PPL Test Part 3: from Gayndah back to Redcliffe

This is the third and final post on my PPL checkride last November, previous posts can be found here and here. Promised, I will go back soon to posting photos.

Short field take-off at Gayndah, and soon after the examiner pulls the throttle back to idle for a simulated EFATO (Engine Failure After Take-Off). It is generally considered poor practice to shut the engine down for simulating an engine failure, so running on idle is the next best thing. According to someone who has been through a real EFATO, there is a lot more drag from the windmilling propeller, less responsive controls and strong pilot denial when it's for real.

You have to love aviation for always coming up with five-letter acronyms. EFATO is just like a FLWOP (Forced Landing WithOut Power), the difference being you have a lot less time to react due to the proximity of the ground and the lower airspeed on climbout than in cruise. As an added bonus, if you stress the middle syllable, EFATO almost sounds like an insult in Italian.

The procedure drilled into me throughout the whole PPL training comes out easily: carby heat on, mixture full rich, fuel on (except there's no carby heat on a fuel-injected engine), trim for best glide speed, select a field within 30 degrees ahead of us and glide in that direction. I point to the examiner the paddock where I would go, he's happy with the choice and thinks we would make it. He asks for a go around. Full throttle, right rudder and away we climb.

In the corner of my eye I can see the Big Orange. Believe it or not, there are actually four Big Oranges in Australia, all in different states. The one in Gayndah houses the tourist information office. Not to be confused with the Big Pineapple, which features on the Brisbane VTC chart just west of Maroochydore airport. If you haven't been to Australia you can't understand the thing with Big Things. So far I've been to the Big Banana, Big Lobster and the Big Rocking Horse. Hopefully one day I'll visit Tamworth and finally pay homage to The Big Golden Guitar.

From Gayndah I establish myself on track for the Maleny VOR and turn the nose a couple of degrees right of our south-easterly track in order to offset the southerly wind. The examiner announces that upon reaching a certain point on the track, I will have to perform a diversion. That point is when we cross the Widebay Highway, 45 nautical miles from Gayndah, which gives me some time to get prepared. And the diversion will be to Kilcoy, 50 nautical miles after the diversion. The examiner is kind enough to turn the autopilot on for me while I struggle with re-folding the map and measuring distances and headings with my protactor and ruler.

I make a call to Center to tell them that at 46 nautical miles on the 307 radial of the Maleny VOR I will divert to Kilcoy. The controller pulls out my flight plan and seems confused as to whether I'm on the leg from Maroochydore to Gayndah or Gayndah back to Redcliffe. We clear the confusion and our flight plan is confirmed as amended. A few minutes later I turn onto the new heading. Now comes the time for instrument flying,

The examiner has me put on the hood and I start about 20 minutes of instrument flying, maintaining an altitude and a heading. I know the heading is wrong, since the moment when one puts the hood on is usually when the examiner takes advantage of the temporary blindness of the person in the left seat to mess with the directional gyro and get them lost. Fair enough. I fly whatever heading I have to fly and when told come out from under the hood. The idea now is to find out where I am.

I proceed methodically. Write down the time. Slow the airplane down to 80 knots, lower a stage of flaps, choose an anchor point and orbit around it. Given the time spent under the hood and how much the DG was off the magnetic compass, I draw a circle around where I should, in all likelihood, be. To the West I can see a lake with a dam and I am very relieved to find a lake with a dam inside the circle on the map. That's Borumba Reservoir. The rest matches, i.e. roads and nearby town, so I declare us unlost and the examiner is happy.

We track south to Kilcoy where I expect another engine failure, this time in cruise. I get it after we clear the ranges coming from the north, and luckily enough I am within gliding range of the Kilcoy grass runway. I plan an approach in such a way as to fly two legs of the circuit, taking into account the strong westerly wind. Yes, the wind has changed direction, a sure sign we should hurry up back home. I am lined up on final with the grass strip, and the examiner agrees I would make it.

Around we go for a bit of low-level following the D'Aguilar Highway in the direction of the coast. What follows is a standard approach to Recliffe, staying under the CTA steps. Radio call to Caboolture then landing at Redcliffe. Still high and fast, damn, third time in one day... I taxi back, park the aircraft between the hangars. The examiner goes back in and I clean up the aircraft. So far so good. I feel very very tired, this was a 3.8 hour flight, i.e. 3 hours and 48 minutes. I call CENSAR and cancel my SARTIME.

