Linda and I finally got to go on our flight. She has been nervous about going (both for the
kids’ sake in case anything went seriously wrong, as well as due to a dislike of flying in general), but she gave me a coupon for an hour of flying in December.

We took off mid-day, got flight following, and went around Palos Verdes at 2,500ft. At one point Linda saw what looked like a whale, so we circled to get a better look at it — unfortunately I couldn’t see it, and it dove deeper, so we continued on. We went up the river at Long Beach, got a look at our old condo there, and then continued on around Downtown LA.

Around Griffith, two unusual things happened. First, I told ATC I was going to climb back up to 2,000ft (I had dropped down to 1,500 to stay out of the Bravo), and they asked me if I was going to stay out of the Bravo. I told them I believed the Bravo started at 5,000ft where I was, and they said that they were aware and were offering to let me into the Bravo to make it easier. Since I had no need to be higher I said “no, thanks” basically. In retrospect I should have accepted: they handed me off to Burbank’s ATC, who told me to make an immediate 180 and then continued vectoring me with few details for a few minutes, querying my intent, etc, and being rather curt before allowing me to proceed towards Santa Monica.

We hugged the foothills, went almost to the coast, and then took the mini route home for a nice landing back at Hawthorne. All in all, it was a nice trip: I am not sure how much Linda enjoyed it and how much she tolerated it, but I think it went just fine. The weather was predicting LLWS and turbulence but none materialized.

All in all, I think there were only a few things I didn’t do right. I didn’t perform an in-cruise checklist (because I gave my checklist to Linda to hold during takeoff, to make her feel less anxious, and didn’t take it back until descent). I didn’t turn the landing light off after take-off — I keep forgetting about this step.

Totals: 1.2 hr in a C172.

I was going to take Linda on a flight this afternoon. I need a flight this month as per club rules, and have been wanting to take her flying for a while, and she had agreed to, and this was a relatively easy to schedule afternoon for both of us.

Unfortunately, weather had another plan. Very gusty winds gave me some pause, though they were OK for my personal minimums. But there was some persistent moderate turbulence in the area for a couple of days, originating due to mountain waves etc, and that would have made for a miserable first flight for her, and a not super pleasant one for me. The TAF showed winds dying down around 7pm, which was also a few minutes before sunset (and I’m not night current, which would have kept me from flying with Linda for longer than about 30min, based on my need to also get to SMO from HHR to pick her up).

So, I shook my fist at the sky, and scrubbed the flight after waiting out the weather a bit. Alas.

I suspect that every pilots needs and wants certain things. Everyone needs a medical certificate, and thus needs good health. Everyone needs a flight review. Everyone (well, except the rare masochist) needs a headset. Maybe not everyone, but a great number of people would want a personal TBM 900, if they could have one. Alas, most of us temper our wants, and make do with mostly the needs.

Here are some other things I want. They’re are not a Cirrus SR22T GTS, but smaller, incremental things to make me safer, happier, and maybe a tad cooler as a pilot. So, mostly things that I haven’t been able to move into the “need” category, but could if it came to it.

Safety Equipment

Personal Flotation Device (or two)

There is a fair amount of water around here, and some of these life jackets come in tiny packs and are a pretty good insurance for those who can’t swim well. I can’t swim that well. They have a water-activated beacon light, and can be inflated with CO2 or manually. As most reviews say, these are fantastic and yet nobody wants to be in a position to have to use one.

Personal Locator Beacon

There are also a fair number of mountains around here, and in the event of an off-airport landing, a PLB is probably a great alternative to a cellphone that might be well out of reach of any towers. They are surprisingly pricy for a single-function item you hope to never have to use, but having one might mean getting found in hours rather than days.

Portable Transceiver

I have a receiver, which I don’t carry with me, and which is surprisingly difficult to use. It’s strange how actual aviation transceivers are not very cheap, though. I have not yet had any reason to want to use them, though I have had a radio fail on me once or twice, and if it wasn’t for the second radio then I would be squawking 7600.

Thermal Blanket

For survival, this is probably a must. These are pretty small, very inexpensive, and supposedly “reflect and retain 90% of your body heat”. Given that I fly in Southern California, usually, I would imagine that they mainly need to help with a SoCal winter night and not actual negative temperatures

Software and Electronics

Foreflight Pro Plus

For those of us with iPads, a Foreflight subscription is a fantastic aid. It’s pretty universally acknowledged that Foreflight beats all other consumer flying software. While I have the Basic subscription, and would continue to pay for it, there is some allure in the Pro Plus plan as well. Log book, weight and balance, etc are great, but also the additional hazard avoidance and synthetic vision features would make night flying a lot safer. Perhaps the value of the Pro Plus will be greater when I become IFR-rated, but even now it’s enticing for these smaller, helpful features.

