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I was in Tucson, AZ for three days of meetings during the week of 06 Feb. It was nice to get away from winter for a few days.

I didn’t get flying the weekend of 11-12 Feb, as the weather wasn’t very good on the Saturday. Sunday was better, but the wind was gusting pretty hard, straight across the runway, and the wind was forecast to increase to 20 kt. I would have probably gone flying if I had slept better on Saturday night, but I had slept poorly, and wasn’t feeling nearly sharp enough to want to face that much crosswind.

I had today off, so I spent much of the day at the airport. The last time I had the RV-8 flying I noted that the indicated airspeed was about 10 kt higher than I would have expected given the altitude and power. There are all kinds of reasons why an aircraft’s performance may deteriorate, but no good reasons why the performance should suddenly improve. So, I suspected a problem with my airspeed accuracy, and the most likely cause was a leak in the static system.

I did a static system leak check this morning, and sure enough it had a moderate leak. The leak was perhaps five times the allowable tolerance given in CAR Standard 571 Appendix B. I started reseating the most likely connections in the static system, repeating the leak check after each one. I found that the problem was in the connection to the analog altimeter, as the leak check was perfect after reseating that connection.

After lunch I did a short flight. I wasn’t sure how high the ceiling was, so I climbed to check out the cloud bases. I hit some light freezing drizzle just below the bottom of the cloud. I got out of the stuff pretty quickly, but still had a fine coating of frozen droplets on the windscreen and wing leading edges. It looked roughly like about 80 grit sandpaper, based on what I could see on the wind screen.

I hadn’t intentionally collected this ice, but now that I had it I was curious to see what the effect on stall speed and stall characteristics was. I did a number of stalls with flaps up and flaps down. The stall characteristics were no different than any other time I have stalled the aircraft. Then I descended down to 1000 ft, which was just below the freezing level, and let the ice melt. I repeated the stall tests and found the stall speed without ice was about 2 kt slower than the stall speed with the light coating of ice. I expect that there would be a greater effect on stall speed if I had collected more ice.

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I got two RV-8 flights during the last week - on Monday and Saturday. The first one was dedicated to evaluating whether an Apple iPad would prove to be a suitable replacement for paper IFR charts and approach plates. Up to now, I have used official Nav Canada paper IFR charts and approach plates. For travel in the US, I purchased VFR Sectional Atlas and IFR Atlas from Air Chart Systems. These atlases are reproductions of the official charts, but in a convenient spiral bound book. For US approach plates, I have been downloading the publically available PDF files, and printing out the ones of interest. The others I put on my iPod Touch, just in case I need to do a diversion.

All these publications for Canada and the US cost quite a bit of money, and take up a lot of space in the cockpit. I’d love to find a better solution. Enter the iPad.

Terry has a first generation iPad - the 3G version with built-in GPS receiver. There are several applications that provide US pubs, but ForeFlight is the only one that also provides Canadian charts and approach plates. We bought a KneeDock at Oshkosh last year, but I had never tried it out. I had convinced myself that there wouldn’t be room for the iPad, as the stick would hit it. But, finally on Monday I downloaded Foreflight (free for 30 days), downloaded the low enroute chart and some approach plates, then went flying to try it out. I found that the iPad sat high enough above me leg so the top of the stick would slip underneath the edge of the it. The visibility was good, even in the bright sunlight. There was a bit of glare, but it wasn’t too bad. The glare wasn’t nearly as bad as it appears in the pictures.

I flew down to Brockville, and shot the RVAV RWY 22 approach, followed by a missed approach to the hold. Then I zipped back to Smiths Falls and did the RVAV RWY 24. The approach plates on the iPad were completely readable.

While enroute, a moving aircraft symbol appeared on the IFR low enroute chart.

I concluded that the iPad is a very worthwhile replacement for paper charts. I won’t renew my subscriptions to paper charts. I’ll plan to print out the approach plates for destination and alternate, and I’ll also install ForeFlight on my iPod Touch as an emergency backup in case the iPad dies. I’ll purchase a Scosche powerPLUG 12v USB power supply to ensure the iPad never runs out of juice while airborne (the iPad needs a higher amperage than is supplied by typical USB). I’ll buy Terry a new iPad whenever the iPad 3 comes out, and I’ll inherit her first generation one.

I got flying again yesterday. I had planned to try the Drift HD170 Stealth video camera again, but my planned mount didn’t work out, so I left it on the ground. I did about 20 minutes of aerobatics then came back to the airport. Great flight.

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Terry and I saw Red Tails Monday evening. It is a recently released movie about the Tuskagee Airmen, who were a group of negro pilots, aircraft mechanics, etc who were formed during WWII. As the first “African American” personnel allowed to join the US Army Air Force, they faced great discrimination, and many obstacles, but ended up with a very enviable combat record flying bomber escort missions with P-51 Mustangs. Terry and I attended a presentation by Col. Charles McGee at Oshkosh last year, and we were both very moved by his story. Terry hadn’t been aware of the Tuskagee Airmen until then, and she really wanted to see the movie. She also had developed a great attraction for the Mustang while at Oshkosh.