We managed to beat the weather and perform all the planned test flight. But the oral theoretical exam is till waiting. I take a little break and join the examiner in a briefing room. He looks at the Knowledge Deficiency Report from the theoretical exam and asks me questions about hypoxia, stall speed and the oil system as I expected. No problem here. He makes me double-check in the CAO that the maximum altitude for flights without supplemental oxygen is 10,000ft. Then he asks me a trick question about minimum runway width at unlicensed aerodromes. It takes me a while to find the right answer but I make it. He smiles, tell me I passed and shakes my hand. There's quite a bit of paperwork left, but that's of course quite a pleasure.

I would love to say that I was overjoyed at getting the PPL, but that would be a lie. What I felt instead was immense relief, and also a sense of emptiness. Something was clearly over. I had been waiting for that moment for the last 18 months, and the journey had been just as nice as the destination. Now, what next?

I understood for the first time why some people quit flying after obtaining their PPL. Going from zero to being able to fly an airplane safely to any destination with passengers is a big personal achievement in itself. My theory is that many people think they learn flying because they enjoy flying in itself, while in fact what attracts them is eventually knowing that they are capable of flying an aircraft, which is an entirely different thing.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And it is truly a massive personal achievement, no doubt. The closest thing I could compare it to is getting a PhD. You work hard on doing research for years, you get results, publications, write up a dissertation, the big day comes, and you finally get the degree. Only to realise this was only the first step in a lifelong pursuit of knowledge. Or the lifelong pursuit of tenure and research grants, but that's a different topic. Some people keep on doing research, others are just happy to have done it, get a regular, better paying job and maybe add "Dr" in front of their name on their credit card.

So that concludes the PPL chapter of this blog. Learning to fly was a very big part of my life for 18 months but not all my life. In the meantime I also managed to propose to the woman of my dreams, get married, obtain Permanent Residency in Australia, change jobs and change town. It's been a busy but very fulfilling time.

Thanks for reading that far. More adventures to come in the next months with learning to fly Pipers in Sydney, getting a retractable endorsement and possibly a night rating next Winter. And hopefully there'll be plenty of trips to remote landing strips or fly-ins to report on. Stay tuned!

Engine start-up sequence in the 172SP

A friend I took on a local flight recently recorded a video of the engine start-up sequence for the Cessna 172SP. It's the regular start-up sequence straight from the flight manual. The engine is a fuel-injected Lycoming IO-360-L2A.

Since this was the first flight of the day, the engine had to be primed prior to start-up. This is done by setting the mixture to full rich (pushing the red knob all the way forward) and turning the electric fuel pump on for about 6 seconds, until the needle on the fuel flow gauge comes to life and gives a stable reading.

As surprising as it may sound, a stable needle on the fuel flow gauge does not indicate a stabilized fuel flow. It indicates a stabilized pressure in the fuel lines.

The distinction between pressure and fuel flow does not matter in flight: the position of the needle on the gauge is driven by a fuel pressure sensor and the gauge is marked in gallons per hour because fuel pressure and fuel flow always go hand in hand. Someone in the Lycoming lab probably one day used a piece of equipment that directly measures fuel flow and painstakingly painted ticks on the face of a fuel pressure gauge. The final touch consisted in writing FUEL FLOW in big vertical capital letters on the right-hand side of the needle.

Things are a little different at start-up because, of course, the engine is not yet running. Fuel lines most likely contain fuel vapors and not liquid fuel because liquid fuel evaporated or dripped out since the engine was last shut down.

The role of the electric fuel pump is to push fuel down the fuel lines to the fuel manifold valve and from there to the fuel discharge nozzles, effectively filling up the lines with liquid fuel and getting rid of fuel vapors. Because fuel can only escape through the tiny holes of the discharge nozzles, pressure in the fuel lines rises and stabilizes. That's when the needle on the fuel flow gauge stops moving. The engine is ready for ignition.

Ignition needs to happen as soon as possible after priming, otherwise fuel may drip down the air intake pipe and cause a fire hazard. This is because this engine features indirect injection which delivers fuel at the intake port, i.e. upstream from the intake valve that allows the fuel/air mixture into the cylinder. The other sort of fuel injection, direct injection, delivers fuel directly into the combustion chamber of the cylinder, and is referred to as "common rail" in car marketing brochures.