Stratus 2S

No discussion of Foreflight, or for that matter safety equipment, can be complete without a consideration of ADS-B and the Stratus 2S. I’ve been involved in the Stratux project, which aims to build a Stratus-compatible ADS-B In receiver, and it works — but there’s no denying that a professionally-built piece of hardware is better and easier to work with than a home-brew kit. This becomes especially important if one moves from merely exploring the concept of what an ADS-B In receiver can do, and on to changing one’s personal procedures to reflect the additional information available on one’s iPad.

In the Cockpit

iPad Yoke Mount

This may be unnecessary — I love my iPro Aviator/M kneeboard. It’s sturdy, offers a way to hide my iPad from the sun, provides a surface to write on, etc. However, it’s a bit distracting to keep staring down into your lap to look something up on the map. In any sort of poor-visibility conditions this could lead to unnecessary disorientation. I’ve not wanted a yoke mount because they seem strange to have with impermanence (constantly mounting and unmounting them), plus I’m not a fan of having my map tilt every time I deflect the flight control even slightly. But it’s undeniably closer to one’s line of sight during straight-and-level flight, and probably much cooler when there’s a lot of sun on your lap.

Another Headset

Flying with friends? Go borrow a headset from the club. That’s all fine, but the last time I did so, the choice of headsets was poor and the best of the bunch didn’t look that comfortable. At some point it would be quite useful to get my own headset for passengers. There are many kinds out there, from used Lightspeed Sierras to passive David Clarks to brand new Bose A20s. At the end of they day, they just need to be decent enough to not break, and to be comfortable to wear for a few hours.

Child Headset (or two)

The one time I flew with my older kid, I put an adult headset on him. Itwas pretty uncomfortable-looking, and kept slipping — which meant that half the time I couldn’t hear him, half the time he couldn’t hear me, and the entire time he probably heard the roar of the engine. Child headsets exist, and are not very expensive either, though they have pretty poor quality and durability. The main thing standing in the way of getting those then is that I just don’t fly with my kids, yet. I wonder whether getting a child headset would actually influence this.

Foggles

I am not training for an instrument rating, but I probably will at some point. In addition, I do end up getting checked out by CFIs from time to time — in new planes, for recurrence, for the flight review, etc. Infrequently, I just have another pilot with me. It would be helpful to have ready access to a view-limiting device to keep me current in controlling the aircraft without outside reference.

Fuel Tester

I don’t know why this is necessary, but apparently every pilot carries a fuel tester with them. I’ve been in exactly one airplane before that didn’t have a fuel tester on board (usually a GATS jar, but sometimes the thinner one with a screwdriver at the end), and in that case the rental place was kind of embarrassed and someone went to find one for me. But maybe the other pilots know more than I do.

Multitool

Because why not? Every self-respecting person should have a piece of metal that can turn, pry, twist, cut, and bend other pieces of metal.

After a couple of months of trying to get this arranged, I went flying with a pilot who owns a Grumman Tiger (to be more precise, an American General AG-5B Tiger). I had been a fan of the Tigers ever since I discovered they existed — from its cockpit to its shape to its performance, this seemed like a fantastic airplane worth checking out. I asked on Reddit for anyone willing to let me ride in one, and then saw Tiger parked at a repair shop. One bout of public-records stalking later and I had contacted the owner via Facebook and arranged a flight.

I met the pilot at the airport as she was finishing the preflight. She said she’d wanted to go over to Chino for fuel, and wanted to make it an instrument flight, so I’d act as her safety pilot. I was happy to oblige. With a flight plan pre-filed, we took off and she flipped on her foggles, though not before I got a chance to perform a climbing turn. It’s hard to tell from a few seconds with the yoke, but the plane seemed a bit more responsive than Pipers (my only other significant low-wing experience) though more stable than the Cessnas.

Apart from looking out of the airplanes for traffic, I spent my time just looking outside (the cockpit provides fantastic visibility while at the same time balancing it well with keeping things cool inside), asking questions about the instruments (there were a few strange decisions made by the original owner), and generally observing the flight. I’ve never been on an instrument flight (for what it’s worth, this was my second right-seat flight ever), and so a lot of the ways one conducts the flight were new to me. Having not had instrument training, I am not familiar with how to read approach plates or anything like that: vectors and altitudes and clearances are easy enough, but the details of how to execute the flight are not. There certainly seemed to be a lot of work required, and one needed to always be ahead of the airplane, knowing what they will tell you next and preparing for the next phase of flight. Surprisingly the pilot was pretty relaxed about it all, and though she was flying with foggles she was still able to chat with me, even before she got enabled the autopilot. I say surprisingly because I always assumed that instrument flight under the hood would take close to 100% of one’s concentration.

The flight overall went fairly smoothly. We got to Chino, filled up, and then flew pretty much directly back to Hawthorne (with a partially open cockpit, whee). In all, a pleasant flight with a friendly and very competent pilot in a fantastic plane.

