Return to Instrument Flight

Finally, the weekend before a scheduled 300-mile cross country flight, I recovered instrument proficiency with the G1000, and was duly signed off by my instructor for an Instrument Proficiency check (IPC), my first since before 9/11.

Then, the last weekend of April, 2006, I set out on my 300-mile cross country to Westerly, RI, from my new home field of Easton, MD. I was using the same Cessna 182 I'd been flying regularly for several months, the one with the G1000, number N923DM. The weather was about as good as it gets: a strong cold front had gone through the day before, and I had the sparkling, windy, cold conditions we expect after a cold front, but these conditions persisted for all 3 days of the weekend, rather unusual for this late in the spring.

Well, there have been a few changes since I last flew a long, instrument flight. A few things are better. The phone call to Approach to get your clearance, with a void time only a handful of minutes away when you know perfectly well that engine start, runup and taxi will take at least ten (not counting your sprint from phone booth to airplane), has mercifully joined holds and NDB approaches in near-obsolescence. Between cellular phones and improvements in the FAA's communications at smaller general aviation (GA) airports, getting the clearance has become quite simple and much safer. (I wonder how many accidents were caused by pilots rushing to meet a void time, and therefore failing to have everything properly set when they taxied onto the active). Today, I found new phraseology from air traffic control (ATC): "923 Delta Mike, readback correct, you are released." That means you're cleared for takeoff from a field without a tower.

Likewise, I had XM satellite weather and lightning strike data from NEXRAD, traffic displayed on the G1000's moving map using the Traffic Information System (TIS), and an autopilot that could fly the whole flight plan, including both horizontal and vertical positioning, with little prompting from the human pilot.

On the other hand....some things were worse. For reasons I don't understand, ATC had changed its policy and in both directions, insisted I do something they didn't let me do in the old days: they routed me directly over JFK Airport in New York City! That meant I was "feet wet", as the Navy pilots say, much more than I wanted to be. When you're single engine and it's still April in the Northeast, as you head over water you think about how cold that water is and what you'll do if the engine stumbles. I looked carefully at the engine gauges as I crossed each shoreline. The airplane is barely more than a year old and its engine hummed smoothly the entire time.

Then there were a few limitations to all the modern equiment...but I'm getting ahead of my story. I'll tell it chronologically.

The flight outbound was quite easy, but did have a few surprises. After filing my flight plan and doing the rest of the preflight things -- this time, including loading up the airplane with my brown bag, my wife's purple cooler, our laptop, and some other stuff, I called my host (who had invited me to give a lecture on ship hull forms in Connecticut) on the cellular and told him when to expect me at Westerly, RI, my destination airport. Then I started the engine and taxied to the active runway. When I got my clearance, I was astounded that for the first time I can remember, I was "Cleared as filed!" Well, I patted myself on the back (prematurely, as it developed) for second guessing air traffic control, loaded my own route into the airplane's software, and in minutes I was off. It was a little gusty and turbulent as I climbed to altitude, then as I leveled off at 5,000 and started crossing Delaware Bay, it smoothed out.

Then, ATC dropped its bombshell: "923DM, we have new routing. Are you ready to copy?" Well, this wasn't good, and when I actually got the new routing written out it looked fast but not too safe: they were sending me straight across from Sandy Hook, over JFK International, then diagonally across Long Island Sound for about 40 miles before I finally hit the coast again at Bridgeport, CT. While this routing was substantially shorter than the inland route I'd asked for, flying over water single engine does not give me a feeling of security after my previous experience at Wurtsboro [I'd had to dead-stick a Piper Arrow into this field in upstate New York after the engine seized from oil starvation in 1997]. I'd also neglected to bring life preservers, but I realized that didn't matter -- at this time of year the water is so cold that they would have made no difference. However, I felt I couldn't refuse ATC's short cut, and as I passed over NJ the air became turbulent again so I asked for a higher altitude -- figuring that would give me a longer glide range and more safety as well as getting me above the few wisps of cloud that seemed to be correlated with the turbulence. I reprogrammed the new route into the GPS while the autopilot was steering a heading that looked from the moving map that it was about right for the next waypoint. The autopilot did a great job -- I actually left it on the whole time from passing through 1500 feet climbing out of Easton till I was 5 miles from Westerly.

