Nav6: Errol Flynn in command

Relating what happened to me on Nav6 is going to take more than one post. It’s not that this flight was any longer than the previous ones. It's simply that the first leg was a comedy of errors so farcical it will take a full post just to list all the mistakes I managed to cram into not even one hour. Hopefully someone can learn from my mistakes, or at least have a good laugh.

This training flight was a dual navigation exercise for the purpose of assessing whether I was ready to go solo into controlled airspace. The first leg of the flight took us from Redcliffe to Gold Coast at 1500ft. This was the same route as on Nav5, but the lower altitude meant I had to exit Class C controlled airspace after transiting Brisbane International and re-enter it approaching Gold Coast.

The night before, I had made sure that everything that could be prepared before the flight was prepared. I had a cheat sheet with all the frequencies I would need for the whole flight, in the order in which they would most likely be needed. I even had an enlarged printout of the Gold Coast airport diagram with enough space to write down clearances and ATIS. All NOTAMs were printed out, read and relevant ones highlighted. Pencils sharpened, maps folded, ruler, ERSA and protractor within reach in the cockpit. I was more prepared for the flight than I had ever been.

After start-up I dialled the first frequencies I would need to talk on as well as that of the navaids. I requested a code while taxying, took off on 25 and switched to Brisbane Radar for my clearance. They identified us and handed me over to Brisbane Approach who issued the expected clearance for transiting Brisbane International: Hornibrook Viaduct, Brisbane Control Tower, Manly Boat Harbor and then direct to the Jacobs Well VOR.

Our traffic was a Bell helicopter coming in the opposite direction, which we only spotted when it flew by us, despite having all 4 eyes looking outside. We switched to tower who asked us to go behind a single-engine light aircraft which was landing on runway 19. After that we tracked for Manly Boat Harbor, which for a moment I confused with the Cleveland boat harbor, right behind it. Lee was kind enough to give me a nudge on this one, and I turned to intercept radial 146 of JCW.

Once the radial intercepted, we tracked for the Jacobs Well VOR. Or what I thought was JCW. Because, you see, I had forgotten to properly Tune-Identify-Test it. And it very rightfully came back to bite me. I found out later that I had tuned in Gold Coast VOR (CG) instead. The error was not obvious at first because radial 146 of JCW and radial 146 of CG are only one mile apart. I realised my mistake when the station passage didn’t happen on time, and I knew from looking outside that the station was behind me.

What happened was that I had tuned the wrong navaid frequency on the ground, as part of my let’s-get-as-much-as-possible-done-on-the-ground plan. But because VORs require line-of-sight radio communication, I couldn’t identify and test on the ground, so I left it for later. And when the moment came to use the navaid, I had forgotten about the missing identify and test. This definitely qualifies as a learning experience.

We then tracked for Gold Coast. I wrote down the ATIS for YBCG, and I was about to contact Brisbane Approach for requesting a clearance to enter Gold Coast Classs C airspace when Lee stopped me. Where are we? Approaching Q1 at 1500ft. And what does the ERSA say? That we may request our clearance directly from Gold Coast tower. Which is also the scenario we had discussed in the briefing before the flight. Which I had forgotten. Bad. On to Gold Coast tower, who clear us to track for Gold Coast airport with a clearance limit of Burleigh Heads. The frequency is very busy with the usual mix of jet and GA traffic.

At Burleigh Heads they clear us for joining final for runway 14. We haven’t been in the air for 30 minutes at that stage and I already can’t believe I made so many mistakes. Did I mention I also completely forgot to make a call on the CTAF frequency for Southport, even though we came within a few miles of the field at 1500ft?

I decide to finish this leg on a good note and apply myself to making a very nice landing. We cross the threshold. There’s plenty of runway in front of us. I remove power. I let the plane go down, and when the ground gets closer I bring the nose slightly over the horizon. The stall indicator goes off. All good so far. We haven’t touched the ground yet and we’re near stall speed, this should make for a nice landing, letting the plane touch the ground only when it decides to.

Suddenly the plane really stalls. Usually this is followed very soon by the nice and reassuring chirping sound of the main wheels touching the ground. Except that in our case nothing but a deafening silence happened for the next two seconds, and then we hit the ground. I could feel the struts absorb the energy of our plane falling down onto the runway from a height of about 2 meters. Lee is laughing. I fell victim to a textbook optical illusion: because the runway here is a lot larger and darker than at Redcliffe, I underestimated our height, and flared too high. For estimating our height, I should have looked at the horizon ahead of me rather then look to the side and down at the runway surface.