We enjoyed the movie, but even Terry noted right away that the flying and combat scenes were typical modern Hollywood “over the top”. They were very dramatized, and were completely unrealistic. But, if you can ignore that, and realize that it is not a documentary, the movie does provide a pretty good, very top level story of these great men.

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Winter has definitely arrived, so it seems like I’m spending half my time at the airport clearing snow. Last weekend the snow blower failed just before I finished clearing between the hangar and the taxiway, so I had to complete the job with a shovel. I did get flying with the temperature at -17°C, and with half fuel. The aircraft was a veritable rocket ship at the light weight and cold temperature, with the VSI showing 2600 ft/mn during the initial climb. Vertical eights were very easy (note that unlike the graphic shown at the link, I do a half roll between the two loops, so both of them are inside loops). The one problem I had last weekend is it was so cold that the O-rings in the fuel tank caps were so stiff that I couldn’t get the caps off. Fortunately I didn’t need to refuel. I knew I had half tanks at the end of previous flight, and the fuel gauges still showed half tanks, so I was comfortable going without looking inside the tanks.

I tried out the Drift HD170 Stealth video camera I got for Christmas (thanks Terry!) during this flight. The camera worked well, but I need to come up with a better way to mount it before I publish any videos. My first attempt at a mount put it too low in the cockpit, and it wasn’t solid enough to prevent a jello effect in the video. I’ve got a couple of ideas for better camera mounts, but it’ll take some more hardware and a few hours work to implement them.

Yesterday morning I went out to the airport to troubleshoot the snow blower. I was hoping the problem was a broken shear pin in the drive system, but I wasn’t so lucky. It turned out that there had been a major mechanical failure - the hub in the drive pulley for the auger and impeller had split. The local dealer didn’t have the parts to repair it, so I had to clear away a week’s worth of snow by hand. Hopefully the parts will be in by next weekend. After all that work clearing snow I really enjoyed the short flight I did when I finally got the snow moved out of the way.

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Peter Lubig, the photographer who did the air-to-air photo shoot in October also does a regular article in Canadian Aviator called “My Other Plane”. “My Other Plane” covers interesting aircraft flown by professional pilots in their spare time. He was getting flack from the publisher about having too many Air Canada and Jazz pilots as subjects (the author is a pilot with Jazz, and that is where he found a lot of early subject matter), so he started beating the bushes for other material. He contacted me about a year ago, and I agreed to the article. He put it in the queue in the fall, and I just got word a week ago that it would be in the next issue. I found it on the news stands a few days ago.

 

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I hoped to go flying this morning, but wasn’t sure whether the weather at Smiths Falls was suitable. Smiths Falls airport doesn’t have a weather report, and conditions there are sometimes quite different than at Ottawa, the closest airport that reports weather. There were snow flurries in the Ottawa area this morning, but the radar and the Smiths Falls Airport Weather Cam suggested that conditions were much better at Smiths Falls. The winds at Ottawa suggested the wind at Smiths Falls would be perhaps 45 degrees off the runway axis, but that wasn’t conclusive. So, somewhat hopeful, I climbed in the car for the 35 minute trip to the airport.

The skies cleared out as I approached Smiths Falls, and it looked great to the west. But I was quite dismayed to see the windsock pointing straight across the runway, with about 10 - 12 kt of wind. Normally 10 kt of crosswind wouldn’t be a concern at all, but the runway was about 50% covered with huge patches of ice, and the ice was very slippery. Taxiing and the take-off would be OK, but the landing was a worry. There was more than enough crosswind to cause the aircraft slide sideways when it was on the large ice patches, and then the wheels would grab when they hit a spot of clear pavement. I wouldn’t have been too concerned if the aircraft had tricycle landing gear, as the main wheels would be behind the centre of gravity, and the side force on the wheels when the aircraft came sliding off the ice onto the clear spots would tend to turn the aircraft so it was pointing in the direction that it was sliding. But, with an aircraft with classical landing gear (also known as a “tail dragger”), the main landing gear is in front of the CG, and the side force when the aircraft hits the clear spots would tend to increase the skid. It would take some luck or a huge amount of skill to avoid a ground loop. I couldn’t count on the good luck arriving when needed, and wasn’t 100% convinced that my skills would be up to the task, especially if the wind speed increased a bit.

This is the first time in over two years of flying that I’ve cancelled a flight that I would have done if I had an aircraft with tricycle landing gear.

While I was at Smiths Falls, I ran into the president of the Flying Club. I suggested that we should acquire some sort of anemometer and wind vane, connected to a web server. Wind data would be very useful when making a decision whether to drive to the airport to go flying or not. He agreed to consider it, once I can provide some data on options.