Flying the G1000 - a Six-Pack Pilot's Initiation

Getting Started

My plane is not flying at the moment, for reasons I won't go into. Instead I have a good deal with a local flying club, allowing me to fly any of their aircraft subject to a checkout. They have several recent fixed-gear Cessna 182s, which make a reasonable substitute for my retractable, turbo 1980 TR182.

Most of them are new enough to have a Garmin G1000 panel instead of the traditional six-pack of mechanically driven "steam gauges" like my own plane. They do also have some older steam-gauge 182s, and I've flown quite a bit in one of them, but it seemed a good opportunity to learn some new technology.

I started by looking at the manual, readily available online. It runs to over 500 pages, making it pretty much impossible just to sit and read from end to end. It struck me how similar it is to the familiar old Garmin GNS530, which I fitted to my plane when I bought it 17 years ago. I have over 1000 hours of flying with it now, so I hoped the transition to the G1000 would be straightforward. It also includes a very sophisticated autopilot, the GFC700, which has all the features you'd find in an airliner (well, except Cat III autoland) - vertical navigation, coupled approaches and so on.

G1000 in a Diamond DA40, on the way back to Palo Alto

A G1000 installation has two screens. The one in front of the pilot is called the Primary Flight Display (PFD) and replaces a normal six-pack of mechanical instruments. The one to the right is called the Multi Function Display (MFD) and contains all sorts of other things, including the moving map, flight plan and engine instruments. They are both covered in knobs and buttons, about 40 of them, which mostly do the same thing on each panel - but not always.

Flying the Simulator

Fortunately the club also has a G1000 flight simulator, made by Precision Flight Controls. It has a panel like a G1000-equipped 172, plus an X-plane based simulator with an instructor station that lets you set up weather conditions, create failures, position the aircraft and various other things. I quickly got myself set up on this, with the help of a friendly instructor.

The first challenge was flying the simulator. It seems hyper-sensitive, unlike a real 182 which is extremely stable. It took me an hour or so to be able to "fly" it smoothly and achieve decent approaches, with the G1000 serving just as a simple glass panel replicating the traditional attitude indicator and HSI. It's very hard to land, and although that's not really necessary for learning the G1000 it does seem like something you should be able to do. Every landing is "good" in the sense that you can always walk away from it, and even use the simulator again, but at first several of them turned into simulated crashes requiring a reset at the instructor station. Once I could get the plane stopped on the runway I decided that was good enough. It's hard to get any real feeling for how high you are above the runway, something which comes surprisingly easily when flying a real aircraft. On my one and only flight in a wartime B-25 bomber I landed it smoothly even though the sight-picture is very different from anything else I've flown.

My first couple of sessions with the simulator brought several moments of severe frustration of the "How the ***** do you do that?" variety. A big advantage of an old fashioned panel, where each instrument stands by itself, is that you have a pretty good idea which buttons to try pressing even if you're not sure. For example, my panel has a GTX-345 transponder which includes a bunch of timers. Even if you have no idea how to get to the flight timer, there aren't too many things to try. With the G1000, the function could be anywhere in dozens of nested menus and soft-buttons. The flight timer is a case in point. It's there, but buried in one of the 'aux' pages - and certainly not accessed through the 'timer' soft-button, which would be much too easy.

Another example is the minimum fuel setting. It's nice to be able to set this, so you can get a warning if you reach it. In a 182 I never plan to land with less than 20 gallons. That's pretty conservative, enough for 90 minutes of flying, but with tanks that hold 88 usable gallons it's easy to do, and reduces the chances of becoming the subject of a feature article in the NTSB Reporter. There's a whole sub-menu for dealing with fuel management, allowing you to enter the actual amount of fuel in the tanks, and so it's obviously on that page. Wrong. It's under a sub-sub-menu of the Map setup page. There is some kind of logic to that, because all it does is to show a ring on the map where you will reach fuel minimums. But it certainly isn't intuitive.

Operating the simulator by myself was interesting. You could just position yourself at the start of the runway, then take off and fly just like the real thing. But it would waste a lot of time climbing and getting to the start of the approach. One nice thing about the sim is that you can position the airplane anywhere you want, for example just outside the initial approach fix. But this takes some acrobatics. If you just take a stationary airplane and position it at altitude, it instantly enters a power-off dive. That's recoverable but not really necessary.

In the end the routine I developed was to take off normally and set the autopilot to climb on a fixed heading. The next step is to leap over to the instructor station and position the aircraft at the altitude and location where you want it. But this disconnects the autopilot, so now you have to leap back to the pilot station and re-engage it, being careful to set up the same altitude as the one the sim thinks it's at. After a while it becomes routine, but there are lots of ways to mess it up. For example, before setting position, it's a good idea to think about terrain. Once I didn't, and leaping into the pilot seat was disconcerted to see the scenery a lot closer than it should be, shortly before ploughing into the trees. I had set the position of the airplane in the hills, without first setting the altitude to something that would put me above them.

Another good thing about the sim is that you can set the weather conditions. As an instrument pilot you practice under the "hood" - actually a pair of glasses adapted so you can only see down to the panel. That does a reasonable job of seeing nothing at all, as when you are in a cloud, but there is no way to simulate very poor visibility. An ILS or LPV approach can typically be flown with less than one mile, and without a sim it's pretty much impossible to know what that feels like unless you get lucky (or maybe unlucky) with the weather. Old-fashioned non-precision approaches are particularly hard. I tried the VOR 13 into Salinas, with minimums of 500 feet and one mile. You reach MDA and see... nothing at all, ploughing on through the murk, until just before the MAP you can faintly make out some runway lights. It's a great exercise but I wouldn't be very happy to do it for real. An ILS - or LPV to a similarly equipped runway - seems a lot easier, even to lower minimums. I flew the RNAV 25 to Livermore, with minimums of 200 and a half. As you reach decision height the approach lights are right there, allowing a further descent to 100 feet - no peering through the murk hoping to see something.

Time to Go Flying

After several hours on the simulator and numerous approaches, it was time to go fly for real. We flew three approaches, entirely using the autopilot down to minimums. The G1000 was a pleasure to use, and certainly a lot less stressful than hand flying. It does all seem a bit like a video game though.

With that flight over, I was signed off to go fly by myself. We took the same airplane down to San Luis Obispo for a fish taco lunch at Cayucos and an apple-buying excursion at Gopher Glen, surely the finest apple farm in the country. It was a perfect VFR day with very modest winds aloft, an excellent opportunity to give the G1000 a workout with the reassurance that if ever things started to get tricky, it would be easy to take over and hand fly. The goal, from a flying point of view, was to get comfortable with the G1000, so I let the autopilot do all the flying. Well, almost all - of course I had to do the takeoffs and landings. That led to the uncomfortable discovery that the wheels on the fixed-gear 182 are an inch or two lower than on my retractable. It's not much, but it's the difference between a perfectly smooth landing and one that raises my wife's eyebrows.

Vertical Navigation (VNAV)

One thing I really wanted to try was the autopilot's VNAV (vertical navigation) feature. The idea is simple enough. Instead of telling it the climb or descent rate you want (VS mode) or the airspeed (FLC mode), you just tell it where you want to be at a certain altitude, and it figures the rest out for itself. If you are flying an instrument approach or standard arrival (STAR), the altitudes are built in and are displayed on the flight plan page beside each waypoint. For VFR flight, you can create a waypoint on the final leg to the airport, and create a "track offset" a given distance before, and set an altitude for that. For example, on my way to Palo Alto I set a waypoint 5 miles before the field with an altitude of 1500 feet. The G1000 figures out where it needs to start the descent to meet that, for a specified (but not normally changed) descent profile, e.g. 500 ft/min. As long as you press the right buttons at the right time, it will fly the descent all by itself, leaving you only to monitor the throttles.