Not loggable, but total: around 1.5 hrs in an American General Tiger.

It’s come time for my 6-month club checkout flight with a CFI — and, incidentally, next month was the expiration date for my flight review, so I decided to just combine the two and scheduled a morning with one of our club’s instructors.

We met early in the morning, and spent an hour on questions about FARs. The instructor had a list of about 40 questions, ranging from fairly straightforward checkride-like ones (“what causes a stall? what are the entry requirements into a Class B airpsace?”) to trickier ones that were either exceptions to the general rule worth remembering, or something not clearly specified and thus requiring discussion. I didn’t know what to expect — this being my first flight review — but I enjoyed the session quite a bit. It was at once a refresher on some topics that I haven’t thought about in a while, as well as a chance to learn a few things in some of those tricky areas.

We then took off from Hawthorne and headed off to do some air work. On takeoff we flew towards Torrance and the instructor handed me a pair of foggles. I think it’s been a full two years since I’ve worn a view-limiting device, so it was actually pretty challenging to transition into flying on instruments alone. The instructor gave me some heading changes, and we flew like that for a number of minutes. I think that this is probably one of the better aspects of the flight review: a low-pressure but forced instruction on a variety of topics you may be out of practice on.

The instructor then had me do slow flight in a clean configuration, something that I rarely do (I show off slow flight to my friends from time to time, both to show that a plane can fly slow as well as to practice slow flight, but I always do it with flaps down). A power-off stall came next, and I kept power in for so long that it made the plane hard to stall. Then some steep turns, which I do from time to time, followed by an emergency descent, which I practice so infrequently as to not remember how to set myself up right away. I should aim to practice this more often.

We then headed back, but the instructor set up a scenario for a simulated control cable break where the yoke became inoperable. I then proceeded to fly on throttle and rudder alone. While obviously the airplane normally has some amount of positive stability and allows you to take your hands away from the controls for a while, it was altogether a different thing to spent 10 minutes of flight without ailerons or an elevator, and have to go through altitude and heading changes. I’ve read before of people landing with controls inoperative and this scenario was a pretty good indication of how that could be possible. It’s now to say that yaw + power makes for a very smoothly controllable airplane, but between the dihedral wing and other factors, it can work in a pinch.

Came back to Hawthorne, did a full stop landing, then taxied back, did a mostly-soft-field takeoff, landed again, and called it done. Flight review good for another two years, and club checkout accomplished!

Some takeaways:

• Either get serious about a case for the Stratux, or get a real Stratus. It’s very helpful in the basin.
• Finish making my own printed checklist. Consider approach plate inserts instead of lamination.
• Develop a pre-takeoff checklist, especially to help with mixture, flaps, and trim after a taxi-back.
• Acquire an inflatable flotation device. They’re small and yet give you peace of mind over water. And there’s lots of water around LA.
• The second-to-last page of the Advisory Circular AC91-67 contains a useful flowchart to follow when determining if broken equipment should ground a flight or not.

Totals: 1.1 hr in C172.

Andres is a friend who hasn’t been flying in small planes before. I, on the other hand, haven’t gone in two months. In early December I had my flight of poor timing, which earned me a no-fly fee from the club since I didn’t use their plane. The cost of that flight, plus bad weather, kept me from flying in early January. Then weather plus plane availability (it was either bad weather or totally booked on weekends) caused me to earn another no-fly fee for January. So, flying we went.

The weather promised to be light-to-moderate turbulence, but most PIREPs were either far south (east of San Diego) or north of us by around 30nm, so I figured it would be ok to try — otherwise, the day was just fantastic. I warned Andres that we could expect some bumpiness, but that if it got too annoying for us then we’d just turn around and come back. I like using words like “annoying” or “bothersome” with first-time fliers so as to not get them unnecessarily worried about things like light turbulence. We looked at weather maps and decided to pick our route when we got to the airport.

A normal preflight followed our arrival at the airport. It really helps to have two people to remove the cover off the plane! We sat down and planned our route, deciding to just fly around the LA area and see how it goes. In my mind, I figured if it was not pleasant that we’d go out to Torrance and then come right back, but if it was fine that we’d head on to Palos Verdes and then Long Beach, climb up the LA river, fly by the Hollywood sign, and then come back over LAX. We asked ground for flight following (I wanted to see how that went with SoCal in the PV Practice Area, being a bit more nervous out after the mid-air collision there), and then took off.

There wasn’t a bump in that sky. Smooth sailing up to 2,500 ft and off we went to the practice area talking to SoCal Approach. Once past Torrance I asked to descend to 1,000 ft staying with them, but they advised that I might lose them on the radio that low so I stayed at 1,500 or so. I let Andres fly for a few minutes, all the while watching out for traffic. Having SoCal was at once helpful and strangely odd — I’m so used to calling out my position in that area and listening out for other planes reporting that I constantly felt naked in a way. The airspace was not busy in the least, with everyone probably preparing for the Super Bowl.

