LancairTalk

Columbia runs a mechanics course for their CARMA repair network a few times a
year and when they have open spots they make them available to owners. Since Im the
type that likes to know everything possible about my airplane, I jumped at the chance.
The class is an all week thing and Ill be reporting on my experiences as we go along.

I missed the first couple of hours this morning since I flew in from Seattle and
the weather was a real pain. The flight to Bend is usually just about 1 hour but
between headwinds and several diversions to deal with the complicated weather it
took me a whole 2 hours to get here.

Today was a representative from TCM talking about engine maintenance. He was very
careful to point out how important it is that the various engine components are
torqued to the exact right levels. Given some recent incidents this seemed like
a really key topic. He went into tons of detail about many aspects of the engines.
One thing I noticed was that from doing some oil changes and examining my engine
a bunch Ive got a pretty good feel for the outside parts of the engine. Today I
feel like I got a good exposure about the inner workings.

There was also one other interesting tip useful for pilots. The speaker mentioned a
pilot who was flying from the Bahamas to Florida when he started losing oil
pressure. Now, if I were in a similar situation Id have been tempted to reduce
power to try to put less stress on the engine. But it turns out the best move
(unless you already have a good landing spot within range) is probably to hit
full power, climb all you can and get every last bit of energy you can get out of
the engine before it fails. The rate of oil loss between full power and lower isnt
likely to differ very much. Either way its the same amount of pressure in the oil
system. Once you have an airport successfully made its a different matter, but until
then, screw the engine, save yourself.

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With the winter season approaching rapidly I thought I’d write about some of the tools that I use for winter flying decision making with
a focus on icing conditions. Most of the details of these weather models I learned at Scott Dennstaedt’s “Under The Weather” seminar.

There are 4 main things I look at. First of all the forecast icing potential on aviationweather.gov. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you about how serious the icing is, just the likelihood. One thing I’m looking for is any SLD (Supercooled Large Drop) predictions- if I see that, I’m going to avoid it at all costs. But mostly it gives me a picture of what levels to expect icing at.

The second thing I look for is a chart with the ‘lifted index’ from one of the weather models. Icing is pretty dependent on lifting happening in the atmosphere. As I understand it, without lifting when the temps are less than 0C, you are just going to get already frozen ice particles / snow which is no big deal. With lifting little bits of liquid water go up where they get colder but they don’t necessarily actually freeze until they hit your wing.

The third thing is a skew-T diagram. Skew-T will give you much better predications of where the cloud tops and layers are than the stuff you will find on aviationweather.gov. For example the cloud-top predications there I find are usually way higher than the real cloud tops. If you look at the skew-T and see the temperature and dew points are almost equal for a big stretch of altitudes, thats a pretty nasty thing to climb through. If they just briefly touch, thats probably a good sign. Plus the skew-t can show you inversions and other things to watch out for (freezing rain is really bad).

The last is of course PIREPs. These are often not so useful but I try anyway, and there is nothing like actual reports of icing (and lack thereof) and/or tops to do some good planning. If I really can’t tell I’ve been known to ask an arriving or departing jet to report tops- most of the time these guys have been super helpful although they often aren’t paying attention to the tops level unless you ask ahead of time.

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Today it appears that a significant terrorist plot was foiled by authorities in the UK. However the blow-back of the more sophisticated techniques pursued by the authorities is resulting in 90 minute security lines across the country (and presumably Europe also). Combine that with the inability to bring laptops, carry-on luggage and more on many flights and commercial aviation has overnight turned into even more of a nightmare than it was before. A 90 minute security line puts me 350+ miles into a trip in my Columbia- for a trip to Oakland I can probably now easily beat the equivalent commercial trip (it was only a tie before) and puts me into the running for just about any trip that I can do non-stop (Los Angeles, Vegas, Palm Springs, Denver, Phoenix, etc.)

We will see how this turns out over the coming weeks- hopefully the authorities will come up with less intrusive approaches to foil these new terrorist techniques. In the meantime those of us in the GA community need to continue to be vigilant to make sure that we arent leaving any openings for terrorists and the associated restrictions that would follow. So far the tight GA community has done an excellent job preventing these threats but we need to not let our guard down.

