Practice, Practice, Practice

Another short enjoyable evening's lesson in 4JG practicing GPS usage and airwork: steep turns, holds, unusual attitudes, GPS setup and programming, and the GPS RWY 27R approach into Oakland (twice), nearly all of it partial panel. This time everything feels good, and if my flying's a little agricultural, it's getting consistently closer to PTS standards, and I was ahead of the plane and instruments the entire time, for once. I'm still having problems with the Return Of The Death Grip and some tendencies to over-correct and over-control, but the approaches both went well, and the radio work's getting easier... Overall, things felt good.

Again I'm impressed by how much easier it is to fly things like holds with the GPS, and how nicely partial panel work goes when you can use the GPS ground track instead of the whisk(e)y compass. One thing bugs me -- and many of the other pilots I talk to about it -- there's no depiction of victor airways on the screen. This is really only a convenience issue, but it cost me a few moments the other night when John threw me a hold at the last moment and I couldn't find V187 on the area chart; and if told to join V244 from your current position, life would be even easier if victor airways were first class parts of the GPS world. But even with all its faults, it's hard to imagine doing serious IFR work in a small GA plane without a unit like this...

* * *

About 30 minutes into the flight, as we're departing the hold at SALAD intersection (which, surprisingly, isn't over Berkeley), John suddenly says "Look up and behind to your left!". Just Another Boring Bay Area Moonrise, the moon a slightly-flattened yellowy-orange disk coming up in the scattered cloud over the Diablo Range. Cool!

* * *

John's started talking about the checkride, which is a little scary. I have to juggle job and contract commitments at the moment just to be able to fly at all; the thought of also getting all worked up and nervous for a few weeks about the checkride sometime in the next couple of months doesn't increase the serenity levels much. But it'd be nice to have that damn rating in time for the long-planned trip to LA late autumn in 4JG....

As Usual, Nothing Goes Horribly Wrong...

A short lesson in IFR GPS usage with the Garmin GPS 530 in 4JG over San Pablo Bay: GPS terminal and enroute procedures, holds, the RNAV (GPS) RWY 6 approach with a circle-to-land on runway 18R at Napa (KAPC) and a shot at the missed, and the GPS RWY 27R approach back into Oakland for a change. As usual, nothing goes horribly wrong, but I'm not real pleased about my ability to cope with ad hoc holds (John got me to hold at REBAS using the GPS, with only a minute or so's notice, which I flew poorly) and other precision airwork. I've spent a few hours over the last week playing with Garmin's excellent GPS 530 simulator on my laptop, which was great preparation for the approaches themselves, so at least I'm mostly ahead of the plane and instruments for that part of the lesson. Pity about the flying, though.

* * *

I've been a fan of GPS for flying, and for things like backpacking, sailing, cross-country skiing, cycling, etc., for years (I have at least 5 handheld GPS units somewhere around here), and this lesson helps reinforce a few prejudices. GPS as a concept, and GPS enroute and approach procedures and the associated instruments and displays (at least as experienced with the 530), just strike me as natural. There's nothing conceptually or procedurally difficult about using GPS for IFR, and there are huge advantages -- the help with things like missed approach procedures or holds, the heading advice, the moving map for situational awareness, etc. These things make IFR flying a lot less hit-or-miss, and a lot more forgiving (which some would probably say makes GPS a Bad Thing, but never mind). I think I'd agree with John: if you own a small GA plane and you fly it single-pilot in IMC, it's difficult to justify not having something like this (well, he puts it more forcefully). And the flip side of all this is that GPS approaches can be designed and specified for a whole bunch of smaller airports that wouldn't otherwise have any sort of approach.

