 10 miles to the East and West of the airport and could almost see the Watertown VOR, just a few miles north of the field itself, from my position in the hold.

It was, I was hoping, a temporary situation. I mean, it was clear just a few miles away so surely the fog wouldn't last.

Throttles and props way back, mixtures pulled until the engines were barely running I went into fuel savings mode. No sense in blasting around in circles at cruise power burning 200 pounds of fuel an hour.

As I flew circle after circle a picture emerged.

To the south the fog was even more widespread, much wider. A slender protuberance, perhaps 15 miles wide and 40 miles long had extended ahead and covered the Watertown airport.

It looked, both literally and metaphorically, like a giant middle finger pointed directly at me.

Time to make a decision. The fog had not moved in the past 30 minutes and I still had a stop to make in Marshall before heading home.

Adding to my growing concern, the sun was beginning to set and I expected the fog to increase rather than decrease as the temperatures dropped.

Enough then. A call to center and they cleared me on to Marshall. Leaving the hold I took my time turning on course to fly directly overtop the airport for one last look.

Nothing. I could see the far western edge of the lake that abuts the Watertown airport but that was it. No town, no runways, no approach lighting, nothing.

Power back up, and turned on course I had barely finished re-programming the GPS when center came back on the frequency to tell me our company had called them and wanted me to divert to Brookings, SD.

A mental shrug of the shoulders and a confession to ATC: I was fine with going to Brookings but had no idea where it was and would really appreciate it if they could pass along the identifier for the airport since I hadn't a clue.

Another quick reprogramming of the GPS revealed KBKX to be just 36 miles to the south.

I hurriedly flipped through my approach charts to find one for the Brookings airport, discovered much to my relief that they had an ILS, tuned in the automated weather and began laughing out loud.

Brookings, the divert airport my company had so kindly seen fit to find and point me toward, was at minimums: 200 foot ceilings and ½ mile visibility in mist and freezing fog.

Center, obviously not quite seeing the humor in the situation came on to confirm we were both looking at the same weather report.

For some reason, it seemed, the center controller thought diverting from an airport reporting ¼ mile visibility to one reporting ½ mile when there were dozens of nearby airports that were virtually in the clear seemed odd.

I explained that I indeed had the same weather, that somebody at my company had a strange sense of humor and that since Brooking was reporting ½ mile visibility I was legal to attempt the approach.

A quick “y'all be careful out there” clearance (“Cleared for an approach to the Brookings Airport, change to advisory frequency approved, report your missed approach back with me or cancellation through radio”) and center had washed their hands of me and I was alone on the approach.

The approach itself was routine and the runway lights oozed into view right about the time I was thinking of going missed, just as I had hoped, so I dropped full flaps and landed in the fog, thankful I had seen fit to fill my tanks in Aberdeen.

A quick text message to my director of operations (“You sick bastard. KBKX 200 and 1/2”) let him know I was still alive and elicited an equally sympathetic response ( “:-)” ) and I hunkered down to wait for my freight to be driven in.

As it turns out, the weather at Brookings had been far better when the decision was made to have me divert there and that the fog was moving in much quicker than anybody could have imagined.

Sioux Falls, which I had initially considered as a divert airport because much of the freight I had on board gets driven down there anyway, went down below ¼ mile and closed for hours. Watertown, which had never been forecast to go below 2 miles, stayed below ¼ mile for much of the night.

Even on the trip home, after spending 90 minutes on the ground in Brookings nervously checking the weather and hoping it remained at ½ mile or better so I could depart, mighty Minneapolis-St. Paul International closed briefly due to the fog.

In the end it took every ounce of speed and every shortcut I could muster to get in to our home airport, just 16 miles north of Minneapolis-St. Paul International, landing literally a minute or two before the fog completely covered the airport.

The only saving grace for the evening was that I somehow had seen fit to fill my tanks in Aberdeen, which left me with plenty of fuel should I have arrived home just a few minutes later and needed to divert yet again.

Why I love the Internet

So, my parents decided to sell their 2003 Honda Element and I decided to buy it. Simple enough.

Primarily, they wanted something with lower miles. A secondary reason was the Element wouldn't pass New York's state inspection in March because the odometer was not functioning. Or so they thought.

Their Honda dealer had investigated the problem and determined it needed a new gauge cluster ($437.40) plus $150 to reprogram the new cluster to the actual mileage on the vehicle.

They had already bought a new car and didn't want to sink any more money into the Element. Minnesota, of course, doesn't have a state inspection so I could have cared less about a functioning odometer and said I'd buy it without even knowing how much they wanted for the thing.

Anyhow, I got to thinking. If there is one part on a modern vehicle that is going to be dead nuts reliable and fuck proof, it's the odometer.

The beauty of the Internet, aside from an unlimited supply of pornography, is that it's the best gathering place ever invented for highly focused, obsessed communities. You left-handed, transvestite, sidecar drivers know what I'm talking about.

As you probably have figured out, I tend to take a fairly big picture view of vehicles.

Pretty much, as long as it's not on fire I don't care about it.

