Today, the kids were tracked out of school so I decided to take them and a friend of mine, Tony, from the flying club out for a $100 hamburger (pilot parlance for flying to lunch).  After finishing computer instrument training, I preflighted one of the Piper Warriors and planned on flying to Grand Strand/North Myrtle Beach Airport (KCRE) for a burger-joint a mile up the road.

Preflight went fine, taxied out to Runway 21, waited for traffic to land and pulled out onto the runway.  I gave the bird full power and noticed that the pitch (sound) was not as high of a note as expected.  The tach was showing around 2,300 RPM’s and we were accelerating.  However, when we reached around 52-54 knots, we stopped accelerating.  That is rotation speed so I let the nosewheel come up, but the main gears were not leaving the ground.  After a couple of seconds, we got airborne a few inches but nothing more.   I immediately decided this was “No Bueno” so I pulled power and aborted the takeoff.

I taxied off of the active runway to an empty portion of tarmac and ran the engine up a few times and completed procedures to clear any fouled plugs on magneto checks.  I still did not get a comfortable feeling so brought it back to maintenance.  Maintenance decided that it was just a fouled plug and combine that with being close to gross weight, the plane was just sluggish.  However, I was complimented on my decision-making in “being down here wishing I was up there rather than being up there wishing I was down here.”

I thought it was about time to give an update to my training.  I deferred entry into the Doctor of Education program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in order to focus more brainpower on flight training.  I surpassed 100 hours of flight time a couple of weeks ago and have been hitting the books pretty hard.  I am concurrently attending Commercial Rating Ground School (for a Commercial Pilot’s License) and training for the Instrument Rating.  As this point in training, I am doing all of my flying in a PCATD (Personal Computer Aircraft Training Device – fancy FAA name for a glorified flight simulator which doesn’t have graphics as nice as Microsoft Flight Simulator).  I have around 8 hours in the “sim” and can count a total of 10 hours towards the training requirements for the rating.

However, the Instrument Rating is very technical and my brain hurts after every training session as we discuss timed-turns, holds, including parallel, direct and teardrop entry into holds, approaches, missed approaches, etc…  If this sounds like Greek, it did to me too a few weeks ago, but I have been reading a ton and studying, studying, studying.

In a couple more weeks, we will fly an actual plane again, but there is so much of a technical learning curve, the computer is the best place to learn versus trying to fly an airplane while multitasking at this level of my training.

 

My son decided that he wanted to have an airport birthday this year, so he was allowed to bring 3 friends for airplane rides!  They absolutely loved it!  We also had a visitor at the field that weekend:

The Memphis Belle (movie version) was at the airport for the weekend giving rides.  What a great piece of history!

The birthday boy requested that we not have a cake, so Mom improvised anyway:

With Moon Pies from the snack bar!!  I was told it was the best 12th birthday party ever by an attendee!

A few days ago, I was able to take a staff-member from one of my client churches and his son for a flight in Warrior N64TZ.  Barry had flown in a general aviation plane before, but Noah, his 13 year old son, had only been in an airplane once before, and it was a 737 airliner.  We had to delay for about an hour due to low clouds and the weather never really cleared, but we were able to complete a few touch-and-go landings and perform some maneuvers in the practice area.  I showed them some sights and they had a complete blast!  This is how to spread the fun of aviation.  Take someone up and just let them enjoy the ride!

Today I spent 1.5 hours with Harrison Ashworth beginning training for the instrument rating.  I have been reading the massive Instrument Training Handbook (which is very technical) for the past couple of months and wanted to apply reality to theory.  We flew .9 hours in one of the club’s Piper Warriors to re-acclimate myself to the Warrior.  I made 5 take-off and landings and then flew around learning about the GPS system in the plane.  We use the Garmin 650 heavily during instrument training.

After landing and securing the airplane, we went inside the club and played “video games.”  Not really, the club has an Elite Flight Training Device (computer simulator).  I can log up to 10 hours of training for the instrument rating through the use of the Elite.  I logged .6 hours just learning how to take off and make certain standard maneuvers required for the instrument rating, such as the two-minute, or standard-rate turn, cruise descents and different climbs.

After completing the Elite, Harrison gave me several more handouts to study to prepare for the next lessons.  Back to books I go!

Today I took my son for his first flight in the Remos GX light sport.  He loved it!  He said he had more room and the visibility was much better than a Cessna 152.  I agree.

