phik

Stuart brought a GPS receiver with him on our grand adventure, and that more or less got me hooked. I’m a big fan of having my photos location-tagged, being one of those people who, with some 5,000 photos spanning 7 years, can no longer keep track of where they were taken. I’m also sold on its value as a flying tool; it’s been enlightening to look at my tracks after IFR lessons (to see how badly I’m botching the wind correction in a holding pattern, for example).

I hitched my chariot to Vlad and rode him all the way to victory, graciously allowing him to do all of the research related to this particular buying decision. In this instance he did not steer me wrong, selecting the Wintec WBT-201, a rugged, vanishingly small logging receiver with just two buttons and no display.

First, the good things:

• It’s like two cubic inches in volume. If that. It weighs nothing and you cannot beat the size.

• I haven’t scientifically evaluated their 12-hour battery life claim, but it is quite acceptable. I charge it every few flying days, maybe once a week.

• It has Bluetooth and USB.

• gpsbabel can be harnessed to suck out the track data and erase the device.

• It’s very, very good at maintaining a GPS lock in the face of lousy reception. I leave mine in the outside pocket of my flight bag, or the pocket of my trousers, in the mostly-metal airplane cabin, and it has no problem.

And of course, the inevitable accompanying problems:

• It’s very bad at acquiring a GPS lock under poor conditions, and even under good conditions sometimes takes as long as two or three minutes. Worst of all, if you start moving before it’s locked, even under good conditions, you may never succeed.

  Just walking around, holding it in my hand with a clear view of the sky, I had it fail to establish a lock during the entirety of a thirty-Earth-minute walk. (!)

• Apart from this GTK software, which I haven’t even contemplated on OS X, there doesn’t seem to be a way to configure the device apart from their Windows software. The default settings aren’t disastrous, but they’re definitely not perfect.

• The aforementioned Windows software is a disaster. It is dangerous at any speed. Use it to set the few options whose meaning you can decipher and close it immediately before your brain atrophies.

• In fact, it is the documentation for the software which causes the most harm, because it is total garbage of nearly zero value. It reads like a motherboard manual, full of helpful information like this complete explanation for the DGPS Timeout value: “DGPS Timeout”

  If any of the options were explained at all, the software would be merely bad instead of useless.

• Every once in a while I get a point or three way off to the side, maybe 30 miles from where I actually am, and then it settles down. This seems to happen chiefly when I’m walking around and just establishing a GPS lock. It’s confused momentarily, and doesn’t seem to realize that those points are low-confidence. Fortunately, these don’t seem to happen if I let it get a solid lock before moving.

  gpsbabel has an option to discard points below a certain confidence threshold, but either the device doesn’t produce this data, I don’t know how to enable it, or the gpsbabel reader doesn’t know how to parse it. If I had to guess, I’d wager it’s the second.

On balance, I recommend it with relatively few reservations. If you can wait 3 minutes to establish a lock before you move, and don’t mind editing the odd broken point out of your track, it is an excellent device that will maintain its lock in the face of very poor reception. I think it’s hard to do better at any price, and this is sub-$100.

Given its long battery life, tiny size, and negligible weight, it’s the kind of device that you can turn on, toss in your flight or camera bag, and forget.

I missed a question on my instrument written exam last week, and it still bugs me.

I knew that if any were wrong it would be this one, because I spent a good five minutes arguing with myself about it before ending the exam.

Like most multiple-choice exams, it is all about choosing the best answer for a given question. They might all be correct, but some of them are more correct than others. And if part of an answer is wrong, even if it’s the most complete, it is not the right answer.

Most of the questions on these FAA exams are straightforward, with one correct answer, but they’re not above a trick question now and then. Maybe a couple dozen of the roughly 1,000 questions in the test bank are tricky. The one I missed was not, I believe, intended to be tricky:

The pilot in command of a civil aircraft must have an instrument rating only when operating

A. under IFR in positive control airspace.

B. in weather conditions less than the minimum prescribed for VFR flight.

C. under IFR, in weather conditions less than the minimum for VFR flight or in Class A airspace.

This question was especially troubling because the answer is so obviously (to pilots) (C). You need an instrument rating to fly under instrument flight rules (in any weather), or in instrument conditions, or in Class A airspace (above 18,000 feet). Simple! Indeed, the FAA thinks you should choose (C).

But there’s a problem: (B) and (C) don’t read “in instrument conditions,” they read “in weather conditions less than the minimum for VFR flight,” which exposes an unfortunate loophole.

