Networking

So I am a little late posting about this, but I didn't want to leave it out of the blog. Last week I had a chance to meet up with a friend from the forums. His name is Ken and he owns a Senecca III. You can look at it here http://www.klrdmd.com/Home/Seneca.html That plane is so awesome. And guess what... I got to log my time in it because he is a CFI. So me... a student with only about 15 hours has 1.4 in a multi-engine aircraft. Kinda fricken cool.

So Ken emailed me on Wednesday night to see if I wanted to go grab some breakfast the following morning. Of course my response was nothing short of YES!!!! How could I possibly say no to that? I got to the airport around 730 and wasn't expecting him til 8. I sat in the truck and listened to the scanner waiting for his call sign. Sure enough at 745 I hear "Chandler tower, Senecca 8377X 15 miles south with Kilo, request full stop" Woot.. I jumped out of my truck and headed for the terminal. I listened to the radio and followed him on the frequency until he pulled up to the terminal. I walked out the plane to meet him. What a beautiful plane.

Ken is a great guy. He is a dental anaesthesiologist and I guess more of a teacher now. He travels the country giving lectures and whatnot. Not a bad gig. Sounds like fun. I would rather be traveling talking about planes.. but I'm not a dentist so I wouldn't have much to talk about. Anyway...

As I approach the plane Ken motions me inside to the left seat. I must have looked thoroughly confused because he explained that he could ride right seat because he is a CFI and MEI so I could actually fly the plane. OMG! I jumped in got situated and looked at the panel. Now you have to understand this situation to fully appreciate it. Up to this point I have flown a 1 engine Cessna 172. About as basic as it gets. Now I get in the left seat of this thing and it might as well have been an airliner. Well that is a little extreme but you know what I mean. It turns out it wasn't that difficult. This plane has two engines so instead of doing everything once... you do it twice. You start the left engine, then the right. Check instruments for both of them and you are ready to go. I let Ken handle the radios so I could concentrate on not crashing his 120,000$ plane into anything. We picked up ATIS and taxi'd out to runway 4L.

This is where it really gets fun. After being cleared to takeoff I positioned us on the numbers. Once all lined up he told me to hold the breaks and throttle both engines up to 36 inches of manifold pressure. (if I knew completely what that meant I would take time to explain it to you... I need to do some reading and maybe I will put it in my next post. But for the purpose of this entry... We put the needles on the 36 mark on the instrument displaying inches of manifold pressure.) Ok so here we are... breaks held on the numbers... engines cranking away just waiting to lurch forward.. Once I got both engines equal.. let go of the breaks and WOOOOOOOOW! ZOOOOOOM! (I have other way to describe the feeling sorry) Every other plane I have flown in you slowly increase throttle and go down the runway. This thing went screamin' after you released the breaks. Rotate at 79 and away you go. I barely had to give any rudder pressure with this plane. Ken explained that it doesn't have all the normal left turning tendencies of other planes because the engines rotate opposite of each other counteracting torque. (Did I explain that right?) So we get cleared to turn away from the airport and we are on our way. Basically Ken did what Dan did. He pointed to a mountain and said fly there. The whole time Ken was naming mountain peaks and airports in the distance. I guess he flies this route quite a bit, so he knows it by heart. We saw an aerobatic plane doing it's thing around a mountain. That was pretty cool. You see them do the shows at airshows, but it is a totally different view when you are flying over them. I leveled us off at 5,500 ft and we just cruised. It was much easier to maintain altitude and heading in this plane. I'm not sure why, but it just flies smoother than the Cessna.

As we got close to AVQ-Merana Regional, we announced our intentions to land and Ken put it down. I got us on the approach and ken took over a couple hundred feet above the runway. He says it's because it lands differently than the Cessna I fly, which I'm sure it does, but I'm pretty sure it was because he didn't want a student pilot with 15 hours pounding his nice Senecca into the pavement. Somehow... I understand. :)

I taxi'd us to the parking and flipped it around. Ran through the shutdown checklist and secured the aircraft. Time for breakfast! Breakfast was good! I had a Western Omelet... yum. We sat and talked about a lot of things. He has owned I think 7 aircraft now. The Mooney was his favorite, and that is probably what he will go back to after this one. What a life. I would love to own an aircraft like this. I would do the same thing. I would find young people who love to fly and let them. Why not? He did get breakfast out of it. Granted he said that a full tank of gas costs about $1,000, so I think I ended up spending less money. He wouldn't accept money for fuel, what a great guy.

