Foggle maneuvers, landings

This morning started with a pre-dawn pre-flight of 172R N24AF by headlamp.  It was pretty nice, to tell the truth.  Calm and quiet, except for the occasional Southwest jet takeoff.

Pre-dawn blur at Atlantic

Clearance (VFR to Lockhart, 2500).  Taxi to spot 1.  Ground.  Taxi to run-up area at 17L.  Wait for a few departures and arrivals.  Go!

Sunrise at 17L

170 to Lockhart. Foggles.  Maintain heading.  Descents and vectors by Mark's simulated ATC instructions and before I knew it we were on the 45 for 18 at Lockhart.  

The beginning of the pattern was good.  On base I felt I was getting a little low so I added power.  I felt good about the rest of my pattern, but that extra power came back to bite me because I didn't take it out until I had the runway, but by then I was probably 8-10 kts over ideal airspeed (65 kts).  It wasn't anything awful, but I did balloon a bit when I pulled back to flare, which meant we floated for a long time, which ended with a firm (but respectable) and long landing, which meant we missed the mid-field turn off, which meant we rolled all the way to the end and had what felt like the neverending taxi back for takeoff.  Before that run-on sentence, I had managed to look for towers, glance at the windsock, do a GUMPS check, and make the traffic pattern calls over CTAF.

It was fine, and good enough that I was confident to do another and plan for a touch-and-go.  I have done maybe five touch-and-gos total, and it has so far been intimidating to be finalizing a landing while transitioning into a non-standard takeoff.  However, by this point, I was feeling good about my patterns, approaches and landings and was willing to incorporate the next step.  (Proficiency at touch-and-gos means more landings per outing.)

The second pattern was good, too.  I was a little tighter to the runway on downwind, so I extended a little to compensate for the shorter base leg.  GUMPS check, a little worse job staying on centerline than the first time around, but touchdown, throttle in, one notch of flaps retract, pop off the runway, accelerate, climb, retract, climb, retract, depart the pattern to the northeast.

Sometime after liftoff, probably before even 500' AGL, we got a nice, deep, tantalizing whiff of smoking BBQ; Lockhart is home to the famous Black's BBQ.  Mmmmmmm.  As I told Mark during our debrief, it's a good sign that I'm relaxing and re-acclimating to flying enough to use secondary senses in flight!  He agreed, saying that my "bandwidth" while piloting is opening up.

Foggles on.  Slow flight.  Slow flight maneuvers.  Surprisingly intense rudder pressure to turn -- I had forgotten how very unresponsive that control surface can be!  Constant airspeed... climb?  I forget which we did, but it's starting to feel more natural to find the pitch/power balance again and cross-check instruments to control airspeed and climb/descent rate.  I was still working at it, but not working as hard as the last time we did this.

Before long Mark was talking to approach and we were vectoring in for landing.  We were on a long base when the foggles came off and I had an eye-opening experience:  I was disoriented now that I had visual flight back!  I saw the airport, I saw our altitude, I had the picture, but somehow it felt like we were much farther away.  It was a very odd feeling.  Mark had to prompt me to start on my pattern descent and airspeed adjustments.  With that prod, I got us on track, trying to deliberately keep speed here to not delay the waiting departure queue.  It ended up being a pretty well-managed approach and nice landing, perhaps the nicest so far, and after a turnoff at Juliet and a call to ground, we taxied back and shut down.

Phew!  A happy phew!  It was a fun flight.  Room for improvement, but satisfactory for this stage of training.

Good ol' training route to 50R and home again...

Things I did and will continue to do:  "talk good" on the radio; keep an eye on the DG; GUMPS; stabilized landing approaches that start with a properly managed pattern; generally held altitude and heading in simulated instrument flight.

Things I will improve on:  "talk better" on the radio; increase scan speed; hold altitude and heading closer; landing flare.

Next time:

- Stalls on instruments

- Unusual attitudes on instruments

Soon, I hope:

- Start using nav avionics

Good, good and more good!

So glad to be writing this post.  :)

The flight was later in coming that I had hoped, but no amount of wishing will make the weather cooperate.  This was the first flight (Wednesday) after the monumentally disappointing one (last Friday) and I was so ready to get some good stuff done to restore my confidence (and probably Mark's, too!).

I spent the weekend reading, planning, processing, and preparing.  Getting my brain set right.  Focusing on proper traffic pattern operation, minding airspeeds and distance and flaps and power and altitude.

And it was good.  I was bubbly when it was over.  

To begin, it was a gorgeous evening.  We weren't leaving the airport until about 6pm, which was later than hoped but Austin's rush-hour traffic will strain even the most generous driving time estimates.  I stopped on the way to the airport to grab a protein bar, knowing that low blood sugar could well be my downfall since we'd be flying through dinnertime, and it could have been a factor on that last flight.

During preflight, there were two anomalies and one mistake.  I'm trying to get better about preflighting and doing checklist tasks from memory then following up by reading through the checklist to confirm completeness.  The first anomaly was that the fuel indicator for the left tank was bottomed out, while the right was maxed out.  A visual inspection showed that both tanks were full, so just something to keep an eye on.  The mistake was that from memory I did *almost* the whole preflight properly, but did not test the fuel from the three nose sumps (just the five on each wing), so I had to get out, get out the GATS jar again, and wrap it up.  The second anomaly was related to the first; after cranking up the left fuel indicator came alive and showed full, but the annunciator for L FUEL LOW kept flickering intermittently.  Something in that sensor circuit is screwy. 