You don’t always need an instrument rating to fly in weather conditions below VFR, I contend, because you can do it during daytime Special VFR Operations. From FAR 1.1:

Special VFR conditions mean meteorological conditions that are less than those required for basic VFR flight in controlled airspace and in which some aircraft are permitted flight under visual flight rules.

Thus I argue that (B) and (C) are incorrect, leaving only (A) as the “best” answer. Also, (A) implicitly includes Class A airspace because you “must conduct that [Class A] operation under instrument flight rules” (FAR 91.135).

I was going to write a polite letter to the FAA.

Unfortunately, in the course of re-reading the regulations and trying to explain myself, I finally noticed the word “only,” which had somehow escaped my attention during the exam. The word “only” also renders (A) incorrect, because you also need an instrument rating to operate IFR outside of controlled airspace.

Carefully read, the regulations seem to imply that SVFR operations are not “below VFR,” but rather a redefinition of VFR in that time and place, for that aircraft. Otherwise there are references to “below VFR” throughout the regs where they would more correctly write “in instrument conditions”. I would be curious (though apparently not curious enough to write a real letter) to know what the FAA legal office thinks of this virtually pointless technicality.

With all three answers being flawed in some regard, I must grudgingly admit that (C) is the most correct of three incorrect answers.

It was supposed to be an obvious question.

Fortunately, 98% is still a passing grade.

I haven’t been nervous about the instrument checkride, but I don’t think for any of the obvious reasons. Yes, I’ve been through the process once already. Yes, I’ve flown with this examiner before, and I know that he’s a nice guy and very fair. I just felt like there’s a lot less new stuff to memorize, and that it’s about performance to a larger degree than the VFR checkride.

For those who have never done it, what I found most challenging about the training was not flying the airplane. Rather, it was flying the airplane while doing the hundred other things required of a single IFR pilot. Keeping way ahead of the airplane, learning to anticipate and set up as much as possible in advance, engraining good habits, minimizing workload, so that you can focus on flying when it’s most dangerous: in zero visibility, close to the ground.

Others have, I believe, likened it to playing a game of chess while riding a bicycle. I would add that you can’t stop the bicycle, and there are obstacles strewn all over the pavement.

I have certainly learned to be paranoid, and experienced some of the stress that comes with single-pilot bad-weather operations. As a 40.1-instrument-hour pilot, I will not be testing the edges of that envelope by myself.

The oral exam was a straightforward discussion of IFR currency for the airplane and pilot, route and altitude planning, departure and arrival procedures, rules about alternates and fuel, and the IFR enroute chart. Nothing unexpected, which seemed to confirm my feeling that the new required knowledge was either less voluminous than my initial licence, or was less abstract and easier to learn. Maybe both.

The flying was also straightforward. We needed to do a recovery from an unusual attitude, a holding pattern, and three different approaches — of which one should be precision, one other should be partial-panel, and all three (ideally) should terminate differently. That’s it.

I won’t bore you with the minutiae of the approaches, just links in case you care: GPS 16 KBVY, COLLE transition missed approach, hold at WITCH, vectors to ILS 5 KLWM, and vectors for VOR 23 KBED circle to land 29.

a representative approach

It was a very bumpy day, not unlike the day I got my Private. There was almost no part of the ride that didn’t require constant adjustment to keep us near the right altitude and heading. At one point a particularly violent gust briefly rolled us perhaps 60 degrees.

But it’s done and I didn’t blow it. The piece of paper looks exactly the same as last time, except there’s another line that says “INSTRUMENT AIRPLANE”, and a hole punched in my old card while I await a new one.

That’s about all there is to it. No! Wait!

I didn’t mean to turn this into a flying diary, it just happened. The other stuff I’m spending a lot of time on isn’t really ready for public consumption yet. HOW’S THAT FOR FORESHADOWING?

OK, now we’re finished.

I met the sweetest little precocious four-year-old girl on Sunday. A little bit later she was playing with her toy ponies, and I witnessed this exchange:

mom pony: do you know what happened when you were born?
baby pony: no, what?
mom pony: you came out of my uterus!!

I swear to god.

Now that iPhone on T-Mobile is a reality, I was going to write about unlocking iPhone with a Mac, but I figured if I waited long enough someone would beat me to it. Problem solved.