But the way most IFR GPS interfaces are currently implemented is a human factors mess, and the 530 is no exception, at least for me. I'm an experienced computer (and GPS) user and programmer, and I have trouble navigating my way around the menus and screens. There's just no affordance in the design -- there's no simple mapping from the world out there or your mental model of it or IFR flying to the 530's interface, as there arguably is for simple VOR navigation instruments, for example. And the complexity of choices on offer at any point in a sequence of entries can be overwhelming -- there doesn't seem to be any way to intelligently minimise the choices available based on locality, likely use, phase of flight, etc. Part of the problem is obviously just the sheer complexity of what the 530 can do (so much more than a simple OBS or HSI), but part of it also just poor interface design. A classic example is the need to hit a separate "entry" button after entering a waypoint name (or whatever) with the cursor knob; it's more natural to just press the same knob in (as I kept doing), but that action brings up a new menu and erases what you've just entered (leading to a whole string of "D'Oh!"s 3,000' over the Bay...). As John says, this is a unit that just cries out for an "undo" or "cancel" or "back" key. And things only get worse if you have to change your clearance mid-air -- navigating a series of screens, buttons, and menus to amend a stored flightplan or cope with vectors to an approach can become a serious distraction. In my case it took a minute or so to enter some new information, during which time I lost heading and altitude, both quite seriously. It's obviously an acquired skill to keep the plane steady without a copilot or autopilot while doing all the bit-twiddling; it's also obvious that it'll take me a fair while to learn that skill. It's obviously worth it....

A less serious problem is that the beautiful moving map display -- especially with the superimposed CDI and heading indicator -- is so damn seductive, so eye-catching, that it's way too easy to watch it instead of the coupled HSI or OBS. But the 530's display has a noticeable lag to it, and it's just not as simple to read and react to as the HSI; plus it keeps you away from your normal instrument scan, which could have serious consequences if (say) you missed the altitude problem you're developing as you're mesmerised by the GPS. The trick here is probably to do what John recommends -- put the unit display onto the (boring) flightplan page and concentrate entirely on the coupled HSI, glancing over every now and then to check progress, read any advisories, etc. from the 530's screen. This may take some getting used to...

But overall, it's hard to imagine doing serious IFR work in the future without something like the 530. Just watching it sequence through the approach waypoints while telling me the upcoming desired track and when to turn (based on its groundspeed calculations), or the way you just hit OBS on the missed and it automatically points you to the next waypoint in the missed procedure, or having it tell you the hold entry procedure on the upcoming hold -- well, all that's just magic. When it's retrofitted with WAAS, the whole precision GPS approach thing suddenly starts looking real.

* * *

4JG's a 172 with a 180 HP engine (as opposed to the more typical 150 HP), and the difference makes for extreme climb performance and great sustained cruise speeds (for a 172, at least). It also proves to be very stable in pitch, airspeed, and heading at slower speeds (below about 100KIAS), which is great in the approaches and when going missed. But I have trouble with heading and altitude stability much above that, and the entire leg home from the Napa missed approach hold to vectors for the Oakland approach I keep hunting around the heading in ways I don't seem to have to do in the other planes. I always seem to be a few degrees of heading, scalloping slowly along the course at 125 KIAS. Oh well -- I was never more than a dot or two out, but it would drive the average passenger crazy after a while, I suspect.

Et In Arcata Ego

A typical Oakland summer morning -- grey, overcast, cold (about 16C), breezy -- i.e. perfect weather for an instrument cross-country. DUATS claims the ceilings at Arcata are varying between 500 and 700 feet this morning, so (as planned) we'll head straight for Arcata and check with Flight Watch before Ukiah as a sanity check.

I call FSS and file an IFR flight plan -- V107 PYE V27 FOT, cruise 100 KTAS at 8000' -- and after engine startup and the instrument checks, I call Deliverance to get my clearance. Surprisingly enough, it's given pretty much as filed, the only (expected) exception being vectors on the initial segment to V107. John says I shouldn't be surprised, but I guess I expected more hoops to jump through -- something like "vectors to REBAS, SGD direct, STS direct, PYE ...", etc.

As we taxi to 33 we hear the Navajo we saw last week with the ferry tanks call ground with destination Honolulu, taxiing to 29. Runway 29's the main commercial runway, 10,000' long, over on South Field. I guess it'll take a substantial portion of that 10,000' to get airborne -- but more importantly, there aren't any obstructions on the extended centreline for a fair way after the runway ends, unlike the shorter 27L on North Field. It can stay low over the water for some time. We don't see it take off, unfortunately...