After breakfast we came back out and started it up. Wind was favoring 30 so that's where we taxi'd to. As we get up to takeoff there was a Cessna doing touch and goes opposite of our runway. That is the joy of an uncontrolled airport. You can do whatever you want. If you want to takeoff and land with the wind... you can. Not that you should but he did. Oh well, when he took off again and was crossing us on the runway we took the runway and blasted outta there before he knew what was going on. I think before he even turned crosswind we were above pattern altitude cruising on out. Fun stuff.

This time once we got to cruise altitude he let me try out the autopilot. LOL how cool. Push a couple buttons and the plane flies itself. That was cool and all... but I kinda wanted to fly. (Now I know I don't want to be an airline pilot.) I popped the autopilot off and hand flew the rest of the way home. I handled radios this time. Got the ATIS, contacted tower at 15 miles out. This is one little mishap that I did. I called the wrong tower frequency. At chandler there are two frequencies. 133.1 if you are coming from the South or the East and 126.1 if you are coming from the North or East. Now we were coming up from Tuscon area so I should have contacted 133.1 which I KNEW. Anyway.. I called the wrong tower .. they told me I was stupid and I made the same call on the right frequency. Before I knew it we were on the ground and it was all over.

It made for a great morning. It was beautiful outside as always. Couldn't ask for more. So for 20 bucks I got 1.4 of multi-engine cross country time. What a smokin deal. Thank you Ken! I appreciate it so much. Another entry in the logbook that I will never forget!

Not so hot!

Aircraft: C4653G

Weather: HOT! Winds 190@8G18 - felt that!

Finally I got back in the air after 2 weeks of no flying. I have been dying to get back up there. Last week money was tight, so I had to put it off, no way around it. This week I invited my father-in-law, Joe to go up with us. What a great trip!

This is the first time with me flying that I actually got to fly somewhere. Normally for training up until this point we just fly around the pattern or go out to the practice area. This time we flew from Chandler Municipal over to Williams Gateway, which is about 10 miles away. Nothing big, but fun because they are slightly busier with some military jets, and some airline activity, and they have a great restaurant. This was the true 100$ hamburger that I got to fly!

I showed up with Joe at about 1030 to pre-flight 53G and Dan was already there. No big deal, did the pre-flight, told Joe a little bit about what I was doing and why. I think Dan is learning to trust me a little bit more because he didn't do his own pre-flight right behind me this time. HA. After the pre-flight, we headed into the air conditioning and talked about the flight we were about to undertake. Dan had a sectional and we went over what all the markings and identifiers meant on and around Gateway. After grabbing some waters, we were off to the aircraft again, this time to FLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

With Joe all secure in the back and everyone adjusted, I picked up the ATIS on the speaker before cranking the engine. This saves me a little buck, because why sit there on the taxi-way with the engine turning? I taxi'd up to the tower to make my ground call, and all went well. Got cleared to taxi over to 22R via Alpha, November. Thanks to my excellent night before preparation I was prepared and wrote everything down and read it back like a pro. I had all the frequencies lined up for CHD and IWA with Chandlers on Radio one and Gateway on Radio two. All I had to do was flip a switch and I was ready to transmit on the Gateway frequencies. So... we taxi'd over to 22R and did the runup, made our call and we were off!