Some additional recommendations, however:

1. Download iNdependence and use it to activate. The new version makes YouTube work too.

2. Get AppTapp, that shit is white-hot.

3. If you don’t want iPhoto to open every time you sync your iPhone with new photos, you have to change the pref inside Image Capture.app. I thought having to use Safari to set your default web browser was insane, but at least they’re sort-of not-really consistent.

4. I haven’t tested this yet, but the prospect of unlimited iPhone data for $6/month is cause for salivation.

The only annoyance so far is that iPhone seems to assume that you have new voicemail after you reboot it (presumably some mild confusion related to T-Mobile not doing the new visual voicemail protocol). After you dial the voicemail number, or actually get some, it seems to keep up.

It’s a nice upgrade from the 2001-era phone I’ve been using, which had 64 KB of memory, lacked a music player, camera, email, web browser, bluetooth, colour display, and touch-tone dialing, and had a separate backpack-mounted lead-acid battery.

I don’t think Joe found it particularly amusing when he rang the doorbell yesterday, and I began an exaggerated pantomime of looking through the bushes, offering to help him find his keys.

But when he came over today, he brought his keys.

I listened to a voicemail this week, around midnight.

“I hate to be the one to tell you, but your car is missing a window.”

It actually wasn’t missing at all, it was still there, it was just all over the interior.

exhibit a

After the boys down at the crime lab were finished with it, I got the rock back.

exhibit b

It’s a very good throwing rock, they chose well. Heavy, fits nicely in your hand; a really good rock.

They were thorough, which is to say they appear to have examined every nook and cranny in the vehicle with some haste. As some kind of cosmic reward for their comprehensiveness they were able to locate (and abscond with) my GPS, which is a shame. They apparently weren’t aware of how expensive airplane headsets are, because they left both of those behind in plain sight.

Unfortunately they also took my backpack, which was not something I usually left in the car. It had a lot of little things that are annoying to replace, like remote controls and cables for my camera and laptop, and my Australian SIM card. On this occasion it also contained a cordless drill, two boxes of drill bits, and a stud finder. I’m a handyman now, or something.

It also contained my passport, which is the real drag. A pain to replace, although my next trip to Canada is two days before the US passport exemption expires. Unfortunately, the passport office keeps your proof of citizenship during the process, so I have to get another birth certificate to get into Canada.

I learned that although safety glass is pretty awesome, it does create the tiniest of glass slivers, like you might find in fibreglass insulation. My doctor said not to get them in my eyes.

This is bad, but it could also trivially have been much worse. I usually leave my flight bag in the car, the contents of which would be fantastically annoying to replace (though it drives home the backup value of a digital logbook). The aforementioned headsets, of course. Not to mention that my backpack usually contains an expensive camera and a bag of assorted foreign currency, which I just happened to have removed.

Good times.

Jacob brought this to my attention, but callously failed to look out for you, the reader.

Featuring film and television’s MICHAEL CERA and some other guy. That’s all you need to know.

The complete ten-episode series, presented to you free of charge courtesy of the internet. I give you: Clark and Michael

Right. I’ve had the helicopter itch for a long time.

I don’t know when it started, exactly, but once I finished my instrument rating, and I realized that it wouldn’t actually bankrupt me, I decided to make it happen.

Today was my first lesson in the Robinson R44. Most people, myself more or less among them, come from the school of thought that believes that helicopters are basically designed in the factory to kill you.

So imagine my surprise when, three minutes after take-off, I am responsible for all four (or three, depending on how you look at it) controls and we’re heading directly for downtown Boston.

The actual flying turned out not to be very difficult — at least for this instrument-rated airplane pilot. My new instructor says that this is very common, that instrument pilots are quick studies, because they are already very sensitive to the attitude of the aircraft.

Small movements of the controls. This is the key.

The flying I found pretty easy. It was definitely made easier by the fact that this helicopter has a governor.

To explain the governor, it would help to first explain the four fundamental helicopter controls: collective, throttle, cyclic, and anti-torque.

The collective changes the pitch angle of all the main rotor blades. When you raise the collective, you’re causing the blades to impact the air at a larger angle. Basically, when you raise the collective and increase the blade angle, you’re commanding the ship to rise.

The cyclic control tilts the entire main rotor assembly, which changes the direction of thrust. For example, if you push the cyclic forward, you tilt the blades forward, which causes more thrust towards the rear of the ship, and the helicopter moves forward.

The throttle controls how much power is delivered by the engine. All else being equal, higher throttle means the blades spin faster and generate more thrust. If that thrust is pointed upward, you rise. If it’s pointed forward, you move forward faster.

