Travels with FatCatAir

Velocity


Well my pseudo airline will eventually be getting another airplane. After much delay I've ordered a kit for a new airplane. I've wanted to build an airplane for a long time. Back in the late '80s I thought I wanted to build a White Lightning. It was a really fast (300+mph) 4 seater (though the rear passengers faced backwards). It's probably a good thing I never built one as you can barely find evidence of its existence on Google. Actually once I saw one in person I wasn't really interested in it anymore.

The airplane I finally ordered is a Velocity. It is a derivative of a Rutan design. It is decently fast with a big enough engine in it (200 knots). I've ordered an XL-5 RG.  Although it is a very long way off I hope to put a diesel in it. Once the folks at DeltaHawk get around to the larger engine.  The factory quotes numbers as low as 1200-1500 hours to build it. I expect it'll be at least double that. My schedule is to have it flying in seven years.

I certainly know what'll be taking up my spare time for quite a while in the future! I guess the first thing will be to work on a new logo for FatCatAir.
Jan 13 2006, 02:04:40 PM EST Permalink

I never thought I'd hate a tailwind

Well I made it back from my short trip to Canada. Fortunately no international incidents. This is the first time I had ever flown my plane to another country and had to deal with customs and a different air traffic control system. There were only two things I noticed about ATC. The first is that, not surprisingly, they don't have radar coverage everywhere so when I got close to the Wiarton VOR they lost coverage. This meant I actually had to report my position every so often. The same is true in the U.S. while flying IFR but I've never had but a few minutes of not being seen on radar. The other difference was sort of funny. As we came in to Gore Bay's airport the conditions were beautiful and the airport was in sight from at least 10 miles out. So I called Toronto Center  to "cancel IFR" and I got the usual "cancellation received". Then I got "Do you also want to cancel your right to air/sea rescue" (or similar words). Err, umm, "Sure". The controller was funny with his reply "I'm glad you gave me such a positive response. Cancellation received". Guess I better not crash now...

The biggest hassle on this trip though was the worry about customs. Going to Canada was no big deal. You call this number for CANPASS and the conversation goes something like this:

Later on landing and no agent is present.

Coming back to the U.S. (land of the free, home of the paranoid) is not quite so simple. We were landing at Erie airport. As a somewhat bad sign this is actually called "Tom Ridge Airport". You have to make an appointment with customs and you have to give them at least 2 hours notice. Now here's the kicker, according to the US Customs office you can't be any earlier then 15 minutes early or later than 15 minutes late. If you've ever flown a private plane you know how hard that can be if you're flying any long distance. From what I've read on the web of various  interactions people have had they can be quite picky about this and fine you for missing the window. So since it took us 2.5 hours to fly up and even though I knew I should have more favorable winds coming back I set the appointment for 2.5 hours from takeoff.  You can easily go slow if the wind is good but it's impossible to go faster if the wind is not favorable.

Of course we get a great tailwind! We have to slow down, way down. My airplane cruises between 135-140 knots. After the first leg we have to slow down to around 100. :-( At one point ATC clears me direct to a position that will make the trip shorter. I have to decline it. At one point while we're out of radar coverage I think I really ought to just fly in a circle for 10 minutes. We're flying slow enough I'm wondering when ATC is going to ask "You're filed as a Tiger what are you really flying?". We fly at 100 knots for almost 2 hours. We still get to customs 10 minutes early.  They don't get out the whips or chains. Actually they were quite pleasant but they did confirm that they get annoyed if you miss the +/- 15 minute window. Certainly makes the flight planning  harder than it ought to be.

