Moisture in the air and water in the tanks

The date was sometime in July, and the intended destination was Taree, NSW, with the idea of getting back into cross-country flying. There's only so much pottering around the Sydney basin one can do, as beautiful as it is, and the glimpse of the area I got while competing above Warnervale enticed me to come back.

At first it looked as if I had been very lucky with picking Saturday morning for flying, since this was the only day in the week with no rain and even a bit of sunshine. Even the aviation weather forecast on the day before looked hopeful.

I arrived at the club and checked the weather. The trip to Taree was not going to work. Most of the aerodromes along the way had forecasted or reported conditions with either low clouds, fog, showers of rain or a combination thereof. With full tanks I would be able to fly to Taree and fly back to Bankstown without refueling if I couldn't land. But rain was coming in from the south-west later in the afternoon, reaching Sydney around 4PM which would result in visibility of 4000m, below VFR minimums. I could visualise the holes in the Swiss cheese slowly lining up. A Plan B was needed.

I decided instead to fly an abbreviated version of the planned flight and go to Cessnock via Warnervale and Newcastle. This way I could still fly part of the planned flight, and would be back early enough to avoid the rain. Flight planning took a little while, the flight notification was eventually submitted and I was on my way to preflight the aircraft.

Yes, in the picture above there is actually water at the bottom of the fuel tester. Moisture in the air and cold temperatures overnight result in water condensing inside the half-empty fuel tanks. The phenomenon is more common in low-wing aircraft where the wings are closer to the ground and therefore exposed to lower temperatures at night. This is no big deal at all, just a reminder to always perform a thorough pre-flight. Which I did.

From the ground I could see rather low clouds in the GA lane, but I decided to go anyway since there was enough space between the low clouds to turn back to the airport or go to the training area should the lane northbound be obscured by clouds. Taking off in those conditions pushed me a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but not to the point where I felt unsafe.

I took off on 29R, maintained 1000ft until well outside the control zone and climbed to 2000ft. Contrary to what the area forecast had said, there were still plenty of low clouds still firmly seated in the valleys to the west, over the Berowra area. And it didn't look like they planned on dissipating anytime soon.

After Patonga I adjusted my heading slightly toward Warnervale at 3500ft, with still lots of clouds in the Kariong area. I found Warnervale aerodrome, which is not really a challenge given its prominent location between the Pacific Highway and Tuggerah Lake. One lonely Cessna 152 was doing circuits at Warnervale. I made a call on the CTAF frequency advising everyone I was overflying the aerodrome and kept tracking north.

I flew over Vales Point power station and then over Lake Macquarie. This is Eraring Power Station at the back of the picture above. I was maintaining 3500ft, so you can tell from the photo that there was one point where the weather forecast was spot on: cumulus and stratocumulus clouds with a base of 3000ft.

Swansea was easy to identify thanks to the breakwaters and the bridge. The Aeropelican aerodrome appeared immediately after. How much nicer is it to see it from the bumpy and noisy comfort of a small airplane rather than from the relative comfort of an airliner?

Nobbys Heads was also very easy to find, thanks to the very distinctive shape of the coastline and the lighthouse. If the Williamtown military control zone had been active I would have been in trouble by then, but the ATIS had told me that it was de-active, as is generally the case on week-ends, so all was good.

My aircraft on the day, the Piper Archer VH-SFA, was fitted with a carburettor temperature gauge, so I applied carby heat from time to time to keep the needle away from the yellow zone since there was plenty of moisture in the air. I think I would have done that anyway, but the gauge acted as a useful reminder that high humidity and winter temperatures increase the risk of carburettor icing.

At Nobbys Head I turned left and flew west toward Cessnock. I passed Mount Sugarloaf and its twin masts.

The town in front of me was Kurri Kurri, but where had Cessnock airport gone? Answer: it was hiding under the blankies! The cloud blanket that is. I was at 2500ft by then and the clouds looked much lower than that, so instead of going scud running to find an airport I had never been to before, I decided to head south to Warnervale, which I had planned to overfly anyway on my way back from Cessnock. This way, I would get back onto my planned flight.