Finally, the anti-torque rotor offsets the effects of Newton’s third law. You know Newton’s third? Equal and opposite?

Well, when the engine turns that main rotor, it’s effectively pushing against the body of the helicopter. The body wants to turn in the opposite direction, and the tail, or anti-torque, rotor pushes back. You use that rotor — controlled with foot pedals — to control left and right yaw.

OK, we’ve made it through that. So what does the governor do?

Well, when you raise the collective, and increase the blade angle, it’s harder for the blades to turn — higher angle means they’re pushing against more air, and trying to generate more lift.

All else being equal, if you increase blade angle, the rotor speed will decrease. Or to turn it around, if you want to maintain the same rotor RPM, you need to increase the amount of power (throttle).

That’s what the governor does: when you increase the blade angle, it automatically increases the power to maintain the same RPM. This is huge, because it basically removes the throttle from the picture, and means you only have to deal with three controls instead of four.

Finally, that’s behind us. If you are unbelievably interested in the principles of rotorcraft flight, I recommend the FAA’s Rotorcraft Flying Handbook, available at no charge courtesy of The Internet!

I seemed to be doing well with the controls in straight-and-level flight, so my instructor decided we could do the rest of our lesson over downtown. The city tour was an excellent introduction to the joys of helicopter flight.

We flew over Harvard and MIT, Fenway and the waterfront, and I was able to get a real feel for how to control the helicopter at various airspeeds, altitudes, and bank angles. It is apparently possible to do this same tour in a fixed-wing aircraft, but two important considerations make it impractical.

First, it would be illegal at our altitude. Helicopters are allowed to fly much closer to ground obstacles than fixed-wing aircraft. To put it in some perspective, I flew by the Prudential Center at about 2/3 of its height, close enough that the noise echoing off of the building caused some mild radio interference. Think about that.

Second, you can only slow a fixed-wing aircraft down so much. Slowing a helicopter too much can be dangerous, but at least it’s an option when you’re in close quarters with tall buildings. It is never an option in a fixed-wing airplane.

After our Boston city tour it was back to Hanscom for some hovering practice. Among my greatest achievements in life, this first attempt at hovering was not among my top ten solid gold hits.

I was told later that holding the hover for twenty seconds was, in fact, a tremendous accomplishment — that most people last five or maybe ten — but it didn’t feel that way at the time. There were very few instances during airplane training when the instructor had to take the controls, but I imagine this is something I will get used to.

In summary, however, lest you get an impression that is at all shy of accurate: helicopters are one thousand percent awesome, and I eagerly await tomorrow’s lesson.

Flying time: 1.1 hours

Today’s lesson started by flying a short distance away and doing an aerial survey of an off-airport landing site: wind, wires, way in, way out, size, shape, slope, surface. You need to worry about all that because helicopters more or less take off and land like airplanes, just in a smaller area.

You don’t (at least in a Robinson) do purely vertical take-offs or landings, because if your engine fails in that situation, you are fucked. If you’re lower than about 400 feet above ground, you need forward airspeed to successfully autorotate (land safely with no engine power). At 150 feet you need a full 50 knots of forward airspeed for a successful autorotation, which is why on takeoff you accelerate to 45 knots before you’re more than about 20 feet off the ground. Here are some height/velocity diagrams for various helicopters.

After a few orbits discussing the merits of a particular landing site, we went back to Hanscom for some hover work.

My hovering today was much better. It started to click right away, and while I’m not able to hold the helicopter totally motionless for very long (particularly regarding altitude — I tend to oscillate slowly between about 5 and 25 feet), I can recover well from all of the little deviations and generally be in the right place. He didn’t have to take the controls and bail me out.

That felt like real success, much faster than I expected.

With the hovering going well, we started working on transition from hover to take off, traffic patterns, approaches, and transition back into the hover.

Transition to takeoff I got right away, though it’s not nearly as easy as taking off in an airplane, which a new student can do on his very first try. I had to learn not to put in more power at takeoff, like you would in a tiny airplane — hover power is more than sufficient until you’re established in the climb.

Helicopters fly traffic patterns not unlike airplanes, but typically lower and closer. You’re also less concerned about shape: where you’d be trying for nice straight legs and crisp corners in an airplane, you can apparently just fly oval patterns in a helicopter without being called a dangerous nut.

