Lesson 7: More Right Rudder
Sunday, June 30, 2017: We were sitting at the end of taxiway-A, performing the run-up. The RPMs were at 1800, the magneto check had gone well, and now I needed to check the engine instruments. Fuel flow: good. Oil pressure and temperature: in the green. Vacuum: ok. Battery Volts: 28. Perfect. Main bus charging: -1.0. Uh-oh. With 1800 RPMs, the engine is spinning fast enough that the alternator should be charging the battery - that -1.0 should be a positive number. I look over at Grant, he asks me what this meant. I said it meant we could have a bad alternator, that we’d be running on battery power, and that we could lose our glass cockpit. It could be 30 minutes or 3 hours, but we’d lose it. “What should we do then?” he asked me. “Check the POH?” Yep, we needed to check the pilot operating handbook to see if there was a procedure or advice if we saw a negative charge. We found and executed the relevant procedure, with a negative result.
“What now?” Grant asked. “I don’t think we should go up. We should head back and have someone take a look.” He agreed. I contacted ground, asked for clearance back to the ramp, and started taxiing. On the way, Grant checked the logs for the flight and found that it was actually a known problem. It was a bad sensor, and the alternator was fine. If I had read the logs closely, like I was supposed to when I dispatch the aircraft, I would have already been aware of the problem. I would have known that this could safely be ignored. 15 minutes wasted. Frustrating, but a good lesson to learn. I contacted ground yet again, and we headed back towards the run-up area.
It was a sign of things to come. It was my most frustrating lesson yet.
This is the first post in what (I hope) will be a series on my experiences learning to become a private pilot. I’m not blogging for any reason other than I think it’ll be fun, and it’ll be a good way for me to remember this experience. I was on vacation in late May (2017), and I mentioned to my wife that I probably needed a new hobby. The kids were getting older and I had some free time. Having just flown the 7 hours to Maui, I was reminded how much I loved flying. I always have. A good friend was an Air Force pilot and had shown me around his KC-10. I’ve made countless business trips all over the US, Europe, India, and Australia. Unlike many people, I have always loved just being around planes and airports. I started training in June 2017. There’s been some fits and starts (more on that some other time), but I’m in the swing of it now, training roughly 3 days per week.
Back to today’s flight. Once we finished our second run-up (sigh), we lined up on the runway and took off. Conditions today weren’t ideal. Ceilings were low at 1500 feet, so we decided to just do pattern work: we take off, turn right (crosswind), turn right again (down wind), turn right again (base), and then once more (final), and then land. You can picture an oval, or a racetrack, where the “back straight” is the runway. As soon as we hit the ground, we take off again (“touch-and-go’s”). I had done pattern work twice before, and I thought I was mastering it. This particular lesson set me straight. During the takeoff climb, I kept relaxing the right rudder. When a little airplane (a Cessna 172S) is at full power, it has a tendency to run left. You use right rudder to keep the nose pointing forward. I couldn’t seem to find the right amount of rudder. Grant said, “get in some more right rudder” probably 40 times in this flight. He stayed so calm. I don’t know how he did it, because I was frustrating myself with my inability to find the sweet spot.
It turns out everyone else wanted to do pattern work, so in our 3 trips through the pattern, I couldn’t ever find my rhythm. Once we were up at the right altitude for the pattern (about 1000 feet), it was so busy that the tower kept asking us to stay on the downwind leg longer, before turning base and then final. I had done all my practice in non-crowded patterns. In that situation, you have check-points that you hit as milestones in the landing process. When you’re on the downwind leg and abeam the runway numbers, you pull back the RPMs, you put in a notch of flaps, and you start to descend. When you’re 45 degrees from the edge of the runway, you turn base, put in another notch of flaps, and start to slow down a little more. You then turn final, put in the final notch of flaps, keep descending, and try to find an airspeed of 65 kts or so. I had started to get better at that. I actually did 1 landing completely by myself in this configuration.
Because we did a longer downwind, all my checkpoints were off. I kept getting distracted by the radio calls, watching out for traffic, and compensating for the wind. This meant that my speed control was crap, and my final turns were always off. My final landing was the best of the three, but it still wasn’t pretty.
I got some tough love from Grant in the debrief today. “Controlling your speed in the pattern is number one. You get that right, and everything flows. Get it wrong, and you’re gonna have a tough time.” Grant’s been good - he told me the stuff I did well (I’m starting to get the radio calls, I’m handling ground ops decently, my taxiing is coming along), but he also is straight with me when I need to do better.
This was the first lesson where I walked away just a little discouraged. I’m much more patient in acquiring a new skill than I was 20 years ago, that’s for sure. But today felt like a setback, and that’s a bummer. That said, I’ve got a lesson on the books in 2 days, and I can’t wait to get back up there and try it again.