Scott Blomquist's space: Aviation

The other Channel 9

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:19:43 GMT

Most of you have probably heard me rave about Microsoft's video blog for developers called Channel 9. It's named after my favorite feature of United Airlines—namely the ability to plug a headset into your armrest and listen in on the cockpit's radio by tuning to channel 9. As I was flying back for a visit to Seattle, our pilot did something that put the original United channel 9 in the same class of coolness as Microsoft's Channel 9. He invited us to tune in to Channel 9 for a 10 minute "talk show", where he proceeded to talk us through a bunch of trivia about our airplane and our flight. He talked about why we fly so high, why the cabin isn't pressurized all the way to sea level pressure, what it is that pilots actually do, and some performance numbers for our airplane.

One of the neater things that he talked about was that technically the only part of the flight that the pilots pretty much have to do is taxi and takeoff. He talked a little about Category III ILS operation, pointed out that both Seattle and Denver are equipped for Category III operations, and then went on to explain that the only reason they have visibility minimums for Category III is so that once your autopilot has you safely on the ground you can see far enough to safely taxi clear of the runway.

If you want to see just how eerie Category III operations are, there's some great video of a Horizon Airlines Category III ILS approach into Portland up on YouTube.

Update: we had clear skies down to a few hundred feet above Seattle, at which point it turned to very dense fog. As I was deplaning, I gave the captain kudos for his radio show, and said "speaking of category III, what was the RVR when we touched down in Seattle"? He told me it was 5500 ft. That was way longer than it looked, but I'm sure he was right. He said that they worried they'd have to do an autoland because the RVR number kept going up and down on them.

Beginning instrument training!

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:40:41 GMT

It's been way too long since I've flown, but I met up with my flight instructor today, and am signed up to get started learning to navigate through the clouds like real airplanes do!

I can't wait for Flight Sim X

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:12:03 GMT

When Microsoft's next flight simulator ships, it looks like they're going to have some incredible features such as built in support for air traffic control and cockpit sharing. Here's a fun little YouTube video that shows off these features (and more):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsCpH7nqmS0

SeaTac's little-known third runway

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:29:28 GMT

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002621198_seatac13.html

Radar crashed, but plane did not

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:51:40 GMT

Insert software joke here.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/69B5A23CB6ACF3F1862570B5001C7AA4?OpenDocument

C*ckpit priorities

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:34:42 GMT

[Yes, the asterisk in the title for this blog is really really stupid. Apparently, MSN Spaces considers the word "cockpit" a prohibited word, but only in the title. Sigh.]

Yesterday, Jennifer and I took our friend Arthur on a flight around the area. At one point, we decided to do some landings and takeoffs at Paine Field in Everett, mostly for fun. As we were approaching the airport, I called up the air traffic controller to request a clearance to land. Just as he started reading me a landing clearance, Jennifer started talking to point out an airplane approaching us quickly. He was below us, and not a factor as it turned out, but it sure looked like he might have mattered. I got kinda mad because she talked over the controller and I knew that she knew to expect a reply from him. I told her rather harshly to be quiet so I could hear the controller and asked him to say again. As soon as I got the clearance, I paused briefly to think about the situation. Upon reflection, I let her know that I realized she did exactly the right thing. It's much better to know about traffic in the area, and have to ask the controller to repeat himself than to crash while giving the controller more sway over my priorities as pilot-in-command than he deserves.

Jennifer, keep up the good traffic spotting and always call out traffic that may be a factor.

Island hopping in the San Juans

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 23:41:53 GMT

I got up to my alarm at 6:30 yesterday morning. I don't get up that early for just anything. In fact, I only get up that early for about one thing--flying. (For puzzles, I'll stay up until 6:30 and beyond, but to wake up then is a different story.) Jennifer and I were going to take a couple of friends (Erik and Sonya) on a plane trip to the San Juan Islands, almost literally only a stone's throw away from Canada (you can look out and see Victoria on Vancouver Island from one of the San Juans).

Leading up to the trip, I had been a little nervous about whether it would even happen--the forecast for the weekend looked bad starting as much as a week out, but you never get to fly anywhere in Seattle if you always believe the TV weatherman's 10-day forecast, so I patiently waited for the aviation forecast to come out. Since the aviation forecasts span 24 hours, I could get a sense for what our morning flight would be like starting the morning before. It looked marginal, and often the forecasts change slightly in one direction or the other over the course of 24 hours so we had to continue to defer our go/no-go decision. As of the evening before, it was looking slightly better for the outbound and the weather for the return flight looked really good, so we called our friends and told them that we'd probably get to go but that things could take a turn for the worse over night. We'd meet at the airport unless they heard otherwise by 7:30 the next morning. They didn't hear otherwise.