Transition back to hover was harder than taking off, and took a couple tries before I was doing it on my own. That being said, I’m still not making very good approaches, in that I almost always end up high and overshoot my landing target.

While we were farting around in the pattern, two Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopters landed at Hanscom, so we walked over to check them out and talk to the crews after we shut down.

Alas, by the time we made it over there, they were already spinning up to leave. Still, watching these twin-turbine beasts depart was most impressive.

Flying time: 1.4 hours

Today we went to nearby Minuteman airport in Stow for a change of pace, and to save the Hanscom controllers the hassle of having us in their airspace.

I’ve done a lot of practice instrument approaches to Minuteman, but never landed there, because the runway is shorter than the 3000-foot minimum for our club’s airplanes. It’s a nice little private airport.

We started with the same things as yesterday: more hovering, traffic patterns, and approaches. My takeoffs are looking good, my approaches are still generally ending up too long. None of them seem particularly bad, and my instructor’s advice seems to work, but I guess I’m making the same mistakes the next time around. Most often I think I’m pulling in too much collective near the end, and leveling off.

After a pattern or two, we started doing full touch-downs and pick-ups.

The touch-down advice he gave me was gloriously pragmatic: you can try to make the perfect touch-down, in which you’re constantly adjusting all of the controls because they all aerodynamically affect each other, and work your ass off all the way to the ground.

Or you can work 10% as hard, by just reducing collective slightly, sinking slowly, and not arresting it. You still have to use the cyclic and pedals to keep the ship straight and level, but you’re pretty much done with the collective, which limits the need for cyclic and pedals.

Still easier said than done, but a lot easier than fighting the ship all the way to the ground trying to achieve a pillow-soft landing. The landings are not as soft or straight as I would like, but he says I’m doing well.

Lifting off into a hover I found somewhat easier. Just take it slowly: bring in a half inch of collective. Wait. Neutralize any yaw or drift tendencies. Repeat until you lift off.

To end the day, he demonstrated an autorotation from a 5-foot hover, and explained that it would have been a very different experience in the R22. With its much lower rotor inertia, it apparently happens 5 times faster, and it’s hard to learn much. This is perhaps one of the biggest advantages of training in the R44.

It’s never easy to evaluate how well you’re doing at something very new, with little or nothing against which to compare it. But my instructor says that we’re moving very quickly, that most people require 10 or 15 excruciating, frustrating hours learning how to hover and takeoff and land to get to this point.

So that makes me feel good! I guess he’s right about instrument pilots being more sensitive to attitude.

Flying time: 1.6 hours

Every day this week has been gorgeous, and today was no exception. Sunny and warm, with virtually no wind, probably the longest string of no-wind days I can remember since starting to fly last April. There’s almost never no wind at Hanscom. Perfect for the first few helicopter lessons.

We went back to Minute Man airport today, which previously unbeknownst to me has an excellent Italian restaurant on-field. By excellent I do not merely mean with respect to typical airport fare, I mean so excellent that the parking lot is full from people who drove in just to eat there.

We did a couple patterns and approaches, some hovering on the grass crosswind runway, and more lateral translations (i.e. sidestep maneuvers).

We made the mistake of not taking a door off the R44 before we left Bedford, which makes it an absolute greenhouse, so by that point we were sweating through our clothes and decided to have some lunch in the air-conditioned restaurant.

Lunch was excellent. If you’re ever in Stow, or are allowed to land your vehicle on a 2,700-foot runway, do stop in.

The airport owner tells helicopters, for whatever reason, to park on a little grass island in the car parking lot. To this naive student it seems like a questionable choice: an area surrounded by cars, perfect for people to walk into the tail rotor, with easy access for accidental damage while we’re inside.

On the other hand, everyone in the parking lot stopped to stare while we set down, with one little boy particularly excited about having his picture taken in front of the ship. Or at least his mother was. He was pretty shy.

After lunch we took a detour to Marlboro Airport with an even more terrifying (with my fixed-wing pilot hat on) 1,660-foot runway.

I could land a Tomahawk or Warrior airplane at Minute Man, probably on the first or second try. Although 1,660 feet is actually about double the published required landing roll, that implies a perfect short-field touch-down with full braking. I am not yet confident enough to even attempt to land an airplane at Marlboro.

Especially on runway 32, where you don’t even have the full length to work with, on account of 53-foot trees just 100 feet from the approach end. Zounds.

Practicing short-field landings at Hanscom is one thing. I can land in 1,000 feet on a 7,000-foot runway when my vision isn’t filling rapidly with trees. This is not that.