Mark and I discussed that he was to be a knows-nothing passenger for this flight (except when I actually needed instructor input, which I asked for a couple times).  This put me in a frame of mind to be very talkative about what I was doing every step of the way, and that was a good thing.  

Clearance was ok, thought I stepped on another transmission and bugged the controller who had told another pilot five seconds earlier to standby.  Taxi was normal, although it is worth noting that in preparation for the expected F1 aircraft influx, they crammed the school fleets just as tight together as possible so the taxi was extra cautious.  When I called ground the volume on COM1 was too low and so I missed the transmission and had to ask him to say again for 24AF.  Run-up was normal, and we got to face down a Southwest airliner who was waiting for their clearance release time.  I forgot to dial in our departure frequency, but I did remember to set the transponder to altitude-reporting mode, which Mark has been the one to remember so far in the past.  Lights, camera, action!

Density altitude was a little over 2800' (field elevation 541') and it was again over 90 degrees; my plan was to rotate at 60 kts instead of 55, and that worked well.  Our destination, Lockhart, is due south of the Austin airport, so we were given a heading of 170, same as runway heading, and that would take us straight there, with the Circuit of the Americas off to the east.  As I was climbing, not long after takeoff, tower sent us to departure; here's where having it loaded into standby would have been great, because it's just a single button push to activate, but instead I had to twist a few knobs and look at the com in addition to managing the other takeoff climb tasks.  I felt comfortably on top of the situation so it didn't add stress, but it should have been done earlier.  On Friday, after an unexpected takeoff experience, it would have been much more difficult.

We climbed, we chatted, we looked around.  It was very relaxed.  We heard another trainer take off a little bit later, also heading to Lockhart for landing practice so we'd know to anticipate other traffic in the pattern.  Soon enough, it was time to bear east a tad in order to join the 45 for left downwind for 18, Lockhart, and start descending to the 1500' pattern altitude and slowing.

The target power setting in the pattern would be 2100 RPM.  Abeam the numbers we'd aim for 1500 RPM and less than 110 kts to be able to put in the first notch of flaps.  I think I had us at 95 or so, which was great.  We were a little tighter to the runway than I would have liked, so I aimed a little to the right.  Left base, still descending, still slowing, shooting for 75-80 kts and a second notch of flaps.  Doing fine.  Turn to final, overshoot, correct course, slow to 70 and put the flaps to 30 degrees, with a goal of 65 kts at the threshold.  

It was good.  It was well-managed.  It was stabilized.  I don't even remember the touchdown itself, I just remember feeling victorious!  

We taxied back, waiting at the threshold for the other trainer who was on final by now to do their touch-and-go, and as they turned onto the crosswind leg, we took the runway and took off.  Nice takeoff, nice climb, nice re-entry into the pattern.

We did this two more times, for a total of three landings at Lockhart, keeping a nice spacing with the other airplane.  There were little adjustments on each one, but I frankly don't remember one from the other at this point!  They were all decent, and all performed within a pretty reasonable margin of each other, but here are the pattern and landing notes I need to work on:

- CENTERLINE alignment.  It seems that my sight picture is off.  Every time Mark told me to aim for the centerline, which to me it looked right but to him we seemed way left.  I can certainly see that when I'm out at base distance, my alignment is poor, but it gets fixed, and I do still favor the left side.  Once we're over the numbers, it's pretty close, but it's something I'll work on to be just right.

- THROTTLE FRICTION LOCK.  There were several times in the pattern where I made power adjustments for being lower than I wanted to be.  Mark said he had noticed the RPMs dropping by 100 or so seemingly without my intention.  I tightened the friction lock so that I wasn't moving it inadvertently and it got better. There are still so many factors to hitting the desired altitude, but power being lower than intended is certainly one of them.

After three firm but satisfactory landings, it was time to head back to Austin.  This was the time when Mark pointed out that the display on COM1 was unreadable.  D'oh.  We could hear the other plane, but were not confident that he could hear us.  It would not be usable for dialing in Austin approach or anything else.  We departed Lockhart, keeping the other plane in sight in case he couldn't hear us, and almost as soon as we were out of the pattern called approach on COM2.  They vectored us back in to the north east, then around to join the traffic.

By the time we were in the inner ring of the Class C, it was dark.  I could see the blue taxiway lights (which looked greenish-blue to me), but failed to remember that the rest of the runway lights are not omnidirectional and so I was thankful that ATC was helping us to get into the right position.  Somewhere on base, the controller said we'd be #2 to land 17L behind the Phenom on final and asked if we had the traffic in sight.  I replied that yes, we had the traffic.  Mark and I were noting that we had no idea what kind of plane it was, but it was the only thing on final or anywhere nearby for that matter so it must be it.  Then the controller asked somewhat pointedly if we had the Phenom in sight, almost like he was calling us on it!  I said yes, then Mark pointed out that it would be better to confirm what we know, rather than what ATC is offering; confirming "we see a landing light on final at our 12 o'clock" would have been better.  (We were quite far away from it.)