I couldn't take a direct heading to Warnervale since this would have taken me over high terrain with little space left between the fluffy stuff in the air and the hard stuff on the ground, so I headed for a gap in the hills.

I flew past the Cooranbong aerodrome, which is no longer used as one can tell from the big white crosses at the threshold of each runway. It's sad because it looks like a very nice airport, with a long sealed runway. Apparently, Avondale College used to run an aviation degree out of here up until 2006.

I overflew Warnervale. The same Cessna with the same pilot was still doing circuits. I tuned the Calga NDB and tried my best to track to the aid. Not a big success, but then again I was keeping my eyes out and not flying on instruments. And I have a proof of that: I could spot Mardi Reservoir, and later Somersby aerodrome.

After Calga I tracked to Brookly Bridge, the entry point for the GA lane southbound. This is the highway bridge right above the cowling in the photo below, not the one more to the east which is only for trains, and also dangerously close to the GA lane northbound.

This was my first time flying the GA lane southbound and everything went absolutely according to plan. I had watched the CASA DVD on flying around Sydney a couple of times the day before, which really helped. I also had the GPS on, just to make double sure I would not infringe on Richmond Military CTR. I even slowed down a little to give me more time for thinking and finding the landmarks.

I found the Berowra strobe exactly where I was expecting it, then identified the power substation, the rifle range to my left and Dural Tanks with the strobe on top. I managed to maintain 2500ft all the way down the lane, with some minor zigzagging around clouds required. The picture above says it all.

I picked up the Bankstown ATIS and started a descent in order to be at 1500ft at Prospect Reservoir. I was about to make my inbound call to Bankstown Tower when a pilot came onto the frequency. One could tell immediately from his voice that he was very distressed. But that's a story I'll tell in the next post. I landed on 29R, taxied back to the club house, shut down, wrote down the numbers and tidied up the airplane.

All in all a nice flight even though it didn't go according to plan, and not even according to the revised plan. This was clearly a case of experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.

I was happy with my decision making throughout the flight though. At every point in the flight I had a Plan B and even a Plan C, so I like to think this was a safe flight. The thorough flight preparation definitely paid off. Flying in marginal weather was a good experience too. Now with the summer ahead of us, I'm looking forward to really making it to Taree sometime soon.

Spot the airfield: Gold Coast, Queensland

On a flight from Sydney to Brisbane in a Qantas 767-338, Air Traffic Control gave us one turn in the hold over Gold Coast airport, which created a photo opportunity for the seventh instalment of our "spot the airfield" series, where I try to spot, photograph and later identify airfields from a window seat at the back of an airliner.

Previous episodes featured Stuttgart, Dalby, Mitchell and Charleville, Lombadina, Clermont, Southport and more recently Aeropelican.

I am not instrument rated (yet), so you'll forgive the approximate description of the procedure: the airplane first flies over the navigation aid (Gold Coast VOR in our case), makes a 180-degree rate-one right turn, flies straight ahead for one minute, one more 180-degree rate-one turn, then one more minute to get back to the navaid. Each half-turn takes one minute (rate-one turn means a heading change of three degrees per second). Flying the entire holding pattern therefore takes four minutes.

The picture above was taken as we were about to complete the turn away from the navaid. The airplane bit in the bottom left corner is the trailing edge of the right wing. The Pacific Highway can be seen running across the pictures, right above the airport.

The airport's little name is YBCG, CG for Coolangatta which was the name of the airport up until 1999. It is a controlled airport, with one very long 14/32 runway and a very short 17/35 cross runway whose sole purpose is, in my opinion, to introduce confusion in the mind of student pilots trying to comply with a taxi clearance there.

It may not very obvious from the taxiway diagram in the ERSA, but a taxi clearance from the GA parking area to the run-up bay for runway 32 for example actually involves crossing runway 17/35 after taxiway Golf before turning on to Foxtrot. That's the bit marked "Runway Incursion Hotspot".