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Yesterday at the annual Seafair air-show in Seattle I was happy to catch

the Columbia Airshow Tour featuring Sean D. Tucker. Sean flies a Columbia
400 and does a number of aerobatic manuvers including rolls, loops, and other
inverted and otherwise impressive displays.

The show itself was very impressive- I shot some video but I’ll need to edit it a bit to see if I can get it into good enough shape
to post online. The weather was beautiful and unfortunately still photos don’t really capture what it was like since they look like
normal photos turned upside down.

In any case, motivated by a few discussions on the Club Columbia Forums about
the limitations of the Columbia, I headed in to Galvin today after the airshows and chatted with Sean for a bit.
First of all let me say that Sean was great. I’m sure he was tired out from
doing the air-show but he patiently answered all my questions, let us take a few
pictures and all.

When I mentioned that I was active with the Columbia pilots community he was
really curious to know what message we were getting from his routine. I
mentioned that we were all pretty impressed by what it said about how solid the
Columbia is, but he wanted to make sure that the word got out that his most
important message is about safety. I think he is pretty concerned that there are
a bunch of pilots out there in a very high performance airplane who don’t have
that much recurring training, fly occasionally, and/or have limited training in
the first place. I took away that his key message is that there are all of these
scary situations (unusually attitudes) that, if you know how, shouldn’t really
be that big a deal at all. But most of us have never experienced a full spin or
inverted flight and if we were to suddenly find ourselves in that situation, due
to a mountain wave, wake turbulence, or who knows what, we wouldn’t have the
right knowledge and reactions to recover. That’s why he is working on his
training program for unusual attitudes that will use the Columbia as the
training platform (and an Extra I believe, although for most of us there would
be no better training than learning in your own aircraft model).

I asked him a bit about the maneuvers in the show. Since the Columbia wasn’t
designed for inverted flight, the avionics and engine aren’t set up for those
situations. All the maneuvers he does stay in the positive-g range (his goal is
to stay between .4g and 4gs). This means that the fuel flow and oil systems in
the engine never get cut off. The airplane he is flying is equipped with the
Garmin PFD and he says that it sometimes glitches at extreme attitudes, but it
comes right back up. The Avidyne system unfortunately is not as good in this
respect- if it glitches, it shuts down. Now that they have the competition from
Garmin on this front I wonder if Avidyne might pursue an upgrade to enable
better recovery in the attitude ADHRS system.

One of the recent discussion topics is the CG envelope on the Columbia.
Typically with pilots up front “by the book” you are either at your forward CG
limit or else you need a bit of weight in the back. He flies a stock Columbia
400 and doesn’t put any ballast in the back. His statement on this topic was “a
forward CG never killed anyone”, although he did point out it can make it a bit
harder to have a graceful landing. We discussed landings a bit since a
full-flaps landing does take a bit of skill to pull off gracefully, but I
pointed out that given enough runway I like to land with just the take-off
flaps, since it makes it a breeze every time.

Another thing he mentioned was that he was looking forward to checking out a
few things at the end of the air-show season, especially the condition of the
turbines. The turbines are spinning fast and thus are in effect gyroscopes. The
high-G maneuvers probably put some interesting stress on them and he is looking
forward to inspecting to see their condition.

While he does his routine he is basically full-throttle the whole time. He
starts out by hitting right at Vne, and probably heads back to that speed range
quite a few times. When he does a loop he is aiming to be a bit less than 100kts
at the top of the loop because otherwise he will pick up too much speed on the
way back down. During the show the only instruments he uses are the airspeed and
altitude (with occasional engine checks). Mostly its classic visual flying,
given the passes low to the ground.

He also spoke for a bit about how confident he is in the Columbia. He has
done over 200 spins in it himself, and despite the fairly extreme air-work the
solid construction of the wing and good flight characteristics leave him with
confidence- his quote on this point was that if he were buying an airplane for
his own personal use with his family, the Columbia would be it. Of course that
loops back to his main point- the airframe isn’t going to fail you, but if you
get yourself into trouble, there is no parachute to bail you out, you need the
right training to be able to fly the airplane to the ground, hopefully in a
relatively flat spot somewhere (ideally a flat spot called a “runway”, but in an
emergency any will do).

