Thursday, March 30, 2006
FAM 2
A Top Fuel driver, Eddie Hill, once said after completing a sub five second 300+mph quarter mile pass "Man, if people only knew how much fun this was, they'd sell their houses and buy themselves one of these cars." I know what he was talking about. Earlier this afternoon, as I broke through the cloud layer at 5,000' and was greeted by a beautiful blue sky I thought, "This makes it all worth it."
I had just taken off from NAS Corpus Christi under a pretty nasty layer of clouds after a less than stellar brief and was not feeling particularly good about myself. I thought I was prepared for the brief but there were several things that my IP asked that caught me off guard. It hadn't started well because the duty last night told me that my brief time was 1100, but as I was driving to the base at 1005 I got a call from my IP asking where I was. I was a little shocked to say the least. He wasn't mad, but it put my routine all out of whack and got me started on the flight off balance.
But man, once I was at the controls and flying across the water at 170 knots and 500' it was all better. I felt confident and in control of the plane. I knew where to go and knew how I was going to get there. We reached our first checkpoint and I picked the nose up to start my climb to 2,500' and she responded like it was no big deal at all to add on 2,000' of elevation. If you wanted to do that in a Cessna, you'd apply full power, calculate the density altitude, calculate your best climb velocity and break out the bag lunch because it's going to take a while. Not so in my new ride.
I was still not really enjoying myself, the weather was crappy and the skies were gray. I knew there was blue sky above us, but if we didn't find a hole in the clouds we couldn't get up there to see it. My instructor did some fancy flying to get us around a few cloud formations and finally we found our hole. Full power and on up to 7,500'.
Even 5,000' of altitude didn't take that long. Before I knew it we were cruising along in the blue with a pillowy white layer of clouds beneath us. I completely forgot how crappy the brief was and how crappy the weather down below was. I thought to myself "I don't think it would matter if the instructor was yelling and throwing things at me right now, I would still be loving this."
We did a couple of maneuvers that all went well and even further bolstered my confidence. I remember doing 45 degree angle of bank turns in the Cessna and feeling like the plane was going to fall out of the sky, like that was too much for the little plane to handle. The T-34 wants to climb; it had no trouble handling the 45 degree angle of bank turns.
After that fun, we headed back down out of the clouds and on to
He didn't start off well, he wasn't making many of the customary radio calls you make when doing touch and goes at a field that is so popular with training aircraft. When I first saw him he was less than half a mile off our port side (left) heading right at us 200' below our altitude. If he had been on the same altitude we would have collided.
The Navy break and landing pattern is much tighter than the civilian landing pattern. Civilians fly a big box, with gentle 15 degree angle of bank turns and a wide pattern that takes a loooooong time to complete. You could make a sandwich and eat it in the time it takes to fly a civilian touch and go. We fly a tight oval with 30 and 45 degree angle of bank turns. You'd barely be done deciding what kind of bread you wanted in the time it takes to fly a Navy break and landing. Combined with the fact that he flies his pattern at 80 knots and touches down at 70 and we fly ours at 100 and touch down at 85, he was a pain in our ass. Several times we had to extend our legs and go wide to maintain separation from him. At one point we had to offset our take off because he was lifting off so slowly that we were concerned that we might hit him. It wasn't easy for me especially because on top of all of the things I had going on in the cockpit I had to keep a constant lookout for his slow ass so I didn't lose sight and have him reappear just before we made his tail a few feet shorter with our propeller.
But I got some good landings in and flew the landing back at home almost 100% by myself, so I was satisfied. I even remembered the shades this time.
