New Pilot

The acquired skill of cross-country planning

To go, or no? Learning how to make the decision, execute the plan, analyze the results, and modify the technique for the next time is a rite of passage for every pilot. If things don't go exactly as planned, don't jump to the conclusion that some major flaw exists in your flight-planning ability.

Planning cross-country flying is an acquired skill. Weather fronts can slow down, speed up, stall, or produce unexpected precipitation, confounding forecasts. Fog expected to lift by 9 a.m. may hang around until noon, delaying departures. Scattered cloud decks can unexpectedly thicken up to broken or overcast, with lower bases or higher tops than forecast. External factors — such as a long day at work, a traffic jam on the way to the airport, or a suspicious indication during the runup — can throw clouds of doubt over your plans.

As if that wasn't enough to consider, pilots often find themselves torn between their discomfort about flight conditions and promises made to friends, family, or the boss that the aircraft will arrive at a certain place at a certain time. Learning how to maintain that problem in perspective keeps many bad decision- making temptations at bay. We face some combination of these issues each time we consider a flight; and most of the time, we make the decision and the rest is routine. But when the flight is a long one — perhaps with an overnight stay at the destination — or when the on-board equipment and pilot experience levels impose additional limitations on flying, a whole new set of factors enters the equation.

You may feel a bit sheepish about postponing a seemingly easy trip or rescheduling a return leg, but if safety demands it, defend your decision not to fly against your better judgment. Plan conservatively, be skeptical about forecasts, leave yourself plenty of extra time for safety margins, and be flexible about making the necessary changes to your plans. Before liftoff, pilots flying with passengers should make sure that the folks aboard understand that plans may have to be changed. Experienced fliers and new students alike must grapple with the ever-changing dynamics of the go/no-go equation, as one new aviator with a pretty good working knowledge of "the system" recently discovered.

The student pilot — an FAA flight service specialist experienced at giving (but not using) pilot weather briefings — arose early, obtained a briefing, and filed a flight plan for his first solo cross-country. All indications were that the 90-minute flight could be completed with hours to spare before any nasty weather moved in. Of course, there were some delays in getting started. The fuel truck doesn't always arrive right away at your tie-down spot, and you can't just walk through the terminal without saying hello to other pilots.

Slightly behind schedule but still unconcerned, the student pilot launched and noted with relief that a 5,200-foot mountain located just north of the destination airport was visible almost immediately after takeoff.

Going home was another matter. Groundspeed into the gathering headwind was down to 80 knots, and it was getting bumpy up there. Scattered clouds at about 1,500 feet agl could be seen in the vicinity of the home field. The automatic terminal information service (ATIS) broadcast proved interesting, too: Runway 15 was in use, as it had been earlier, but the surface winds had increased from 8 knots to 18 and had shifted to a direct crosswind — all well in advance of forecast deterioration of conditions.

The first landing attempt resulted in a go-around. Diverting to a nearby airport with ztwo runways (and arriving late for work) was going to be Plan B; but on the second try, the wind let up a bit and the pilot was able to land.

When fronts are on the move, what they'll do and when they'll do it are anybody's guess. When doubts do crop up, staying home — or staying put until conditions become more favorable — can prevent bad circumstances from becoming worse. Looking back on many years of flying light, slow aircraft on long cross-country trips makes me realize that most of my delayed departures occurred when I was coming home from somewhere, rather than heading out.

During one 13-hour drive, the skeptical questions that flowed from the lips of the two other people in the vehicle — neither of whom had yet recovered from the surprise of learning that we would be leaving the Cessna in Maryland and driving home to Maine — subjected my no-fly decision to a most severe test. A warm front that should have behaved itself and slid northeast out of the picture had gone stationary instead, straddling our route home. With cloud decks at various levels from 2,000 feet all the way up to Flight Level 200 and the possibility of icing in any of them, the weather was out of our league.

Making the decision wasn't difficult — the telephone weather briefing that I received, alone in the motel room while my friends visited a relative in Virginia, took care of that. Sticking with it is often the hard part. As the protests began to mount, it surprised me how eager non-pilot passengers sometimes can be to place themselves in dangerous situations over which they will have absolutely no control. The pilot must use his or her good judgment for all parties concerned and not give in to anything, from cajoling to dire threats about the problems that will be caused by the delay.

The greater likelihood of a delayed return comes as no surprise: The further into the future one must gaze to divine conditions, the more vulnerable one becomes to new twists in the plot. One rule of thumb seems to be that when the pilot is flying more than 100 miles or staying at the destination overnight, there is a dramatic increase in the odds that something unexpected will happen (either for better or worse, from a flight-planning point of view). Never rule out renting a car or spending the night at a local motel.

The go/no-go decision will always be one part art, one part science. With practice and patience, the new pilot will become skillful in both. The science — processing the available information and developing a feel for its strengths and weaknesses over both the short and long terms — can be practiced seven days a week, whether flying or not, by procuring aviation weather forecasts for the local area or proposed routes. Look them over, then see what kind of weather actually develops. The real education will occur in playing the cards that you are dealt, in the place where you find yourself when you are dealt them. When you alone must make the decision for others, confront that responsibility with the same care you would expect them to use if it was your well-being in their hands.