We exit the runway, hold short for a Jetstar A320, taxi to the GA parking, shut down and stretch our legs a little. I prepare the cockpit for the next leg. We won’t be able to fly at 6500ft to Kyogle as planned because of clouds over the ranges. We decide to go for 2500ft instead.

Startup again, ask for an amended clearance at 2500ft which we obtain. Take-off on 14, right turn to intercept radial 215 of Gold Coast and we climb to 2500ft and level off there. Just a couple of minutes later Brisbane Approach tells us we’re leaving controlled airspace, which I read back dutifully.


I do my CLEAR-OFF checks and start computing an estimate for Kyogle. Lee points at the altimeter which is now reading 2700ft. I use the trim to make the plane slowly loose altitude and get back to 2500ft. Lee says I need to be more aggressive than that and push the nose down now to get back to 2500ft as soon as possible because we’re currently busting controlled airspace. Busting controlled airspace? That doesn’t sound good.

What happened was that our amended clearance made us leave controlled airspace at 2500ft and fly right below the next Class C step, whose base is precisely at 2500ft. Class C airspace around airports is pretty much like an inverted wedding cake. Flying a bit lower than 2500ft would not have been a big drama, but flying one foot higher is a big no no. Especially when it’s not one foot but 200 feet and the objective of the day is to assess my ability to fly solo in controlled airspace. Needless to say I didn't get a tick on that one.

Mal has an expression for that, he calls it an Errol Flynn day, in reference to the Australian-born actor who apparently had a reputation for breaking anything he touched. My Errol Flynn day lasted less than one hour, but I still have trouble understanding how I could get so many things wrong, even though a similar exercise a few weeks earlier went without problem.

As a consequence, I’ll have to redo the controlled airspace part of Nav6. The plan will be to go from Redcliffe to Gold Coast, then to Toowoomba via the Laravale VOR and back to Redcliffe. This will give us plenty of Class C airspace to get in and out of and hopefully a chance for me to demonstrate that I can do better than on my Errol Flynn day.

Kangaroo 1 - Airplane 0

Aviatrix just recently posted a story about towing airplanes with the hand brake on, and how this could result in a nasty flat patch on the tires. This reminded me of a tire I saw in the corner of a hangar at Redcliffe a few months ago:

The two tow bars at the back are of the type Aviatrix refers to as the giant tuning fork. I guess if you're a whale, elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, okapi, or alligator, all animals known to use infrasounds, this would indeed be a handy tuning fork for your very long vocal wavelengths.

That tire came from the main wheel of a C172SP. I think the story is that a kangaroo jumped in front of the plane right after touchdown on 07 at Redcliffe. The pilot jumped on the brakes and blew up one of the tires, but fortunately enough the airplane didn't suffer any other sort of damage. No idea what happened to the kangaroo though. Probably hopped his way back to the pub with a good story to tell.

That's actually quite a facetious bunch of kangaroos we have at Redcliffe. The entire mob lives south of the threshold of runway 07. I saw them a few times in the distance when flying early in the morning. I think during the day they just retreat in the shade.

The close-up picture above does not require much explaining, it's very consistent with blocking the brakes. Which makes me think, why don't airplanes come fitted with anti-lock braking?

Thanks to the irreplaceable Wikipedia, I just found out that the first anti-lock braking system was actually developed in 1929 for use in airplanes by French automobile and aircraft pioneer Gabriel Voisin. He and his brother designed the Antoinette III, the first airplane on the European continent to succeed in landing back where it had taken off after flying a pre-assigned 1 kilometer long closed circuit.

What one can learn with just a few clicks of the mouse will never cease to amaze me.

How to use 123.45 in Australia

The Plastic Pilot recently published a post titled Do you know how to use 123.45? which got me thinking about what exactly the pilot-to-pilot frequency was supposed to be used for in Australia.

Here's what the ERSA (En-Route Supplement Australia) has to say about it. It's in the NAV/COMM part, section 4. The bold face is my addition:

4. AIR-TO-AIR COMMUNICATIONS - CIVIL
4.1 Interpilot air-to-air communications in Australian FIRs may be conducted on frequency 123.45MHZ. Communications between aircraft on this frequency are restricted to the exchange of information relating to aircraft operations. Communications are to be established by either a directed call to a specific aircraft or a general call, taking into account conditions pertaining to the use of the particular channel. As target aircraft may be guarding more than one frequency, the initial call should include the distinctive channel identification “INTERPILOT” or identification of the air-to-air frequency.
4.2 The following examples illustrate the application of the calling procedures.
a. Qantas 2, SPEEDBIRD 15, INTERPILOT, DO YOU READ?; or
b. ANY AIRCRAFT VICINITY lOS 135E, QANTAS 5, 123.45, OVER.