Overall the air-show and talking to Sean Tucker were very inspiring. I’ve put
up a copy of the Columbia Airshow Tour Schedule on CalendarData.com- go check it
out if it comes near your city (or if you are a Columbia pilot, anywhere within
about 1000nm of your city should do the trick).

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The Evade install is going to take a few days extra to get the paint and details right. In the meantime I’ve
been working on updates to CalendarData.com which
is a new venture I’m working on.

One of the cool features is that you can develop group calendars for interest groups like pilots and post them
on other web-sites and blogs. For example, here is a general US Aviation Events calendar. Enjoy, and please let me know
if you have any comments or difficulties.

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The Evade upgrade is almost done over at ViaJet in Skagit. These guys appear to be very careful and while I haven’t
picked the airplane up, I love it. They have fixed about 4-5 problems that other mechanics either didn’t notice or blew off
including a misplaced piece on the baffeling on cylinder 1 that should impact the temperatures quite a bit. Keep in mind
that CHTs are usually the limiting performance factor for these airplanes and my cylinder 1 has been running 20-40 degrees
hotter than the next hottest cylinder (and sometimes 60-80 hotter than the coolest) so anything that controls cylinder temperatures
is a huge improvement. They also fixed a small exhaust gas leak around the EGT probe and spotted some cracks that were starting to
form around the door hinges. So far so good even though full judgement will be reserved for after I get a chance to put a few hours
on the airplane after picking it up. I’m still eager to find a Columbia service place that has sent someone to the APS class, but at least
these guys are all pilots and seem to know quite a bit more about the actual operation of airplanes than some others I’ve worked with.

Here is a picture they sent me of the airplane with the tail off and being worked on-

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On Monday my friend Eric invited me to join him in the Boeing 767 full-motion simulator for an hour that won
in a charity auction. We were a bit behind our goal of arriving 15 minutes early but our host greeted us at the
entrance and gave us an introduction to the building and showed us around a bit on the way to the simulator.

These are the high end, full-motion, full 180-degree visuals simulators. Apparently the new ones for the 787 is going
to have more tha 180-degree visuals so you can even look backwards a bit. We got into the simulators, sat in the front seats
and saw that we were parked at KSEA gate N10. He gave us a quick briefing of the various displays- the PFD, MFD, auto-pilot controls
(hmmm, sounds familiar) and started our push-back. Steering was quite a bit different since you use a little turn-handle on your left
rather than foot-steering, but after a few lurches we managed to taxi all the way down to runway 16R. Flaps 5, throttles to about 60%, press
the N1 button for auto-throttle. We are pressed back in our seats a bit, the speed tape scrolls up pass 140kts, rotate slowly and then
all the way up to 15 degrees and we are air-born. Wow.

After a somewhat disorienting reset we are now suddenly on long final for 16R and flying a landing. We each flew a couple of landings
which were surprisingly easy. The auto-throttle takes care of most power settings, you just maintain glide slope, about a 2.5 degree nose-up
attitude, and listen to the call-outs from the radio altimeter. At about 100 feet you pull back the power a tiny bit, at 50 you flare-slightly
(just 2 degrees more up) and on touch-down you slowly lower the nose and pull up on the thrust-reversers which are these extra
knobs on the top of the throttle.

None of our landings were even close to botched so that answers the old question “could a couple of GA pilots safely get one of these
things on the ground in an emergency”. My first landing was a bit too soft- our instructor said that you are supposed to put the mains
down solidly to reduce ground-roll, avoid skidding, etc.

We then switched to SFO where Eric took off, and we did a few wacky manuvers that you could never do for real but in the simulator
its all just computer graphics. We flew under the Golden Gate Bridge and then did a series of barrel rolls. Finally we did a few more
landings and I convinced our instructor to give me an ILS at minimums which again went just fine (although spotting the approach lights at
DH was difficult and the transition to visual was a bit wobbly, but that is realistic too).