I got to do a landing in the dark but couldn't count it as a night landing since it wasn't officially night.  The airport is a Christmas tree at night, that's for sure!  This was a time when I called on Mark to be the instructor, helping me navigate back to the FBO.  It's very, very different at night.  I can stay between the blue edges, but I'm not fresh on picking out the various airport signs in the dark.  You might think it'd be easier since they're lit, but alas...  :)

All in all it was a really, really good flight and a good time.  The non-landing things I need to work on:

- cut the word "for" from my communications (unless necessary, sometimes?).  I don't remember specific instances, but imagine responding to an instruction with "whatever for 4AF."  Was that "whatever, 44AF"?  Avoid the opportunity for confusion.  Be efficient and concise.

- respond more quickly.  This will come with practice, but I will be aiming to improve on every flight.

I checked the 172R POH supplement covering the radio.  It has a self-dimming display, but the user can set the minimum brightness.  It's possible that was set too low.  It's also possible that the display was just going.  Things to check next time.

Bad, bad and more bad

TL;DR:  Was this lesson about density altitude and performance?  If not, WTF?  I have to compartmentalize, stay present and focused, and move forward.

If I were a superstitious person, I would never fly at the full moon again.

It was a gorgeous afternoon to start and my attitude was perfectly in line with the weather. We wrapped up as the day transitioned into a beautiful evening, but at this point my mood was all rain and low overcast.

I made mistakes.  Mistakes accrued and compounded.  I did not recover, despite handing the controls to Mark for a few minutes to give me a chance to reset.  It solidified my resolve that I am not ready to be flying alone again yet.

I have the plane scheduled for first thing Monday morning for a non-lesson practice-practice-practice flight with Jason and on Wednesday for a morning lesson.  I will be an instrument-rated pilot, despite occasional abysmal proficiency.  Until then, I will be safe and diligent and keep making progress.  After then, too.

The flight.  It was originally supposed to be primarily a crosswind-landing-practice flight, because that condition is still the 800-lb gorilla in my room.  The only experience I have with crosswind landings is bad experience from my very first solo.  On Friday, I was seeking it out (with an instructor) and facing it head on to tame it.  Unfortunately, the predicted 10kt winds petered out to about 2kts, so we decided to convert to an instrument lesson for slow flight and stalls under the hood, with a few landings down at Lockhart for extra practice.

Preflight, radios, taxi and all were fine and normal.  We talked about tuning the radios and making good use of the four frequency slots for the start of our flight:  NAV2 for ATIS and clearance delivery, NAV1 for ground and tower.  Still working on phraseology and efficiency on the radio, but I feel I'm past needing to scrutinize every interaction; it's good enough to not blog it.  :)  Checked instruments while turning during the taxi.

The pre-takeoff checks and run-up took forever.  Do you know TOJAM?  The Other Jason A Miller?  I'm married to MyJAM, and the other JAM is a CFII and the man behind The Finer Points of Flying (TFP).  Super nice guy, extremely knowledgable, very practical.  I've started watching his videos, and in the first one he emphasizes redundancy.  When performing checklisted tasks, the first pass is your knowledge and flow, backed up by cross-checking the checklist afterward.  This flight's pre-takeoff checks and run-up were long because it was my first time trying to establish and follow a flow, which required reading the checklist, looking at instruments and avionics, getting situated in my head with the pattern of attention and expected sights, rechecking the checklist, and so forth.  (I had intended to be at the airport 15 minutes early to do this before Mark arrived, but he also showed up 15 minutes early so we just got right to it!)

It also was an extended time because we talked about the GPS, putting Lockhart in there, tying it to the localizer with the GPS/NAV switch, setting the heading, checking the autopilot (which I had never used before), and doing the final "Lights, Camera, Action" check.  Lights are the lights:  beacon, strobe, landing/taxi as needed.  Camera is the transponder, to make sure we're squawking the right code and have switched to altitude mode (so ATC can see our picture).  Action is fuel quantity, fuel selector, fuel cutoff valve, mixture, throttle, trim, flaps.

Here's the panel for 652MA.

I put us at the runway threshold and called tower, who told us to wait for aircraft on final.  I could see several landing lights in a row.  It was busy.  Way busier than anything I've flown in before, and it definitely felt like a commercial airport.  But no biggie, I used the time to double-check that the departure frequency was tuned, quadruple-check to DG calibration, look at engine gauges, open the windows again (after all, it was 90 degrees in full afternoon sun with no AC), ...  A few minutes later, tower wrapped up an exchange with an inbound Airbus and told us to line up and wait on 17L, where the Airbus was headed to land.  For any non-flying readers, this is totally normal, and we had barely gotten lined up when tower cleared us for takeoff (and then told the Airbus to slow down a little).

Here's where the first link in the chain started to crack.

We started down the runway.  Airspeed came alive.  Oil looked good.  Centerline was being tracked.  At the 55kt rotation speed, I rotated and we didn't lift off pleasantly and easily like usual.  I pulled back a little harder, glanced at the the airspeed (still increasing), and still nothing.  I think I said something to Mark along the lines of "Why can't we take off?" and he asked if I was pulling back enough.  We started ever so slowly to climb, like painfully slowly, and I was rattled.  We still had forty miles of runway in front of us, but what if there were obstacles we wouldn't be able to clear?  I didn't know why the takeoff was so sluggish, and not understanding that made me really uncomfortable about the conditions and the plane and myself.  Had I been alone, I would probably have called tower right away and asked to just stay in the pattern and come back.  But Mark was there and was calm, so I took a cue from that and continued.  (The answer here is density altitude.  Checking the METAR from 5pm that day, the calculated density altitude was 2800', for a field elevation of 541'.  Guess what I'll be paying attention to and comparing to performance now!  I've had the book knowledge about it, but have not had to deal with it in over ten years!)