Turning the ignition key makes the electric starter motor rotate the engine, which makes the magnetos deliver high-voltage electricity to the spark plugs with some help from the impulse coupling, which in turn ignites the fuel-air mixture in the cylinders.

One peculiarity of starting this fuel-injected engine is that it is done with the mixture on idle cut-off, i.e. full lean. The mixture is then quickly advanced to full rich once the cylinders start to fire. Why this is so I do not know. According to a thread I read on pprune.org some time ago, fuel-injected Continental engines work the opposite, they are started with the mixture in the full rich position. Go figure. I guess that's the point where pilots should stop asking questions and just trust what the POH says.

Nav6: Solo tick at last

Remember how a few things went well but how I also busted controlled airspace on Nav 6 last May? As a logical consequence, it was decided that I would do the controlled airspace part of this navigation exercise again.

I got around to doing this so-called supp nav (for supplementary navigation exercise) only in the first half of August. The three-month delay can be explained by a long overseas trip I took in June and later by a combination of sick instructors, bad weather, and a very busy booking sheet at the Redcliffe Aero Club.

Let me kill any sense of suspense right from the onset by saying that yes, I received a tick to move on to Nav7, which is a solo nav in controlled airspace. Congratulations to me then, even though the flight was far from perfect.

The plan was to go from Redcliffe to Gold Coast through the controlled airspace around Brisbane airport then to the GAAP airport of Archerfield via the Laravale VOR before heading to Toowoomba and eventually going back home.

The airplane VH-SPP and the instructor were booked for the afternoon only, so I had the whole morning to prepare for the flight. At 1PM Mal rocked up and I was ready to go, with maps drawn, flight planned, weather and NOTAM checked, airplane pre-flighted and refueled.

We took off on 25, climbed to 1500ft and requested our airways clearance through Class C airspace. The approach frequency was very busy with incoming jet traffic into Brisbane. While waiting I orbited overhead the aerodrome at 1500ft, which was not a very smart thing to do, as I realised later during the debrief.

I couldn't go higher since 1500ft is the lower limit of the overlying controlled airspace. But 1500ft also happens to be the altitude at which other airplanes inbound to Redcliffe from the north overfly the field on their way to the dead side before joining the circuit.


To make matters worse, I was listening to Brisbane Approach and not to the CTAF frequency since I was waiting for my clearance, and given the congestion on the frequency I didn't fancy having to ask the controller to say again. This means that I wouldn't even have known if there had been a flight inbound. Not good.

In hindsight, orbiting near Castlereagh Point at 1500ft would have been a lot better since my track wouldn't have infringed on the circuit. I'm sure this was covered at some point in a briefing in the past, but it somewhat managed to fall between the cracks. One more item on the list of things to do better next time.

We eventually got cleared for Hornibrook Viaduct, Brisbane Control Tower, Manly Boat Harbour and Jacobs Well VOR at 1500ft, with a clearance limit at the tower. This is the standard clearance for transiting this airspace and is actually published in the Flight Plan Requirements section of the ERSA.

Obviously, since this was a dual nav and I was being assessed, even I could realise that taking pictures in-flight, even for blogging purpose, was not a smart idea. So I didn't. I was lucky enough though to fly twice to Sydney on business the week after, which allowed me to take a few pictures to illustrate this post. On both flights the Qantas airliner flew via the Laravale VOR, which took me back to the same neck of the woods where this Nav took place.

I took the picture below from a Qantas Boeing 767 soon after take-off from Brisbane. You can see the control tower right under the wing of the aeroplane. Redcliffe is the peninsula right below the horizon and to the right. In-between Redcliffe and the airport is Bramble Bay. The Hornibrook Viaduct is on the far side of the bay, somewhat up from the Domestic Terminal.

Back to the nav in the Cessna 172. Approaching Brisbane control tower, the controller asked us to track for the threshold of runway 19 where two Virgin jets were waiting for take-off. We continued on to Manly Boat Harbor, after what we left controlled airspace and tracked to Gold Coast via the Jacobs Well VOR at 1500ft. Manly Boat Harbour is visible near the center of the picture below. The winglet belongs to a Qantas Boeing 737-800.

This time I made sure that I Tuned-Identified-Tested all the navaids, which was an issue the last time when I confused the Gold Coast VOR with the Jacobs Well VOR. Speaking of Jacobs Well, I was at the West End Market recently when the name Jacobs Well jumped up at me from the label of an egg box.