I can't even tell you for sure what year my pickup is, much less how many amps the alternator is putting out or how many horsepower the air conditioning saps on the highway.

I fill them up with gas. Change the oil and fix stuff when it breaks. Other than that, I really just don't care.

The same holds true with the airplanes I fly every day except somebody else fills them up with gas, changes the oil and fixes things when they break.

I can, for example, describe to you in detail the fuel system of a Cessna 310 right down to how many fuel pumps there are, how much gas each tank holds and how to get it where it needs to be.

On the other hand, I don't know for certain who makes the engines.

This is because not understanding the fuel system could kill me but whether the engines were built by Lycoming or Continental is of essentially no operational consequence.

The Element, being a fairly weird vehicle, seems to have more than it's fair share of fanatical devotees. There may be a Chevrolet Malibu Owners Group or a Toyota Camry Drivers Association but I doubt they approach the degree of passion and insane level of detail documented by the 143 different owners groups devoted to the new Mini.

Weird vehicles attract weird, obsessed people. Thankfully, those weird, obsessed people like to show how smart they are to other weird, obsessed people who are equally devoted to Kia Souls or Toyota Matrixes. (Or is it Matrii? I'm sure there are several sticky threads devoted to that very subject.)

So I spent a few minutes rubbing virtual shoulders with the weird, obsessed people who drive Honda Elements. Turns out, most Honda dealers have their head's up their asses when it comes to blank odometers (and everything else) on 2003 to 2007 Honda Elements built by Joe and Saki on the third shift under a full moon in winter.

Or something like that. You get the idea. Did I mention these people are obsessed?

Turns out, my newly found obsessive compulsive Honda Element driving friends pointed out, odometers are pretty much dead nuts reliable and fuck proof.

Light bulbs, on the other hand, burn out.

Why Honda dealers haven't figured this out remains a mystery but there were literally 12 pages of stories from people who had experienced the same problem and been quoted $437.50 plus $150 to repair what was almost always really a couple of burned out light bulbs.

Sure enough, when my folks took a flashlight and shined it on the blank odometer they were able to read the digits.

They were, rightly, not happy at all with their local Honda dealer. On the other hand they were very happy with their son, who in turn was very happy with his newly found obsessive compulsive Honda Element driving friends.

So, after explaining that since the odometer actually was working I was more than happy to not buy the Element at all or at least to pay more than the absurdly low price they were asking, my parents still sold the thing to me and I drove it home from New York quite happily not knowing how many miles I had actually traveled.

A quick trip to PepBoys put me in possession of a pair of 2721 bulbs. (Type 74 bulbs seem to work ok as well, although some people have had more success with type 73 bulbs and several have changed all of the instrument panel bulbs to LEDs but still others have painted their bulbs to change the instrument panel lighting color while others argue that it's better to buy the properly colored bulbs from superlumination.com.)

Sorry, I got distracted.

After studying the extremely detailed how-to (complete with photographs that were graced with little arrows and super-imposed boxes of varying styles to denote clips versus parts that just pulled straight out versus screws) I spent 10 whole minutes replacing the burned out 35505-SCV-A11 (that's the Honda part number for the odometer light bulbs, not to be confused with 35505-SCV-A01 which are the regular instrument panel bulbs and are 1.2 watts instead of 2.0 watts for the odometer bulbs) with my 2721 bulbs from PepBoys.

The bulbs cost $3.74, I now have a readable odometer and I swear to God everything else is true, right down to the part numbers.

Which is why I love the internet.

The real question, however, is why I bothered to replace the damn things in the first place.

I think I'm becoming an obsessive compulsive Element driver.

It's the middle of winter

I know this because it was snowing yesterday, I flew four approaches and considered the day to be so totally unremarkable that I had forgotten about it while I was sitting in the airplane back at base finishing my paperwork.

When another pilot asked me how the weather had been all I could do was manage a blank stare.

Eventually it came back: 5 miles visibility in Aberdeen, easy ILS. 1 ½ mile visibility and snowing in Watertown, easy ILS. 1 mile visibility and snowing in Marshall, easy ILS. 2 mile visibility and snowing at home plate, easy VOR approach. 3.5 hours in the soup. No icing and mostly smooth sailing.

Finally I just shrugged. “I dunno man. It's the middle of winter. I guess it was fine.”

With luck, in six months I will be rusty again, spoiled by warm summer days and an endless string of visual approaches. I can't wait.

A day

0300 wakeup. I never handle those well.

Despite my best efforts, crawling into bed at 9:30 p.m. yielded but a few hours of restless sleep.

Part of the difficulty comes from the natural cycle of things. Friday was a tough day. Four instrument approaches, nasty weather and some learning experiences I may write about as my conscience permits. I am still making sense of them myself.

I went to bed knowing today would be as tough, if not tougher.

Exhausted but wired is no recipe for a good night's sleep and I am finally, predictably deep asleep when the alarm blares. This is never good. I almost always wake up before my alarm and when I don't, it's going to be a tough day.

Shower, half a bowl of cereal and a pot of coffee brewed and poured into my thermos for the trip. The drive to the airport is a snap until I turn through the gates.