How It Works: Engine Basics

By Marc E. Cook

Compared to automobile or motorcycle engines, aviation powerplants are simple and, some say, crude. Yet as you are learning to fly, that jiggly old noisemaker ahead of the firewall holds both mystery and suspense. What's going on up there? Will it continue to run while I cross this ridge line?

You'll probably hear a lot about aircraft engines being one step up the food chain from your average lawn mower's or garden tractor's, and in the grossest of simplifications, that's true. Airplane powerplants are, save for a few rebels, simplistic, air- cooled, horizontally opposed, four-stroke internal-combustion devices with low operating speeds and low specific output. If you had to describe an automobile equivalent closest to the aviation average, you'd have to point to the venerable Volkswagen Beetle powerplant.

As with the People's Car, the vast majority of piston powerplants in service today use the Otto-cycle, invented by Nikolaus August Otto in 1876. Also called four stroke or four cycle, these engines contain a cylinder into which is fitted a piston; the piston acts on a crankshaft through a connecting rod. The crankshaft, which in most airplane applications is bolted directly to the propeller, translates the piston's linear (back and forth) motions to rotational work.

In the Otto-cycle scheme, there are four distinct cycles, differentiated by strokes of the piston inside the cylinder. On the first stroke, the piston moves downward, drawing fuel and air through a homeowner's nightmare of plumbing to the combustion chamber inside the cylinder. The second stroke sees the piston rising in the bore, compressing this mixture. Fuel in plain form is not particularly volatile — that is, it won't ignite with the slightest provocation. But compressed, it will. Typical aircraft engines attempt to compress this mixture by a factor of between 6.5 and 8.5; this is called the compression ratio. Compression ratio is actually measured by determining the volume of the entire cylinder with the piston at the bottom of the stroke BDC (bottom dead center) to the volume with the piston at the top of the stroke TDC (top dead center). The total volume of all the cylinders measured at BDC is called displacement. So the 1.6-liter engine in your car has a displacement of 1.6 liters (about 96 cubic inches), and the Lycoming O-235 has a displacement of about 235 cubic inches.

Once the piston has compressed the mixture, a spark plug (or two, in aviation applications) lights off the mixture. The resulting explosion pushes the piston toward BDC and is called the power stroke. A final trip upward in the bore has the piston forcing the spent gases through the exhaust system and into the skies.

Movement of intake and exhaust gases into and out of the cylinder is managed by tulip-shaped valves placed at the top of the cylinder head. The valves are, in turn, activated by short rocker arms through long pushrods (you'll find them above the crankshaft on most Lycomings and below on Continentals). A camshaft, basically a steel rod with egg-shaped lobes along its length, activates the pushrods through film can-sized lifters (or hydraulic lash adjusters) in the engine case directly adjacent to the camshaft and rocker arms at the valve end of the pushrods.

To better understand the hardware layout, let's look at the Lycoming O-235 as used in the Cessna 152; other common types, like the Continental O-200 in the Cessna 150 and other versions of both marques' powerplants, share the same basic layout. Incidentally, these model numbers mean something. The O stands for opposed; the banks of cylinders are 180 degrees from each other, or flat, like the Beetle's engine. (Smarmy engineers sometimes call these 180- degree V engines, but what do they know?) The next number is the total displacement of the engine in cubic inches, rounded to the nearest 0 or 5. An I in the prefix denotes fuel injection. For Continentals, a TS prefix means turbocharged — or, "turbosupercharged" — and for Lycomings you'll find a T prefix. Presence of a G in the prefix declares a geared engine — or one in which the propeller turns more slowly than the engine itself; the vast majority of the popular engines are direct drive, however. These prefixes are additive, so a GTSIO-520 is a geared, turbocharged, injected, opposed, 520-cubic-inch engine. Suffixes to the displacement denote variations of the type. A Lycoming O-235- C2A is, for instance, a 115-hp version of the engine, while the O- 235-F2A is one with 10 more horsepower.

So much for the numbers. Put simply, an internal-combustion engine makes power by converting heat into motion. The heat comes from the burning of fuel (combined with a lot of air, typically at a ratio of 15:1). Because they are air cooled, the cylinders employ fine fins — not like a 1959 Cadillac's — to help to promote transfer of heat produced in the combustion process to the airflow directed around them by the cowling and metal baffles around the cylinders.

The cylinder is made up of a cast aluminum head permanently- -at least as far as the pilot is concerned — mated to a steel barrel that can be coated or treated with any number of processes.

If you compare the average airplane engine to the latest in cars coming from Germany, Japan, or Detroit, you'll be mighty disappointed. You won't find high-tech electronic fuel injection, overhead camshafts, stratospheric redline speeds, or engineer- pleasing high specific output. But the engines are designed to run at maximum rated power for a long time; 2,000 hours in an automobile is 110,000 miles, and the car is using on average about 20-percent power. Think about that when crossing the next ridge line during that cross-country trip.