I so wanted to do a good job of using the navaids that I spent an awful lot of time with my head in the cockpit. Not good. I should of course have spent more time looking outside the window and use my planned heading and time intervals at the primary navigation aid, and only use the navaids as a secondary navigation aid. Especially on that day, the visibility was excellent, which made dead reckoning a piece of cake, especially when you're aiming for Q1, the world's tallest residential tower.


I made a call when 10 nautical miles to the north of Southport aerodrome to let everyone in the area know that I would be tracking nearly overhead the aerodrome at 1500ft then I switched back to the area frequency. In hindsight, I should have treated the Southport CTAF with a lot more caution, remaining on the frequency and making more calls while there was a risk that I would interfere with traffic coming in or out of Southport, or even doing circuits there. One more item for the do-better-next-time list.

Approaching Q1 at 1500ft I requested a clearance from Gold Coast tower. A controller came back saying I was actually talking to Gold Coast Ground, not Gold Coast Tower, and would I please remain outside of Class C airspace while requesting my clearance on the right frequency this time. Oops...

What happened was that I had read (what I thought was) the tower frequency as 121.8 in the TAC chart for Brisbane, while the correct frequency was 118.7. To be honest, I find the line in the box that reads "TWR 121.8/118.7" very misleading. Of course, I wouldn't have had this problem if I had read it out of the ERSA or even from the VTC chart. Or if I had listened to the frequency long enough to hear the callsign of the ATS unit. I guess one lives to learn...


Once on the right frequency we received a clearance for making a visual approach to Runway 32 with a right base turn. My base leg was a bit too close to the runway and when I turned final the preceding aircraft was just touching down. It was a small Cessna so no problem with wake turbulence, but for a moment I thought I would have to go around. I was actually cleared to land and did an acceptable landing, much better than the time when I just fell onto the runway at the same airport.

We taxied to the GA parking, taxied back to the holding point for Runway 32 soon after and took off. Our airways clearance was to track for the Laravale VOR at 4500ft. We had originally asked for 6500ft, but I guess they wanted to get us out of their airspace as quickly as possible.

A couple of minutes after take-off the tower controller for Gold Coast asked us to turn our transponder on. The first thought that crossed my mind was that for some reason the transponder had failed. Blaming instruments is so much easier. Then I looked at the mode switch and realised it was still on "SBY" and not on "ALT". Oops. I should have turned it on before calling ready at the holding point, which I didn't do obviously. Instrument OK, pilot defective.

I couldn't pick up the Laravale VOR because of the mountain range between us and the station. And I forgot that I could use the corresponding outbound radial of the Gold Coast VOR. So I flew the heading and once over the ranges I picked up the Laravale VOR and I wasn't too much off track. Approaching the station Mal put me under the hood for a dozen minutes after which I had to perform a lost procedure, i.e. finding where I was.

This went fine, and after that Mal asked me to go to the township of Beaudesert by flying low level and following the road. This was as simple as following the highway, being mindful of not overflying house at less than 1000ft. Soon after Beaudesert we saw the Park Ridge water tower. Mal asked me to request a clearance to overfly Archerfield on our way back to Redcliffe.

On the picture below, taken from the same 767 mentioned earlier, this would mean flying from left to right. Archerfield aerodrome is near the center of the picture, with runway 28R/10L clearly visible as a dark strip oriented top left/bottom right. To the back is the Brisbane river. To the left is the Centenary Bridge, a reporting point when coming in from the north. Near the right side of the picture is the Indooroopilly Bridge, a tracking point when flying out of Archerfield to the north.

So we tracked for overhead the runway at 1500ft. A Metroliner was taking off on runway 28R as we overflew the runway at 1500ft. It was also tracking north, but at 1000ft and was much much faster than us.

A few minutes later we landed on 25 at Redcliffe, taxied back to the hangar and I cleaned up the airplane and canceled SARTIME. We had a half-hour debrief during which Mal greatly enriched my list of things to do better in the future. The objective of this nav were met though, so Mal gave me the tick to move on to Nav7. I'm really looking forward to it. This will be my second solo nav, and given how much of a blast the first one was, I can hardly wait to take the airplane somewhere else than Redcliffe all on my own.

And I have a little handy GPS tracking device that will add a new dimension to such blog posts in the future. More on that next time.