|
|
First you have to glide a little airplane
INTRODUCTION
Jay Palmer is a friend who lives across the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State and flies a sister ship, one serial number removed, from my Diamond Katana Xtreme motorglider.
He is a retired physicist and totally unencumbered by the responsibilities that clip my wings and keep me grounded when soaring conditions call.
Time passed a couple of years ago when I could pass on tips to Jay because his flights of fantasy have launched him to heights I can only dream of.
Enjoy a brief preview of some of his adventures in the following communication he sent recently.
- Happy landings from Ken Armstrong
By Jay Palmer
In a delightful little book entitled “First you have to row a little boat” the author, Richard Bode, draws parallels between life’s journey and mastering the art of maneuvering a small rowboat and sailboat through the waters of a northeastern U.S. harbor.
Gliding a small airplane whether by deliberate or unintended stoppage of the engine can offer the same type of metaphor. As with small boats, the basis of the metaphor lies in the smallness of the plane in comparison to the forces of nature.
The following snippets of adventures with a motorglider and an ultralight are offered as an attempt to find those same parallels in flying.
In an age where vast institutions are being created to protect us from our own decision making, it seems timely to find ways like these to remind us of the joys of life’s risk-benefit tradeoffs.
BREAKING RULES
It is human nature to break the rules. It is the source of our creativity. It is how we progress.
The challenge is to know which rules to break, when to break them and by how much. But we must continue to break them, even if only by a tiny bit.
I never thought that I could soar my motorglider here in the marine, atmospheric boundary layer of the northwest, especially on a solid overcast day like this.
However, the convoluted shoreline of the Olympic Peninsula generates interesting local convergence zones that I learned I could use if I accepted the low cloud base of only two to four thousand feet.
Today it was blowing out of the southeast here at Diamond Point, but I noticed on the web that it was Southwesterly at Port Angeles to the west. I headed west in my Diamond Xtreme motorglider to see if I could find the convergence zone.
At Sequim Valley airport, the wind sock showed the winds to be westerly, so I had already past through it or by it. I headed back to Diamond point looking for some signature of the convergence zone.
I headed toward some lowering of the overcast layer at around 2000 ft., shut the motor off to explored the area, but found nothing. It was then that I saw them - six eagles, tumbling around one another near cloud base.
Sure enough, when I joined them, I found the weak, 200 fpm convergence lift I had hoped for. As soon as I arrived, one of the eagles dived down straight at me with talons out, turning at the last moment when it could better judge my size.
I spent a half hour with the eagles watching their exuberant behavior of tumbling around each other. It was spring so perhaps it was mating behavior.
I noticed that whenever I turned my attention to the variometer, I would fall out of the subtle lift zone. However, if I simply followed the eagles, I could sustain my altitude in the lift at about 1800 agl.
I had some unease in realizing that my discipline to unfeather the prop below 2000 ft. had been compromised in order to enjoy the eagles. In such weak lift, I needed the 50 -100 fpm reduced sink rate that the feathered prop provided, but was aware that a full minute was needed to unfeather it.
Suddenly, no eagles were visible. Looking at the vario, the lift had disappeared with them. I was at 1500 ft. I unfeathered the prop, glided to Diamond Point airport with the engine off, and landed with the prop ready to use if needed.
Violating my rule to unfeather the prop at 2000 ft. allowed me to enjoy a wonderful episode of soaring. I still use the same 2000 ft. rule. I expect that I will break the rule again, accepting increased risk for the increased benefit of discovery.
TAKING CREDIT
We need to assume responsibility for our decisions whether they were good or bad decisions. We have created too many institutions to transfer our responsibilities to. Even a positive outcome is too often credited to an external agent.
The Owens valley has a reputation for soaring adventures, but the one I had in the summer of 2002 was unexpected. I did not want to repeat a mistake I made on my last trip down the valley with the motorglider.
Then, I had refueled at Bishop in late afternoon, and the hot valley air made for a very difficult and uncomfortable climb with the little 80 hp engine.