Sounds good, except that the documentation for how to use the feature is terrifying. It runs for several pages in the manual, mainly telling you all the things that will make it refuse to do what you want and other things that can go wrong. For example, the altitude associated with a waypoint can be shown in four different ways: in blue or in white, and in a large or a small font. They all mean different things and woe betide you if you can't remember which means what. But after reading it a couple of times and trying it in the sim, I realised that normal operation is pretty simple.

The flight plan panel shows, among many other things, the time to the "top of descent" that has been calculated. As you fly along this gradually goes down, until eventually it gets to one minute. At that point the autopilot status line on the PFD changes. There are two things you have to do, assuming you're currently flying in altitude hold: first press the VNAV button, and then set the desired altitude to something less than the first target. If you're planning to land, it makes sense to set it to minimums for the approach. If you don't reduce the desired altitude, it doesn't descend. But assuming you do, one minute ticks by and then the nose drops, the annunciator changes to say VPTH, and down you go. If there are multiple step-downs (rare these days), it will level off between them but pick up the next one and keep on flying down them until the glideslope activates.

Flying Approaches

There is one more button to press before you land. Once VNAV is active and you have been cleared for the approach, you press the APR button which sets the system up to capture the glideslope. (And don't what I did once, fortunately in the sim, and press the AP button instead - which disables the autopilot. To my pleasant surprise, pressing it again simply re-enabled the autopilot and carried on where it had left off).

If you're used to a traditional HSI or CDI display, finding the glideslope on the G1000 is far from intuitive. Instead of a horizontal bar in the middle of the HSI, it appears as a magenta diamond to the left of the altitude tape. It took me a while to find it at first, though it's simple enough once you know. For a traditional ILS, it is active as soon as the physical glide slope signal is received. For a GPS approach (LNAV or LPV) it's a bit less obvious. It shows up at the first fix outside the FAF. It's the same for the 530W, and I remember a very frustrating moment flying the GPS into Palo Alto, first wondering why it wasn't there, and then wondering why it had suddenly shown up as I flew through the fix in question, ACHOZ.

The G1000 does a very nice job of flying the aircraft all the way down the approach to Decision Height - as long as you press the right buttons at the right time. Compared to hand-flying an ILS or LPV, it's very relaxing! You can set the DH or MDA, but once again it isn't obvious where. It's called "baro mins" (not sure why specifically "baro"), and it's found on... the timer inset, unlike the flight timer. If you do manage to figure out how to set it, a serious-sounding voice calls out "minimums!" at just the right time, so it's pretty useful.

I've had one chance to try the G1000 in actual IMC, luckily, and since it was flying around the Bay Area there was plenty of vectoring, course and altitude changes and everything else that ATC can do to make a flight more interesting. Everything worked perfectly. We flew the ILS into Santa Rosa, in perfect VMC, with the pleasure of watching it keep the runway on the nose down to DH. On the way back we were in actual as we were vectored to the GPS into Palo Alto, including an initial VNAV section. I let it fly all the way down to DH, 460 feet (not currently permitted in IMC due to the Google construction, but we were already in VMC).

Odds and Ends

Since the G1000 knows all of indicated and true airspeed, as well as ground speed and current heading and track, it can figure out what the wind must be doing. It's very nice to see that displayed in a tiny inset on the PFD, giving an instant readout of headwind rather than trying to calculate it by mental arithmetic.

The PFD includes a Flight Director (FD), which is the airplane telling you how it thinks you ought to be flying it. The idea is simple: your current attitude is shown by a pair of yellow lines, which you should try and line up with the magenta lines of the FD. Airline pilots swear by them, and so does my friend who happened to get one in his plane. For myself, I don't really see the point. I'm happy for the plane to fly itself, the yellow and magenta lines always snuggled up together, but if I'm hand flying then I don't really need it. It reminds me of the annoying indicators on stick-shift cars telling you that it thinks you should change gear. At least you can turn the FD off, though it's easy enough to ignore it.

The MFD normally shows a large map, showing you where are relative to the scenery, in much better detail than the 530. It's a nice feature although you can always look out of the window, in VMC anyway. It is good to see where other aircraft are (thanks to ADS-B) relative to the scenery - it is surprisingly hard to see them even when in theory you know where they are. The map also includes terrain warnings - if it's red, don't go there. It's good while you're in the air though a bit dazzling when you're taxiing, since naturally everything is red then. You can turn it off though it's a good idea to remember to turn it back on again, especially at night or in IMC.

Conclusions

I've enjoyed learning and flying the G1000, and I'll miss it when I go back to my own 1980 panel, especially the very capable GFC700 autopilot.

When I started I thought, how different can it be from the good old Garmin 530? In many ways it's very similar, but remembering which buttons to push when is very different and significantly harder because there are just so many of them.

For someone who flies regularly and can stay current with where everything is and which button to push when, it is really an excellent system. I would worry about it though for the typical PPL flying an hour or two per month - it would be just too easy to need some feature and blank completely on how to get to it.

Flying the London Helicopter Routes

To small planes the whole of London, from Docklands in the east to beyond Heathrow in the west, is a no-go area. With Heathrow's airspace, and London City's, and restrictions over the centre of London, almost everything inside the M25, except for fringes to the north and south, is closed.

Helicopters, though, are a different story. Because of their ability to land engine-out in a very small space and without risking damage on the ground, they are permitted on a small number of carefully planned routes that provide an out along their entire length - mostly in open spaces, except for central London where it is the river. These routes allow you to fly all along the Thames, from Chiswick to Greenwich, as well as directly overhead Heathrow airport. Considering how protective the UK is, it is astonishing - but true - that you can fly over Heathrow in the tiniest of single-engine helicopters, the Robinson 22. But you can - there are even videos on Youtube.

I'd wanted to do this for a long time, and finally a trip to England provided the opportunity. I booked a Monday morning flight with EBG Helicopters at Redhill Aerodrome (EGKR), in one of their Robinson 44s, so my son could come along too. I'd previously flown there in their Guimbal Cabri G2 (G-ETWO - geddit?). That was a very interesting introduction to a new (to me) type, but we didn't go very far from the field.

I'd prepared for the flight by studying the helicopter route chart, available from Pooley's, and reading what I could find on the web, e.g. this. From the south, the most interesting routes are H9, which runs dead straight from the A3 to just south of Heathrow at Bedfont, and then north to the A40 at Northolt. That is followed by a stretch of H10, along the A40 then turning right onto the North Circular Road (A406) to the river. There is a lot of IFR - I Follow Roads (or Rivers) - involved in this. H10 joins up with H4 (via a short stretch of H3), snaking along above the Thames from Kew through the centre of London to the Isle of Dogs. South and east of there, you can do what you want, relatively speaking anyway. H7 provides an alternative route north from Redhill straight into H4 if you don't want to fly over Heathrow.

Over the weekend, the forecast was not good, and I was afraid I'd have to cancel. But the morning dawned with blue skies. It clouded over by the time of our flight but never worse than 2500 overcast, plenty for this trip.

The first challenge is finding the aerodrome. Redhill has to be the hardest to find in the whole world, despite being only a couple of miles from Gatwick and sandwiched in the corner of the M25 and the M23. I'd been there before so had a rough idea, but was still very grateful for the data roaming package on my phone as I followed a succession of single-track country lanes and narrow roads through housing estates.

Once you find it, Redhill is a very interesting place. It's home to many of London's helicopters, including the Surrey Police, an air ambulance, Sky's ENG ship, and a good selection of expensive-looking executive machines. It also has a couple of grass runways but I've never seen a fixed-wing operation there - I think the runways must be waterlogged a lot of the time.