While I was having a mental wrestle with the takeoff, I acknowledged tower's instruction to go to departure, switched freqs, but then didn't check in with departure.  Getting a little farther behind...  Which is a sardonic comment from the universe because in the TFP video the night before the big idea was to stay ahead of the airplane and I am such a planner, always in all aspects of my life preparing for what's next, that I felt that mindset would be natural for me.  My MO is to be prepared, and I admit that in other areas of life I also do not deal well with unexpected wrinkles.  Preparation + flexibility = success?

Mark could already tell I was off.  We chatted for a minute and he took the controls so I could make a few notes to get thoughts out of my head, try to reset for the next phase, and put on the foggles.  As I put them on, I took a glance out the right window and saw a handful of birds spiraling in a column not terribly far to the right of our path.  At lunch today with Jason, Andy, and Steve, they told stories of bird strikes and showed gory pictures of the birds, the bloody inside of the plane, the hole in in the windscreen.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but every.last.bird was now on my radar.

This was autopilot test time.  I had never used it before, and this AP is heading-only.  Dial in the heading bug on the HSI (DG), press the button, observe it holding the heading.  Dial twenty degrees to the left, observe it turn and hold the heading.  Next we tried having it get the heading from the GPS, but it wasn't working as expected and so we agreed to learn more about it back on the ground.

By this point, we were nearly to Lockhart and Austin departure asked if we were planning to land there.  Mark responded that we'd maneuver some first, and had me turn out to the east.  We were preparing for slow flight and I failed to mention clearing turns in my planning for the maneuver.  Blergh.  We did them, then I talked out slowing down and using flaps and maintaining altitude, all the while failing to maintain heading.  When I went to regain heading while still trying to slow further, I started losing my altitude.  We were at about 60kts with probably two notches of flaps and I was poorly managing power to maintain altitude, which had already dropped by 400' (!!!) when Mark asked for the controls.  I was perfectly ok with that.  I just couldn't seem to get back in front.  If it was new stuff, that would have been understandable.  But this was stuff I can do competently, and I'm even better at heading and altitude when using instruments!  My best guess is that density altitude was messing with me up at 3000', too, and I wasn't getting the engine performance I expected, nor was I adjusting properly for the situation.  Mark said at least twice while I made corrections to add power, and I did, but obviously not nearly enough.

Scrap the maneuvers.  We headed for Lockhart, and while I was fuming mad at myself inside, I was determined to have a decent landing to at least perform something correctly.  CTAF was quiet, so that was one factor at least that was promising to be simpler.  But, alas....  The first trouble here was that we were flying west, into the setting sun, and despite having it plugged into the GPS and on ForeFlight, we still had a very hard time finding the runway; the light and contrast were bad, the trees and roads and buildings weren't helping it to stand out, then we heard another aircraft halfway there from Austin, ....  We knew we were close, intending to come in on a 45 for downwind, and so we proceeded and kept looking out to the left.  As I scanned back in front of us, a huge cloud of birds was sitting there, and our current path would take us just under the edge of their swarm!  Birds dive when planes scare them, and after the horror stories over lunch, that was so not where I wanted to be.  I turned us a bit to the left, and when I was comfortable to look for the runway again, there it was, super close.  We were basically cutting the corner from downwind to base, still above pattern altitude and with no flaps and higher than desired RPMs for that point.  Alright, fine.  Mark asked my plan, and after bumbling for a minute that we'd fly up the crosswind leg (was my brain even on?!), it was obvious I was making the incorrect choices but given our solitude and altitude, we carved a big rectangle west of the runway, turned on the actual crosswind, found the incoming traffic on ForeFlight (thanks, Stratus!) and verified that he had us in sight.  From there the pattern went better, more as expected.

But the landing.  Oh, man, the landing.  Well, both of them, because there was a solid bounce. Then the start of porpoising, or pilot-induced oscillation.

Flashback ten years to a lunchtime solo at KJGG when I popped over to stay in the pattern and practice a few landings.  Hadn't had any more exposure to them then than the three paragraphs in the ground school book, and after not being able to regain control through elevator inputs, I pushed in the throttle as a last resort to lift of and go around and the control surfaces became very effective and I was able to land and stop.  With a thudding heart and bulging eyes.

Back to this flight.  After the second bounce, Mark calmly said, "My controls," and I acknowledged and withdrew my hands.  Power in, the bouncing stopped and we were flying but not climbing.  Stall horn.  Accelerate.  Ease in the flaps.  Stall horn still squealing.  Climb a little.  Accelerate.  Ease in the flaps.  Climb.  Obstacle awareness.  Climb.

Mark kept the controls for a little bit.  I was mired, stewing, trying to figure out what was going on and why I couldn't keep up.  If I were alone, I fully believe my mind would have snapped into a present, effective and stoic state; that's what has happened every time I have ever been solo, a feeling of hyperawareness mixed with intention, initiative and responsiveness, with emotions tucked away for later review.  Having an experienced pilot on board -- which will continue for quite some time -- is a luxury that allowed me to allow myself to not be at my best.  A luxury I will mentally resist from now on.

