ADIZ Impact

Here is a poster-child flight for the impact of the DC ADIZ/FRZ. One might call it a "Great circle route". The flight originated at Leesburg, VA and flew to Stevensville, MD.

More dangerous posts

See DayJet post disclaimer below and then read this article:

http://tinyurl.com/m8lla

Comments:

1) Leave Alaska alone!
2) What would be the economic effect of eliminating "willing seller(s)?" - see article referring to new FTC powers to prosecute retailers with "unlawfully" high gas prices.

What is an "unlawful gas price?"

Well before any new laws are passed, I would like to request Thursday as my day to buy auto fuel.

"Please, sir, I want some more."

Please Tax the Oil Companies!!!

Congress needs to act; it is an election year and we’ll be voting.

In addition:

1. Please extend the tax incentives for purchasing large SUVs that weigh more than 6000 pounds.


2. Also, keep enacting environmental protection legislation with unreasonable timeframes for implementation


3. Please make sure the public is fully in-the-know well in advance so that we can have nationwide panic which will lead to even stronger short term demand.

There is no doubt that all of these efforts will bring the higher gas prices necessary to make some tangible progress in actually finding viable alternative fuel sources.

DayJet Announces Service Region, Plans

DayJet announced that it will serve all the airports in the FAA Southeast US Airport Facility Directory (A/FD) ... almost. Readers from Kentucky should know they will not be included in the initial service launch.

As for the reason for this post, I almost hurt myself laughing when I read this.

WARNING: The quote presented below has been known to cause loss of physical motor control. This weblog accepts no responsibility whatsoever for any injury that may result from continuing to read this post.

DayJet has 239 Eclipse 500s on firm order, plus 70 options, all planned for delivery within 24 months of beginning operations. -- Graham Warwick, Flight International

I have lived long enough to learn that there are a several simple rules to live by, for example:

1) Avoid consumption of mass-produced fish
2) Avoid buying the first model year of a new car design


NEW: 3) Avoid air travel in newly designed, mass-produced aircraft.

Scary. If they can, great. I'll wait until Eclipse produces serial number #601 about 5 years from now to work out the bugs before I hop on board.

Here is Cessna's production in 2005 for comparison.

During the year, Cessna delivered 249 Citation jets, 822 single engine pistons, and 86 Caravan single-engine turboprops.

Cessna Aircraft Company is a subsidiary of Textron Inc. (TXT), a $10 billion, multi-industry company with 46,000 employees in 36 countries.

Now, here is some insight into Eclipse:

And as it ramps up production to 130 jet planes this year, Eclipse will nearly double its work force to 1,000 employees by the end of the year, Raburn said.

Flight aware upgrade

Flightaware now provides historical flight track map overlays. Outstanding!

Here is the flight track for the ORH-TTN flight last week.

Cheat -ed / -ing on return

With a warm front stretching from Atlantic City to Danville, and a strong low in the midwest the weather was less than ideal when I got to the KORH airport to come home. The reported weather was OVC007, strong winds on the surface and enroute (40-60 knots forecast), and wind shear on the TAF. After a lengthy study of the weather computer and chat with flight service, it looked like I could fly to Trenton (TTN). The flight plan I pre-filed the day before was completely out the window.

Once the tower found the new flight plan, I got a full route clearance to TTN, and taxiied to rwy 29. The clearance was runway heading, vectors ORW v16 DIXIE v276 RBV KTTN, 3000, expect 6000 in 10. I started messing with the weather pages in the G1000 again - big mistake. More on that later.

There was a good bit of turbulence in the climb, but nothing outrageous. Cleared up to 6000 and heading 250, I cleared the clouds at 5000 feet. Total IMC time, like 5 minutes maybe. Cheated. I was eventually cleared south to ORW. Arriving north of ORW, the clouds faded and by the time I hit the LI Sound, skies were clear above, and below. Over Long Island I saw a few distant flashes of activity to the West-Northwest. When I asked NY approach about any weather, the response was - nothing apparent anywhere.

The reason I had to ask NY about the weather, despite having XM Weather on the G1000, was that I had managed to turn it off. There is a "Done" softkey on the AUX page. This should be relabeled the "kill" key - it effectively disables the data link function. Upon further study of the purpose of that button, there is no information on what it does, except to denote its use when first activating the system. So, at a time when weather would have been nice to have, I had none.

But then, I really didn't need it. The trip to TTN was very uneventful. I landed, got self-serve fuel, refiled, and reviewed the weather. With the radar trend showing a slot opening up west of JYO, it looked like a very doable flight. All that and a phone call to Mike to discuss the G1000 WX problem, I was on my way within about 30 minutes. The fuel farm is to the left rear of the FBO building when pulling up. I will remember that as TTN is a good stop.