Briefing for the flight was simple enough - no flight plan or other permission is required. A quick call to Heathrow's ATC confirmed that they were taking H9 transitions, and then we jumped into G-PAMY to start our adventure: me, my son Joe, and my instructor for the day. It would be crazy to try a flight like this for the first time without someone who has done it plenty of times before. I asked him to take care of the radio calls since there are plenty of unfamiliar visual reporting points, and I'm not 100% comfortable with the differences between UK and US radio practice.

After takeoff our first call, crossing the M25, was to Heathrow Special. This sounds an odd name, to me anyway. All non-airline flights in Heathrow's airspace are done under Special VFR (SVFR), which is essentially VFR flight under IFR-like control. I did this once before flying from White Waltham to Stapleford, though I never got anywhere close to the airport. Heathrow Special is a dedicated frequency for such flights. They cleared us as far as the Bedfont holding point, at "approved altitude".  Every segment has an approved maximum altitude on the chart, sometimes changing every couple of miles, and you are expected to have this information to hand.

Close to Bedfont we were handed off to Heathrow Tower - a first for me and, unless I do this again one day, the only time. They were very friendly and helpful, despite handling the two busiest runways in the world as well as a pesky helicopter. There had been some concern about how long we'd have to hold, one of the guys at Redhill mentioned holding for 20 minutes and then again for 15 minutes between the runways. We had plenty of fuel and the view is excellent, so it wouldn't have been a problem, but it didn't happen. We were instructed to wait for one landing aircraft, which we did hovering at 1000 feet just south of the 27L runway numbers. Joe got several excellent shots of the arriving Air Canada 767. Once it was on the ground we were cleared to proceed across both runways, having hovered for less than a minute. The view was absolutely spectacular, along the whole length of Heathrow. I'm using to flying past San Francisco, and have even landed at LAX, but this was really extraordinary. There was a long line of departing aircraft, with a BA Airbus 380 at the tail. In fact I counted 5 A380s on the ground - a significant proportion of the entire fleet.

Once north of the airport, we went back to talking to Heathrow Special as we admired the collection of bizjets at Northolt - no evidence there that it is still owned and operated by the RAF. Soon we reached the Thames at Kew. The river is surprisingly twisty and quite hard to follow accurately, even though I slowed down to 60 knots - partly for manoeuvrability but mainly to enjoy the view. And the view was fabulous. With Battersea heliport below to our right we could see right across London, with Chelsea and the Royal Albert Hall off to our left. (At home we joke that Albert is plane spotting from his memorial, writing down the tail numbers of the airliners on long final into Heathrow in his royal notebook - this was probably the first time he logged G-PAMY).

Further on we got a very special treat - our timing coincided exactly with the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, giving us a spectacle of the Household Cavalry as well as the massed tourists in front of the palace. From the same location we also got an excellent view of the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and then Whitehall and Downing Street. I once had the good fortune to attend a meeting inside No 10 (the Cabinet Room, no less, though the occasion was much less exotic), but I'd certainly never seen it from this angle.

By now we were talking to City Airport tower, and they had us hold just short of Tower Bridge. We had a tailwind so hovering wasn't a great idea - instead we made a tight turn over the river and returned to Westminster Bridge, giving us a magnificent second showing of central London. Sadly we only got one turn around the hold, before City cleared us to proceed overhead Tower Bridge, following the twists of the river until the exit point of H4 at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs.

From here it was a simple straight flight back over Croydon to Redhill, with a glimpse along the way of the remains of Croydon Airport, London's main airport before the War. All that's left is the terminal, a pre-war airliner in front of it, and about 200 feet of the runway.

Back at Redhill I demonstrated an autorotation to Joe - the common belief is that helicopters drop out of the sky if the engine fails, but in fact a power-off landing in a helicopter is much safer than in a plane since you only need a very small space to touch down. The aircraft descends quickly, but under complete control, and at about 40 feet above the ground you flare to slow down and stop the descent, then drop gently to the ground, cushioning the final drop with the remaining energy in the rotor.

From there it was a short hover in a challenging crosswind back to EBG's base, and we said goodbye to G-PAMY. Though not to Redhill, since we stayed for lunch at the excellent airfield cafe. The food is very good, but the best part is the toilets - or rather the walk to get there, which takes you around three sides of a hangar filled with unusual and vintage aircraft, including the only remaining specimen of the 1932 Spartan Arrow.

It was a wonderful trip, so good in fact that I'm awfully tempted to do it again when I'm in England again! There are lots more pictures from the trip here.

Bye bye helicopter

Well, the day has come when I have to face up to not flying the helicopter any more. It's been obvious for a while, really, or at least it should have been. I've been trying to fly at least once a month, but not always succeeding. And slowly, my skill level and comfort level have been dropping off.

Flying a helicopter is not like riding a bicycle (in a number of respects, actually). It's a very, very delicate thing, and it takes constant practice to be comfortable with it. Take off and landing are much more delicate than in a plane, you have to touch down with absolutely no lateral motion or rotation, and if there's the slightest wind this is a lot harder than it looks.

The odd thing about flying helicopters is that it can only be done if you are completely relaxed. And it just happens to be about the most unrelaxing activity you can ever undertake. The slightest false move will, at best, wreck half-a-million or so dollars' worth of machinery, and at worst kill you or somebody else. So if you're not completely on top of things, you tense up and then it's just about impossible to do anything smoothly or properly.

The very worst example of all this is slope landings. Imagine you have to land to pick up an injured person, but there is nowhere absolutely level. You line up parallel to the slope, and very gently touch the uphill skid on the ground. There must be absolutely no motion of any kind relative to the ground, even if you're doing this in a gusty wind. Now you slooowly lower the other skid to the ground, by lowering the collective, meanwhile moving the cyclic to the uphill side so the rotor shaft remains vertical relative to gravity, not the ground. Takeoff is the opposite. The slightest horizontal motion can tip the heli onto its side, with expensive and possibly fatal results. If this sounds hard - well, you have no idea until you've tried it. And you have to be able to do this with absolute confidence and smoothness to claim to be a helicopter pilot.

There's a famous pianist (I can't find who) who said, "If I don't practice for one day, I can hear it. If I don't practice for two days, the orchestra can hear it. And if I don't practice for a week, the audience can hear it." There are some things where, no matter how much practice you've had and how much natural talent, if you don't practice, practice, practice, you will lose your touch.

Flying the helicopter is one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done - especially when I was really on top of it. You have a sense of controllability that absolutely nothing else gives you. You can hover at any altitude, go backwards and sideways, do pedal turns, with absolute precision. It's really an amazing feeling. But for actual practical use... there's really not that much you can do with a helicopter, that you can't do with an airplane. Of course that's not true if your business is long-line work (using the aircraft as a flying crane), or rescuing injured people from road accidents, or a bunch of other extremely useful things. But those are professions, not hobbies.

In theory a helicopter can land on any more-or-less flat and level piece of land with room for the rotor blades, like your backyard, or a restaurant parking lot. You can land anywhere, go anywhere. Well... except you need permission from the landowner, which is unlikely to be forthcoming because of liability issues. In California you can't land on a public road. If you go out into the wilderness somewhere, nobody is likely to see you - but you could be in big trouble if they do. And speaking of wilderness, landing in a Designated Wilderness - which means most land in National Parks and a lot else too - is flat-out illegal and will get your helicopter confiscated. I called the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) once to ask about landing on BLM land - which covers an awful lot of middle-of-nowhere, desert and so on. Several people were very helpful but in the end nobody knew the answer. And forget keeping your heli in the backyard, regular use of an off-airport location requires all kinds of permission which you'll almost certainly never get.

And that's if you have your very own helicopter. If you're renting - and there are very few places that will let you fly without an instructor, other than for specific training purposes - then you're subject to the owner's limitations. They have to worry about liability too, plus they don't want you wrecking their aircraft. Most likely, this means no off-airport landings, and no overnight stays.