After a few minutes, I took the controls and Mark called approach, who sounded busier than when we had left.  Once straight and level, and after syncing the DG for at least the third time (why is equipment that requires this much babysitting still in use?!?!?!) and doing an instruments/gauges/breakers/power/fuel scan, we were being vectored in.  Ready for another incident of major stupidity?  I responded to a "turn left to heading whatever" instruction by turning the DG calibration knob instead of the heading bug knob as I rolled into the turn.  Mark somewhat urgently said something alerting me to the mistake, and I'm pretty sure I reached full demoralization at that point.  So we're turning, can't reliably reset the DG, inside the class C airspace, in the busiest environment I've ever been in, with zero confidence.  It wasn't a huge course change, maybe 20 degrees, so after a guess at what might be close I leveled, reset the DG, set the bug, and corrected course.

"Mark, you'll be doing the landing."  I kept the controls as we were vectored into sequence with the other landing aircraft and took us part way down final before a positive exchange of controls.  About then, tower instructed us to use as little runway as possible (yeah, the departures were stacking up, too), so Mark powered back up and did a smooth no-flaps landing that had us turning off a taxiway K that takes us straight back to the FBO.

To say I was disappointed is a complete misrepresentation of how far below my standards and expectations that flight was.

Aviate, navigate, communicate.  I has having a hard time with aviate.

How do I learn from this?  What is my plan for understanding what happened so I can take better action next time?

- Get a handle on the plane:  Read the POH.  I had read the 172N (the first plane I flew last month) and lackadaisically did not go through the 172R POH when switching to non-carbureted.

- Get a handle on density altitude:  Re-read all of the density altitude materials.  Study anything in the POH about performance.  (A brief conversation with Jason suggests that while that sluggish takeoff could possibly have been density altitude ("are you sure you rotated at a high enough speed?"), pilot error was more likely the explanation for the slow flight flubs.)

- Manage conditions better: No more Friday night flying, especially when there's a UT homegame the next day.

- Put it behind me.

Bad, bad and more bad

TL;DR:  Was this lesson about density altitude and performance?  If not, WTF?

If I were a superstitious person, I would never fly at the full moon again.

It was a gorgeous afternoon to start and my attitude was perfectly in line with the weather. We wrapped up as the day transitioned into a beautiful evening, but at this point my mood was all rain and low overcast.

I made mistakes.  Mistakes accrued and compounded.  I did not recover, despite handing the controls to Mark for a few minutes to give me a chance to reset.  It solidified my resolve that I am not ready to be flying alone again yet.

I have the plane scheduled for first thing Monday morning for a non-lesson practice-practice-practice flight with Jason and on Wednesday for a morning lesson.  I will be an instrument-rated pilot, despite occasional abysmal proficiency.  Until then, I will be safe and diligent and keep making progress.  After then, too.

The flight.  It was originally supposed to be primarily a crosswind-landing-practice flight, because that condition is still the 800-lb gorilla in my room.  The only experience I have with crosswind landings is bad experience from my very first solo.  On Friday, I was seeking it out (with an instructor) and facing it head on to tame it.  Unfortunately, the predicted 10kt winds petered out to about 2kts, so we decided to convert to an instrument lesson for slow flight and stalls under the hood, with a few landings down at Lockhart for extra practice.

Preflight, radios, taxi and all were fine and normal.  We talked about tuning the radios and making good use of the four frequency slots for the start of our flight:  NAV2 for ATIS and clearance delivery, NAV1 for ground and tower.  Still working on phraseology and efficiency on the radio, but I feel I'm past needing to scrutinize every interaction; it's good enough to not blog it.  :)  Checked instruments while turning during the taxi.

The pre-takeoff checks and run-up took forever.  Do you know TOJAM?  The Other Jason A Miller?  I'm married to MyJAM, and the other JAM is a CFII and the man behind The Finer Points of Flying (TFP).  Super nice guy, extremely knowledgable, very practical.  I've started watching his videos, and in the first one he emphasizes redundancy.  When performing checklisted tasks, the first pass is your knowledge and flow, backed up by cross-checking the checklist afterward.  This flight's pre-takeoff checks and run-up were long because it was my first time trying to establish and follow a flow, which required reading the checklist, looking at instruments and avionics, getting situated in my head with the pattern of attention and expected sights, rechecking the checklist, and so forth.  (I had intended to be at the airport 15 minutes early to do this before Mark arrived, but he also showed up 15 minutes early so we just got right to it!)

It also was an extended time because we talked about the GPS, putting Lockhart in there, tying it to the localizer with the GPS/NAV switch, setting the heading, checking the autopilot (which I had never used before), and doing the final "Lights, Camera, Action" check.  Lights are the lights:  beacon, strobe, landing/taxi as needed.  Camera is the transponder, to make sure we're squawking the right code and have switched to altitude mode (so ATC can see our picture).  Action is fuel quantity, fuel selector, fuel cutoff valve, mixture, throttle, trim, flaps.

Here's the panel for 652MA.