So I guess it's all in what you understand by "the exchange of information relating to aircraft operations". Maintaining separation and providing advice on weather are of course in, but commenting on how beautiful a day this is for flying may not be.

The ERSA makes a point that I didn't think about before: even if there seems to be no-one talking on 123.45, that doesn't mean no-one is listening. So unnecessary communications on that frequency add to the workload of pilots "guarding more than one frequency". I didn't know about the use of the word "Interpilot" for identifying the channel either. Always something new to learn.

More critical than chatting on 123.45 is probably the problem of pilots chatting on frequencies used for auto-information at non-towered aerodromes or, even worse, using 121.5 as a chat channel. But that's a topic for another post.

Spot the rural Queensland airfields: Dalby, Mitchell and Charleville

On a recent Qantas flight from Brisbane to Alice Springs I had a window seat on the left hand side of the 737-800 and could take a few pictures of airfields along the way. Back home a few days later, I faced the challenge of identifying the said airfields.

Soon after take-off, the First Officer said that our route would take us to Alice Springs via Roma and Longreach. Not the most direct route, but not too bad either. That's actually the route we took when we did the same trip in a 172 last September. Except it took us three days and not three hours.

I had taken a picture right after take-off from Brisbane, so thanks to the timestamps on the image files I knew that I had spotted this first airfield 18 minutes into the flight:


Drawing a line on my WAC chart from Brisbane to Roma and assuming a ground speed of about 300 knots, this gave Dalby (YDAY) as a likely candidate. I checked in the ERSA, and the shape of the two runways on the airport diagram matched. I looked up Dalby on Google Earth and the airfield was identified without a doubt: the shape and position of the town, the racetrack, the river running through the town, everything was there. So far so good.

The next one proved to be a lot more difficult:


The picture above was taken 25 minutes after Dalby. Roma was an option, but the shape of the apron didn't match. I tried different ground speeds along the route to Longreach via Roma, but never came close to any airport. Bummer! The only logical explanation was that we were no longer following the planned route. Most likely, ATC had cleared our flight direct to Alice Springs.

And indeed, now assuming 400 knots ground speed, the airfield was identified as the unlicensed airfield of Mitchell (YMIT).

The third one was only a few minutes after Mitchell: Charleville. Speaking of YBCV, we landed at Charleville during that air safari to Ayers Rock I mentioned above. We spent the night at the Cojones Motel in downtown Charleville. The motel is right across the street from the Big Hallucinated Kangaroo (not the official name), and a few hundred meters from the town hall.


Surprisingly, the Big Kangaroo didn't make it into the list of Australia's Big Things. Maybe it's not big enough? Or is it the two big round protruding eyes that make it look like it's high on special outback drugs?

According to the driver of the shuttle bus who picked us up at the airport, we were well advised to choose the motel section of the abode over the “heritage ensuite hotel” section. Apparently the hotel’s claim of "elegance and comfort of yesteryear" needs to be taken quite literally. This was confirmed to me later by friends who stayed at the hotel there on a road trip to the outback.


Back to aviation. What I remember from flying out of Charleville is a very long taxi to the threshold of runway 36. We left the apron, taxied through a forest, came to what looked like a regular road, turned left and finally found the holding point.

Maybe it was me (I had a grand total of about 10 hours flight time back then), or maybe it was the airport diagram in the ERSA that got me confused. When you compare this:


To the Google Maps image of the airport, it's difficult to figure out what the big grey triangle in the airport diagram is supposed to be.

The next two hours of the flight were very uneventful in terms of airfield spotting. On arrival we flew parallel to the runway at Alice Springs for a very wide downwind leg (at least for a C172 pilot of course):


We turned base over the MacDonnell ranges. At the back of the picture below one can see what local pilots refer to as "the big golf balls". These are the radomes of the Pine Gap American spying station. The airspace around it from the ground up to FL180 is actually the only permanent Prohibited Area in Australia (P229).



Our long week-end in the Red Center was great. We spent our time camping, bushwalking, 4W-driving and successfully running after a dingo who stole one of our sleeping bags. We flew back via Sydney, where more airfields were spotted but not yet identified, so this will have to until for a future post.

How we escaped an in-flight engine failure by just two weeks

OK, what happened may not be as dramatic as the title of this post would like you to believe. I'll let you be the judge of that. Hey, after all, that's what comments are for :-) The story is as follows.

My better half and myself finally made it to Keswick Island during the Easter week-end. This was a follow-up holiday from last year's Christmas holidays which had been cut short due to exceptionally bad weather.