Owning a heli makes a wonderful dream, but unless you were an angel investor in Google then you almost certainly can't afford it. It's not just the capital cost, which is comparable to an airplane, but also the running cost. Just insurance is well over $10,000 per year, and maintenance is much more than for fixed-wing - which given the number of flight-critical rapidly-moving parts is not a surprise.

And there is one really bad thing about helicopter flying - airports. Given you can't really land anywhere else, this is kind of important. The problem is, airports are designed for and mostly used by airplanes. And airplanes fly very differently from helis. For one thing, even the humblest trainer is a lot faster, especially on final approach. So flying anywhere near an airport is little short of terrifying, as you feverishly scan the skies for other aircraft, whilst trying to work out where you are going to land and how to get there while keeping well out of everyone's way.

In an airplane, there's only one thing to do. There's one runway in use (except at the largest airports), and that's where you're going to land. You fly a conventional and well-defined traffic pattern, as does everyone else. You need to keep your eyes wide open but you won't find anyone suddenly flying at right angles to you - except those pesky helicopters of course. But the helicopter can land anywhere, and certainly doesn't need a runway. A few airports have designated helipads, and even well-defined routes to get to and from them - but most don't. So you study the airport diagram in the A/FD and try to figure out where you can stay away from the traffic pattern, but it's often not obvious.

Towered airports are mostly simpler, since the tower will generally take care of separation. But not always - Concord tower once very nearly killed me, giving me an unconventional departure that took me straight through the path of an airplane that was also talking to them. We missed by about 100 feet. Another problem is that you need to be very clear with tower what you're planning. A busy airline airport once gave me a takeoff clearance without being precise about the route. The controller was pretty grumpy anyway, and I didn't go through exactly what I was planning with him - which was a big mistake. After departure I got the dreaded "please write a number down to call on landing". Nothing came of it, in fact they were quite nice about it, but they made it very clear that my departure route had been a surprise to them.

It has given me some unforgettable flying moments, like my very own self-fly helicopter tour of Kauai. And flying (perfectly legally) under the Golden Gate bridge. I don't for a moment regret the time and money that I spent learning to fly the heli. But staying current enough to fly safely and with confidence, for no obvious practical reason, is another question.

All this came to a head when my instructor bluntly told me that I was no longer proficient enough to solo in his helicopter. It didn't come as a big surprise, I'd been feeling less confident myself too. But it did mean I had to make a big decision. Do I fly more often, at least a couple of times a month, and more for a while, to bring my skills back to the right level and keep them there? But that would take a lot of time, which I really don't have, and even more money - renting a Robinson 44 is $500-600 per hour. It's just not realistic, for me anyway.

So that's it, bye bye helicopter. Maybe I'll fly an occasional hour of dual, just so I don't forget completely. I fear that I'll find it more frustrating than anything else, feeling my own lack of skill and confidence and knowing that I can't go for an occasional solo flight. On the bright side, my bank account has been rejoicing ever since that depressing meeting with my instructor.

Flying the iPad - happiness at last

A couple of months ago I did a routine instrument curency flight. I was complaining to my instructor that Jeppesen, in their continuing move towards being a zero-customer-servce company, had dropped their "Express" approach chart service, where they sent you a new complete set of charts every two months.

"What's wrong with you?" he said, "Why aren't you using an iPad like everyone else?"

So, I asked around a bit, and decided to take the plunge into the 21st century and get one. The first question is, which kind? You can get them with varying amounts of memory, important if you're going to load them up with movies. Charts take quite a bit too. And you can get with or without mobile data. Without mobile data also means without built-in GPS, which would condemn you to using an external GPS with the attendant cables and clutter. So I went for 32 GBytes of memory - enough for aviation charts for the whole country, plus plenty of room for other stuff - and the 3G/GPS.

The universal consensus for the software to run was ForeFlight. I chose the more expensive option that shows you where you are on the plate as you fly an approach. Situational awareness is a good thing.

You have to hold the iPad somehow in the plane. Following recommendations, I bought a fold-out kneeboard from MyGoFlight. It seems sensible, the iPad goes on one side, displaying whatever chart you need, and a normal clipboard goes on the other side, for notes and whatever paper stuff you need.

I never really got it to work though. Unlike my regular kneeboard, which stays open, this one keeps trying to fold itself up during the flight. The worst was during landing, when it slithered down to my knees folded into a V-shape. I thought about improvising ways to hold it open, but it seemed complicated. I tried squishing the hinges with pliers, to tighten them up. This worked a little but it still wanted to fold up and slide down my leg in flight.

It seemed a good idea to protect the screen and reduce reflections and glare, so I also bought a pack of two fancy screen protectors. These were a dead loss - well, the first one was. I've never dared try the second. For a surface of this size, it's impossible to avoid trapping at least one dust particle unless you happen to have access to a clean room. Once that happens - which it will - any attempts to improve things just go rapidly downhill. The protector was in the garbage ten minutes after starting.

I needed a way to use the iPad in the helicopter - where the cyclic makes a big kneeboard impossible. So I also bought the simple knee board from MyGoFlight, and also a yoke mount. The yoke mount consists of a clamp, a spigot that clips into the back of the plastic iPad case, and a double-ended clamp that joins these two together. In my plane (Cessna 182), it didn't work out. It held the iPad so high that it obstructed most of the instruments - it would be totally unusable for IFR flight, and awkward even for VFR. I tried mounting the clamp sideways, with the clamp sticking out between the center and one arm of the yoke. That sort-of worked, but wasn't really ready for prime time. For one thing it unbalanced the yoke, so holding it straight for level flight required constant pressure. For another, the screen was vertical so it was hard to read from a normal flying position.

The built-in GPS works fine in my high-wing plane, and in the helicopter too. I found no need for an external GPS, unless you want to pay serious money for the Stratus and get in-flight weather as well. One surprising omission from ForeFlight is any kind of flight tracking. Luckily there is another app which does a wonderful job of this, called CloudAhoy. You start it at the beginning of a flight, and stop it at the end. Afterwards, when it can, it uploads all the flight data. Now you can go to www.cloudahoy.com and view your flight track, superimposed on Google Earth or a sectional, with complete data on altitude, speed and track. You can even relive the flight on Google Earth. The accuracy is astounding, even when you're taxiing. This is really a great app.

I flew a cross-country in the helicopter with the simple holder. I had the iPad on my left leg and my usual small clipboard on the right. Nothing got in the way of any of the controls. CloudAhoy worked perfectly, showing me afterwards the exact location of the private back-country airstrip I'd spotted. But climbing out on the second leg, I noticed the screen was blank. Pressing the button got me a message saying "I'm too hot, I've shut down". And indeed in the 34 degree (C) ambient heat in the Central Valley, with the sun blazing down through the canopy, it was too hot to touch. I'm very glad I wasn't relying on it to show me the details of an approach to minimums! It came back to life later but it's certainly a concern for relying on it as the only source of charts. I found afterwards that this is a common problem when flying with the iPad.

I could also use this setup in the plane, but I wanted to try one last thing. From Sporty's I bought some RAM mount spare parts, a "double ball adapter" and a "small double arm". My idea was to hold the iPad lower down and also to allow it to be angled a bit. This worked very nicely. The picture shows how it works. The thing that looks like a piston clips into the back of the iPad holder, allowing it to rotate and holding it at both right height and at a good angle for easy reading. There is just enough clearance to pull the yoke fully back.

I have one experiment left: from Sporty's I bought a screen protector called iVisor which claims to be reusable and hence be a solution to the dust problem. We'll see.

So, to summarize, what I have found works is:

• 32 GB iPad with 3G and built-in GPS
• MyGoFlight "iPad kneeboard sport"
• Yoke mount for the above, plus extra bits as in the text
• ForeFlight Mobile software
• CloudAhoy for flight tracking

I can't recommend the double kneeboard from MyGoFlight - I never got it to work and having attacked it with pliers and chipped the paint, I can't even sell it.