Jennifer and I got to the airport around 7:50. Jennifer's flight instructor was scheduled to open the flight school that day, and she showed up just a few minutes after we did to let us in and get started dispatching us. Erik and Sonya showed up just a few minutes after that. The day was getting off to a great start.

I did some arithmetic to make sure we weren’t going to be overweight, since the airplane we were in can only barely carry four adults. We would safely all fit, but couldn’t afford to carry the weight of a full tank of fuel. I did a quick preflight inspection of the airplane (it was in great shape and everything worked fine), and we all piled in. After we had clearance from the ground controller to taxi, I had Jennifer do the taxiing so she could get a feel for how that works in aircraft types other than the one that she trains in. We did our final engine run-up to make sure everything was fine and requested clearance to take off. The controller asked us to depart using the complicated Vashon Departure procedure.

Once we were outside Boeing Field’s airspace, we turned toward our first waypoint which was carefully chosen to avoid a few spots of sensitive airspace along the way. The clouds were still fairly low over our heads for this leg of our flight which added watching out for towers to the already important task of avoiding other airplanes. The weather conditions at the time we left and the forecast indicated that the cloud cover should be higher before the over water, and I told my passengers that if I couldn’t climb by then, we’d turn around and head home. Just in the nick of time, the clouds gave way to much higher skies. I shoved power to full and we climbed to about 3500’. Once we got to the water, we turned to head directly at the airport on Orcas Island.

Once we got to the island, we opted to take the route toward the airport that involved flatter land so we could scope it out a little easier. We flew over the airport still at 3500’. It’s a pretty airport, with the north end of it’s approximately north-south runway very near the north shore. We decided to fly out and around Mount Constitution on the eastern side of the horseshoe-shaped island while shedding some of our altitude so we could make a good first approach to the airport. I warned my passengers that in the event that I felt there was anything wrong with my approach to land that I might go around and try again. I didn’t have to in this case. Both our setup and the conditions—a 10 knot headwind blowing straight down the runway—were perfect. We got down on the first try and headed straight for parking.

After tying down the airplane around 9:30, we left the airport. We had to go through a gate designed to keep deer off the airport property, and after that it was slightly more than a 10 minute walk down to the town of Eastsound.

Once we got in to town and scouted around to see what was open. Since it was a Sunday morning (before 10am), very few places were open. We found a bakery and stopped there for coffee and a very light breakfast. While we were there, other places began to open, so we set off to explore the town some more.

We found two main streets in town, and we walked up and down both, stopping at almost every store that was open, including a couple of independent bookstores, an antique store, and a neat little museum of Orcas Island history. At some point during our wandering, we stopped for lunch at Vern’s Bayside Restaurant & Lounge. A couple of our other stops were timed to wait out brief rain showers as the clouds from back home caught up with us. At some point mid-afternoon, we decided to skip over to San Juan Island and check out its biggest city, Friday Harbor.

We took off from Orcas Island and headed directly to the Friday Harbor airport. There was a fairly strong crosswind there, and I haven’t had a lot of crosswind practice. Unfortunately, it took me three tries to get down at Friday Harbor. It was pretty busy, too, which made me feel even sillier over having to go around. But really pilots don’t laugh at each other for balked landings—even multiple times. Everyone was a beginner once, and even the experienced ones have their less-than-perfect moments. We finally landed, parked, and set out for town.

The security gate at this airport was designed to keep out not only deer, but unauthorized people as well. Since we had flown in, and were on the inside of the gate, we were given the benefit of a sign telling us the combination to the keypad lock. We typed it in and made it a point to remember it so we could get back in later that afternoon when it was time to head home.

We spent some time wandering around Friday Harbor and stopped a few times to just relax and chat. I checked the late afternoon weather update on my cell phone, and the conditions for our return trip looked great into the evening, so we called the flight school and extended our return time from 6pm to 8pm (“Hello, this is Scott Blomquist in Niner Five Two Two Sierra over in Friday Harbor. Nothing bad happened—I just wanted to check to see if anyone has the airplane reserved right after my flight, and if not I want to extend my flight time.”). We wandered around a little more doing nothing particularly exciting, and then headed back to the airport. We added 5 gallons of self-serve fuel, for which the gas pump refused to give me a receipt. Even without adding fuel, we had more than enough for the return flight home, but the flight school from which I rent asks us to always take off more than half full of fuel and I figured I might as well go along.

We took off and backtracked toward Boeing Field. We had intended to go fly over Microsoft campus and some other things worth seeing on the east side of Lake Washington, but the skies looked pretty hazy over there. Instead, we decided to just fly back to our home airport and land. Apparently, while Jennifer and I were busy planning and executing our approach to Boeing Field, Erik and Sonya got a great air tour of Seattle, which was probably more interesting to them than an Eastside air tour, anyway.