I put us at the runway threshold and called tower, who told us to wait for aircraft on final.  I could see several landing lights in a row.  It was busy.  Way busier than anything I've flown in before, and it definitely felt like a commercial airport.  But no biggie, I used the time to double-check that the departure frequency was tuned, quadruple-check to DG calibration, look at engine gauges, open the windows again (after all, it was 90 degrees in full afternoon sun with no AC), ...  A few minutes later, tower wrapped up an exchange with an inbound Airbus and told us to line up and wait on 17L, where the Airbus was headed to land.  For any non-flying readers, this is totally normal, and we had barely gotten lined up when tower cleared us for takeoff (and then told the Airbus to slow down a little).

Here's where the first link in the chain started to crack.

We started down the runway.  Airspeed came alive.  Oil looked good.  Centerline was being tracked.  At the 55kt rotation speed, I rotated and we didn't lift off pleasantly and easily like usual.  I pulled back a little harder, glanced at the the airspeed (still increasing), and still nothing.  I think I said something to Mark along the lines of "Why can't we take off?" and he asked if I was pulling back enough.  We started ever so slowly to climb, like painfully slowly, and I was rattled.  We still had forty miles of runway in front of us, but what if there were obstacles we wouldn't be able to clear?  I didn't know why the takeoff was so sluggish, and not understanding that made me really uncomfortable about the conditions and the plane and myself.  Had I been alone, I would probably have called tower right away and asked to just stay in the pattern and come back.  But Mark was there and was calm, so I took a cue from that and continued.  (The answer here is density altitude.  Checking the METAR from 5pm that day, the calculated density altitude was 2800', for a field elevation of 541'.  Guess what I'll be paying attention to and comparing to performance now!  I've had the book knowledge about it, but have not had to deal with it in over ten years!)

While I was having a mental wrestle with the takeoff, I acknowledged tower's instruction to go to departure, switched freqs, but then didn't check in with departure.  Getting a little farther behind...  Which is a sardonic comment from the universe because in the TFP video the night before the big idea was to stay ahead of the airplane and I am such a planner, always in all aspects of my life preparing for what's next, that I felt that mindset would be natural for me.  My MO is to be prepared, and I admit that in other areas of life I also do not deal well with unexpected wrinkles.  Preparation + flexibility = success?

Mark could already tell I was off.  We chatted for a minute and he took the controls so I could make a few notes to get thoughts out of my head, try to reset for the next phase, and put on the foggles.  As I put them on, I took a glance out the right window and saw a handful of birds spiraling in a column not terribly far to the right of our path.  At lunch today with Jason, Andy, and Steve, they told stories of bird strikes and showed gory pictures of the birds, the bloody inside of the plane, the hole in in the windscreen.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but every.last.bird was now on my radar.

This was autopilot test time.  I had never used it before, and this AP is heading-only.  Dial in the heading bug on the HSI (DG), press the button, observe it holding the heading.  Dial twenty degrees to the left, observe it turn and hold the heading.  Next we tried having it get the heading from the GPS, but it wasn't working as expected and so we agreed to learn more about it back on the ground.

By this point, we were nearly to Lockhart and Austin departure asked if we were planning to land there.  Mark responded that we'd maneuver some first, and had me turn out to the east.  We were preparing for slow flight and I failed to mention clearing turns in my planning for the maneuver.  Blergh.  We did them, then I talked out slowing down and using flaps and maintaining altitude, all the while failing to maintain heading.  When I went to regain heading while still trying to slow further, I started losing my altitude.  We were at about 60kts with probably two notches of flaps and I was poorly managing power to maintain altitude, which had already dropped by 400' (!!!) when Mark asked for the controls.  I was perfectly ok with that.  I just couldn't seem to get back in front.  If it was new stuff, that would have been understandable.  But this was stuff I can do competently, and I'm even better at heading and altitude when using instruments!  My best guess is that density altitude was messing with me up at 3000', too, and I wasn't getting the engine performance I expected, nor was I adjusting properly for the situation.  Mark said at least twice while I made corrections to add power, and I did, but obviously not nearly enough.

Scrap the maneuvers.  We headed for Lockhart, and while I was fuming mad at myself inside, I was determined to have a decent landing to at least perform something correctly.  CTAF was quiet, so that was one factor at least that was promising to be simpler.  But, alas....  The first trouble here was that we were flying west, into the setting sun, and despite having it plugged into the GPS and on ForeFlight, we still had a very hard time finding the runway; the light and contrast were bad, the trees and roads and buildings weren't helping it to stand out, then we heard another aircraft halfway there from Austin, ....  We knew we were close, intending to come in on a 45 for downwind, and so we proceeded and kept looking out to the left.  As I scanned back in front of us, a huge cloud of birds was sitting there, and our current path would take us just under the edge of their swarm!  Birds dive when planes scare them, and after the horror stories over lunch, that was so not where I wanted to be.  I turned us a bit to the left, and when I was comfortable to look for the runway again, there it was, super close.  We were basically cutting the corner from downwind to base, still above pattern altitude and with no flaps and higher than desired RPMs for that point.  Alright, fine.  Mark asked my plan, and after bumbling for a minute that we'd fly up the crosswind leg (was my brain even on?!), it was obvious I was making the incorrect choices but given our solitude and altitude, we carved a big rectangle west of the runway, turned on the actual crosswind, found the incoming traffic on ForeFlight (thanks, Stratus!) and verified that he had us in sight.  From there the pattern went better, more as expected.

But the landing.  Oh, man, the landing.  Well, both of them, because there was a solid bounce. Then the start of porpoising, or pilot-induced oscillation.