Flying the T-6

One of the many good things about Attitude Aviation is the variety of exotic aircraft that you can fly there. You can fly a Pitts and even, with enough time, patience and money, get to the point where they'll let you solo it or take friends for hair-raising aerobatic rides. They also have a Waco, which is a huge, lumbering - but aerobatic - biplane of pre-WW2 design, and a Marchetti, which is a nice touring airplane that just happens also to be fully aerobatic, including inverted. Not to mention the L-39 which allows you, at eye-watering expense, to fly a jet.

And recently, they finally got their T-6 (also known as a Texan, or in the UK a Harvard) back on the line. This is another WW2 design, classified as an "advanced trainer". In those days, a 19-year old would start flying a Stearman, solo after a handful of hours, and after getting to barely double figures would find himself behind the stick of a 550 HP monster, the size of a combat fighter. A few tens of hours in that and he'd be in a Spitfire, Hurricane or P-51, in combat for real. And maybe he'd come back, too... or maybe not.

Attitude originally had the T-6 on the line a few years ago. I flew it a couple of times, partly to prepare myself for flying the P-51 - but that's another story. Soon afterwards it had a landing mishap. The saga of the repair work and repaint that followed makes for a very long story - but finally, two years later, she showed up again at Livermore airport. I felt I needed to do something to celebrate getting my commercial pilot's license, so the timing was perfect.

The first thing about the T-6 - compared to the normal small planes we fly - is that it is seriously big. The low-mounted wing is at chest height, and the canopy stands about ten feet above the ground. Getting into it involves first clambering up on to the wing, then hoisting yourself into the cockpit, standing initially on the seat before you carefully lower yourself into place. There are two beams for your feet, with rudder pedals at the ends, and underneath that a huge void. Whatever you do, don't drop something in there!  All the controls are massive. It feels truly indestructible. After all, they were made to take tremendous abuse from very inexperienced pilots.

It's also been said that they were specifically designed to embody every known defect of all the combat aircraft of the time. So no matter what you eventually found yourself flying, it would seem tame compared to the T-6. One thing to do the first time you fly a new type - especially if it's as different as this - is to get familiar with all the controls. This means sitting in the cockpit, manual in hand, making sure you know where everything is and what everything does. Maybe you even move some of the controls. But whatever you do, don't move the landing gear control. Because this aircraft has no protection against that - move it to the "retracted" position while on the ground, and it will obligingly tuck the wheels up under itself, doing a lot of expensive damage in the process.

Finally, you feel ready to go flying (with an instructor - this is not a plane that Attitude will let you solo). The first thing to do is start the engine. It's not like a car, this is not a trivial matter. First of all, the prop must be manually turned through a couple of revolutions. Big radial engines like this are notorious for getting puddles of oil in the lower cylinders. Oil being incompressible, if the engine starts like this, the cylinder will be wrecked. This would be highly embarrassing, as well as expensive.

That done, you can climb back into the cockpit, and do battle with one of the most frustrating pieces of equipment on the aircraft. Like most piston engines, this one needs priming - using a manual pump to squirt raw gasoline into the inlet manifold. But the pump is incredibly stiff, and once you're strapped in it's at arms-length. I confess to having been completely unable to unlock the pump, needing someone else to climb up and do it for me. Though not expensive, this is definitely embarrassing - a bit like not being able to release the old-fashioned parking brake on your first driving lesson.

Finally, four shots of primer, and the primer has been closed and locked again. The starter is, uniquely, operated by a pedal between the rudder pedals. As soon as the engine fires, you must get back smartish onto the pedals, to be sure the brakes are fully applied. At the same time, you have to get the engine actually running. Radial engines start one cylinder at a time, or so it seems. The first kick must be carefully nurtured, the throttle advanced very slowly, as (hopefully) another cylinder starts to fire, and another, to the accompaniment of loud bangs and the occasional flame from the exhaust. Watching someone else start a radial engine (and listening to it!) is a delightful experience. Doing it yourself is fraught, with the knowledge that if you fail you'll have to start over, including the dreaded primer.

Finally the engine is running smoothly, all cylinders firing. Now it's time to taxi. As you release the brakes and start to move, you realise just how huge this thing is. Luckily the brakes are conventional - not heel brakes, or the strange composite arrangement with a bicycle brake lever on the stick like on the L-39. But it can't be too easy. In a taildragger you want to keep the stick fully back all the time when on the ground (let's ignore quartering tailwinds for now). That locks the tailwheel within a narrow range of motion. So if you want to make a tight turn, for example to reverse direction in the runup area, you must release the tailwheel lock by moving the stick forward. But for takeoff, it's vital to have it locked. And of course sometimes  it doesn't just lock itself - you have to wiggle the aircraft to and fro, until everything is right.

So, you've been through the (long) pre-flight checklist, got the oil nice and warm, taxied into position, and you're ready to take off. This is the frightening bit - first because you have no idea how it will behave when you apply power, and second because once you've taken off, you will, sooner or later, have to land again. (A very experienced Pitts pilot once told me that it took him several hundred flights before his first thought on becoming airborne stopped being, "Oh, sh*t, now I have to land it!").

The T-6 is actually fairly docile as it rolls down the runway. It doesn't have any vicious habits. It does take some heavy footwork to keep it rolling straight, especially as you bring the nose up. And, unlike the Pitts, it rolls a long way - although it has 550 HP, it weighs a lot too. Finally it reaches rotation speed, and with a pull on the stick you're airborne.

We flew over to our usual aerobatic practise area, which gave some time to get a feel for the aircraft. The stick is quite heavy but easy to get used to. It doesn't have a lot of adverse yaw (unlike the Citabria, for example) so only modest rudder inputs are required. And it makes that wonderful radial noise as you putter along at a modest power setting and 130 mph or so. You just know that everywhere you go, people are looking up and thinking, "What's that?"

We did a few of the usual exercises with a new type, starting with turns and then steep turns. They're easy to fly, the forces, while heavy, are consistent and well balanced. Then we went on to simple aerobatics - loops and rolls. These, too, went easily enough. It takes a lot of force on the rudder to keep a roll straight, and because the roll rate is not very high, the loop finishes with the nose pointing distinctly downwards. Loops go nicely enough, diving for 180 mph then pulling round at 3.5G or so.

Once in flight, the T-6 flies fairly unremarkably. You forget its size, since it doesn't really matter up there. The panel is typical of its era - there's no six-pack, just instruments and switches dotted about at random. The landing light switches, for example, are on the left of the main panel - while all other lights are on their own panel on the right side of the cockpit. (I confess that I didn't find them in flight when I wanted them). The fuel gauges are even worse. They're purely mechanical, with sight gauges down in the void under the floor on either side of the cockpit. Before strapping in I did manage to locate them, but I found reading them in flight to be impossible. The gear lock confirmation is similar - you have to look through two tiny windows in the upper surface of the wing, to see the yellow lock pins. I said I could see them, and at the time I convinced myself that I did, but to be honest it's pretty questionable.

We did a couple of stalls, which were also unremarkable. Then it was time to go and land - with a wonderful view of Mount Diablo in the setting sun. I had an unpleasant experience landing a much smaller vintage taildragger a couple of years ago, so I get a bit apprehensive at this stage. With the T-6, the plan was to wheel-land it. Smaller taildraggers are normally landed on all three wheels at (much) the same time, but with bigger ones it's common to land with the fuselage level, just on the main gear. This means that the wings are still flying and will happily bounce back into the air if the tail drops, increasing the angle of attack. So you have to "stick" the airplane by pushing the stick forward at touchdown. Timing and finesse are everything - too late, and you bounce. Too early, and you thunk painfully hard into the runway - and then bounce. Too much, and you can ding the prop as the nose drops towards the runway.