We depart through the usual relatively thin coastal layer -- a few minutes of actual -- then head up to Arcata as planned. There's really not much to say about the enroute stuff except that -- as predicted -- I'm paying to block out beautiful views that other people pay large amounts of money to see. Urgh. My handheld GPS (an old Garmin GPSMAP 195 I bought during my private pilot training) works fine as backup (much better than the VORs at any real distance from the VORs themselves), but the suction mounting fails like clockwork every hour or so and drops the damn unit on my left knee. There's got to be a better way...

Getting close to Fortuna VOR (FOT) I start prepping the ILS into Arcata, still unsure whether Seattle Center will vector me or whether I'll have to fly the full approach (no big deal either way, I'm just curious). About 25 nm out, Seattle actually calls and ask me which I'd prefer. I ask for vectors -- I want to do this the routine way -- and sure enough, a few minutes later we're gently vectored into the localiser with appropriate descents. Arcata's now reporting 800' ceilings, which is good for Arcata but not so good for experiencing more actual. Oh well. The ILS goes well, with a FedEx Caravan coming along behind us to keep us at a reasonable speed (John turns out to know the pilot), and we break out of the thin layer at about seven or eight hundred feet AGL with the runway close enough to sort-of dead ahead and land on 32 with a stiff quartering tailwind.

* * *

Arcata's a nice shiny little college town in the middle of a large rather remote economically-depressed timber region on California's Redwood Coast (the college being Humboldt State University, haven to hippies and newagers everywhere), and the airport's kinda the same way -- slightly slow-moving, a weird mixture of clean efficiency and delapidation, friendliness and wariness. It's got no control tower (more on this later), but it's got a steady stream of Brasilias and Dash-8's doing the run to and from San Francisco, Sacramento, Redding, etc., and a similar stream of FedEx Caravans doing the freight runs, so the commercial side is really quite busy. The GA side, by comparison, is almost non-existent (GA seems to happen mostly at Murray Field, KEKA, just down the coast), and we have to share the fueling facilities and staff with the big boys. Luckily we arrive during a lull, and after a quick refueling we park outside the old airport building and wander off towards the new terminal building for lunch. By this time the sun's actually appearing; it's enough to cause one presumably-local pilot to later point at the sky and shout something like "Look! It's VFR at Arcata!" to us while walking past us on the apron.

The restaurant's on the second floor of the terminal, with great views of the apron and the runways, and -- amazingly -- the food turns out to be really pretty damn good, especially for an airport. I pick the Fish and Chips out of morbid curiosity (Californians -- and Americans in general -- just don't get fish and chips), but it turns out to be freshly-cooked and, if not the Real Thing, it was the Northern Californian version (Even Better Than The Real Thing...). Our waitron -- a raven-haired woman with tats who just has to be a student -- keeps filling my cup with good fresh coffee, which always improves my mood. The view outside reminds me a lot of the Puget Sound area -- low rolling coastal pine forest hills with larger mountains in the background, everything on the ground some form of green, with housing poking through here and there. And that nearly omnipresent grey sky...

Outside, below on the ramp, a waiting Brasilia pilot drives one of the little baggage cart tractors around slowly looking rather pleased with himself and (apparently) taunting the other staff good-naturedly about something. His co-pilot loiters near another baggage cart while some ground staff gesticulate at the pilot. The incoming Brasilia from San Francisco gets later and later....

I use the phone to file IFR to Ukiah as planned, and we stroll out in the cold sunshine to the plane. John tells me that Arcata was in line to get a tower not so long ago, but it fell through. As we pass the old building he points out the tiny portable control tower that was supposed to be the initial tower. It's now sitting forlornly in the debris-strewn mess of the old building; it's not clear what the future of Arcata's tower is going to be (it's hard to see why a somnolent place like Salinas (KSNS), with no passenger traffic at all, gets a tower while Arcata doesn't).

We taxi out to runway 20 and pick up the (as-filed) clearance from Seattle Center. He tells us we'll probably have to hold for release maybe five minutes for an incoming Brasilia, but as soon as he's finished giving us our clearance, the incoming Brasilia pilot tells Seattle he'll cancel IFR now (at 10 DME) if it helps get us off the ground earlier. So we get to depart immediately, thanks to the guy in the Brasilia (a nice gesture).