We flew up to Mackay in a Qantas Dash-8, then flew over to Keswick Island in a single-engine Piper Cherokee 6 chartered through Australasian Jet. This is a short 15-minute flight, with beautiful views of the Mackay coast and nearby islands. The approach to the landing strip is rather interesting, right in-between Keswick and St Bees Island.

We spent three beautiful days at the Keswick Island Guest House thanks to the excellent hospitaly, genuine friendliness, cooking and singing skills of our hosts Bryan and Lynn. In the course of that long week-end we got to meet each and every one of the nine inhabitants of the island. We even appeared on the Keswick Island Kapers blog edited by Eva. You will have to search the page for my first name to find us.


On the way back we took another Cherokee to Mackay, then a JetStar A320 back to Brisbane.

A couple of weeks later I picked up the Courier Mail (Brisbane's main newspaper) in the office and found an article titled Female pilot, 21, in 'textbook ditching' which started with

A 21-year-old female pilot on her first day on the job has performed a "textbook ditching" to save the lives of her four passengers in the sea off Mackay. All five on board survived when the Cherokee Piper 6 crashed into the sea 200m off Squeaky Beach on Carlisle Island just after 2pm today.

Mackay? Cherokee? This sounded familiar. How many Cherokees doing charter flights can there be in Mackay? We had flown on two of them, VH-ZMP and VH-VSN . I looked up the ATSB database, and there it was:

AO-2008-22: Piper Aircraft Corp PA-32-300, VH-ZMP, Brampton Island Qld. It was reported that the aircraft ditched after takeoff from Brampton Island aerodrome. The investigation is continuing.

Oops... that was the Cherokee we flew in two weeks before on our way to Keswick Island... The pilot seems to have done an awesome job ditching the plane safely and getting the passengers out without anyone getting seriously injured or worse. She can even be seen sporting a smile in a picture taken in the rescue helicopter, despite the multiple bruises on her face. That's picture 9 in this gallery.

To the best of my knowledge, that's the closest I've come so far to an in-flight engine failure in a single-engine aircraft. Two weeks between our flight and the final flight of VH-ZMP may sound like a big enough time interval. But if you think about it in terms of engine time, it's probably only a dozen hours we're talking about. A bit too close for comfort.

Which brings up the eternal question, what would I have done in the same situation? I can't honestly answer, but one's thing for sure: it's all about training and keeping a cool head. I should take a 172 out to Bribie Island one of those days to practice forced landings. It's been a while since I last did that, and I clearly remember that my last forced landing drills left a lot to be desired. Going through the checks, briefing passengers and making the mayday call was all OK, it's picking a field and planning a glide approach to it that could do with more practice. Of course, this is precisely the part of the forced landing you do not want to screw up. Training, training, training. Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage.

Nav5: seven controller, a few street lamps and a diversion

The first leg of Nav5 took us from Redcliffe to Gold Coast through the Brisbane Class C airspace. I think I talked to more controllers in the first 30 minutes of this flight that in all my flying training to this day.

Redcliffe being a non-towered aerodrome, my only contacts with controllers so far were during navs to Archerfield, Maroochydore and Oakey. On a couple of occasions I also contacted Brisbane Radar to request a radio check early in the morning when no one was answering on the local CTAF frequency.

We requested a code and clearance from Brisbane Radar, who immediately handed us over to Brisbane Approach. We got cleared for the Hornibrook Viaduct, Brisbane Control Tower and Manly boat harbour at 1500ft.

As we approached the tower, the controller gave us a landing clearance for runway 14. Hmmm... that was very nice of him, but we never intended to land at YBBN, and never asked for a clearance... Before I could think of what to say he came back and corrected his mistake. A minute later we overflew the threshold of runway 01 and I could see three Qantas airliners queuing up at the holding point right under us.

Tower handed us over to approach on the other side of Brisbane airport. We overflew the Jacobs Well VOR, jotted down the ATIS for Gold Coast then switched frequencies again a few more times through approach, tower and ground for Gold Coast. In total, I talked to seven different controllers. My radio calls were good, thanks to careful preparation and quite a bit of rehearsal at home beforehand.


We landed at Gold Coast on runway 32, taxied to the GA parking and started up again soon after for Cherrabah. Gold Coast was very busy that morning, we had to wait for a little while at the holding point. Finally the controller gave us an immediate departure and we took off just as a Virgin Blue 737 was coming in to land. As we departed I glanced back at the runway to realise that, instead of the normal Virgin Blue red livery, this aircraft was entirely painted in blue. Sean explained that this was Virgin Blue’s 50th Boeing 737, and that the names of all employees, including his from a past non-flying job with the airline, were printed on the overhead lockers.

