July 2008 Flight

I had been a couple months since my last flight out of Mansfield. It was at the end of April, and with vacation in early June and flying in the Sacramento area, I never scheduled a rental for May. Then after vacation, I waited a bit to rent again for financial reasons.

However, I couldn't wait too long. As with most places, I have to rent from Mansfield at least once every 90 days, otherwise I have to check out again with an instructor. That is not necessarily a bad thing, as I go fly with an instructor every 6-9 months or so anyway just as a matter of maintaining a level of proficiency.

I was actually originally scheduled to fly in N2120M last week, but to make a long story short, there were multiple maintenance bumps in my reservation and I ended up taking 2138W at 7pm. Laurie came along in the event that we would be able to make it to Turners Falls for ice cream. However, with only 1.5 hrs before sunset, it turned out that there wasn't enough time for much of anything except for some airwork and cruising around.

I was reminded how hazy it gets around here in the summer. Today was pretty nice compared to recent weather that has been incredibly humid and muggy - but visibility in the air was only 10 nm. That sounds like a lot, but at even 3500 feet, details on the ground become obscured when they are only 3-4 miles away - and really the only details discernable at 10 nm is stuff like the reflectivity difference between a lake and surrounding forest. By contrast, on a real clear day you can be in Providence and look north and see mountains in New Hampshire - well over 50 nm away.

And to think - the minimum for VFR operations during the day is 3 nm. I've flown in visibility conditions of 4-5 nm before when I was flying solo during my training, and I was almost on top of Providence airport before I could see it. And that is a much bigger airport than one like Mansfield or Orange or even Fitchburg.

We ended up flying a loop around Worcester airport. Once we were past Worcester and it was getting to be 8 pm, it was obvious there was little chance of even getting to Turners Falls and making it back to Mansfield before the end of evening civil twilight (about 20-30 minutes after sunset). Since I am not even remotely current on night flight, and I am currently restricted from flying at night due to some red/green color blindness, I didn't want to chance it.

On the way back I did some practice with slow flight, keeping the plane under control with high angle of attack, high power, and the stall warning horn blaring. Its a nice way to practice precision and positive control of the aircraft when the controls are mushy and it is operating near the limits of its performance envelope. After that, it was a basic turn around a point where the concept is to keep the airplane a set distance from an object on the ground throughout the whole turn, all the while taking into account wind correction factors (direction, strength, and resultant ground speed).

I ended with a steep turn to the left and to the right. A steep turn is simply a turn at a 45 degree angle of bank, keeping altitude, airspeed, angle of bank and rudder/aileron coordination all static during the manuever. Since this was the first time Laurie was with me doing airwork, she had never been exposed to a steep turn before. I at least warned her that it was going to be a little odd for her - but she still didn't care for it. Until you get used to 45 degree banks, you feel like the plane is going to fall out of the sky. However, it is actually not even close, as the stall speed has only increased by about 20% as compared to straight and level flight (about 45 kts to about 55 kts). Given that the manuever is practices around 90 kts, the wings at 45 degrees are still generating nearly 2x the amount of lift necessary.

After the steep turns, it was back to Mansfield.