* * *

The HOCUT2 departure takes you straight out over the (rough, cold, foggy) Pacific for at least six miles at low altitude, which is a little scary in a 172, but I'm under the Cone of Stupidity again and don't think too much about it. Like the rest of the flight to Ukiah, the departure is pretty routine, with just a tiny bit of actual on the way out. John starts getting bored and tries to find some music with the ADF. Not much to play with, but some cheesy Conjunto and rapid-fire Spanish DJ-ing from a couple of stations in the area livens things up for a while. Pity about the sound quality from the ADF.... Some distance out from Ukiah Oakland Center tells us to advise him when we have the airport in sight, presumably for the visual, but we tell him we'd like the localiser 15 approach (another little lesson in real-life radio work and procedures). No problem, and we start being vectored towards the localiser. You have to stay high for this approach until fairly close in, and even close-in you're only a mile or so off a bunch of hills that reach to within a thousand feet of the minimum altitude for that segment (I've approached Ukiah from the north VFR several times and know what's off my starboard wing...).

Nothing much to report about the localiser approach itself except that from just before the FAF to short final things get intermittently rather bumpy, and I tend to wildly over-correct for the bumps while under the hood. We could also hear some CDF aircraft on the ground on CTAF preparing for takeoff on a firefighting mission, and with another Cessna in the pattern, I just trusted John to sort out whether we'd join the pattern VFR or do the straight in. In any case we cancel IFR at the last moment and land straight in between the traffic with the appropriate CTAF calls (one of my pet peeves at untowered airports has always been the oblivious IFR pilots who call in with positions in terms of IFR waypoints or fixes -- e.g. "Ukiah traffic, Citation 12R is at the outer marker on the localiser..." -- which the average VFR pilot may not recognise; I at least trying to learn to report in terms of direction and distance).

Ukiah is hot -- the sort of place where you see everything distant through heat waves and mirages -- bone dry, and sleepy. A red-on-white CDF Bronco spotter and two S-2 tankers taxi past with that turboprop buzz and the smell of burning jet fuel. The Bronco's a plane I'd love to fly.... There's a Calstar medical helicopter hooked up for quick use just in front of the airport building. Inside the FBO, it's cool and dark. I file IFR to Oakland, and we return to the plane.

John asks me how we're going to depart Ukiah. I've given it a bit of thought, and although there's a published obstacle DP for Ukiah, it takes us back many miles to the north, and crosses the pattern. It's currently very VFR, and there are firefighting planes in the vicinity heading for the pattern, and given the conditions and the fact that under Part 91 we don't have to do the published departure, I suggest we do the missed, which takes us to 4,000' on heading 140, then ENI direct. Neither departure is perfect, but at least this way we get clear of the pattern very quickly and safely. John agrees, but says that if it weren't perfect VFR, he'd do the obstacle DP.

After startup we call Oakland FSS through the RCO, and promptly get told to call Oakland Center on 127.8. Hmmm, another useful lesson (in this case it's rarely clear which you should call; it wasn't clear that the RCO also does Center as well as FSS). Center gives us the clearance as filed, and off we go. The return to Oakland is also pretty routine -- as suspected, we don't get to fly any of the filed route back: Center just gives us a vector from above Mendocino straight for Oakland (about 90nm away at that point) and clears us Oakland direct when able. The GPS comes in handy here, since Oakland isn't really indicating reliably until about 50 nm out, but the controller's vector is pretty accurate in any case, and we just potter along at about 100 KIAS back towards Oakland on the suggested heading until the OBS needles stops swinging erratically. Over San Pablo Bay we start being vectored for the VOR/DME 27L approach, which ends up going OK, if (as always) my flying gets a little agricultural in the final moments.

On the ground again -- 5.5 hours in the air, 5.3 of them under the hood or in actual. I'm exhausted...