Enough daydreaming about airplanes; back to helicopters.

From Marlboro I did my first maximum-performance takeoff, useful for departing from confined areas with obstacles. Not a vertical takeoff, but as close to vertical as you can do while still having enough forward airspeed to autorotate in the event of an engine failure (although in a truly confined area, that might still yield a poor result).

Today was a good lesson. My hovering’s getting better every day; my approaches were still consistently long, and usually right of the centerline, but definitely improving; my takeoffs seem to be pretty smooth; pick-ups and set-downs progressing well.

Flying time: 1.7 hours

Back to Minute Man, where we presume (correctly) that we’ll be almost the only traffic.

We started again with a couple patterns and some hover work, but this time with an 8- to 12-knot wind for more excitement.

Hovering upwind or with a right crosswind are basically the same as no-wind, just holding a little extra forward or right cyclic.

Hovering downwind or with a left crosswind, however, are rather less stable. The crosswind in particular requires almost constant pedal adjustments, as the tail rotor alternates between being very and not-so-very effective.

As you increase the angle of attack of the tail rotor (i.e. left pedal), that diverts power from the main rotor — thus you start to sink a little, and need more throttle and collective, &c. It’s a huge balancing act.

Being Saturday, there were golfers under the crosswind leg of the traffic pattern, and a little-league baseball game below final. I’m not sure how much noise we make 300 feet up, but it’s a lot lower than I’m used to flying, and I try not to linger over their leisure.

Today’s approaches were much more accurate, most of the time landing right on the numbers, so we proceeded to practicing steep approaches, which one might use for a confined area landing.

We spent more time air taxiing up and down the runway, which is a higher-speed taxi about 50 feet high (contrast: the very low-speed hover taxi, about 10 feet high). It’s basically a normal take-off of about 45 knots airspeed, then you level off.

Finally, my instructor demonstrated a full straight-in autorotation and a quick stop, both of which are pretty exciting!

The quick-stop is pretty much what it sounds like: you get the ship moving quickly, and then you try to stop on a dime. It involves a shockingly large nose-up attitude to reduce airspeed, and smooth reduction in collective so you don’t balloon any higher than you have to. Almost immediately you need to put the collective back in, to arrest the sink that develops.

For the autorotation, I climbed up to traffic pattern height, about 1,000 feet, then he took the controls and rolled the throttle down to zero.

Compared to an airplane, helicopters glide like a grapefruit. But they do glide, well enough to make a steep approach and, done correctly, a very soft landing.

You basically point yourself straight at the ground to maintain airspeed and rotor speed; with collective lowered almost fully, the air rushing through the blades will be enough to keep them turning at the right speed. Steer yourself to the landing site (top tip: it’s not very far away) then flare at about 40 feet to kill your forward airspeed and (momentarily) stop sinking.

For someone familiar with landing small airplanes, the process is not very different, although the pitch attitude is a lot more nose-down. For people entirely new to flying, I bet it’s terrifying.

I’m evidently getting better at this, because I wasn’t nearly as tired when we got back to Hanscom. And no lunch break in the middle!

Flying time: 1.8 hours

Today we did some flying with the governor off, which was cause for me to discover that what I wrote last week was not entirely correct.

The R44 has both a governor and a correlator. The correlator is a mechanical link that performs most of the throttle adjustment relative to changes in collective pitch that I referred to. The governor prevents rotor over- or under-speed from occurring, which is a more traditional function for something called a governor.

I hope that clears that up. For misleading you last week, expect a 50% refund as store credit.

With the governor disabled, you have to make small throttle corrections to keep it in the green arc, but otherwise the correlator still does most of the hard work for you. Making small adjustments in the R44 is actually not very easy; the throttle is a motorcycle-style twist grip (although in the opposite direction), and is very stiff.

My hovering skill continues to improve perceptibly with each lesson. Winds were light today — below 10 knots, and not shifting much — and I was able to do things like spin the helicopter slowly around the nose, and then repeat the same around the tail rotor. Couldn’t do that last week.

Flying time: 1.2 hours (8.8 total)

No, there was no falling out with my usual instructor, he’s just on holiday for two weeks. He also wanted a real student to fly with this guy who they’re thinking about hiring as a club instructor. Someone else suggested that this might not be a good use of my time, but I was just happy not to have to take two weeks off (not to mention that I can pay the solo rate!)