Practice Area: Famous Last Words in Aviation

By William K. Kershner

While I was going to school at Iowa State University in the spring of 1950, I flew as an instructor out of the Nevada, Iowa, airport on weekends. This helped with income and gave me a break from too much studying, which I had already decided interfered with the enjoyment of college life.

The Taylorcraft BC-12D was fun to fly, and instructing out of a 2,300-foot grass strip with that airplane (considered a floater by some) would seem more of a challenge today than then. But a 20- year-old male has few doubts about his ability.

Central Iowa had a plethora of open fields; in the event of an engine failure you could set up a minimum-descent glide in any direction and be pretty well assured of a successful touchdown — even with your eyes shut. Or so it was said.

On the day in question, I was flying with a student at 5,000 feet agl (above ground level), a high altitude indeed for the T-craft. The reason we climbed that high is forgotten, but there we were, doing stalls, or slow flight, or maybe spins. Students were given spins and recoveries pretty much as a matter of routine in those days.

I gave the student a high-altitude emergency as a way to get down lower for some wind drift correction maneuvers.

Making some assumptions and rounding off the altitude to one (statute) mile above the terrain, and with the T-craft's having a 10:1 glide ratio (I think it could slightly beat this), it can be determined that the airplane could be landed anywhere within a 314-square- mile area surrounding the "cut" position, throttle at idle at 5,000 feet.

It was not to be.

Within that 314 square miles was a wooded area approximately one-half by one mile, with a clearing or pasture in the exact middle.

This pasture had an irresistible attraction to the student — and whether he felt that the other 313-plus square miles were too easy for his ability or he had tunnel vision, I don't know — but we spiraled down over the clearing.

I wanted to see if he was waiting for me to advise him or if he really did feel that this little pasture was the best place to put the airplane.

I took over while we were still low over the woods approaching the tennis court-sized landing area. I was especially careful with the use of carburetor heat and clearing the engine because, frankly, I didn't think this was the best spot; it wasn't Midway Airport, anyway.

I climbed the airplane out, circled low over the woods, pointed out his shortcomings for choosing such a spot to land, and commented that "I wouldn't land there if my life depended on it."

There was a large "Bang!" from the engine and smoke came into the cabin.

We were too low over the woods to make it to the "good" fields abundant from altitude, so with radical slipping and fishtailing, I landed — fortunately without scratching the airplane — in my student's chosen field (the little pasture). I found out later that a cylinder had failed.

While I was braking hard to avoid entering the woods, the student said, "I thought you said...."

"Shut up," I carefully explained.

The blown cylinder was changed and the (now lighter) airplane was flown out after a couple of days.

Other famous last words in aviation have included:

1. If this tailwind holds up, we won't have to make an interim stop for fuel.
2. I know we're pretty heavily loaded, but there's plenty of runway.
3. An intersection takeoff will save us a couple of minutes.
4. We can beat the squall line if we get out in the next five minutes.
5. I don't need to check the fuel; I saw the fuel truck by the airplane, and I told line service to fill it up.
6. This gas smells a little different, but I'm sure it's OK.
7. Don't worry about those reports of heavy icing. I've flown flights like this and never even picked up a trace.
8. Crosswind? Relax, I can land the box it came in with more crosswind than this.

Or my famous line to another pilot just before we flew across Memphis to pick up an airplane. We were preflighting an Aeronca Champion that had been sitting out for several weeks and had been drained of what seemed like several gallons of water:

"There, that's got all the water."

Twenty minutes later the Champ was sitting in a cabbage patch between four houses in a subdivision. The destination airport was about one-half mile away. One of the homeowners, hearing a strange noise in his backyard, walked around the house; the look on his face would have broken up both of us if we hadn't been still staggered by the transition from godlike birdmen to occupants of the muddiest garden in western Tennessee.

There was a language problem since it appeared (but was not confirmed) that the gentleman had only recently arrived from some European country. We explained as best we could and thanked him for his wire fence that had slowed us to such an extent that our final touchdown was gentle indeed.

In any event, the airplane was moved to the airport, repaired, and later ferried to the final destination.

And a personal case of famous last words that weren't really "last" words (fortunately):

The Combat Information Center indicated that Red Chinese snoopers were flying in the vicinity of the task force and needed interception.

We manned our F4U Corsairs, started the engines back in the "pack," and prepared for a quick deck run and vector to intercept the Red airplanes.

I was about the fourth or fifth in line and, after starting the engine, found that there was no indication of oil pressure — zilch, nada, nicht. Earlier we had had problems with the oil pressure transmitters; so, after the plane captain had checked the area behind, I elected to run up the engine at a high power setting to check for an unusual oil temperature rise during the (very) few minutes before launch.

"It's only the gauge," I said. I didn't want to miss all the excitement.

The deck run was normal; but during the first two or three minutes on climbout, that oil temperature gauge had my total attention. It turned out to be the gauge only. The snoopers turned back and were not intercepted. There were no hometown newspaper headlines such as "Local boy destroys an entire flight (squadron, group) of Red airplanes! Gets Navy Cross plus 20 or 30 other awards!"

And, of course, there are the most famous last words of all: "I don't think the ceiling is as low as they report. I'll drop down a little lower and see if we can break out."