As it turns out, the T-6 is a pleasure to land. Maintaining a steady 95 mph on final, just gently lowering the main gear onto runway then pushing the stick forward give a gentle touchdown. It's much easier than a wheel-landing in a Citabria!

The flaps on the T-6 are odd in a couple of ways. First, they're "split flaps" - all of the action happens under the trailing edges. From the cockpit the wings look solid, and when you move the flap handle, nothing visibly moves. All the action is underneath. In consequence, it's easy to forget to retract them after landing. And if you forget them until after shutdown, you have a problem. They are operated by an engine-driven hydraulic system, and once the engine has stopped, the only way to retract them is with a manual pump somewhere in the bowels of the aircraft. Guess how I know.

We did a couple of touch-and-goes, which went rather well, then we returned to base. My one real landing didn't go so well - I dropped in hard enough to elicit comment, rather than the smooth touchdown I'd managed earlier. And I'm afraid to say I was a bit heavy-footed on the rudder. I think I've got so used to the Pitts, which is very controllable and reactive on the rollout and will forgive a surprising amount of clumsiness, that the much more leisurely response of the T-6 caught me unprepared.

So, finally, it was back to Attitude, and engine shutdown. The sun was just setting as we landed, so the usual post-flight photo opportunity gave some nice sunset-type shots.

And some time, I really will have to spend some time just getting comfortable with landings. Apart from that the T-6 is a pussy cat, albeit a very big, heavy (and expensive) one.

Instrument Flying by Helicopter

My latest flying training project is to work towards my commercial helicopter license (CPL-H). Having, finally, got my airplane commercial a couple of months ago, it seems like an obvious thing to do. So my plan over the next year or so is to gradually "tick all the boxes" for the experience requirements for the CPL-H, as described in FAR 61.129(c).

One of these is to get 5 hours of "actual or simulated instrument flying". Since our Robinson 44 is not allowed to fly in actual conditions (i.e. in clouds), this means flying "under the hood", using a gadget which restricts the pilot's view to just the instruments. This is how most instrument training and currency is done, even in airplanes, since you can't really count on clouds to be there when you need them, especially in our part of the world. Yesterday I completed my second helicopter flight under the hood, amounting to a magnificent total of 3.4 hours so far.

In a plane, with its high glareshield, there are lots of effective ways to limit the pilot's view. I use something called "Foggles" which are like industrial eye protection goggles with most of the lens covered in a translucent film. Only the bottom part, corresponding roughly to the reading part of bifocal glasses, is left clear. As long as the pilot isn't actually trying to cheat, these do the job very well. In fact, it's surprisingly easy not to cheat, assuming your goal is to be trained rather than just to pass a checkride. (In the latter case, it isn't really worth trying to cheat because the examiner will notice immediately). I remember one flight, on my own in actual cloudy conditions, where I popped out of the cloud and it took me a while even to realise that I didn't have to rely on instruments.

In the helicopter, it's harder to do an adequate job of restricting vision, because the visibility is so much better. The only thing that works - and then not very well - is the decidedly steampunk Francis hood, looking like something a submarine commander should be wearing. Even so it's impossible not to see ground through the lower part of the canopy - you just have to try not to notice it.

Flying the helicopter under the hood is much harder than a plane. For a start, you can't take your hands off the controls. A plane will cheerfully fly for tens of seconds, hands off. You sometimes see a plane referred to as a good "instrument platform", meaning that it is naturally stable. My own Cessna TR182 falls into this category. The heli, on the other hand, always requires a hand on the cyclic (the up/down/sideways control corresponding to the stick or yoke in a plane). Normally it's your right hand, but you can switch hands if you need to, for example to twiddle the Garmin 430 in the usual R44 instalation. Even that is tricky - it's difficult to fly as smoothly with the "wrong" hand (I guess left-handed helicopter pilots may find the opposite, but probably not - it's all a question of habit). And you have to be constantly prepared to get a hand on the collective really fast if the engine stops, to enter autorotation in the couple of seconds you have before the aircraft simply drops out of the sky.

Flying, and especially instrument flying, involves a lot of fiddling round with bits of paper - charts, approach plates and so on. It is very difficult to refold a flimsy IFR en-route chart with just one hand. For this reason, IFR-approved helicopters have either a crew of two, or an autopilot (or both of course). But helicopter autopilots are eye-wateringly expensive - little change out of $100,000 - and anyway not available for training aircraft like the R44. So, even during an instrument checkride, the instructor (or examiner) can be used as an "autopilot".

I've done a lot of airplane instrument flying, both under the hood and in real clouds. Much of it has been partial panel, i.e. without a functioning attitude indicator, which generally mysteriously "fails" at the very start of my instrument currency flights. So much so, that I've got used to flying without using it very much - the turn coordinator and the altimeter work just as well. That absolutely does not work in the heli, at least not at first. It is so much more sensitive that the AI absolutely has to be the primary reference all the time, just like it says in the IFR manuals. It took me a little while at the start of my first flight under the hood to realise this. Once I did, my flying became a lot more stable. In an airplane, quite a casual instrument scan works fine. But in the heli you really have to be moving very quickly between all the instruments. It takes only a small distraction to suddenly find yourself in a 30 degree bank or a couple of hundred feet off altitude. This is especially a problem when tuning radios or fiddling with the GPS - you have to scan back and forth between the AI and whatever you're twiddling, making the latter just an extra part of the scan. It's hard.

Once cruise flight is mastered, or at least under control, the next thing to tackle is approaches and holds. In principle an approach is just flying, but there's a lot more to keep track of - altitudes and headings change, and there's radio work too. A general problem with instrument flying is what happens when you get overloaded. You can go very quickly from feeling comfortable to being on the edge of complete panic, not because anything has gone badly wrong but just because there is so much to keep track of. Then small things start to go wrong - altitude and heading deviations, maybe a bit of an extreme attitude - and that piles on the workload too. It takes self-discipline to take a few deep breaths and get back to focusing on basic flying, get straight and level again, go around if you have to. For some reason the hood adds to stress too - flying in actual clouds, without the hood, seems less daunting. This may be just a very basic animal reaction to not having complete vision.

The handful of approaches I've flown have worked out pretty well, all things considered. My first helicopter ILS was the long, long descent into Moffett (KNUQ). Although it's charted as a series of step-down fixes, in practice you can fly the whole thing down the glideslope, all the way from HOOKS - 20 miles out and 5500 feet above the field. It's probably the longest ILS descent in the world, 15 minutes or so of following the needles. Fixed-wing, I flew it once with everything covered up except the VOR head - everything done by making tiny corrective inputs as the needles start to drift. It's a great exercise, but I'm certainly not ready to do it in the heli just yet!

What next? I only need one more flight like this to "tick the box" for my CPL-H. A helicopter instrument rating is pretty useless, since it's unlikely that I'll ever fly one that's equipped for IFR. But there again, it might be fun to do after the CPL-H - amazingly, it only requires another 10 hours of hood time to meet the legal requirements.

Cross Country to Alturas

About a year ago I finally decided to get serious about my Commercial Pilot's License (CPL). Not that I have any ambitions for a second career as a pilot, but with well over 1000 hours of flying under my belt it just seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

Getting a CPL involves a checkride with an examiner, a written test, and a bunch of experience requirements, such as a minimum of 250 hours of flying. Most of the training goes towards the checkride. For single-engine planes, this requires a bunch of new things which don't form part of the Private Pilot checkride, specifically some not-quite-aerobatic maneuvers: chandelles, lazy-eights, eights-on-pylons.These are actually pretty hard to fly to the required standard, but after struggling with them for a while I can begin to see some point to them: they definitely do make for a finer touch in aircraft handling.