Today also turned out to be an excellent opportunity to get experience with more difficult wind conditions: 15 knots gusting 20 (28 G 37 km/h), shifting between west and northwest.

To put that into some perspective, my first sign-off to fly airplanes solo was limited to 12 knots, and I expect my solo helicopter limit to be even lower. 20-knot gusts are challenging, particularly when you’re trying to maintain a ground speed of zero, as in a hover.

I think the instructor was nervous, either about my abilities or about making a good impression, because the start of the lesson was a disaster.

First, he twice talked over the tower’s takeoff instructions. Just because I’m working the radio doesn’t mean he can stop listening. I think he’s used to instructing at a much sleepier field than Hanscom.

Then a wind gust surprised me as we left the shelter of the row of hangars, and I was having a little trouble steadying the craft. Nothing dangerous, but he helped me out — which is fine; we’ve been flying together all of 60 seconds, he doesn’t know what I’m capable of recovering from — and in doing so, started flying a heading that directly contradicted the tower’s instructions.

I had to take action to avoid a runway incursion, because he was about to overfly the active runway with landing traffic. He confessed to not knowing the airport layout, which is understandable, but you don’t cross a runway unless you’re sure about which one it is!

I suppose it’s good that he was flying with me, because I doubt that most student pilots would have had the courage or the confidence in their situational awareness to override the instructor. There was no imminent danger, but it could have been grounds for a serious FAA enforcement action against the instructor if the tower reported it (as they’re obligated to do). Runway incursions have been on the rise, and are near the top of the FAA’s list of major safety concerns.

Anyway, we were 30 feet from a runway incursion after just 90 seconds in the air, so I was starting to have second thoughts.

Fortunately, once we got over to taxiway romeo — this underutilized mile-long taxiway is usually assigned for helicopter practice — it went very well.

His procedures for conducting approaches are a little different, but that’s bound to happen. Once he saw that I was capable of managing the wind, he was good about keeping his hands off the controls. He did a good job explaining maneuvers and helped me smooth out my pickups with some good advice, so he’s capable of teaching.

All in all it went well enough that I think he’s a safe pilot and capable instructor who just had some first-minute jitters. I’m going to fly once more with him tomorrow.

Flying time: 1.2 hours (10.0 total)

No map today; if you forget what traffic patterns over romeo look like, see yesterday.

This “Cops Writing Cops” site is deliciously vile. So delicious that I almost can’t believe it’s not satire.

Each blurb can be summarized thusly: I’m a cop and I can’t believe some other cop wrote me up. I’ve been on the force for 94 years, and I never ticket other cops. Cops are supposed to show a professional courtesy to other cops.

It’s excellent reading.

First, the corruption just hangs out there, swinging in the wind for everyone to see. “We’re positive that there is someone more deserving of your attention than your own brother or sister,” they write. “Is it fair? No, but when is life ever fair?”

Second, it reinforces what everyone already knows but nobody in the bureaucracy dares admit: that traffic enforcement has almost nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue, power, and bureaucracy.

If these cops had more honour, this site would be about reforming the broken traffic regulations, rather than placing officers above the moronic laws they’re enforcing.

Lesson two with the candidate instructor; today featured fewer runway incursion scares.

He wanted to see some more of the local area, and I was happy to oblige, so we went back to Marlboro.

I noticed for the first time their large sign about being the oldest privately-owned still-operating airport (in North America? in the world? I don’t remember), and I thought it a little strange that they didn’t try to charge us a landing fee for practicing there. Tiny private airports aren’t eligible for FAA airport improvement funds.

A pretty routine lesson, all in all. We didn’t do anything new, just practiced a bunch of what I’ve already learned. I don’t think he wanted to break any new ground, since we’re only doing two lessons together, but our time wasn’t wasted.

A few hours later I got an email from someone at the club saying that someone from Marlboro had found his number and tried to hit him up for some cash. He didn’t say how much. Maybe we won’t practice at Marlboro any more?

Flying time: 1.3 hours (11.3 total)

The news has been abuzz for a year about how badly backlogged the US State Department passport office is, caused by regulations that now require passports for return from Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, and presuambly a more thorough examination of applications in this post-9/11 world of fearmongering that I hate so much.

At any rate, when my passport was stolen two weeks ago, I was informed repeatedly that I would never receive a new one in time to travel on Sept 28.

Fortunately, the new passport regulations don’t take effect until October 1, which is to say, as long as you leave before then, you only need proof of application to return. So that’s cool.