I flew into Gold Coast a few times during my PPL training. The green patch near the water in the top-right corner of the picture above is Burleigh Head, a VFR reporting point used when flying inbound from the north.

The bit of airplane here is the leading edge of the right wing. The four little vertical metal blades are vortex generators, designed to improve the airflow over the wing. That's pretty much all I know on the topic.

As to the function of the yellow piece of metal with a hole in the middle on the right, this mystery was solved by Plastic Pilot a little while ago.

You'll come a-Flying Matilda, with me

Whatever the rules are for choosing 5-character names for IFR waypoints, there is still plenty of room left for poetic licence. There's a GAMBL waypoint not too far from the town of Casino and a WOOLY JUMPA somewhere over the Pacific. And SEXXI NIPPL have been reported in the Philippines.

In the case of a string of waypoints off the coast of Western Australia, inspiration was drawn from a well-known poem by none other than Banjo Paterson, Australia's best-known bush poet:

WONSA JOLLY SWAGY CAMBS BUIYA BYLLA BONGS UNDER ACOOL EBARR TREES

Sing it out loud with me and you'll get the first two verses of Waltzing Matilda, Australia's unofficial national anthem:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a Coolibah tree

Pretty cool, isn't it? There's lots of waypoint trivia out there. Plastic Pilot once proposed to learn French using French IFR waypoints. Pprune.org has some more. The ultimate reference though, at least for trivia related to the UK airspace, is Nick Locke's reportingpoints.info.

David at Land and Hold Short has come full circle: he's not using a song for naming waypoints, he's composing with navaid idents. Combine that with The Checklist Song and you may get the overture of an aviation opera.

Less Bliss and more Boredom

Three weeks after our inbound flight, it was time to say goodbye to the European summer and brace for the Australian winter. Not that we noticed much difference: we spent our first afternoon back in Australia soaking in the sun at Balmoral Beach, officially for the sole purpose of helping our Circadian Clock readjust itself to Australian time.

The flight back was very long, entirely experienced in economy class and entirely uneventful. The photo below was taken at sunrise over the Queensland coast, about one hour before touchdown at Sydney.

The Great Circle from Frankfurt to Seoul took us over Berlin, Gdansk at sunset, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Riga and Tartu before entering Russian airspace not too far from St Petersburg.

Entering Russian airspace in a Korean Air 747 brings back memories of KAL 007, the airliner shot down by the USSR Air Force in 1983. I was only nine at the time but I remember reading about it in the Midi Libre newspaper while on summer holidays with my grandparents in the South of France. Not that I was reading international news at such an early age, I was most likely attracted to the article by a photo of the airliner.

In Russian airspace we used a metric flight level at 11000 meters. However, when flying from Poland to Lithuania through the small Russian territory around Kaliningrad, we stayed at FL 350, i.e. 35,000 feet above the reference datum of 1013.25 hPa.

The landscapes of the Gobi desert over Mongolia and north-western China reminded me of the Australian Outback, minus the color red. Then I realised that, since the Great Wall of China was built in order to ward off Mongolian invasions our flightpath would eventualy cross it and I could maybe spot it from the airplane. I remembered something about it being visible from space, so if I kept my face glued to the window I would not miss it. How awesome would that be.

Unfortunately this was not meant to be as a thick layer of stratus clouds started building below us as we approached Beijing from the north-west. Soon after the airliner altered its south-easterly course to track due south towards Beijing, before resuming a more direct route to Seoul.

The reason for the dogleg could be seen right out the window: a massive thunderstorm had developped right on our intended flightpath.

On approach to Seoul I could observe the little crystals of ice that build up on the inside side of the window quickly melt as we passed through the freezing level at about 15,000ft. Yes, I was utterly bored at this stage of the flight.

By the way, I learnt by reading a German flying magazine on holidays that the German word for freezing level is Nullgradgrenze, literaly "zero degree limit". Another funny one is Wolkenuntergrenze, which means cloud base.

We approached Sydney at sunrise, Brooklyn bridge is sort of visible on the photo below.