We left North Triangle (KLHZ) at 2:45pm and flew north of Raleigh over Wake Forest and Falls of Neuse Lake to Burlington (KBUY).  North Triangle was extremely congested and busy with glider flights, skydivers and various other planes in the area.  It was a relief to get away!  Raleigh Approach provided flight following air-traffic control for us as we were close to the departure areas for Raleigh-Durham International (RDU).  The guy at Burlington welcomed us and asked if we needed gas but we had only used about 3 gallons to get there!

After a short water and potty break, we took off and flew from west to south-southeast of Raleigh to the home of the Wings of Carolina Flying Club at Raleigh Executive (KTTA).  We landed there and I got to take a bath in Avgas!!!  I went to top-off the fuel tanks and the fuel “backflowed” all over me.  I just couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.

After washing up, we departed KTTA and set our sights back on KLHZ northeast of Raleigh.  We communicated with Raleigh Approach again and they put us directly over downtown Raleigh on our way back to KLHZ.

Our course towards KLHZ put us lined up perfectly with the runway for a straight-in approach.  We put the plane back in the hangar and logged 2.5 hours of flight time and a great tour around the Raleigh area.

The Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) state that to maintain night currency (i.e., being able to take passengers during night flight), a pilot must make 3 landings to a full-stop every 90 days at night.  For this purpose, night is defined as 1 hour after official sunset to 1 hour before official sunrise.  Since we are getting closer to Summer, “night” is getting later and later.  This Saturday, night began at 9:21 PM.

I rented one of the club’s Cessna 152’s for the night currency.  Before it became real dark, around 8:00 PM, I took the plane up for some pattern work.  I practiced all the different types of landings and then made the 3 required landings after dark.  All in all, I made 8 takeoffs and landings.  The night was clear and cool with no wind at all.  It definitely made things easy.  I heard so many whippoorwills, they blended together like cicadas during a Summer day.

I was the absolute last person at the airport so I got to turn the lights off, lock the doors and enjoy the silence of the airport at night.

This afternoon, the whole family was able to go up for the first time together.  It took about 30 minutes to get everyone loaded into Piper Warrior N64TZ for just a 30 minute flight.  Did a little sightseeing to see if everyone could handle it.  It was Liani’s first time in a small general aviation airplane.  She did fine.  No motion sickness or anything, but we had some problems with her and the kids’ headsets, so we landed pretty quickly.  They all said once the headset/radio issues were resolved, they wanted to fly longer.  That is a good sign.

This morning I flew with a friend of mine that will be an international missionary with the International Missions Board (IMB).  Since he will be in the foreign mission field, I will not mention his name, but he is a licensed pilot himself and would love the opportunity to utilize aviation on the mission field.  In the meantime, we took the Remos light sport from KLHZ (North Triangle) to KISO (Kinston) and back.  The weather was perfect!  Light winds and cool temperatures.  An absolutely beautiful early-May Saturday.

Here is a selfie that he took to memorialize the flight.

I guess this is proof that I can pilot an aircraft.  I will try to upload a video later showing a crosswind landing of the Remos.  The winds were not too gusty but were directly across the runway.  This required a “sideslip” to landing and my right wheels touched down a couple of seconds before the left wheels did.

In addition, I have completed approximately 13 hours of Pilot-In-Command (PIC) cross-country time and can start Instrument training shortly.

I have been spending quite a bit of time at the flying club these past couple of weeks.  The club has been running a rebate program to get people flying again after the winter lay-off.  Today, I wanted to get some cross-country time in and some crosswind practice so I flew a Warrior from KTTA to KCRE (North Myrtle Beach).  Even though I didn’t leave the airplane, it is still nice to see the beach every now and then.  Unfortunately, my crosswind practice was not as productive as I had hoped.  Winds were pretty blustery at the coast but straight down the runway!  They were picking up to a nice crosswind back at TTA, though.

Anyway, I spoke with an instrument instructor this past weekend to create a training strategy for the instrument rating.  He said to get about 10 hours of cross-country time in and then we would start training on the simulator.  I found that I can count cross-country time that is used as instrument training to knock-out two items at once!  That will save some time and money.

On another note, I take my 9 final hours of masters classes this summer and then potentially begin my Doctor of Education work in the fall.  I am certainly a glutton for punishment!