They let me climb to 7,000, and at that altitude it was smooth the whole way, with sparkling visibility. Having TIS (collision avoidance) in the airplane was quite interesting since it often showed me traffic that ATC never called out -- perhaps because it was so obviously not in conflict with where I was, but sometimes alarmingly close. It's just as well they routed me that way because it reduced the loss in speed I suffered through having 15 to 20 knots headwind the entire way. The flight took almost 3 hours, but it was 3 pleasant hours. Oh yes -- it was 25 degrees F at 7000! I had to turn on the heat in the airplane.

I was 10 miles from the airport when I saw it. An instrument approach was obviously unnecessary, so I asked for a visual, but had to go around and repeat my approach when it turned out I was too high on final. (In retrospect I think there was wind shear -- the wind at pattern altitude was different from that at ground level.) Then, having taxied to the terminal I called my host and it turned out he'd just pulled up in his van! So we went back to the inn immediately, then tested the projection equipment with my laptop. It worked. So, we were ready for the presentation. (this outbound flight happened on Friday; the presentation was on Saturday, and my return flight was on Sunday).

On Sunday I had an easy and very quick flight back, with 25-knot tailwinds most of the way so the elapsed time wasn't even 2 and a half hours. ATC made me fly over JFK Airport again, and management at Easton says they seem to have changed their policy and are doing that essentially all the time now for flights from Maryland to New England. That's good in that the flight time is shorter, not so good in the event of engine failure. However, I looked more carefully at the coastlines, and conclude that at 6,000 feet, where I could coast 15 miles before having to maneuver for a landing, I would be out of gliding distance from shore for only a few minutes on each crossing (Long Island Sound and Raritan Bay). Actually, I was beyond gliding distance from shore for longer when crossing Delaware Bay, and there's no real alternative to that route. So, bottom line is with a careful scan of the engine instruments before passing across the shoreline, I guess the nouvelle regime is just something one must get used to. Indeed, even in my engine failure in 1997, there was about 5 minutes of warning from the gauges before the engine died.

The conditions were perfect for flying as long as you were above about 4,000, where it was bumpy enough that I could fly better than the autopilot. Crossing over the shoreline into Delaware, Dover Approach descended me to 4,000 and called out traffic at 6,000. I saw it immediately. This military controller was absolutely top flight -- he descended me just in time to avoid a too-close encounter and called out the traffic when he knew I was close enough to see it, giving me a good distance and direction. I wish all controllers were that good!

But, down at 4,000 it was bumpy and after several minutes I could see that the airplane was perceptibly wallowing and the autopilot clumsily overcorrecting for the turbulence, using the controls so much that speed was noticeably bleeding off. Cruising at 6,000, the autopilot had been doing all the work and I was still, after 2 hours in the air, quite fresh. So I just disconnected the autopilot and flew the rest of the distance to Easton myself, but following the moving map and "desired track to next waypoint" readouts on the G1000. When I was within gliding distance of the field I cancelled IFR and intercepted downwind for the active runway, which was 4, the one long enough for Learjets. I was above pattern altitude even at the end of the downwind, but I'm getting more used to the C-182T, and was able to coordinate the descent rate and pattern maneuvers so that my landing was a very good one with barely a chirp from the tires, immediately after a bleep from the stall warning that told me I had the airspeed on final just right.

While in Connecticut, I had time to go to Mystic Seaport and mostly just walked around the grounds. I did see the new replica of the AMISTAD that was suddenly politically correct when a movie was made of the slave rebellion on her in the 1830's, and as a result, a foundation was talked into coughing up $3.5 million dollars to erect the replica. As you may imagine they "spent enough" on this replica that it is a very nice boat, much more elegant than a slaver would ever have been in reality. I do not consider this a helpful utilization of resources, but I enjoyed looking at the boat.