We landed on 34L at Sydney after a left-hand circuit. We cleared Customs and Quarantine relatively quickly and jumped into a cab direction home. Just like most cabs it had a GPS on the dashboard.

It's amazing how in the space of a couple of decades a classified military technology initially developed during the Cold War to guide ICBMs has now found its way into most cars, mobile phones and of course airplanes.

It's in 1983 that the Reagan Administration took the decision to declassify the NAVSTAR GPS satellite navigation system in order to allow civilian applications, such as better navigation systems for airplanes. It became operational in 1990, just in time for the first Gulf War.

A decision that was taken when it became clear that the downing of Korean Airlines flight KAL 007 by a Russian fighter jet had been triggered by a navigation error that took it over a prohibited section of Russian airspace.

Bliss is Being Bumped up and Bibimbap

This is a post written from an airliner seat I can plug my netbook into, which seasoned travellers will immediately recognise as a Good Sign. A very good sign that the Gods of Seat Assignment finally smiled at me and bumped me up to Business Class. Bumped us up to business class actually since I have the pleasure of travelling with my wife.

This post is low on the usual aviation technicalities, although as we might see later the subtelties of flight level assignment in Mongolian and Russian airspace can be sensed from a passenger seat for passengers with an inquisitive or bored mind.

For a change, this transcontinental trip was not a business trip, which is why we didn't fly Qantas or Singapore Airlines as usual. When the time came to book our tickets for our (Northern Hemisphere) summer holidays, we decided to go with Korean Airlines, who offered the cheapest fares among all the acceptable airlines. We flew Sydney to Seoul in the half-empty A330-300 in the photo above. Note the Emirates A380 in the background. Maybe next time.

As Nina sat in her seat she couldn't suppress a cry of surprise. Her finger was pointing at the back of the seat in front of her, and at the obvious absence of any personal in-flight entertainment system. There was a screen at the other end of our section, but it all looked like a scene out of the movie Airplane.

Our in-flight entertainment came under the guise of the making of Bibimbap. The choice for food was beef or Bibimbap, which the flight attendant explained was a traditional Korean dish. Being the curious and culturally sensitive couple that we are, we both went for Bibimbap, to the obvious delight of the flight attendant.

That's the only in-flight meal I have ever been served that comes with a five-step instruction sheet. Thinking about it, that's the only meal I ever had that comes with printed instructions. On completing step 5 I recognized the dish as something I ordered a couple of times in the past in a small Korean eatery in the Elizabeth Street Arcade in Brisbane.

Bibimbap is a very healthy mix of vegetables, beef, mushrooms and steamed rice. Sesame oil and hot pepper sauce come as separate ingredients. I enjoyed the dish and washed everything down with a big bowl of seaweed soup, not too bad either, just like a Miso soup, but without the evil tofu.

The cabin crew insisted on having all passengers pull the window shades down even though we were right in the middle of the day. This is all the less understandable since there is only one hour time difference between Sydney and Seoul, so it's not like fake night will help us shift our circadian rhythm to our destination. When asked, the flight attendant said it was "rest time". I felt like I was in Kindergarten again, when they forced us to stop playing and take a nap. Anyway, sticking to our theme of cultural sensitiveness, we accepted the Korean Siesta.

Maybe because the cabin was in the dark, a flight attendant carrying a tray full of glasses down the aisle stumbled as she walked by us and spilled some water over Nina's blanket. No drama at all, the spillage was quickly removed using a single napkin, and no garment got stained in the process. The ensuing display of apologies by the flight attendant, and later by the cabin chief was just amazing. I joked to Nina that she should have played the offended customer and ask for a business class upgrade on our next flight.

After a night in Seoul we resumed our journey with a long 12-hour flight to Frankfurt in a 747-400. I had seat 19B. I entered the airplane, turned right and started looking for my row number on the overhead baggage compartment. Suddenly the most bizarre thing happened. The numbers jumped from 12 to 39. I was so surprised that I asked the flight attendant who directed me upstairs. I climbed up the stairs, turned left and found my wife who had followed instructions and arrived there before me. We looked at the wide seat and exchange a very big smile. Business class. And not any business class seats. Exit row business class seats. To paraphrase Flight of the Conchords, It's Business Time.