This time I refueled at the higher elevation airport at Mammoth and made sure to catch some good thermals before entering the valley. I succeeded and headed down the valley at 10,000 ft.
Things were going well until around Lone Pine when the smoke from the Sierra fires began to reduce visibility. I decided to use the motor to climb to 11,000 ft., but began to lose visibility of the ground.
As I proceeded south it got much worse and I was forced to descend to less than 1000 ft. to keep the ground visible. Now both myself and the engine were overheating and the visibility was barely acceptable and getting worse.
With the engine temperature hotter than I had ever experienced before and getting hotter, and the smoke so bad that my eyes were watering, I was preparing to land on a dirt strip that wasn’t even on the charts.
Just as I was turning a down wind leg for landing, I felt some lift. I began to circle in it, and was able to shut down the engine. The problem now was that half of my orbit took me into smoke that was so bad that I had to frantically look over my shoulder to maintain visibility of the ground.
Reluctantly, I made the decision to break out of the thermal and head south towards the dirt strip again. I was still low and in the smoke.
As I headed south, expecting to drop out of the lift, I was surprised to find that the lift continued! Although the altitude gain was causing reduced visibility, I could see that it was improving ahead, so I just continued pointing the glider south. I continued to go up!
I finally realized that my old friend, the Sierra mountain lee-wave had come to my rescue. Because I was able to continue south I eventually exited the smoke and was lifted up to 12000 ft! I looked back at the awful smoke cloud behind and beneath me, and was able to glide all the way to my California City destination in cool, clear desert air.
Although I was not in any significant danger because of the dirt strip, this experience felt like a “deliverance” of some sort. Some would surely pronounce it as such.
At the time, I was immersed in decision making, using some personal safety rules, but also trying to remain open to anything new that might come along. Rather than being delivered, I felt that I was an active participant in a delicious act of discovery.
ROTOR FEAR SWEET SPOT
There is a sweet spot of fear. It is in front of the lazy complacency zone back from the cliff edge, but not right at the cliff edge where too much focus takes place.
It is in the sweet spot that our sphere of awareness seems at its great extent. It is where discovery takes place.
I started my motorglider trip to the Mojave Desert on top of an overcast layer in western Washington. My friend in his Vivat motorglider tried going underneath, but had to turn back.
I found good soaring conditions in central Oregon, but the fun really started the next day after I had to motor to the west of a thunderstorm complex in the Lake Tahoe area. There was plenty of lift on the western slope of the Sierra, but with just a couple thousand feet between the cloud bases and tree tops, I chose to continue motoring until I was up and back over the Sierra crest west of Mammoth at 14,000 ft.
I had three times the altitude needed for an engine off glide to Mammoth airport in neutral air, but as soon as the prop was feathered, I hit sustained strong sink which was to be an omen of things to come. Unfeathering once again and motoring, I found 20 knot cross winds at Mammoth airport so I went on to Bishop to refuel.
As it turned out, I certainly didn't need fuel for the 150 mile remainder of my trip to California City. After taking off from Bishop, I used the motor for only about three minutes to arrive at a continuous band of thermals on the western slope of the Inyo mountains all the way to Lone Pine.
It looked like I might be able to cross over to the Sierra side of the valley as was required to stay out of the China Lake restricted area without having to use the motor. However, now I could see a familiar but worrisome sight.
Dust was coming off the Owens dry lake bed suggesting the presence of the dreaded Sierra rotor. At about the same time, I heard a pilot on the radio in "severe turbulence" requesting "any place to land." I knew now that the awesome Sierra wave was working.
Trying to avoid the rotor, I stayed high as I crossed over to the Sierra side of the Owens dry-lake, using the motor for only about five minutes to help. I hit a fierce rotor anyway, but this time I disciplined myself to continue toward the Sierra mountains instead of retreating away from them which I had done on earlier trips and which my primal brain still wanted very much to do. Was I ever rewarded.