Flashback ten years to a lunchtime solo at KJGG when I popped over to stay in the pattern and practice a few landings.  Hadn't had any more exposure to them then than the three paragraphs in the ground school book, and after not being able to regain control through elevator inputs, I pushed in the throttle as a last resort to lift of and go around and the control surfaces became very effective and I was able to land and stop.  With a thudding heart and bulging eyes.

Back to this flight.  After the second bounce, Mark calmly said, "My controls," and I acknowledged and withdrew my hands.  Power in, the bouncing stopped and we were flying but not climbing.  Stall horn.  Accelerate.  Ease in the flaps.  Stall horn still squealing.  Climb a little.  Accelerate.  Ease in the flaps.  Climb.  Obstacle awareness.  Climb.

Mark kept the controls for a little bit.  I was mired, stewing, trying to figure out what was going on and why I couldn't keep up.  If I were alone, I fully believe my mind would have snapped into a present, effective and stoic state; that's what has happened every time I have ever been solo, a feeling of hyperawareness mixed with intention, initiative and responsiveness, with emotions tucked away for later review.  Having an experienced pilot on board -- which will continue for quite some time -- is a luxury that allowed me to allow myself to not be at my best.  A luxury I will mentally resist from now on.

After a few minutes, I took the controls and Mark called approach, who sounded busier than when we had left.  Once straight and level, and after syncing the DG for at least the third time (why is equipment that requires this much babysitting still in use?!?!?!) and doing an instruments/gauges/breakers/power/fuel scan, we were being vectored in.  Ready for another incident of major stupidity?  I responded to a "turn left to heading whatever" instruction by turning the DG calibration knob instead of the heading bug knob as I rolled into the turn.  Mark somewhat urgently said something alerting me to the mistake, and I'm pretty sure I reached full demoralization at that point.  So we're turning, can't reliably reset the DG, inside the class C airspace, in the busiest environment I've ever been in, with zero confidence.  It wasn't a huge course change, maybe 20 degrees, so after a guess at what might be close I leveled, reset the DG, set the bug, and corrected course.

"Mark, you'll be doing the landing."  I kept the controls as we were vectored into sequence with the other landing aircraft and took us part way down final before a positive exchange of controls.  About then, tower instructed us to use as little runway as possible (yeah, the departures were stacking up, too), so Mark powered back up and did a smooth no-flaps landing that had us turning off a taxiway K that takes us straight back to the FBO.

To say I was disappointed is a complete misrepresentation of how far below my standards and expectations that flight was.

Aviate, navigate, communicate.  I has having a hard time with aviate.

How do I learn from this?  What is my plan for understanding what happened so I can take better action next time?

- Get a handle on the plane:  Read the POH.  I had read the 172N (the first plane I flew last month) and lackadaisically did not go through the 172R POH when switching to non-carbureted.
- Get a handle on density altitude:  Re-read all of the density altitude materials.  Study anything in the POH about performance.  (A brief conversation with Jason suggests that while that sluggish takeoff could possibly have been density altitude ("are you sure you rotated at a high enough speed?"), pilot error was more likely the explanation for the slow flight flubs.)
- Manage conditions better: No more Friday night flying, especially when there's a UT homegame the next day.
- Put it behind me.

Constant airspeed climbs/descents, foggle work, ILS intro, DG trouble

It was so pretty today!  A nice, cool 59-degree start with low humidity, calm winds and clear skies.

TL;DR:  What a good flight!  Be sure to sync the DG with the mag compass before takeoff and recheck it periodically.  The attitude indicator is pretty useful.  The scan is happening, but needs to speed up.  I'm feeling fairly solid on flying by instrument reference.  Maintaining localizer/glide slope is more challenging the closer you get to the airport (or the equipment beaming you the signals).

I got to the airport a few minutes early, finally!  I've been trying to get there ahead of Mark to knock out the bulk of the preflight before he arrives so we can hop in and get to it, but it seems there's always a hold up -- kids' lunches being packed, an extra hug before leaving the house, a forgotten cup of coffee, traffic.  Mark arrived as I was testing the fuel, having completed all else, partially by the iPhone flashlight.  He adjusted the VSI, which has been reading a 100 fpm descent at level (like sitting on the ground) for a while.

The plan was twofold for today:  for me, to get simulated instrument time (e.g., foggle flight) and revisit constant-airspeed climbs and descents, which I haven't done in a decade; and for him, to get in a hold.  I did the radios, which is getting better but still needs work, with today's pointer being to repeat the highest priority information first.  Example:  Tower advised to fly a heading of 130 and that we were cleared for takeoff on runway 17L.  I repeated that info in the order it was given, but the highest priority info is "cleared for takeoff, 17L."  That should have come first, followed by "130."  (130 is a placeholder.)

Here's how the flight looked, taking off to the south, turning east toward the Industry VOR, the hold, and the return:

As we rolled out of the parking space, we checked brakes.  As we turned and taxied to spot 1, we checked that the DG and mag compass were rotating and that the turn coordinator showed a turn (wing dip) and slip (ball displacement).  The attitude indicator always showed wings level.  Super.

