First Flying Day
First things first. Damn, it was hot! 34 degrees on the ramp and no air conditioning.
Henderson Airport is spectacular and just shows what you can have when the state is paying for something and it doesn’t have to turn a profit!
A fantastic terminal building, great restaurant and some lovely machinery sat on the apron.
I’m sorry to say that I didn’t take any pictures whilst flying today – my brain was just too frazzled to start messing around with the camera. I did, however capture the GPS track so I’ll slot in some Google Earth images as compensation.
Before I go on, I have to say one thing. The staff at Cactus Aviation are all absolutely brilliant – you could not ask to meet a bunch of nicer people.
Right – new stuff to learn, namely wobbly propeller, retractable undercarriage and lots of different airspace. So after an hour long briefing, we headed out to the aircraft.
I’ve clocked up about 7 hours on the PA28′s at Lyneham so am familiar with the type which made things more straightforward. One new addition to the run up tests is cycling the propeller, but apart from that, the pre-departure checks were the same.
I am a living disaster on the radio. It’s like being a 8 hour student again. I keep saying ‘November’ when you don’t need to and I’m sure a ‘Golf’ or two slipped in there. The ground and tower stuff I can just about cope with although it’s all very fast and quite a bit of ‘informal’ language is used. One thing I immediately noticed though is that you have to say a heck of a lot less than you do back home. There’s no calling final, and you don’t have to tell ATC when you are leaving their frequency. Both things I found a bit odd.
Where I really fell to pieces was with the non-towered stuff… In the US they have something a bit like our SafetyCom channel, except they are on published frequencies and shared by more than one airfield – often many miles apart. You really have to listen out and make sure what you’re hearing is meant for you, and all calls are both prefixed and suffixed with the airfield name. I really struggled with this on a number of levels. Firstly, lots of unfamiliar place names – I had no idea half the time where we were! Secondly, I really don’t know what to say in the first place! I’m sure it will come to me soon!
The Arrow is an exceedingly heavy aircraft. You really need to haul it off the ground, but once it gets going, the rate of climb is pretty impressive.
Departure to the south east from Henderson is interesting. You have to aim for a fairly narrow gap in the mountains in order to slot in between terrain and class B airspace. It’s a pretty impressive sight as when you pass the ridge, the ground rapidly drops away beneath you to reveal a dry sand bed.
We climbed to 6000 feet and did steep turns, stalls with power off, stalls with power on, practice forced landing and simulated gear failure.
Airwork done, we set course for Bullhead City using the Garmin 430 GPS where I then proceeded to do one of my worst landings ever. Completely screwed up the flare. The constant speed propeller is really confusing me at the moment. I’m used to whacking some power on to climb, and pulling it off to descent. All it seems to do with a CS unit is make you go faster and slower. I’m going to seek some clarification on that tomorrow and do a bit of reading tonight.
We departed Bullhead and decided to head over to Kingman. Now what a strange place that is. Huge two runway airfield – just a guesstimate, but I’d say considerably bigger than Gloucester for example – yet it’s completely uncontrolled. Not even air-ground radio. And this place had passenger jets on the ground, dozens of them. All brand new still with their protective plastic bits on obviously awaiting delivery.
There was little or no wind so we picked a runway at random and headed back to Henderson…
… where I did three more shockingly bad circuits …
2.8 hours logged today. I need to get 10 in by the end of the weekend so should be good to go!
Agenda for the next day… Yes, circuits!
Here’s my track in Google Maps
I promise to take photos next time!
April 3, 2011 at 06:59
Really interesting blog. Just been reading up on Kingman airport – a lot of history attached to the place (World War II era) – fascinating.