One of the experience requirements is a long cross-country flight, at least 300 miles round trip with the furthest point at least 250 miles away. Oh, those are nautical miles, of 6080 feet or about 15% more than the everyday statute mile. Why flying uses nautical rather than statute miles - and the corresponding unit of speed, knots (nautical miles per hour) rather than mph - is lost in the mists of history. And not all the time, by the way - some things, such as visibility requirements, are expressed in statute miles. More on that later.

There are a bunch of other requirements associated with this flight, such that, although I have many flights of this length, none of them qualifies. There have to be at least three landings, it has to be day VFR, and it has to be solo - nobody else on board, not even a non-pilot passenger. I suppose this is intended as a test of flight planning and navigation skills. The FAA, or the part that deals with "airman certification" anyway, doesn't seem to have heard of GPS, and doesn't know that nowadays all you need to do is enter the code for the destination airport and follow the resulting magenta line on the screen. Well, almost - it's as well to take things like mountains and restricted airspace into consideration, and to make sure you have enough fuel. So anyway... in the preparation for my checkride, I needed to make such a flight.

There are lots of places I could go. The LA area is over 250 miles, so a round trip to say Santa Monica would qualify, or to southern Oregon, or to somewhere in Nevada like Elko. I've done all of those, though. It would be nice to do something I've never done before. Looking at my wall-map of California, with pins for the airports I've been to, showed one big pin-free expanse, the north-east of the state. There a very few towns and it's not even on the way to anywhere. Alturas, the north-eastern most town in California, is 251 miles from Palo Alto, so just qualifies.

A straight line from Palo Alto to Alturas passes overhead Livermore, east of Mount Diablo, overhead Sacramento and Grass Valley, then across 8-9000 foot mountains to Quincy. The mountains are gradually replaced by high plains at around 4000' with the occasional pointy story-book volcanic peak. You can't fly in quite a straight line because of the TFR for the pilotless aircraft testing centre at Chico, so I flew a slight dogleg to the south which also kept me out of the big military training areas in the region. The easy way to do this is to find a waypoint in about the right place for the desired route. My route ended up as KPAO-SUNOL-HAGAN (the waypoint in question)-KAAT (Alturas).

The flight northwards was uneventful but beautiful. Crossing the mountains is always a bit scary - there really aren't too many good options if the engine stops. Luckily it didn't. I flew just to the south of Quincy airport. That's a scary place too - I went there one Saturday when I was on my own. It's the only airport I know that has mountains in the traffic pattern! You can't fly left traffic at approach speed, if you tried you'd quite literally hit a mountain.

Past Quincy, there was really almost nothing. I picked out Susanville to my right. There were just vast, green grassy plains, a few lakes, the very occasional small settlement and a few roads. For nearly a hundred miles I didn't pass within ten miles of a town. The last part of the flight, over the high plains, was very bumpy, too much for the autopilot, so I hand flew. Finally Alturas came into sight. It's a tiny place and the runways are narrow, so it took a while to find the airport. Needless to say I was the only person flying.

It was with great relief that I pulled up to the fuel pump and stopped. It had been an enjoyable flight but it's a long time to sit in the same position. The airport was completely deserted - a sign gave the number to call for fuel, and it took about 15 minutes for the fueller - who is also the county building inspector - to show up. Later the airport manager showed up too. I ended up spending nearly an hour on the ground, which allowed me to witness the arrival of another airplane. It's a quiet place, and beautiful in a Swiss, mountainous kind of way.

It would have been nice to walk into the town, which is only about a mile away, but it would all have been closed by then and anyway I wanted to get back before dark. Alturas would make a nice destination for a quiet weekend, except that unfortunately there is no car rental. Without a car there is really not much you could do, and as far as I can tell the nearest are at Klamath Falls, over 60 miles away.

So after saying my farewells - it's hard to imagine I'll ever go back, although it's a pretty place - I set off on the next leg. I'd decided to hop over the mountain to Cedarville. It's only about 30 miles but the Warner Mountains are in the way, ascending to 9000 feet, so the whole flight is spent first climbing then descending. Cedarville is an even tinier place, population 514 - the kind of place you'd retreat to when you just couldn't stand the bustle and crowds of Alturas (pop 2827). It's in the centre of a long narrow valley mainly occupied by three large alkali dry lakes, imaginatively called the Lower, Middle and Upper Alkali Lakes. Unsurprisingly, the airport was deserted, the narrow runway further limited by high weeds at the edges. I turned straight around and set off on my next leg, to Susanville.

I chose to fly down the eastern side of the mountains, just for a change of view. At the end of June there was still plenty of snow above 8000 feet. Once out of the valley I quite literally saw no human presence until I was close to Susanville, a hundred miles south.

Susanville has a huge prison, like so many small, remote California towns. California of course has the highest per capita prison population in the world, higher than China or Soviet Russia, thanks to some seriously misguided right-wing politics and the even more misguided "war on drugs". The state is bankrupt and can't afford to run even the most basic services, but is still not willing to reduce its prison population. But that's not really a topic for this post.

The prison did however make a convenient visual aiming point. When I landed there were still a few people around the airport, and a very friendly dog. But I didn't linger - I was getting hungry as well as tired.

The rest of the flight was uneventful - back across the slightly scary mountains, then over Sacramento, to the left of Mount Diablo, and so home. The landing was spectacularly beautiful - by good luck I landed exactly as the sun set, disappearing under the horizon as I descended on short final.

When not flying, I'm working on my written - actually a computer based multiple-choice test. Fortunately, all the possible questions are published by the FAA, and assembled into a book called Gleim, which also has (one hopes) the correct answers and the reasons behind them. The majority of the questions are perfectly reasonable, having to do with things like the airspace rules and how to read charts. But others are ghosts of a former age. There is not a single question about the use of GPS, even though probably 90% or more of long flights are made using it. But there are dozens of questions on a nearly-obsolete device called the "Automatic Direction Finder", a miracle of 1940s vacuum-tube electronics. The operational side of the FAA is busy closing down the corresponding radio beacons as fast as it can. New planes (sold in the US anyway - the rest of the world is a different story) haven't had ADF equipment in them for well over a decade. Mine had one when it was new, in 1980, but I had it removed when it developed a fault about five years ago.

Not only is the ADF obsolete, but the questions are about ways of using it that nobody has ever done in flight, complicated trigonometric exercises to do with angles of intercept. Flying a plane looks easy enough but it actually takes a lot of concentration. The idea of doing complicated mental math at the same time is as absurd as it would be to do the crossword. (Airline pilots do of course, but they have at least one extra pilot and three autopilots which they are obliged to use in cruise. And they are not constantly looking for reasonable places to land if the engine stops, since they have several of them).

My pilot friend Bill thinks that a lot of the regulations, and the questions that go with them, are just a thinly-veiled intelligence test. For example, there are three definitions of "night" (sunset, civil twilight which is about 30 minutes later, and one hour after sunset). There are many things you must or must not do at night, but which definition applies to which activity is pretty much random and just something you have to learn off by heart. The same applies to the various sources of aviation weather information. These exist both on the ground (via phone and now the Internet) and in the air, from various different places. Each one provides slightly different permutations of all the available information, without rhyme or reason. There are of course numerous questions on these. And, as you probably guessed, there are no questions at all either on Internet data sources, or on in-flight satellite based weather - which between them probably account for 90% of what pilots actually use nowadays.

The written will be my next step, in another few weeks - whatever one may think of it, it just has to be done. I don't expect it to be as enjoyable as my cross country flight to Alturas. More pictures from the trip here.

Jeppesen Customer Service (not!)

One of the first things I did when I bought my plane was to install a then state-of-the-art GPS navigator, a Garmin GNS530. This complemented the smaller GNS430 which was already there, albeit lacking some necessary approvals. The data for these comes on little data cartridges, slightly bigger than an SD card and completely proprietary to Garmin. I signed up with Jeppesen, the universal and only provider of aviation navigation service, to send me updated cartridges every month. Until about a year ago, this worked perfectly. I would take the new cards to my plane, swapping them for the old ones which I then sent back to Jepp. Once a year I sent them a check for quite a lot of money, and everything was flawless.