On the other hand, I will need it for another Canada trip and some overseas travel in the next two months, so I expedited anyway.

Imagine my surprise when just ten days later, I have a new passport! But it is not without problems.

First, it has an RFID, the most ill-conceived and counter-productive passport innovation on record. I have a funny story about passport RFIDs that I’ll save for another time.

Second, these are the ugliest passports ever made, even worse than the ugly monochromatic currency for which the United States is famous worldwide.

The iconic visa pages, covered in the seals of the fifty United States? Gone. I guess the federal governemnt figured that since they’ve made the states irrelevant, they might as well take them off the passport.

In their places are saccharin drawings of stereotypical American scenes: the Statue of Liberty, buffalo on rolling farmland, Mount Rushmore, etc.

On each page is a quote, mostly from presidents, extolling the virtues of liberty, justice, democracy, and similar traditional American ideals.

This last part I would not object to, except that the current administration has done more to undermine all of those traditional ideals than any in recent memory (vote Ron). In that light, they seem nothing short of smarmy and cynical.

In summary: the passport office has totally gotten its shit together, in terms of delivering passports quickly. But the passport they do deliver is unfortunately a travesty.

Jacob and I are headed to Toronto today (dropping Chris in Syracuse), and of course yesterday and today are the only two days in weeks that aren’t perfect for flying.

We checked in with Flight Services a couple times to get updates on a line of thunderstorms moving east over Syracuse. It was a big line, way too big to fly around, but there was a pretty big hole between cells along our route.

Unfortunately, getting Flight Services to describe them to you just doesn’t cut it. With no weather radar in the plane, and with virtually no weather radar on ATC’s scopes, we can’t have confidence that we can avoid the cells.

At the last moment before we re-penetrate the clouds and can no longer see the thunderheads with our own eyes, we do a U-turn and divert to the airport right below us, Johnstown, NY.

Johnstown/Fulton County turns out to be a very nice small airport, almost ideal for spending the afternoon. Valley View Aviation let us crash in their lounge, use their computer for weather updates, order pizza, and generally make ourselves at home. Two hours past their normal closing time, in fact.

Line after line of thunderstorms kept coming off the lake, with just barely too little space between them for us to make a dash. After four or five boring hours the sun went down, which made the weather clear up almost immediately, and we got into Syracuse around 21:00.

Toronto City tower closes at 22:00, so we accepted an invitation to the lovely chez shona’s parents, and will head out early tomorrow.

Definitely ready for sleeping.

chez shona’s parents is lovely indeed, with delightful amenities — but the bed, oh how it squeaks.

This bed squeaked at the slighest motion. I woke up about 4:00 to hear it quietly squeaking — I am not making this up — from the slight motion caused by my heart beating.

When I awoke proper, I discovered that I was locked in, because the doorknob just spun around its shaft. I took the door off the hinges — no screwdriver required, fortunately — enjoyed a shower, and then forgot my robot toothbrush in their bathroom.

Jacob and I continued our planned flight to Toronto under much better conditions. It’s a VFR day, but flying IFR makes for a much easier border crossing, and a much easier time in unfamiliar airspace.

The approach into Toronto City Airport runway 26 is incredible. Fly straight towards downtown, then hang a left onto short final, with the skyscrapers and CN Tower off your right wingtip for landing.

photo credit: jacob

Customs cleared us by telephone — huzzah — and we got to take the idiot ferry across 100 meters of water over which the city refuses to permit the building of a bridge.

beltzner — incomparable gentleman that he is — picked us up at the ferry and took us to his unreasonably nice home.

The place we had lunch had a banner up, along the lines of “YES! WE ACCEPT US DOLLARS AT PAR!“, a sign that manages to be simultaneously awesome and nauseating. We assumed that he’d had it in the basement for 30 years, and couldn’t wait to dig it out this week.

Dinner was arranged at the superb Avli which, in spite of its fixed-in-metal grammatical folly, serves excellent Greek food.

After a post-dinner gathering at shaver’s (freshly painted and looking great for baby) some of us took in a selection of late-night nuit blanche events.

I was not around for last year’s, but beltzner’s opinion is that this year’s offerings were generally inferior, which is believable. Most of what I saw did not inspire, but the highlight, to be sure, was a professional dance troupe’s staging of Thriller in the distillery district.

They’re trying to break the record — I am told that there are records for this kind of thing — for the largest group dance (of Thriller, natch) on October 27 and 28. Awesome?