* * *

This is the sort of lesson I really enjoy -- a lot of real-world IFR flying, lots of little lessons in practical procedures, interesting destinations, and a nice variety of weather and approaches, etc. (plus some decent food and coffee). The main lessons were in planning and procedures, I think, and this time lots of things went right: for the most part I was ahead of the plane and the instruments, and my radio work was mostly acceptable (I made a few minor gaffes that didn't cause any real problems, like calling Oakland Center from Ukiah and claiming to be on the ground at Arcata, which probably caused some puzzled looks down in Fremont...). My altitude and airspeed control were better than last week, but still a little rough. The approaches were OK -- I went one dot below the glideslope at Arcata for a little while, which is cause for concern, but otherwise kept at or above all relevant altitudes, and I never went more than a couple of dots off the localisers or inbound courses horizontally.

What went wrong? According to John, two main things: firstly, as mentioned, I didn't handle the turbulence on the approaches well (I seem to have forgotten the lesson I learned from Dave Penney during tailwheel training, i.e. just ride it out, don't try to correct for the sudden movements unless they turn into trends, etc.). Secondly, the Death Grip still returns during moments of confusion or stress, and also when I'm distracted by doing things like chart-folding, reprogramming the GPS, etc. It's getting better, but it's still definitely there at the wrong times.

So what's next? Practice, practice, practice... more specifically, tightening the various procedures up to consistent PTS levels, which will takes some time (I sense a lot of On Top time in my future...), and polishing up for the orals. Also, now that 4JG is back on line, we need to do some real GPS approaches with the Garmin 530 (I've booked it for next week).

The Best Laid Plans...

I spend days obsessing about the instrument cross country trip coming up tomorrow. The planning for this trip is actually an interesting exercise (for me, at least). From the training point of view we want to satisfy the following:

• The FAA specifies that the round-trip distance has to be more than 250 nm and has to include at least three different types of instrument approaches with reference to instruments only (i.e. no visual or contact approaches).
  
• We want to stay on the L-2 enroute chart and not have to drag along (or buy) a whole new set of charts for (say) Southern California, Southern Oregon, or Nevada.
  
• We want to maximise the amount of actual -- California's coastal summers give you a lot of chances for actual without thunderstorms or icing, so it's good practice. And I really enjoy the transition into and back out of actual.
  
• I want realistic traffic and routing conditions, to see what really happens once you're in the system (who do you call for a clearance at a place in the middle of nowhere? Will center vector you early for an approach instead of making you fly the full procedure? How do you cope with real pattern traffic at untowered airports out in the sticks? Etc..).
  

For the 250nm / three approaches bit, there's a huge choice of routes and airports here in Northern California, so there's also no problems with the second requirement. We don't have an IFR-capable GPS in the plane we'll be using (4AC), so I want something like an ILS, a VOR approach, and maybe either a localiser or LDA approach. I don't particularly want an NDB approach. And almost any decently-long trip here will satisfy the last requirement as long as we include an untowered airport somewhere away from the larger population centers.

The third requirement pretty much points to going up the coast -- the inland is usually totally clear at this time of the year (and desperately hot). Arcata (KACV) seems the obvious choice -- it's usually covered in low coastal stratus nearly all day at this time of year, and even though it's untowered, it has two ILS approaches (which should give you some idea of the likely weather without having to even look at the forecasts...). And -- conveniently -- the town of Ukiah (inland, up highway 101 from here) both has a decent localiser approach and is only a few miles out of the direct route to Arcata, a little under half way to Arcata from here. So making it an Arcata (ILS) / Ukiah (LOC) / Oakland (VOR/DME) thing seems a fairly easy decision. Especially since Arcata apparently has a decent restaurant in the main terminal, and I'm guaranteed to be pretty hungry by the time we get there....

The problem with this is that Arcata is -- by Cessna 172 standards -- a long way from here (Oakland). It's about 220 nautical miles direct, i.e. at least two hours flying over or past the Redwood Empire, the Lost Coast, the Trinity Alps, Humboldt Bay, the Mad, Russian, and Eel Rivers, and plenty of other typically evocative names (this is a wild, rugged, largely uninhabitted part of the world, especially above Mendocino). And the flip side to Arcata being under coastal stratus so much is that you need a decent alternative in case it goes below even ILS minimums (which it has several times in the last week -- I keep a close watch with DUATS). But there are no useful alternatives on the coast much this side of Oakland because of the stratus (if it's below minimums in Arcata, it's probably not much better fairly close by at Eureka or Fortuna, where the minimums are much higher; and Little River (Mendocino), down the coast, has no approach at all, and is a long way from Arcata -- and is usually socked in when Arcata is as well. And the weather only gets worse if you fly north (think Seattle)...