After that stupid smile left my face and I had finished playing with the controls of the eight different ways in which I could adjust my seat, I looked through the window and saw lots of convective activity down below in the steppes. We were north-west of Beijing, approaching the border with Mongolia.

Then of course came time for our Korean siesta, even though flight KE905 left at 1:15 PM and arrived in Frankfurt at 5:35 PM. I started exploring the options of the in-flight entertainment system. The flight information gave our cruising altitude over Mongolia as 31494ft. Not a round number? How comes? Cruising altitudes obey the rule of flight levels, which typically work in increments of 1000ft.

Then I clicked on the "Metric" box and it said 9600m. Ah ah... Maybe just like the Russians, Mongolia uses the metric system in aviation. That wouldn't be terribly surprising given Mongolia's history of close alignment with the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

The mystery got thicker later when over Russia we cruised at 38094ft / 11611m for over an hour. Maybe the aiplane was assigned a block level and chose the most efficient altitude. Or maybe something else.

The rest of the flight was absolutely uneventful, which is good. I had a Tuna and Kimchi Onigiri sandwich which wasn't bad at all, very filling and quite likely very healthy too. The good thing with flying Seoul to Frankfurt is that it makes one realise how freaking huge Russia is. You could fit a couple of Australias in there. Which to my European appreciation of distances is simply mind-boggling.

Alone in the dark

I was driving to the airport from work for my first night solo when rain started to fall. Great. Just what I needed, a wet runway and the likelihood of reduced visibility in the circuit. Or even no night solo at all if Dan estimated it was not safe enough for me to go.

I preflighted the airplane under the rain. It took me a while to understand that the navigation lights on that airplane are activated by the panel lights switch, as opposed to having a dedicated switch like on other airplanes. The landing light had been fixed since the first time I flew the airplane, so I wouldn't have to rely on the wing-mounted light this time. Good. The ground was soaked with water which made it difficult to check the flap hinges or the fuel drains without covering myself in mud.

I went out for three circuits with Dan, the Deputy Chief Flying Instructor, so that he could check that I actually knew what I was doing before signing me out for solo at night. We taxied to 11C, did two normal circuits, one go-around, one normal circuit with no landing light and one full-stop behind a rescue helicopter.

On my first circuit I ended up too high on final so I decided to perform a sideslip to loose altitude without gaining airspeed. "Do you know you're sideslipping?" asked Dan. Yes I answered. I guess I should have verbalised the manoeuvre instead of letting him believe I had developed a habit of unwittingly flying with crossed controls.

Dan explained that sideslips should be avoided at night since judging height is harder than in daytime. Better work on fixing the problem of being high on final rather than on the unsafe solution required to recapture the correct descent profile. 1500 rpm when turning base is the magical number said Dan if I want to be at 500 feet when turning final. Of course this all assumes I fly circuits of correct dimensions, i.e. one minute for each of the last two legs.

Dan said he was happy with me going solo for another hour of circuits. He added that if the airplane started to skid on the wet runway on landing I should apply full power and take-off immediately rather than trying to control the airplane on the ground.

Dan jumped out of the airplane and I taxied back to the run-up bay and then to 11C for ten more circuits. VH-SFA and VH-SFR were the other two aircraft in the circuit, with Dan in one and Ben in the other. So I had two pairs of instructor eyes looking after me. Nice of them to not leave me alone in the dark.

The clouds had cleared a bit by now, and the full moon had risen to the east. On downwind the full moon lit up the entire panel. Having only one person on board allows the 160 hp Warrior to climb and accelerate a lot better. At some point after a touch-and-go I even found myself catching up with a 152 in front so requested and obtained an extended upwind leg for spacing.