We climbed to about 2800ft and leveled off and headed towards Gateway. Since we took off on 22R we were headed SW which is away from Gateway so we turned to set ourselves up to enter their airspace. This is where things started happening fast. We had very little time before hitting their airspace, so I had to pick up the ATIS and call tower. Dan was rushing me the whole time. After getting the ATIS, I made my call to tower and I don't know what happened. In fact I keep playing it over in my head and just can't figure it out. I made the perfect call and she never got back to me. She cleared other people to land and enter the airspace but I didn't get mine. Whatever, Dan said to call again. So I did, and everything was fine. The problem was, were outside their airspace doing circles, and I had accidentally let us climb to almost 4000ft, which was approaching PHX class Bravo airspace. For those of you that don't know... that is a NO NO! So finally she calls out our tail number and we get our clearance into the Delta airspace and set up for a right downwind pattern entry. By this time my head is really spinning because I haven't flown in two weeks, and I need to do a whole bunch of stuff before I can land. So I start my decent, enter the patter too high, pull the power back to 1700 abeam the numbers, kick in some flaps, turn base late, end up being too high, kick in more flaps and FINALLY I am on track for a good landing. This particular runway at Gateway has over 10000ft of runway so that landing wasn't a problem, and was actually relatively smooth. We exit onto taxiway Hotel (I think) and make our call to ground. "C4653G clear of 12R @ Hotel, taxi to transient near the restaurant". We got clearance to go and park at the FBO and pulled up next to an old HUGE navy fighter. I think Dan said it was a T-6, I will add a picture at the bottom and you can correct me if I'm wrong. After I shut the engine down the line guy comes running up telling us we weren't supposed to park there. Dan was trying to signal with him where to park, but the line guy apparently didn't know the correct signals because he was telling Dan to start his left engine. LOL. Needless to say, Dan wasn't moving and we got some chalks to secure the aircraft. Good times!

Lunch was great, it was pretty uneventful compared to the flying, but what can be better than 3 guys flying to an airport to grab a burger. I'll tell you..... NOTHING. There is NOTHING better than flying with some friends to an airport for some food. I can't frickin wait to get my certificate so I can do just that. Take a Saturday morning and go fly for food.

Anyway, after lunch we decide to head out and do some pattern work at Chandler. I did a total of 4 landings there, all of which sucked! You could really tell that it had been a while since I landed. Dan was on the controls more and I was getting extremely frustrated. Once again I sucked with my rudder control and kept cross controlling while turning crosswind and base. Dan thinks I'm trying to kill myself. (the airplane can enter a spin if you are not careful and cross control. A spin itself is not dangerous, but when you are close the ground in the pattern, you just don't have time to recover. I think next lesson we are going to the practice area to once and for all fix my problem with the rudder. Dan said he has some special exercises to fix it. So landing 1 not so hot, I didn't flare very well and we landed on all threes. Landing 2 not so hot, I landed HARD. BOOM! Landing 3 Dan was trying to show me how to stay 3 ft above the runway for a flare and ended up having to just land himself because we would of had a hard time getting up enough speed w/ a passenger in the back. Landing 4 not so bad, I finally flared good and put her down on the main gear first and did it semi-correctly. BUT... the airplane is not broken, and we are alive so.. SUCCESS!

My radio shyness is gone, every time I get on the radio I know what to say and thank god, because that is what used to give me such a heart-attack. Things are good now that I am able to fly again, but they need to improve. I wish I could go twice a week, but at least I need to get up there once a week so I don't forget things and waste my money.

Joe if you are reading this (and you better be) thanks for riding along. I hope you can get into this at some point yourself. I would love for you to take a lesson and let me fly along. You are welcome on any flight that I take as long as we aren't stalling the airplane cuz even though it would probably be ok... I like life. :) ---- Oh and thanks for lunch!

For everyone else.. thanks for reading! You know what to do.... click those adds! MONEY MONEY MONEY!!!! I will return the favor if I can.. just tell me where to go!

This flight: 1.2

Total time: 13.3

$

So another thing that I'm pretty sure a lot of student pilots go through. This week I can't fly. Not because of the weather, I live in Arizona, but because money got in the way. It sucks but it is reality. For some reason Arizona decides that it should cost 400$ to register our truck. The really crappy thing about it is that it is windy this weekend and I need to do ground reference maneuvers. Oh well... next week.

Oh ya.. don't forget to click on the adds! :)