The controller assigned us a straight-in approach from north of the airport, which really is a pretty easy approach to make. The only thing that made it difficult this time was that visibility was only 6 miles due to some rather foggy skies in the vicinity of the airport. 6 miles may sound like a lot, but it made it pretty tough to spot the airport. Or, more precisely, it made it hard to be sure that the patch of ground that I thought was the airport was, in fact, the airport. It was. I had to make another crosswind landing, but given the practice that I had gotten earlier in the day made it a pretty good landing. Jennifer complemented me on it once we were clear of the runway. I got a lot of good crosswind practice in throughout the day.

It was a fun trip, and I’d love to do it again sometime.

I want a helicopter!

Tue, 31 May 2005 04:14:34 GMT

Let's count degrees of freedom.

Trains have one degree of freedom: they can move forward or backward along their longitudinal axis (1). They're stuck on their line.

Cars have two degrees of freedom: they can move forward or backward along their longitudinal axis like a train (1) or rotate their longitudinal axis about their vertical axis (2), but they're still stuck in the plane that's wrapped around Earth.

Airplanes have 2-1/2 degrees of freedom: they can rotate their longitudinal axis around their vertical axis (1) or their lateral axis (2) and they can move forward along their longitudinal axis (2-1/2). They can't move backward like a car or a train. They also can't stop.

Helicopters have a full three degrees of freedom: up/down (1), left/right (2), or forward/back (3). Unlike all of the others, they don't depend on motion to turn, and they don't even depend on which direction their longitudinal axis is pointing. There is at least one thing that a helicopter has a hard time doing that an airplane does not (flying upside down), but that's not nearly as cool as the ability to move in an arbitrary direction in space.

Because of this, I want a helicopter! Next time, we'll consider my options for legally flying a helicopter and what I could do with it.

My first flight as a private pilot

Sun, 29 May 2005 00:36:31 GMT

The mission
Went flying yesterday for the first time since I got my private pilot license. It was intended to be a practice flight for me, with three goals to plan around: 1) build time toward the 50 hours of cross-country experience required for my instrument rating, 2) get in three night landings and takeoffs to stay current for carrying passengers at night, and 3) get in some precision landing practice on a small runway.

For goal 3), there are fewer airports to choose from than for the other 2 goals, so I started with it. A friend of mine told me about Whidbey Air Park near Langley, WA (W10) one day while I was complaining about not having much practice on small runways. (The "small runway" at my home airport, Boeing Field in Seattle, WA (KBFI), is 100' wide and 3700' long--which has a tendency to spoil us a little.) I decided that W10 looked and sounded like a nice challenge.

Having selected an airport for precision landing practice, I started looking for airports to satisfy my other goals. W10 was too close to KBFI to meet the 50 nautical mile straight-line distance requirement in order to count as cross-country. Besides, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to successfully get on the ground there especially expecting sunset shortly after I got there. So I chose Skagit Regional Airport near Burlington, WA (KBVS) a little further to the north, still along Puget Sound. It has a couple of nice runways to choose from and is appropriately lighted for night operations.

Finally, for my last goal, I figured I would just try to do my night landings at Boeing Field. We are encouraged to not do pattern work at night there out of consideration for minimizing noise over houses in the area, but I knew it wouldn't hurt to ask. If the controller wouldn't let me, I could easily move to another airport in the area, or even scratch that off the list for the night--I still had around 30 days left to get in the appropriate landings to keep current.

I read through and wrote summaries of all the information I could find on the unfamiliar airports that were going to be involved on the flight. Next, I double-checked that the runway at W10 would be long enough given how warm it was outside--it easily met the requirements. Finally, I filed a flight plan with the Seattle Flight Service Station, partly because it's a good idea for safety's sake, but mostly because the flight school requires it for cross-country flights. With the planning out of the way, it was time to go fly!

The flight
Since Jennifer's out of town, I took Paul instead. He had never been up in a small plane before. When I took him out onto the ramp at the airport and showed him the airplane, he expressed shock at how small it was. ("I'm not sure what I expected, but I was definitely expecting it to be bigger than this...")

I preflighted the airplane and discovered we only barely had enough fuel to land with a whole hour in reserve. I always like to have way more than enough if weight&balance will allow, so I called line service to request a top-off. We had to wait a while for fuel, so I pulled out my charts and showed him where we were going and how to read some of the symbols. Fuel finally arrived, and we finished the preflight and took off.