So you almost always need a decent inland alternate -- one that has a good chance of actually being used. Unfortunately, the nearest inland alternates with suitable approaches -- Ukiah or Redding -- are each at least 100nm from Arcata, and getting from Arcata to Redding means coping with an MEA of 11,000' to get over the Trinities. 11,000' in a 172 when the temperature at sea level is well over 40C just isn't a lot of fun (in fact, it's not far from the service ceiling when you do the density altitude calculations). So Ukiah is the obvious alternative (as well as being the planned second airport). But Ukiah's at least an hour's flying from Arcata without a headwind -- which puts us very close to the legal fuel requirements of being able to fly to Arcata, go missed, fly to Ukiah as an alternate, and still have 45 minutes reserve. Still legal and doable (4AC will theoretically do 4.5 hours on full tanks), but I have my doubts about how well I'll do after three hours continuously under the hood....

So I make two plans, based on the forecast ceiling at Arcata an hour before we depart (Ukiah will always be clear at this time of the year, so that isn't a factor). Firstly, if the forecast ceiling for our arrival time at Arcata is at least 500' higher than ILS minimums, and not forecast to get worse, we'll go straight for Arcata, refuel and eat there, then come back via Ukiah. Otherwise, if the weather looks really bad, we'll fly to Ukiah first, refuel, then head to Arcata; if we land there OK, we'll have lunch, refuel, then head back to Oaktown; otherwise, we'll go missed, head for Ukiah for fuel again (and do a different approach), and try to scrounge something to eat there (there's no on-airport cafe as there is at Arcata), then head back to Oakland. We'll amend the decision (and flight plan) in the air if Flight Watch give us a different forecast for Arcata as we get near Ukiah.

The route planning isn't hard, but I can't quite believe they'll give us the route we ask for, so I do two versions of them as well. The first looks like KOAK V107 PYE V27 FOT KACV / KACV HOCUT2.FOT V27 ENI KUKI / KUKI ENI V27 PYE V107 KOAK. These three routes are what we'll actually file (or obvious variants depending on whether we go up via Ukiah or direct), but as well as these routes I've programmed into my handheld GPS some variants that seem more likely to me based on my very limited experience. I'm prepared to jettison any of these routes as we go along -- my guess is that Center will vector us along short cuts to the approaches and possibly even enroute -- but they're fairly simple routes in any case. We shall see.

And yes, I could have done the whole Chico / Ukiah / Oakland or Fresno / Sacto / Oakland thing instead like everyone else, but where's the fun in that?

(Dis) Grace Under Pressure

An evening of airwork (holds, DME arcs, etc.), the VOR-A approach (with circling) into Rio Vista (O88), and the VOR/DME RWY 27L approach back into Oakland, almost all partial-panel. Not the best of lessons. Or rather, a good lesson in learning what not to do and identifying what I'm doing poorly; but I do so much poorly this evening that I end up feeling a little depressed. I seem to have lost last week's gains. Once again, I'm behind the plane more than I'd like to be, and I make several stupid blunders that I just shouldn't be making at this stage.

The main point of the lesson turns into -- as John puts it -- trying to learn to have grace under pressure. Too many times this evening on the approaches, or during airwork, or when the radio's getting on top of me I have these little moments of panic or momentary confusion when I suddenly realise (or just think) that something's wrong, and instead of just sitting back for a moment and thinking calmly through the situation to what's important, I obsess too much on one thing and lose the big picture. It's a dumb thing to do -- after all, in the big picture I'm still flying mostly straight and level, and I'm not close enough to anything to cause problems -- but it seems to be today's little gremlin.

