The day after I played chase plane for Len, Saturday dawned a pretty morning as well, although weather forecasts predicted some cloudy skies on the way and a definite uptick in the winds in the afternoon. Today’s mission was taking a number of boxes of CAP Wing Historian related materials from our basement and delivering them to Syracuse (KSYR) to the new Wing Historian.
(Sidebar: Yes, after 22.5 years in Civil Air Patrol, I changed from “active” to “patron” status. Time commitments and other issues made it a good time to step back for a while from CAP. However, there’s another flying-related project that I’m working at that hopefully will take-off in the next couple of months (literally and figuratively) and I’ll fill you all in then.)
Out at the airport, I pulled the POH (pilot’s operating handbook) for 988M so that I could get accurate information on the current weight and balance and useful load stats for the airplane. I also checked the fuel tanks to find (unfortunately) the tanks were fully topped off. While normally a good thing, a full fuel load meant that we would have less useful load available for the flight. (Useful load is defined as the weight of the pilot, passengers, baggage, useable fuel and drainable oil. The maximum allowable gross weight – basic empty weight = useful load. For 988M, useful load is approximately 1200lbs.) But full tanks (88 gals useful ) is 528 lbs. Michiko and I make up another 330lbs or so…Therefore, the actual useful load starts quickly diminish when you’re adding a good number of 30lb boxes.
After calculating the weight and balance and ensuring we were well within the center of gravity limitations (eg the airplane would remain balanced in flight) by a solid safety margin, I filed our VFR flight plan and got my briefing.
The linesmen let us bring the car out onto the ramp to pack the airplane, which I did carefully, ensuring that things were snug and secure, even putting seatbelts around the boxes on the back seat! We had weighed and marked each box, so Michiko triplechecked the number and weight of each box as I loaded them to ensure we only took what the plane would handle with generous margins for safety. I then did a very careful and thorough pre-flight.
Soon we were lined up and departing Runway 29 with a slight turn to the right to put us on our course towards SYR. We had filed for 4,500 feet and our intended route was IGN (Kingston VOR)(northeast of Poughkeepsie) to DNY (De Lancey VOR (east of Walton NY in the Adirondacks) to GGT (Georgetown VOR)(southeast of Syracuse) and then direct to SYR. Instead of staying at 4,500 though, we ended up climbing all the way up to 7,000 feet to stay above the clouds. We had flight following, so ATC was happy with us staying at that altitude, even though it wasn’t the proper one for our direction of VFR flight (technically we should have been at 6,500 or 8,500, but 6,500 would have been too near the clouds).
The flight was uneventful—Michiko was bored pretty quickly. We didn’t really get to see much of the ground for good chunks of the flight because the cloud layer was broken to overcast. About 20 min out from Syracuse, the clouds starting breaking up a bit, and I found a good sized hole we could get safely down through, so we desceded to 3,500 feet. Under the clouds, it was a bit of light turbulence, so Michiko was less bored and less happy with the bouncing around. As Syracuse Approach vectored us a bit to make priority for a Lifeguard flight (air ambulence jet), Michiko muttered they should stop vectoring us around as we got bumped along. Soon we were cleared to land on 9,000 foot long Runway 28 which worked out perfectly, as the FBO is just on the left side at the other end of the runway.
The folks at Landmark were terrific, bringing a dolly out and unloading the boxes while I called CAP contacts to meet us at the FBO. The trip up had only been about 1.5 hours, so since fuel was $7/gallon and we still had a solid 4+ hours of fuel on board, I decided to skip buying fuel. The woman at the desk was kind enough to waive the steep ramp fee as well, since we were doing a quick turn trip (leaving as soon as the boxes were picked up) and it was in support of CAP—that was a very kind gesture and will certainly have me returning to Landmark facilities when I travel!
After a quick handoff to my CAP colleagues, I filed the VFR flight plan for the return. It lead to an interesting discussion with the briefer who said the tower had only closed my northbound flight plan 8 minutes earlier (despite being on the ground 35 min). He laughed and said they had recently had a tower guy come around for an orientation of what the flight service briefers do. The tower guy had commented that he had NEVER in his career closed a VFR plan for pilots…wow. He just assumed that when pilots asked him to cancel/close their VFR plan that they meant cancel the flight following. No wonder there’s always some confusion.
Knowing what conditions had been like on the trip up, I filed for 7,500 feet for the flight back. Calling up ground control, I gave them my info and said we’d request an initial departure to the east (where there weren’t any clouds) in order to climb up to 7,500 before heading south. Cleared to taxi, we passed the NY Air National Guard ramp, where I was surprised to see a MQ-9 Reaper (an unmanned aerial vehicle “UAV”)(smaller version of the attack UAVs being used in Afghanistan/Pakistan and other locales) being prepped for a flight. Apparently, the unit at Syracuse recently shifted from the F-16 to the Reaper—what a sad day that must have been for the pilots especially!!
The flight home was uneventful until we got down to the Adirondacks. For the first time, I experienced a mountain wave on the windward side of the mountains. Despite being trimmed out, the plane started to climb on its own and the airspeed started to drop off. I quickly re-scanned the manifold pressure, rpm, oil pressure and temps to ensure the engine was running smoothly—it had almost struck me as a sudden power loss—but all was good. Then I figured out that it must have been the tailwind we had, getting pushed up by the slopes of the Adirondacks. Freaked me out for a second.
Just southeast of the Adirondacks, the clouds looked to be thickening, so I found a hole on the lee side of the mountains to descend below the cloud deck. Unfortunately, it again meant that the last 20 min or so of the flight was pretty bumpy for Michiko, but she was a good sport about it, though she did say that I owed her a very good lunch or dinner for the discomfort I was causing.
Happily, I made a soft landing for her and we were quickly tied down and made short time of the paperwork and were soon on our way. (Ironically, the “good lunch” turned out to be a trip to Super Duper Weenie, one of the country’s best hot dog stands, which just happens to be in Fairfield!)