After some slow flight (I like practicing this and showing passengers that the plane can fly slowly, too) we told SoCal that we wanted to go upriver, and switched over to Long Beach who OK’ed our transition at 2,000 ft. I followed that, ducking to around 1,800 where the LAX Class B started at 2,000, and then continued around Downtown LA, past the Griffith and the Hollywood sign, talking to SoCal at that point. Then SoCal told us to go talk to Santa Monica, and we requested a foothill transition. Since the air was smooth, and we had a bit of time, I figured that we could go to Malibu, maybe do some turns around a point or steep turns for fun, and come back. But by the time we go to Pepperdine, all of sudden we flew straight into that light turbulence. It was such a strange contrast, going from perfect air into bumpy air, and it didn’t seem to be based on altitude as we climbed and descended with no change. So, we turned around and went our way back to Santa Monica, took the mini-route, and landed back.

Some faults I observed of myself:

• I don’t remember checking the airspeed before extending flaps, neither during slow flight nor on landing.
• I didn’t perform a cruise checklist, nor did I have a systematic check of other gauges. I did glance at a few of them, but could have easily missed one.
• When dialing the SMO navaid frequency, I dialed it up as 108.10 instead of 110.8, and kept being surprised by not getting reception until I realized my folly. I should have just checked the chart.
• When refueling after our return, I did not attach the grounding cable to the plane.

Some other notes:

• KSMO didn’t tell me about a helicopter a few hundred feet below us when we were in their airspace, though they told me about other traffic. It took Andres to see it.
• I really like having a printed checklist that’s in this plane rather than an electronic one on my iPad. Much easier to use.
• It’s a good thing my flight review is coming up, because I could use some practice in stalls. It’s been a long time since I’ve done them in a Cessna.

Totals: 1.4 hrs in C172.

On /r/flying — a Reddit board for pilots — some enterprising folks had declared that they wanted to have SoCal redditor pilots meet up at Flo’s in Chino. I reserved one of our planes, leaving a note on it of where I was going. Another club member got in touch with me and said he’d love to go too — except that it’d be great if I picked him up at Torrance. I said, sure, why not.

So a couple of days before the meetup, I get a note from the club. Apparently a magneto needed replacing, and the guy who could do it was only available the morning of my flight. The meetup was at 12:30pm, and I had the plane reserved from 11am. They were going to start working on the magneto at 8am but weren’t sure how long it would take.

I show up at the airport at 10:30am, to discover them working on the magneto. I ask someone how long it would take, and they say, well, two hours, but you know how these things go — hinting at much longer. I sigh, message the guy waiting to meet me at Torrance that it won’t work out, and head on home.

Except then I get this crazy idea. I haven’t flown the Arrow from Proteus in a while, but I’m technically checked out in one. I love that plane, and it’s nice and fast which would make up for the fact that it’s expensive and further. I text the guy in Torrance and drive back to KSMO. Except I am feeling a bit out of practice, and I remember being behind the plane on takeoff when I was training, and I don’t want to be behind a more complex plane with a passenger. So, I get to Proteus and ask for someone to do a pattern with me to make me feel safer.

Well, it’s 11:30 when I get to Proteus, and there’s no instructor there, but he’ll be back in a half an hour. He does get back at noon, by which time I’ve got the Arrow with a completed preflight, ready to go. We jump in, but he wants to do a slightly longer refresher, complete with an emergency gear extension. So, ok, we go to Malibu, drop the gear, and come back and land. I let him out, and get right back in the air for the mini-route to Torrance. Between all this refresher training and the additional distance, I get to Torrance shortly after 1pm. Pick up the guy, and we get to Chino — shut down the plane, walk to Flo’s… only to see the entire Reddit group stand up, say goodbye to one another, and fly their merry way back home.

We just had lunch by our lonesomes. Well, also one guy was still left there with his wife and kid.

We flew back to Torrance, I dropped my club-mate off, take another mini-route to KSMO and return the plane. After I get home I check my phone, which contains a message from the folks at my club saying the plane I had booked was actually ready at 12:30pm in case I still wanted to use it.

Sigh. I was going to go on a maybe-1.5-hr flight in a cheap Cessna, and instead went on an almost-3-hr flight in a more than twice as expensive Piper, plus had to pay an instructor for a good chunk of an hour and two landing fees at Santa Monica. I’m glad for getting reacquainted with the Arrow (I really do like this plane a ton), but it blew through the flying budget I had for the month and made me get a no-fly fee from the club since I wouldn’t be flying their aircraft in December.

Lesson learned: just wait for your plane instead of changing plans.

Total: 2.9 hrs in Piper Arrow (P28R-200).