I guess it's been a little while since I really posted anything. So today will be catch-up time. I spent the weekend sick. I think it was the flu. I won't go into too much detail, but I felt pretty awful for a few days there. In the end, it made me cancel my cross-country to Deming, NM on Monday. Yesterday I was feeling much better, but I still wasn't sure if flying was the best idea, so Erin and I did some briefing and some FTD (simulator) time instead. I learned how to track outbound on bearings from NDBs (Non-Directional Beacons) on the FTD. This morning was supposed to be an actual local flight so I preflighted the plane and filed a flight plan and greased up the yoke. (It seems like no one else really bothers to grease the yokes in the planes, so when I get to them, they tend to sometimes stick pretty hard. That's not something you want when your goal is to make very small control corrections on your short final to land.) However, it was only 16F out this morning (-9C), and the plane's oil was almost silly putty, so the engine just wouldn't start. After maybe 5 minutes trying, we gave up and spent 36 minutes in the FTD instead. That's officially the longest I've ever spent in the FTD at one time, and I learned how to track inbound on bearings to NDBs. The value of learning how to track to and from NDBs is, at first glance, questionable. NDBs are slowly being phased out of aviation because they're a very old means of navigation and, frankly, technology has yielded better means of achieving the same ends. But the fact of the matter is that instrument approaches still use NDBs at times, so there's still a point to learning them. And, far's I'm concerned, they're kinda fun. Erin has given me the go-ahead to head back over to the ramp sometime today and go up for a local solo to begin meeting some solo requirements. And it apparently doesn't really matter when I go back, as long as it's during an actual flight period. Turns out alot of students have been no-showing for their flight times, so there should be a plane for me regardless of when I head back. And that's the news!
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
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2 comments:
Hey Josh, this might be a dumb question, but is there a heater inside the plane similar to a car's heater. Like with window defrosters and everything? Just curious. At least when it gets that cold you and Jen know how to scrap windows.
Oh, by the way......Andy Jackson.
There is a heater and a defroster. Basically, there are 2 big air inlets right behind the propeller, one on either side of the spinner (where the prop attaches to the plane). When we turn on the heater or defroster, they take the air that comes in through those inlets, pass the air over the engine block to heat it, then bring it into the cockpit. If the prop isn't spinning and/or the plane isn't moving (or the engine block hasn't had time to warm up), it doesn't really have much effect at all. And even in the best of conditions the only heater vents we have are near our feet, so your feet cook and your torso freezes. That said when you have 2 people packed into a cockpit, you have 2 people's body heat radiating into that cockpit, so it's not too bad. This morning, for instance, when we were trying to get the plane started, we wound up leaving a really thick layer of fog inside all the windows solely because of our body heat, since the real heat didn't work.
The other thing to note about airplanes is that all the windows are made of some sort of plexiglass, so you can't use a scraper on them because it would scratch them up really badly. However, Jen had to scrape the car windows this morning so she could drive to work in Sierra Vista.
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