A couple of years ago, Jepp was acquired by Boeing. I presume that the new owner sent in the usual bean-counters who proceeded to look for "economies", of course at the expense of the customer, whose only role after all is to pay the bills.

The first sign that things weren't right came with last year's bill. I've always had a substantial discount for having two GPSs in the plane, which makes it only about 25% more than a single one. This had been forgotten, and the bill was for twice the single-unit price. I called, listening to hold music for about half-an-hour, interrupted occasionally by the usual pathetic excuse about "increased call volume" - the latter caused, of course, by the fact that they had messed up their complete order management system. Finally I spoke to someone who apologised, took my credit card number, and told me it was fixed.

I got various bills and reminders, which I ignored, until eventually the supply of new data cartridges dried up. I called again. This time I got someone very unhelpful who accused me of not paying my bill. Luckily I'd kept notes of the previous conversation, and eventually all was restored.

That was last year. This year they had a new trick, aimed no doubt at saving a few more dimes. They have suspended the data cartridge service altogether, replacing it with an online service where you update your own cartridges. They sent me a USB thingy to plug the cartridges into, and told me to call them for more information. It actually took several calls to get the service set up. Tonight, I finally tried to download into my cartridges. One worked fine. But then, I only had the right to a single cartridge! So we're back to where we were before.

I'm sure that all the calls to try and straighten things out have already wiped out the savings from not sending me the data cards. So I have to spend more time, not to mention hours on the phone to Jeppesen, and it costs them more money. If there was an alternative, I'd already be there - the disadvantage of monopolies.

But I'm sure that somewhere there's an accountant who's jolly pleased with himself.

Flying the Helicopter

It's been a long time since I wrote anything about the heli. I've been flying it generally about once a month since my checkride. That means training and currency flying - apart from the one flight with my wife, everything has been with my instructor. And that means lots of autorotations. They're one of the most fun aspects of flying helis anyway, plus you need to be good at them in case the engine ever stops.

Most practice autorotations are done down to the flare, about 10 feet above the ground, and then you re-apply power and fly away, or hover. That's because the greatest danger - mainly to the aircraft - is in the very final phase. But if it ever happens for real, you need to know how to get the last bit right too. That's called a "full down auto", when you actually land. I've done quite a few of those, my instructors hands poised ready to take over in a heartbeat if necessary. But actually the last couple I've done have been fairly good, resulting in a gentle touchdown and a short roll-out, or I suppose it would be more accurate to call it a scrape-out, considering the absence of wheels.

Another variation on autorotations is the 360 degree auto. This is what you would have to do if you had just flown over the only viable landing spot in sight. Chop the power, then execute a steep (30 degree or more) banked autorotating turn, keeping a sharp eye on rotor speed, airspeed, altitude, and the outside world, all at the same time. The trick is to touch down exactly under the spot where you chopped the power. Let's say I'm getting there.

And then last weekend, something completely different. We've been talking about doing a mountain checkout for a while - we had it arranged a couple of months ago but on the day it was snowing hard in the mountains. Last Sunday, the weather was perfect, so two of us together our instructor flew up to Tahoe, then on to Reno and Truckee before returning home. I flew the outward leg, about 90 minutes from Palo Alto, first in a straight line to Jackson and then following Route 88 up to Kirkwood before cutting across to the pass and then a steep descent into Tahoe. Much easier in the heli than in the plane, where you just about invariably end up flying out over the lake to lose altitude. It was a beautiful flight, with the unparallelled visibility that you can only get from a heli.

We had the heli deliberately loaded up to gross with some ballast, so we got to feel what a high-altitude take-off and landing is like. Also, at altitude you need to watch power carefully, since the limit is lower there. But overall it was fairly straightforward. We went on to Reno, and then I flew the leg from there to Truckee. And learned something important.

In an airplane, your take-off options are limited. You use a runway, and there aren't many of them, and the tower always tells you which one to use. It's something they take seriously! But a heli is capable of taking off from anywhere you like - the ramp, a runway, a taxiway, the grass - and most towers are happy to let you do so, as long as they approve it. But at Reno we ended up with a misunderstanding - the tower expected me to do something different from what I actually did. Nothing bad happened, and they were nice enough about it, but it was an excellent lesson. In the heli at a towered airport, always make certain that what you are about to do is what the tower is expecting you to do.

Flying around Tahoe was a great piece of heli-tourism too. The views were wonderful, especially on the legs where I was sitting in the back, and could take some pictures. Here are a couple to be going on with while I get them all organised and onto Flickr.

PPL-H!

Well, almost exactly one year after my "discovery flight", I passed my PPL-H checkride and became a qualified helicopter pilot. To my pleasure and surprise, my wife - who has never been at all keen on helis and until now has never flown in one - agreed to be my first passenger. So last weekend I did my first helicopter "Bay Tour", departing from Palo Alto towards the coast, with a slight detour to fly over the Montebello Ridge vineyards so she could see them from the air. Then out to San Gregorio, up the coast over Half Moon Bay, over the Golden Gate and back over the city. I've done this numerous times in airplanes, but the view from the heli is much better and of course you're lower too. The flight was a success from all points of view, with a very happy passenger who agreed - despite her attachment to our plane - that this was even better.

One of the hardest parts of flying helis, for me anyway, was to get a really smooth pickup. Hovering seems impossible at first, but after about five hours it's under control and getting better. Autorotations are fun, and if you're used to landing the Pitts then they don't seem too dramatic. Getting them right is tricky and takes some fairly aggressive manouvering, and (in my opinion) you can never practice them enough. But in the end, pickups were the hardest.

Here's the problem. While you're sitting firmly on the ground, the position of the controls isn't affecting anything. Hence, you have no feedback about whether they're in the right position or not. As soon as the skids completely leave the ground, you're flying, even though you're only an inch off the ground, and everything depends on the position of the cyclic and the pedals. A touch too much left cyclic and right pedal, and you're whizzing off to the left while spinning round to the right - not good, especially if you're in a confined area or on soft ground.

Instructors and textbooks say the same thing - lift the collective slowly until you're "light on the skids", correct the control position, then lift further. Easy to say, harder to get a feel for. It's just like learning coordinated turns in a plane - the instructor says, "but surely you can feel it, without even looking at the ball?" And you say (or at least I did), "errr, no, I can't". Now I can feel it, after over 1000 hours and 100+ hours of aerobatics, but it took a while.

So my experience was, you so-so-gently pull up on the collective, waiting to feel the heli come alive as the weight comes off the skids. And then it starts to turn or to move, and in an instant of panic you yank up the collective and you're three feet off the ground and you've zoomed off several feet from your starting point, before you brought things back under control. This is not the way to pass a checkride, something my instructor made very clear to me.

The fix, for me, was an exercise where I deliberately set the cyclic and the pedals way off where they should be, then, as the collective came up, gradually corrected them as I felt things starting to move. After a few times doing that, I'd overcome the panic instinct to yank on the collective, and after that it was just practice. It's very satisfying - now that I can feel what "light on the skids" means - to make small corrections just before the thing leaves the ground, and have it move smoothly and vertically through those first few inches.

The other hard thing, getting close to the checkride, was slope work, where you delberately have the weight partly supported by one skid and partly by the rotor. The amazing videos you see of helicopters touching a steep hillside, yet still flying, are all about this. Again it's all about feel for the controls during the critical moments, and tiny movements of the collective. It's a real feeling of victory when you can hold the heli, half on the ground and half off, then sooo gently let it down onto the other skid. And even better when you can smoothly lift it off again. It takes a lot of practice.

Finally, a couple more pictures from our Bay Tour. There are more on Flickr.