Rain. Relentless rain. Days and nights of drizzle, showers and downpours. Fields turned into lakes and roads to rivers and still the rain came.
Except for Wednesday.
A small blip of high pressure pushed through an ocean of low and for a few hours on Wednesday blue sky met the soggy landscape, the winds died down and I managed to get the last training slot for the day.
When I arrived my instructor gave me an odd look and said,
“You didn’t expect to solo again today did you?”
“Uh…” I said helpfully.
“You have to be on the ground an hour before sunset.” He looked at his watch, “Which means you should be landing about now.”
I gave him my best sad puppy eyes, which, it has to be said, are not all that puppy-like.
“Can’t we do something else? I just want to fly.”
Which was true. At this stage every hour in the air is valuable, even if I just fly in circles.
He stood up and said, “Let me look at your training log” and disappeared into the back office.
A few minutes later he emerged shaking his head.
“You’ve done everything except solos and navigation.”
“I figured you’d say that.”
He smiled, “Feel up for a challenge?”
“Oh yeah!”
“Let’s go!”
Fifteen minutes later we were downwind in the circuit, holding a nice and steady 1200’. My instructor said, “I have control.” I gave him the airplane and he swung us into a sharp left bank, well short of the normal base-leg turning point. He made a radio call,
“Golf-lima-oscar, glide approach, touch and go.”
“OK, “ he said, “You decide when you think you can glide her in for a landing and then pull off the power.”
I glanced at our altitude, took a look at the runway, waited…waited…waited…
“Now.” I said and pulled the throttle back.
If you have never been flying in an aeroplane when the engine power is cut I can assure you that the silence is far from comforting. I should note, for the sake of honesty that we didn’t turn the engine off. I’m not that kind of crazy. Still, with power set to idle the cockpit is a disconcertingly quiet place.
Any glider pilot will tell you that you don’t need an engine to fly. Every aircraft, from an A380 to the tiniest of micro-lights, has engineered into its design a glide ratio, the distance you go forward for every foot you drop.
As counterintuitive as it might seem, the glide ratio is independent of the mass of the aircraft. A fully loaded 747 will fly seventeen feet forward for every foot it loses in altitude while my little Cessna will only go nine. When you hear a pilot say “altitude is life” this is what they are talking about.
US Air flight 1549 had just climbed past 3,000’ when their engines lost a game of chicken with Canadian geese. At that altitude their A320 had a little less than ten miles to run before it cratered. Captain Sullenberger and his enormous testicles rode that baby down to the deck and ditched so perfectly that it added a new chapter to the textbook of flying.
Get your engine knocked out at 3000’ in a Cessna 172 and you have about five miles to play with. And by “play” I mean “search quickly for the best looking field and hope you only roll over once.” This is one of the reasons that you don’t see small aircraft overflying central London: with an altitude restriction of 2,500’ there is no way most single engine piston aircraft could glide clear if their power plant packed it in.
I mention all this so that you will gain an appreciation for the fact when I cut engine power at 1,100’ I had less than two nautical miles in which to land, preferably on a runway and not in the field of a soon to be very angry farmer.
In a Cessna 172 the best glide airspeed is 65kts. Perhaps not coincidently that is also a normal approach speed. It is SOP to get configured for 65kts on the base leg and I was on that now, albeit a mile or so closer to the runway than normal. I got my airspeed right, trimmed and made a 40-degree banking turn to the left to line up on the runway.
Power or not, I was still high and close to the runway threshold so I dumped flaps, being careful to never let my airspeed drop one tiny bit below 61kts and settled into a steep approach.
I’m all about steep approaches, much to my instructor’s frustration. For whatever reason I seem to always come in high, drop down quickly and flare at the last possible second to avoid bouncing…mostly. It’s a bad habit and I’m trying to correct myself but in the case of a glide approach it served me well. I cleared the threshold, held off, floated for a bit and touched down nicely. Flaps up, full power, carb heat off and we were back in the air again.
The next bit of fun for the day was a “bad weather circuit”. This is used when you’ve taken off into questionable weather and discovered that the cloud cover reported at 2,200’ is actually 1,000’ and you had best land quickly while you can still see the ground out the windscreen. It’s also used by instructors who are tired of flying full circuits with idiots like me and would rather get back to the clubhouse quickly for a nice cup of tea.
