Navigation and Planning
Today Chris and I had a long ground lesson at San Carlos (SQL) while a foolish (IMO) pilot tried to land in a 20 knot direct crosswind. Amazing; what's more amazing is that they actually got it down on the 4th try. Heck, I've had to take four tries in 3 knots of crosswind!
The weather was terrible today: Wind, rain, lightning, you name it. But it made for a good opportunity to learn how to plan flights. There's SO much material here, I can't even write about it all. Basically, it's this:
To get from point A to point B, where do I point the plane, and how long will it take?
We started with the charts, where to my horror we took a pen and drew lines along our intended course from Palo Alto to Oakdale, which I swear was the setting of one of the soap operas my mom used to watch when I was a kid. I'm not big on marking paper with ink; it's an engrained instinct that comes from years of singing in choirs using borrowed music and marking it ONLY with a pencil. Not only did we draw our lines in pen, we then used a highlighter to make them show up better. Blasphemy! Good thing charts expire pretty quickly (is it 6 months? or 4? That'd be good to know..).
So for each leg of the course, we have to calculate the wind correction using the forecast winds and the E6B flight computer that I learned to use over the weekend, and then correct for the fact that the charts are oriented toward true north whereas the compass is oriented to magnetic north. Then there's built-in error in the plane's compass, so that has to be corrected for. The keys are: The difference between a course and a heading is wind. Course is a line on the map, heading is where you point the plane.
The navigation log form actually guides you through this process pretty handily, from check point to check point. Selecting check points seems to be a bit of an art, but they should be "can't miss" from the air. Airports are supposed to be good. Now, I'm a little worried given my fairly poor track record of finding airports, but hopefully I'll get over it. So, for each leg of the trip, you have to know what your airspeed will be (which is a bit of a black art, seems like, for legs on which your airspeed will vary, like the first one, since you're climbing) and your intended course. Then you can calculate your heading and your groundspeed, from which you can get time and therefore fuel burn. It's clearly important to compare actual times to expected times during the flight, since if it's taking a lot longer than expected, you'll run out of fuel unless you recalculate and come up with another plan.
I made more purchases today too. A plotter, to plot courses (what's with the completely non-intuitive names?) and the Pilot's Guide To California Airports, which I'm very excited about -- it's just a guide with all kinds of info about every airport in CA. Light reading for the train!
I also discovered another guy's blog, who started training at exactly the same time as me, but in a Diamond DA40-180. I think we have the same number of hours, too, but his instructor seems quite a bit more conservative than Kevin. I'm glad of Kevin's approach, even though I've been a big chicken about going up when things are anything less than perfect. Better to be conservative, right? Anyway, his blog is here:
http://anotherstudentpilot.davidandamy.org/
Hopefully we'll fly the plan we made on Saturday!
The weather was terrible today: Wind, rain, lightning, you name it. But it made for a good opportunity to learn how to plan flights. There's SO much material here, I can't even write about it all. Basically, it's this:
To get from point A to point B, where do I point the plane, and how long will it take?
We started with the charts, where to my horror we took a pen and drew lines along our intended course from Palo Alto to Oakdale, which I swear was the setting of one of the soap operas my mom used to watch when I was a kid. I'm not big on marking paper with ink; it's an engrained instinct that comes from years of singing in choirs using borrowed music and marking it ONLY with a pencil. Not only did we draw our lines in pen, we then used a highlighter to make them show up better. Blasphemy! Good thing charts expire pretty quickly (is it 6 months? or 4? That'd be good to know..).
So for each leg of the course, we have to calculate the wind correction using the forecast winds and the E6B flight computer that I learned to use over the weekend, and then correct for the fact that the charts are oriented toward true north whereas the compass is oriented to magnetic north. Then there's built-in error in the plane's compass, so that has to be corrected for. The keys are: The difference between a course and a heading is wind. Course is a line on the map, heading is where you point the plane.
The navigation log form actually guides you through this process pretty handily, from check point to check point. Selecting check points seems to be a bit of an art, but they should be "can't miss" from the air. Airports are supposed to be good. Now, I'm a little worried given my fairly poor track record of finding airports, but hopefully I'll get over it. So, for each leg of the trip, you have to know what your airspeed will be (which is a bit of a black art, seems like, for legs on which your airspeed will vary, like the first one, since you're climbing) and your intended course. Then you can calculate your heading and your groundspeed, from which you can get time and therefore fuel burn. It's clearly important to compare actual times to expected times during the flight, since if it's taking a lot longer than expected, you'll run out of fuel unless you recalculate and come up with another plan.
I made more purchases today too. A plotter, to plot courses (what's with the completely non-intuitive names?) and the Pilot's Guide To California Airports, which I'm very excited about -- it's just a guide with all kinds of info about every airport in CA. Light reading for the train!
I also discovered another guy's blog, who started training at exactly the same time as me, but in a Diamond DA40-180. I think we have the same number of hours, too, but his instructor seems quite a bit more conservative than Kevin. I'm glad of Kevin's approach, even though I've been a big chicken about going up when things are anything less than perfect. Better to be conservative, right? Anyway, his blog is here:
http://anotherstudentpilot.davidandamy.org/
Hopefully we'll fly the plan we made on Saturday!
posted by MKT at 4:40 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home