I connected with the silky-smooth Sierra wave just as I became so close to the mountain that I was ready to turn back. With my new oxygen canella in my nose, and watching the altimeter wind up twice as fast as the second hand of a clock, I quickly arrived at the 18,000 ft. maximum allowed altitude. Pushing the nose down to avoid going higher, I maintained over 100 mph all the way to California City.
This rotor experience is classic sweet-spot-of-fear stuff. We are all scared of the rotor. Rotor turbulence comes at you with much less predictive structure on short temporal and spatial scales than does convective turbulence with its characteristic vertical shear structure.
My previous experience with rotor placed me in fear’s sweet spot. I maintained attention to the threat, but was not so focused on it that the opportunity to move into the delicious wave was lost.
OUT OF MY BOX
We all know that we should get out of our box. It’s hard to do because it’s comfortable in there, and the system that we are in usually rewards the specialist. However, there are venues out there, and recreational flying is one of them, where opportunities exist to do things differently.
The rewards of having finally punched through the confusion of opposite controls with a trike have been wonderful. Trikes are ultralights that use hang glider wings and weight-shift control.
Flying "in the air" instead of in an enclosure is just pure joy, and the sense of accomplishment at adapting to the opposite controls was a big bonus at my age.
With about an hour of pattern work under my belt, I took off in the early morning calm air at California City airport as usual.
I lined up as usual on runway 6. With the control bar tucked into my gut, I pressed the foot-throttle forward (the positions of the foot throttle and foot brake are as in a car and are the only things normal about the trike).
At about 30mph (judging by the wind flow through my beard) I pushed the control bar forward. This is when "all hell" seems to happen and was routinely followed by a crash during my learning difficulties.
The front wheel comes off at first as expected, but then when the rear wheels come off, the carriage that I am sitting in swings forward like a pendulum that it is, and the prop thrust is now directed much more toward the ground, self-amplifying the swing.
My view now rotates toward the zenith. During my learning period this is when 4000 hours experience in flying fixed wing planes caused my brain to scream STALL WARNING, and next thing I had chopped the throttle and done who-knows-what with the control bar leading to a broken trike and sore back.
That was then. Now the throttle stays on, control bar comes back slightly and I enter a controlled rate of climb. On this morning I continued the climb until about 200 ft. above the ground and turned away from the field for another pattern flight.
While still on my cross-wind I became aware of my foot pressing harder on the throttle without an increase in engine rpm. First thing that enters my mind is that this is no-man's land: too low to turn back to the field, but unfriendly terrain straight ahead.
The trike has about a four to one glide ratio, i.e. it falls like a rock without power, which is what is now happening. Taking a moment to congratulate myself for not turning back, I manage to make the correct movements of the control bar in spite of the emergency situation.
In the previous learning "emergencies" I would return to what I was most used to. I remember being helped in this emergency by exaggerating my leaning opposite the control bar motion to remind myself of the weight shift control going on.
I found a place between a couple of very large creosote bushes and flared, but even larger bushes loomed straight ahead. Now to steer with my feet opposite the 4000 hours of rudder pedal steering.
At that moment, I felt transported back to coasting down third avenue as a seven year old on a wheeled wooden box requiring the same "opposite" foot pressure to make a turn. I did it! Soft sand helped, but my tracks showed the correct steering of the seven year old.
A blown head gasket was later found to have administered my trike final exam. Presumably, the earlier take-off difficulties got me out of my box far enough to grow a few new dendrites in my old brain to help me pass the final.
As with adventures in general, the benefit side of the risk-benefit balance that we seek in recreational flying often includes a powerful learning experience. When I find myself overly focused on a particular ideal in life or in the opposite, lazy state of complacency, I reflect on a flying experience – usually one in my motorglider – that reminds me of the joy of discovery that I am missing when in those states.
Ken is a COPA director who lives in Victoria, BC. He provides services internationally in advanced training, expert witness, flight test and aircraft sales. He has logged 15,000 hours on 375 types of fixed wing and rotary aircraft. Soaring his Diamond Xtreme is what he does for pleasure.
Return to Ken Armstrong Articles