According to Wikipedia, Virgin Blue’s name if a play on the predominantly red livery and the Australian slang tradition of calling a red-headed male 'Blue' or 'Bluey'. So I guess this solves the mistery of why Virgin Blue planes are usually painted red.

We climbed to 6500ft to clear the ranges of the Gold Coast hinterland and tracked for Cherrabah. That was quite a long leg, with spectacular views of the mountains. We identified Palen Creek Prison Farm. Sean tried to convince me to stop doing 'track crawling', i.e. spending my time with my nose in the map in order to always know where I was. Our ground speed was higher than planned, so we entered the open country near Killarney earlier than expected. This threw me off for a moment, then we kept flying the heading and, sure enough, we found Cherrabah a few minutes later.


In the morning when I had called the Cherrabah Homestead to request permission to land, the person on the phone had requested that we overfly the runway once before landing “to scare the roos”. We did one 100ft overfly but couldn’t see any kangaroos. Sean talked me through the approach and landing. Quite a challenging approach actually, with hills on all slides and a sloppy runway.


The airfield is one of those places you have to see to believe. Too bad Shane didn’t get to see it on his Nav5 and got diverted to Warwick and its swarms of flies instead! The runway itself is actually quite nice, it was upgraded from a grass strip to a sealed runway a while ago. Cherrabah is not a licensed aerodrome, so I guess they do not have to comply with too many regulations about runway lighting, and obviously they let their creativity go wild with these beautiful solar-powered replicas of classical street lamps in the Australian bush. The terminal building, although empty, is well worth the picture too.


We took off on 28 and did some low-level flying following a road and a river, pretending the cloud ceiling was so low we were following natural features on our way to Warwick. This is what some people call IFR Flying: I Follow the Road. We then tracked north to Toowoomba, and as we were near Allora we diverted direct back to Redcliffe. I requested and obtained a clearance for crossing Amberley airspace and amended our flight plan.

We flew a few miles south of Lake Wivenhoe, crossed the ranges, kept our eyes out for airplanes tracking south for the "TV Towers" entry lane to Archerfield, found Petrie, the nearby paper mill, then approached Redcliffe from the dead side and landed on 07. We had a thorough debrief during which Sean said that the two things I really had to work on were holding an accurate altitude and heading, so I'll have to make this a priority for the next navs. And avoiding track crawling.

Nav5 was my last time flying at the front of the aircraft for a little while. After that I had two weeks of business travel, half a week of jetlag, some busy days catching up on work, and almost a week of vacations. There was a lot of flying of course, but unfortunately only of the kind that involves sitting at the back of an airliner for more than ten hours in an economy seat that makes the cockpit of a 152 feel like luxury.

Spot the airfield: Stuttgart

Sitting at the back of an airliner can be a rather frustrating experience for a budding pilot: no dials or gauges to look at, no radio to talk into and, to top it all, one can’t even look in the direction of travel. I’m usually a big fan of the aisle seat (can get up anytime I want for bio breaks), but on occasion I like to take a window seat, mostly on short daytime flights.

This is because I enjoy playing “spot the airfield”.

“Spot the airfield” is a game anyone with one functional eye and a boarding pass can play. The idea is to spot as many airfields as possible in the course of an airline flight. With the help of a digital camera, airfields can be later identified using charts and the ERSA, or even Google Earth. Identifying the airfield on the spot gives you extra points of course. Using the moving map on the in-flight entertainment system is considered cheating.

I took the picture below onboard a Lufthansa BAe146 on a flight from Marseille, France to Frankfurt, Germany. That's the only airfield I spotted on that flight, since we spent most of our time in clouds.


I had a suspicion this airport was Stuttgart, both because I knew our flightpath would take us near it, and the time remaining to Frankfurt (about 30 minutes) matched. A minute later I could see the nearby town.


I later confirmed using Google Earth that this was indeed Stuttgart, home of the German automotive industry. The brightly lit patch is actually the Mercedes factory, while the stadium above and to the right of it is the Gottlieb Daimler Stadion. According to Wikipedia, the two video walls of the stadium are the largest in Europe.

And you know what the good thing about flying Lufthansa is? Real good Warsteiner beer in glass bottles.


Plenty of airline flights planned for the next few months, plenty of opportunities to play "spot the airfield". Hope I get decent enough pictures to post them here. I used tips from the Plastic Pilot (here and here) to clean up the pictures in this post, I think I still have a lot of room for improvement. My camera is always bad in low lighting anyway, maybe time for an upgrade...