Saturday, June 20, 2009

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!


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