In a bad weather circuit you dispense with the normal rectangular pattern and switch instead to a tight oval. The turn on climb-out is still at 800’ but instead of continuing up to 1,200’ you stay at 800. The downwind leg is much, much closer to the airfield than normal and you turn directly through base onto final without pausing to reconfigure.
Everything happens very, very, quickly in a bad weather circuit and the danger of turning too sharply and stalling increases substantially. Like a glide approach, you seem too high and too close to ever land safely. It took me hours and hours of practice to even begin to handle the tasks associated with a normal circuit and landing, now I was being asked to do it all in half the distance and a quarter of the time.
Looking back on it now I can’t honestly remember what I did, I kind of went into an autopilot mode I didn’t know I had. All I know is that as soon as one bad weather circuit was done we went right back into another one. The same thing happened, I can’t really remember the steps but I guess I did them because, well, I’m still alive.
Our last exercise for the day was a manoeuvre I failed miserably when I attempted it previously: flaps-up landing.
A flaps-up landing is just that, a landing where instead of lowering the flaps to gain lift and lose airspeed, you keep them up and rely on pitch and power to get you down. My first exposure to the technique was during an otherwise lovely training flight in Santa Barbara.
Over my annual winter sabbatical to California I decided to get a few flying lessons in on my home turf so I booked a couple of training sessions in Santa Barbara. I’ll save the details for another post but the very last thing we practised was a flaps-up landing and I completely cocked it up.
Runway 25/7 in Santa Barbara is just shy of 1nm long. They land proper commercial jets there and back in the day DC-10s would come into Santa Barbara for maintenance. It’s wide enough that you could almost land on it sidewise and has all the lights and navigation aids one would expect at a scheduled aviation airport.
In contrast I fly out of a tiny airfield in Essex with a sloping, bumpy asphalt runway 3,100’ shorter than what they are using in Santa Barbara. In Santa Barbara they vacuum and clean their training aircraft at the end of each day. In the UK I have to scrape the mud off my flaps and make sure birds aren’t nesting in the engine manifold.
But I digress.
It was nearing the end of the lesson. My instructor, seated next to me and dressed in surfer attire, asked if I had ever done a flaps-up landing. I assured him that I had not so he requested clearance from the tower to give one a go.
I was still profoundly struggling with landings and was just coming to grips with the concept of what flaps were used for and now I was about to get them taken away. I was hopelessly unprepared for what I was about to attempt but being a man in the presence of another man meant that I was duty bound to go through with it even if I killed myself in the process.
I got lined up on final but it didn’t take me long to realise I was too high and too hot. I passed the threshold, cut the power and pulled back to flare but the aeroplane glided and kept on gliding. I was ¾ down the runway and still about 10’ off the deck; the end of the tarmac was looming ever closer and my instructor was very, very quiet.
“I have control!” he said, well past the point I judged as the last second we could recover had passed.
He dumped full flaps and the plane dropped like a stone. We bounced hard and flat and I expected the front gear to buckle. The fact that it did not is a tribute to the engineers at Cessna who undoubtedly understood that their aeroplanes would be piloted by morons and designed them accordingly.
Braking hard he turned us off onto the last taxiway before the bushes. I sat in sullen silence feeling like a failure. Later, in the debrief, we talked about what went wrong and how I could have fixed the mess I got us into. The truth is, halfway down the runway, when I saw that we weren’t losing any height, I should have done a go-around. I was taught to never force a landing. Abort and go around, do not attempt to land if the landing starts to turn pear shaped. If I wanted to keep walking away from my landings, I had better learn that lesson quickly and well.
Back in the UK all this was running through my mind when I lined up on final and pushed the lever to raise my flaps. This time however my instructor walked me through each step: “Keep her at 70kts. Your approach will be much more shallow. Keep your aim point the same but know that you will touch down further along the runway. Use your throttle and pitch just like normal. You got this.”
And I did.
In Santa Barbara I ate up nearly a mile of concrete and didn’t manage to touch down. In England I brought her in flaps-up on a 1,968’ runway and didn’t even use half of it. I was elated and ever so proud of myself. I also understood better than ever before that there is nothing more valuable to a student pilot than having the right instructor sitting next to you. One who understands your weaknesses and is willing to work with you until they become strengths and who sees your strengths and pushes you further than you thought you could go.