I've been using the laminated checklist that's in the plane, but it's lacking.  I have the 172N checklist in ForeFlight Checklist, but this plane is an R and I haven't done the work to get Checklist set up for it.  Quite notable today was the omission of aligning the DG (gyro-powered heading indicator) with the magnetic compass.  Immediately upon takeoff I realized I couldn't use the DG to ensure I was flying runway heading while gaining altitude.  At a safe altitude we went ahead and turned generally easterly toward the IDU VOR and dialed it into nav1.  Once we reached 3000', in straight and level flight, I reset the DG to the compass.

First up was positive exchange of controls while I put on my foggles.  Mark asked a bunch of questions about primary and secondary instruments, which I'd use to assess various aspects of flight, and so forth.  I'm slow and I stumble on this because I know what I look at but am trying to take that moment to think about whether that's the proper thing to look at.  It was only just on this flight that the full utility of the attitude indicator clicked.  Anyway, my big dumb doi moment of this flight is that he asked about bank.  I said I'd first look at the HSI -- I was fumbling in my head for "attitude indicator," got stuck on the word "horizon" (as in, artificial horizon), and HSI starts with H so that could be horizon, right?  No, dumdum.  HSI is the horizontal situation indicator, aka the heading indicator, aka the DG!  I don't think I've ever called the DG by the acronym HSI, but you can rest assured that I'll never call the attitude indicator that again.

Next was a constant airspeed climb.  The aim was 110 kts, and it happened.  I'm not sure why I felt like it was going to be a big deal; maybe because it had been so long since I had done it last.  Pitch up (airspeed decreases), power up (airspeed increases), find the balance ideally around 500 fpm, with max climb rate limited by power availability.  About 50' before the target altitude, pitch back to level (airspeed increases) and let the additional power carry the plane up to altitude, then adjust power for airspeed and level flight.  It went fine, no big deal, yay :)

At one point along our outbound path, the departure controller came on and reminded us to remain VFR at or below 3500', which we were.  That was opportunity #1 to talk about how controllers are looking out for you and for your place within the system.  The class C airspace's outer ring is 2100-4500', and they're maneuvering in this space.  Lil' old 652MA, staying VFR with no particular schedule to keep needs to stay low and out of the way.  Effectively, he was giving us a prompt to check our altitude.

Next Mark did his hold.  We basically went in on the 285 radial of the IDU VOR, and he set up to enter the hold at 26 nm from that waypoint (thanks, GPS!).  At 26 nm, he started the timer and rolled into a right standard-rate turn, which would have us do a 180 in one minute.  At one minute, he rolled out and maintained heading for the next minute.  At two minutes, he rolled right for another standard-rate turn, and at three minutes rolled out for straight and level.  At four minutes, we were just short of the 26 nm mark, suggesting perhaps a bit of a headwind on this heading.

My plane again, and we turned back toward KAUS.  Now it was time for the constant-airspeed descent, which I had my brain around but wish I had taken an extra few seconds to broaden my view and ensure I was ahead of the situation.  We were at 3000' and Mark asked me to descend to 2500'.  I started on it right away but should have paused to process.  500' is not far, and had I recognized that, perhaps the process would have been smoother.  The base problem was that I pitched down too far, then was busy making up for the airspeed increase by managing power and easing pitch and blew right through 2500'.  The descent was complete way faster than it ought to have been, hitting a 1000 fpm descent rate at max!  For a 500' desired change!  Stupid.  Briefly then and more later during our post-flight debrief we talked about always aiming for a 500 fpm change unless conditions dictate or ATC requests otherwise.  It's more comfortable for passengers and keeps change at a rate that's easier to arrest and stay in front of.

As we headed back to the airport, Mark called for the ILS and got the avionics set up.  See what I did there?  I wasn't sure whether he plugged it into the GPS or nav, and didn't notice the toggle button at the top of the panel so couldn't say which receiver was in use.  He called approach and asked for it, they indicated vectors to the ILS and set us on 300.  I turned us there, and after a few minutes of chatting about glide slope intercept and procedure approach asked us to turn twenty degrees right.  Begin opportunity #2 for controller assistance.  A few moments later he instructed us to turn ten more degrees right and say the heading we'd be on, which would be 330.  That was the cue for us to check the DG again.  It had gotten way out of sync again already.  We were in straight and level flight and so dialed in the reading from the mag compass, and then things started looking good.  

The controller brought us fairly far north of the field and turned us to line up with the runway, and it was illustrative to see the glide slope be intercepted from below.  The localizer had come alive before turning in so the task was to try to keep both needles centered.  That got harder the closer we got.  I can't tell you how very tempting it was to just look outside at the runway!  In theory, we wouldn't be able to see the airport at this point, with a minimum decision altitude of roughly 700', when field elevation is 542'!  That means you could break out of the clouds with ~150' and land, or if you can't see the runway at that point you "go missed" and follow the instructions for climbing and turning out.

Mark took over somewhere around 1200' to keep us on the ILS and asked to do the landing.  He taxied us back and I rested :)

What I'm trying to figure out is why the DG got off so badly in flight, after we had already corrected it.  I need to revisit precession (mag compass), think about whether the drift was a symptom of a failing instrument/gyro or vacuum/pitot/static problem, and more.  As for symptoms, the other pitot-static and gyro instruments were behaving as expected, so it seemed isolated to the DG.  And then further, what about partial-panel IFR flying if the HSI (bwahahaha) failed?  That's when I'd really need that magnetic compass behavior to be fresh in my brain!