John later points me at Rod Machado's column in this month's AOPA Pilot which discusses those inner demons that you have to learn to filter out and not flood your mind. I read it the next day (I'm an AOPA member), and it's a typical Machado thing -- well written, funny in a slightly corny sort of way, and quite helpful. It meshes well with what John's saying. I need to exorcise my inner demons, or at least learn to filter them out more effectively, when it comes to those things that distract you from getting it mostly right. It's also about turning the scary uh-oh moments into more muted aha! moments, I guess. Or D'Oh! moments, at least.

A classic example is the DME arc we do off Concord VOR (CCR). John tells me to do a 9 DME arc from (effectively) the current radial (about 040, if I remember correctly) to the 001 radial inbound. I think about it as we depart Rio Vista, I plan ahead, set it up, and -- with a minor and very dumb initial mistake in telling John what I'd be doing -- have a clear mental model of what I'll do. But I forget to slow down, then start the initial turn too late, then see that I'm too close in, then unwittingly under-correct, then have an episode of existential angst when I suddenly "see" that I've started the DME arc the wrong way because I don't seem to be getting further out from the VOR even with the correction. So I panic, and say to John something like "I really screwed this up, didn't I? I turned the wrong way back there...". I think I'm going the wrong way around the arc, and that I've just dialed the wrong radial in as well. But John calmly asks me whether the course I'm currently flying will intercept the radial I have just dialed in, and whether that radial is between the 001 radial from the entry radial. I look at the OBS and think for a few seconds. Then: yes -- of course! -- to both questions. D'Oh! Firstly, I was forgetting the most basic fact about the OBS: that any damn course on the same side as the needle is pointing to will intercept the radial, and that in the case of a DME arc you're not often looking for a 45 degree (ie. top hemisphere) intercept to an intermediate radial, more like a 90 degree intercept or so; and, secondly, I've somehow just ditched my (correct) mental model and not "seen" the fact that I'd (almost automatically) dialed in the correct radial. With this help it takes only a few seconds to right myself and get back (more-or-less) on the arc, but it was one of those moment where if I'd just stepped back and thought through it all rather than fixing on the fact that my distance to the VOR was wrong (and getting worse), I might have just corrected the arc and gone on without too much embarassment. Oh well. Next time...

* * *

Earlier, while I'm getting us out of Oakland under the Cone of Stupidity, John says "Take the hood off for a second and look to your left...". Yes, it's Just Another Boring Bay Area Sunset (JABBAS) off the port wingtip again, the usual display of fog banks, the Golden Gate, Mt Tamalpais, the Bay, the Delta, the purple, yellow, blue and red colour fields, etc. etc. ad gloriam. Once again I reflect that I'm actually paying to block out views that people would kill for...

* * *

Even earlier, while I'm waiting for 4AC to come back on line after an oil change, I hear the familiar sound of radials (the engines) and look up to watch a large two-engine amphibian taking off on 27R and lumbering slowly into the air. After a couple of minutes it still seems to be just over the airport boundary to the west, doing what looks to be about 50 knots gropundspeed, if that. The noise is beautiful; the plane itself looks great, graceful and very retro-before-its-time. John thinks it's a Grumman Widgeon, but I suspect it's a Mallard -- the Widgeon looks too small and (according to my Field Guide to Airplanes) didn't have radials, just inlines or turbines. There aren't that many Mallards left in the US, apparently; but it's the sort of thing you occasionally see at Oakland among the assorted P-51's, DC3's, T-28's, etc.

[Later -- John looked the plane up in the FAA database; it turns out it's a Grumman Albatross, larger by some way than even the Mallard I thought it was...]

A few minutes later, as we wander over to North Field Aviation to pick up 4AC, we pass a large Piper Navajo twin sitting up against the hangar in the gloom. I look down at the tires for some reason, and think, hmmmm, they look a little flat. So I make some sort of remark about them to John. He points at the inside of the fuselage and says, "Well, he's got 500 gallons of fuel in there...". The entire interior behind the cockpit is filled with fuel tanks -- it's being prepared for a ferry trip to Hawaii, apparently. The pilot has to crawl across the tops of the tanks to get to or from the cockpit, which makes ditching almost impossible to survive. And the single-engine performance with most of that fuel on-board would make ditching almost inevitable...