Departing runway 24, I called Phili approach to activate IFR. The tower had closed. After a few minutes, I was cleared to JYO via direct MXE v408 ROBRT AML JYO at 6. Phili had me hold at 5000 as can be seen in the Flightaware track log.

It was definitely a bumpy flight and the log shows the horrendous ground speeds. As such other traffic was overtaking me once cleared to 6000, so I was assigned 7000, but given direct JYO - hard to beat that. I flew through one rain shower and the autopilot fought with the turbulence with occasional excursions through 20 degrees of bank and one chart flipping jolt.

For this flight though, I had full weather again and just monitored the radar images. Cheating. It was clear VMC for the whole trip with ceilings at about 8 or so. 44 miles and still 30 minutes from JYO, I had the beacon in sight. With 405 total flight hours as of this trip, I have still not had a weather scenario occur that convinces me that cockpit weather is as valuable as it costs. My thinking is that if it becomes a necessity while in flight, something is wrong with the pre-flight planning process. Yes, weather changes quickly and often, but at most GA airspeeds, it's not that much change. Maybe there is some regional weather variable to this.

As usual for a late night flight, I cancelled IFR once firmly planted on runway 17. 1.8 hours from TTN to JYO - 147 miles - or an avg gs of 82kts. Yikes!

JYO-ORH via JFKrazy

Leesburg, VA to Worcester (that's "wistah" for those of you who grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line) in 2.5 hours. Wheels left runway 35 at 1820, landed ORH runway 29 at 2055. Here is the flight track.



It was a fun flight. I called up clearance delivery at JYO and heard the magic words - "Cleared as filed..." Woohoo!

STILL WOOLY BAL V268 ENO V16 JFK V229 WITNY

Turning east out of JYO to WOOLY, ground speed was over 160 knots, and over BAL and down v268 speeds topped out at 171. Making the turn over BROSS, and heading north, speeds quickly slowed to 145, and continued a southbound trajectory toward 130 for most of the second half of the trip.

McGuire descended me down to 5000 passing CYN, only to have NY turn me 40 left and climb back to 7000 15 miles from JFK. The controller in the south departure sector off Kennedy was non-stop instructions, until the Saudi heavy jet started a two minute (that's not an exaggeration) rant about flight plans - on the wrong frequency. I would have to guess dispatch was on the other end. Oops. The NY controller gave him an earful, demonstrating how a similar dressing down can be done in only 12 seconds. ;)

After the vectored climb, it was direct Kennedy again. Then soon after passing over top the field, I was given 090 for 10 miles, then 30 left to join the airway soon after. The next controller cleared me direct Hartford after I checked in with a request for BDR, as I headed out over Long Island sound. That soon became direct ORH for the visual 29.

Spinning Decathlon

What a nice day to fly! The winds were light with a few scatterings of cumulus clouds at 4500'. Went over to VKX to work with Adam Cope and his Super Decathlon to meet the flight training requirements for stall spin awareness.

Here is a picture of the Super Decathlon.



After an extensive briefing on stalls and spins, and a lengthy suit up process with the chute, the flight began with some stalls and dutch rolls. This was great since it really brings home the experience of adverse yaw.

Climbing up to 3500' on the fringe of the DCA class bravo, we then performed some falling leaf stalls. In this maneuver, the goal is to understand the power of rudder authority. With the airplane set up in a stall, opposite rudder is applied to 'catch" the falling wing. As such, the airplane wallows in a nose up descent as the wings slowly oscillate back and forth from high to low, just as a leaf does. Of course, with good feet skills, this can be minimized a great deal.

Then it was time for incipient spins and fully developed spins. With the airplane stalled, kick the rudder and over we went. Two turns and then it was release the stall and pull out from the dive. Simple.

After a couple of those to the left and right, we did two fully developed spins with 5 rotations from 4500'. After two rotations the spin was fully developed and releasing the back pressure had NO EFFECT! The spin tightened and the rotation increased - a stabilized spin. Now, full opposite rudder to stop the rotation, and pull out of the dive. The first one came out at 2500' and 4.4 G's! 2000' of altitude loss in about 15 seconds (if that). The others also were good for 2000'...exactly. Weird, but most things in flying are mathematical, so not too surprising.

After another one of those, we were basically done. My stomach (more literally my brain) had had enough spinning. A simple three point landing (my first ever in a taildragger), and it was
a day. 1.0 on the hobbes meter. Will have to go do it again some time (on purpose) - it was a lot of fun!