All in all, an amazing experience- I’d highly recommend it for anyone if you get the opportunity. My log book now
lists 1.0 hours of time and 3 landings in a 767-400. Our host at Boeing was great and
its a really amazing thing that they donate tons of these simulator experiences to various charities for fund-raising. I wish I had
better pictures but I only had my camera-phone and I had the settings wrong so I only got a little tiny image.

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This weekend was a perfect example of why I enjoy having an airplane. A few
weeks ago we bought an Aire Super Puma raft and
this weekend we put the raft into the Columbia and flew to Hood River to raft
the White Salmon river.
Hood River is only about 115NM from Seattle direct, but by the normal roads you
need to drive over 225 miles and it usually takes over 4 hours. The flight from
Boeing Field (KBFI) to Hood River (4S2) was only 40 minutes and that was at
fairly low power settings and with a detour to take a loop around Mt. St.
Helens.

The raft fits well in the airplane- the raft itself weighs 106 pounds and
with all of our gear we are at about 150 pounds. It is super easy to remove the
rear seats from a Columbia and with one seat gone there is plenty of room to put
the raft, paddles, and more in. The rear baggage door isn’t huge but the
passenger doors are really big so I’m pretty sure you could fit just about
anything in the airplane with both back seats out. I’m pretty sure we could fit
the raft in the baggage compartment and carry four passengers if they were small
and had much of the other gear on their laps, but with the raft 3 passengers is
the most realistic.

The scenery was just gorgeous and rafting the white salmon couldn’t be
better- the day was 85 degrees and beautiful. I’ve included a few extra shots
from passing Mt. St. Helens and from the ground at the Hood River airport. We
are looking forward to using the airplane for easy access to other NW rafting
like the Deschutes, Tieton, Merced, American, and the Salmon in Idaho.

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I now have my Evade install scheduled for next week at ViaJet. I was going to get this done
at the factory but they contacted me yesterday to ask me to switch to one of the other service
centers. I suspect they are busy repairing damage from the recent hail-storm that struck Bend last week.

I’m looking forward to finally getting this in place. While its now summer so icing is a less frequent issue,
it still gets to be freezing up high and the freezing level tends to be where the clouds and precipication hangs out.
Plus it will be nice to just have it taken care of.

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Flying has been great lately. Since the little incident with the EGTs in
cylinder 1 has been fixed the airplane has been in top shape except for some
slight imbalance in ground running. When I’m in the air everything is great, but
the ground idle is adjusted a little too low and the fuel flows don’t seem even
(the EGTs are all over). Every time I consider having someone mess with it I
remind myself that in-flight is more important and the last thing I want to do
is have that be out of tune again. The only serious issue it causes is that I
need to run the RPMs higher than I would like when I start or the engine will
die and I need to be careful after landing to not stall the engine.

There are a number of service bulletins that have come out lately and I’m mostly updated.
I’m waiting on the torque tube and
the baffle thing my mechanics at Galvin say they are still working out with the
factory how to get it installed correctly. Luckily they are figuring it out on
another airplane. So mostly I’ve just been flying- a trip to Vegas, one to Palm
Springs (non-stop on the way down, nice!), an Angel Flight to Spokane and
Portland,
and a trip down to McMinnville this week. Speaking of which, if you haven’t been
there to see the Evergreen Aviation Museum, I’d highly recommend it. Maybe we
can make that the fun event during the Bend fly-in this fall.

The only issue through all this flying has been the lack of pressurization. On
the way down to Palm Springs at FL230, Kat got sick, and to make matters worse,
if you are actively being sick, its hard to keep the mask on so her O2 levels
dropped into the scary-passing-out zone. We went down to FL190 and I was happy
that a pilot friend Eric was with me so he could “fly” (watch the autopilot)
while I attended to Kat, but it still sucked. I love being up in the flight
levels for the speed, lack of traffic, lack of turbulence (usually its a good
place to avoid the mountain effects), and weather avoidance, but its just
becoming a pain without a pressurized airplane. It occurs to me that the key
breakthrough here needs to be an airplane company that can deliver a pressurized
airplane that doesn’t scare the insurance companies and mechanics. Whomever does
that will have a huge winner on their hands.

Yesterday on the way back from Portland I flew over Mount Saint Helens which has
been very active building up a new cinder-cone lately-

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