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.