The rule when night flying though is to spend the entire upwind leg on instruments and not look outside below 500ft, when ready to turn crosswind. I find that difficult with an aircraft in front of me in the circuit, both because the anti-collision light of the preceding aircraft appear in my peripheral field of vision, right above the dashboard, and also because I want to positively maintain separation, not just rely on ATC spacing aircraft correctly in the circuit. As a matter of fact, in GAAP control zones ATC do not provide separation, the responsibility for avoiding collisions rests entirely with the pilots.

On one circuit I learned a valuable lesson. I had just turned final and the preceding aircraft was on short final. It looked like it was too much to the right so I kept an eye on him to see how he was landing. This distracted me from my scan, and when I next looked at the PAPI lights I saw 4 red lights! I got a bit scared since I didn't how far below the glideslope I was and in addition I remembered there's a line of tall trees in the area. More power, back up to the glideslope.

I landed a few minutes before the tower closed and taxied back to the club house. We spent a bit of time going through all the paperwork required and putting a new stamp in my logbook that says I am competent to fly solo at night in PA28 aircraft at night according to the requirements of CAR 5.01A.

It was starting to get a bit late and I was hungry so I said thank you and good bye to Dan and Ben and walked back to my car. I had not turned round the corner of the airport when rain started to fall again. I made a special mental note that I was lucky with weather this time, so that I won't get too upset next time weather Karma does not go my way.

First go-around in a commercial airplane

Tuesday morning, about 7:30AM. I am half-awake in a window seat on the left-hand side of a Qantas Boeing 737-400 on approach to Brisbane airport. We just flew past the tip of North Stradbroke Island, and in a minute or two the airplane will touch down on runway 19. The landing gear goes down, soon followed by flaps. We make a left turn onto final. More flaps.

This is a beautiful Queensland winter morning, with high clouds and amazing visibility. I can see Brisbane CBD very clearly, and in the distance the towers of Swanbank power station, some 50km away. The sight brings back memories of screwing up majorly in this very area on a PPL navigation exercise about a year ago. But back to our story.

My seat is a perfect vantage point for observing the trailing edge of the left wing. We're now aligned with the runway. The flaps move down a little more and then stop. They're about half-way down, definitely not extended as they should be for landing. A few seconds pass and then we pitch up for a go-around. Some power is applied, but not full take-off power, or at least it doesn't sound like it. The rate of climb is moderate.

We make a series of left turns back to the Mud Island area. The captain makes an announcement saying that we went around because of a problem with the flight controls, that this is a routine procedure, no need to worry, we will be on the ground shortly, and sorry for the inconvenience. The flaps haven't moved at all since final. We come back for a very uneventful landing on 19.

As we taxi to the gate the flaps are still in the same partially extended position. They only come back up a few minutes after we reach the gate. The flaps actually come up very slowly, possibly because the backup electrical flap retraction mechanism was used, rather than the normal hydraulic one. That's my guess based on those notes, and I'll stop here with the armchair incident investigation.

As I was walking out of the narrowbody airplane I noticed the captain standing at the cockpit door saying goodbye to passengers, which is rather unusual for Qantas. I asked him if this was a flaps failure and he confirmed with a wink.

So that was all for the adventure. Nothing spectacular really. Sorry for indulging in Gonzo journalism, but that's la loi du genre. The fact that this was my first go-around ever on a commercial flight after hundreds of flights on airliners I guess should be taken as a testimony to the reliability of airline flying.

Speaking about journalism, I found this article about a similar incident on the same type of airplane in Alaska. They quote an FAA person as saying that they do not regard the failure of flaps to be a safety hazard. Which makes a lot of sense. Some airplanes do not have flaps at all. Student pilots perform flapless landings routinely. Flaps are a very convenient luxury.

I was momentarily impressed by how a local newspaper actually sought qualified technical advice when reporting about an aviation incident that didn't even involve injured passengers or a bent airplane. That was before I read the final two paragraphs, where they quote a local ham radio operator who describes the radio transmissions as "dramatic and alarming to hear" and offers a piece of definitive advice by saying "I would definitely be watching and questioning. I would be kind of apprehensive". I guess the opinion of the FAA person was too sensible to end an aviation story with.