We left the ground around 30 minutes before sunset, and headed directly for W10, which was about 20 minutes away. The airport was completely hidden in the tall trees around it, and would have been very difficult to find without either a GPS or someone along who already knew where it was. Once we spotted it, I descended to the traffic pattern altitude for the airport and set up to land. The wind was calm, so I chose the direction with fewer trees, runway 34.

(There were a couple of other aircraft playing around in the area that I was careful to keep track of. They looked a lot like hang-gliders to me, only they definitely had engines--clearly ultralights of some sort.)

I came in way too high and a little fast on my first pass. The biggest reason was that my downwind leg was only about half-mile from the airport since it disappeared behind trees if I flew any further out. Having nearly landed at the airport, however, set me up for a perfect rectangular traffic pattern second time around, so I was comfortable losing sight of the airport on my better-placed downwind. (One of the ultralights decided it was getting dark, and came in for a landing in front of me.) This second landing was set up nearly perfectly, but I was still a little above my ideal short-field landing speed, so I opened the throttle up wide again for a go-around. We decided it was getting dark enough that we should move on. One of these days, I'll use my new-found ability to find the airport and go try it again.

After an uneventful 20 minute transition to Skagit Regional, the sun was far enough below the horizon that it was pretty dark out, but it was still before the total darkness of night had set in. We could see the airport on the ground even before I keyed the radio to turn on the runway lights. After debating with myself over which runway to land on, I decided to set up for runway 28. Made an uneventful landing on my first try. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Paul flinched slightly just before the landing flair. He later mentioned that his mind projected the airplane onto the ground at the same rate of descent as the descent for landing. He said he actually heard a mental sound effect "thump", before noticing that we were still flying along just above the ground.

From the ground, we tried calling up the Flight Service Station to close my outbound flight plan and activate the plan for the return, but the radio wouldn't reach them, and we couldn't get cell signal, so we took off from runway 10 and took care of that in the air.

On the way back to Boeing Field, we took a detour over Redmond to show Paul what Microsoft campus looks like from the air at night. We headed back to Boeing Field, called them up just south of downtown Bellevue, and requested stop-and-goes. The controller cleared us as requested. We did the requisite 3 landings and 3 takeoffs, and taxied back in for parking.

Paul claims he had a lot of fun, and would love to go again sometime. I can only hope that I might have recruited one more pilot for General Aviation.

Overheard on an airplane

Mon, 23 May 2005 18:47:52 GMT

Lady in front of me to one of her neighbors: "I don't understand why they even bother making the seat cushions float--have you ever heard of a water landing? When you hit water it's like hitting concrete."

Ummm, hello? When you hit the runway, it's even more like hitting concrete.

[Edit: changing category from MSN's silly default.]

I'm a pilot!

Wed, 11 May 2005 06:30:13 GMT

About 4 months after my first loggable flight back in January, as of today I am a licensed private pilot! I showed up at the Boeing Field today around noon to have my instructor go over the checklist of stuff that I needed to have with me for the examiner to review. We had that good to go by the time the examiner showed up.

The first task with the examiner was a 1.5 hour oral exam (no, not like at the dentist--think more like technical interview). After I finished that, we re-checked the weather forecast since the printed weather that I had brought with me for the interview indicated that the clouds in the area were all too low to do some of the required practice maneuvers. The text weather that we could find still wasn't good enough, but there was some indication that there may be some blue sky to be found somewhere, so I called the Seattle Flight Service Station to talk to a weather briefer. He took a look at the current satellite pictures and found what looked like a nice big break in the clouds up by Paine Field in Everett. I chose to give the flight a try, and was admonished by the examiner that if the weather started getting bad, it had better be me and not her that called the flight back to our starting airport.

We finished up all of the required maneuvers and headed back to Boeing Field, and for the first time during the entire process, I began to wonder if I was going to pass. It started off with what would have been a couple of straightforward special-purpose landings (short field landing and soft field landing), but the crosswind was pretty strong, and Seattle usually doesn't have much wind, let alone crosswinds, so I hadn't done much crosswind practice. Trying to dust off my 1337 cr0ssw1nd ski11z while at the same time performing special landings resulted in a somewhat sloppy show. She considered the specialty part of the landings fine, but after taking off from the last one, she asked "do you know how to do crosswind landings?" I sheepishly repleid "yeah." She said "well, I haven't seen one yet today, show me one so we can call this done." If that wasn't a challenge to my piloting skill, nothing was. It took me one extra approach, but I finally did set down in what was a pretty good plain ol' crosswind landing. We taxied back to parking, and before I could push the airplane back into its parking spot, she said "unless you completely mess up during parking, congratulations, you're a pilot."

[Edit: changing the category to something better than MSN's silly default.]