My truck will not stop, will not turn. We've been treated to freezing rain all night long and the entire airport is covered. Walking across the ramp without falling becomes a ballet.

This is bad.

I check the taxi-way, walking out nearly to one of the runways. My scheduled 5 a.m. departure is impossible. Simply getting to the runway is a hazard. I think about all the things that can go wrong on the takeoff roll and the decision is made: It's a no go until conditions improve.

Still, it's agonizing. I walk out to check the taxiway every 15 minutes. It is slowly, ever so slowly, starting to thaw.

Nearly three hours late one last check and I decide to give it a shot. The airport is alive now. The tower is open and the crews are finally getting out to inspect the runways and taxiways.

The weather has gotten worse. The winds are stronger, gusting to 18 knots now, and the ceilings are coming down. Oddly, I'm only worried about my time on the ground. Once airborne my craft is in it's element.

Ground operations are the challenge, and it is a significant one.

Engines alive and happy, clearance copied and I tiptoe out. The airplane still slides slightly on the taxiway but it is under control. The ground crews are out checking the runways and Glenn is running the tower like the pro he is. He gets myself and the ground crews in their pickup trucks talking directly.

Glenn is an old hand, he has seen this many times before. He has worked some of the busiest sectors in the country and works our tower now in retirement like a master. He is one of the very best.

Taxiway Charlie is slippery but not too bad. The turn onto Bravo shoots the morning off axis.

Bravo is still a sheet of ice. Throttles to idle, brakes locked and the airplane still moves.

A gust of wind and I start to slide cockeyed.

My grand plan has fallen to pieces and I have done something incredibly stupid.

I am impatient and tempted by the challenge. Stephen Coots aptly described it as “Whiskey to a drunk” in one of my favorite books, The Cannibal Queen

A better pilot wouldn't have taxied out at all and instead gone off to eat breakfast or just said to hell with the whole ordeal and gone home.

Presented with a chance to explore the ragged edge of the possible I can't help it and have talked myself into idiocy.

It is a personality flaw that needs repairing. I have been weak and it's time to own up.

I slide into the general vicinity of the run-up area and manage to get my tail in line with the wind. An uneasy stasis is reached.

My airplane is not moving. As long as I keep the brakes jammed, the throttles pulled fully back and the controls positioned just so we do not slide. Every now and again a gust of wind shifts my position slightly.

This is very, very bad.

Finally, some common sense intrudes on my sleep-deprived brain.

I call Glenn in the tower and tell him that no way, no how, am I moving from my current precarious position until conditions improve, the strip of taxiway in front of me is sanded or I run out of fuel, get cold and walk back to my truck in disgrace.

I do not want to give the wind access to the side of my airplane. I have no idea if I will be able to halt the resulting slide, but doubt that I will.

I have yet to drive an airplane off of a taxiway and am determined that today will not change that.

The standoff between airplane, wind, ice, snowbank and humility continues for 30 tense minutes.

Finally, the ground crews arrive and the truck driver gives me a big grin as he pulls in front and lets loose a massive spray of sand. His co-worker is treating the runway with ice melt.

I hold position for a few more minutes until the crews are clear of the runway. Finally, I gingerly release the brakes and give it a try.

The sand has done it's job. I can control my airplane again.

The takeoff is a non-event. The runway is in fine shape.

Two hours and 30 minutes later I am climbing out from Sault Ste. Marie after my first missed approach in years. It is not a pretty sight but it works out well.

I don't bother holding in hopes the weather will improve. There is an airport 5 minutes away and I had decided more than an hour prior that should I miss, as appeared likely, I'd head directly to Chippewa County with an ILS almost directly into the wind and close enough that it would be an easy trip for the courier waiting for my cargo.

The ILS is unremarkable and I am finally on the ground, 8 hours and 10 minutes after my alarm prodded me out of bed. I had expected to be home by now, instead I am only half-way.

The trip back is more of the same. The same strong temperature inversion that has made life so tricky for pilots in a five-state area for the past week is there. At the surface it is a chilly 26 degrees F. At altitude, only 5,000 feet above the ground, it is a relatively balmy 47 degrees F.

This is good in one regard: Icing hasn't been a problem at our modest cruise altitudes, but it has trapped a layer of cold, ice, low-ceilings and low visibilities below.

The result has been 11 instrument approaches for me in only three days of flying this past week. Most have been what would normally be classified as “low IFR,” although “low” is a relative term and perhaps only half have been close to the legal minimums.

I would rather it have stayed frigid. The cold is tough enough, but I'd rather deal with it and bask in a series of easy visual approaches than be warm but suffer through low ceilings and “maybe, maybe not” moments.

On the phone half-asleep and frozen on the Chippewa County airport ramp I relate the day's goings on to our director of operations.

He is a good man and looks out for his pilots. In turn, I try to give him no reason to cause him heartburn.

“Look on the bright side, you'll never be as sharp as you are right now” comes the voice through my cellphone.

He is right, of course. He has done this for years.

Looking back on the morning's string of poor decisions I decide the trick is staying sharp but not cutting myself.