The rest of the trip was pretty much uneventful. One part was neat though. Our path flew us by Pittsburgh. Actually we flew right between the airport and the city. The view was pretty good. My wife and I went to Carnegie Mellon so we tried to see if we could pick it out but it was just too far away. I then realized that our route was going to take us very close to where I grew up. As we got closer I kept looking out the window trying to pick it out while still staying on the course and maintaining altitude. I sure wish I had an autopilot (or a pilot in the right seat). Just as we get really close and I'm looking out the left side the controller says: "28531 turn 20 degrees right for about 20 miles" Argh he must know what I'm trying to do. We turn right. After about 2 minutes he comes back with "28531 thanks a lot you can resume on-course". What's up with that? There was no other traffic that I could see or hear him talk to that we would interfere with. I really do think he knew what was up and just decided to mess with me. Anyway I never did pick out the house I grew up in but it was still pretty neat to see the whole area from 6000 feet. Maybe someday...
Aug 16 2005, 12:51:00 PM EDT Permalink

Invading Canada by Air

Well I off for a few days and I'm going to do something I've never done,fly my plane to a foreign country. Ok so it's Canada and maybe not so foreign. Still it'll be something different.

My wife's twin brother Jay and his wife bought in inn on an island in Lake Huron. My wife and my niece Gretchen that lives with us (different brother in law) went up to visit them in early June to help with the work of the grand opening. My niece liked it there enough that she decided to stay for the summer. Now that school is about to start again we have to bring her back.

When my wife drove there from here in NC it took 20+ hours of driving. It looks like it'll take a little more than 5 hours of flying time. The straight line will work wonders in this case.  There is actually an airport on the island that is relatively close and has a customs office. So assuming I do all the procedures correctly it shouldn't be a big deal. If I do something wrong you might hear about it on national news when I get intercepted... Let's hope not.
Aug 11 2005, 10:34:06 AM EDT Permalink

Oshkosh Day 4 - Going Home

Well the time has come for us to leave. Once again I've learned that spending 3 days at the show just isn't enough. Next time I'm allowing at least 5 days maybe the entire week, there is just too much to see and do.

A check of the weather shows that it will be kind of iffy over the mountains on our way back to NC. Friday doesn't look much better. Oh well I haven't had much IFR time lately and it looks like I'll get some today.

We get to the airport and fire the plane up and get in line to go. We're going to go VFR from here until we stop for gas in Delaware Ohio. They have two lines setup for departure one for IFR on the taxiway and one for VFR in the grass between the taxiway and runway 27. It is slow going. The last time I was here in 2001 we left much earlier around 6am and there was no landing traffic so we had 6 planes on the runway simultaneously, three on the left and three on the right. Today leaving around 8am we have to wait as they let eight or ten planes land and then six or eight takeoff.  We finally get to the front of the VFR line and sit there for a while. While we are waiting a big Cessna (206?) fires up from the parking area just off of our left wing. He's basically right at the front of the IFR line but he's going VFR. We were joking it wasn't fair that he was going to cut to the front of the line.

The lineman directs the Cessna to the grass to get into the VFR line. Just as he gets across the taxiway and his nosewheel in the grass it sinks into the dirt up to the axle. He's stuck and he's partially blocking the taxiway making it hard for anyone going IFR to get by. He's plenty pissed when he gets out and talks to the linemen. They shut down the taxiway while they figure out how they are going to free them. We finally get directed onto the taxiway and into position to go. We take off and maintain just 500 feet AGL as we fly to the west. This path has us crossing paths with the incoming landing traffic. We're well below them but it is kind of cool to see this long line of small planes coming in and going by us.

We finally clear the airport traffic area and can turn around to the east to begin the trip back. At least this time the wind is behind us. We climb to 9500  and this time when we cross  Lake Michigan we're doing  150 knots. We get across in no time.  Once across we descend to 3500  and make our way to Ohio.  We occasionally have to go down to 2500 to remain clear of the clouds and VFR legal but it is mostly uneventful.

We land in Ohio and refuel. I  take a look at the radar picture and there is a line of storms across our path in the mountains. They don't really look bad though,  mostly green with very small  dots of yellow and nothing worse. I've flow through worse before but you don't really want to mess with a thunderstorm. Talking to flight service the briefer at first says we ought to just go the way we originally intended a south east track toward Greensboro. As we talk though he changes his mind and suggests we go directly south until we're beneath the line and then go east. That's the path we file.

We take off and climb to 9000 feet. We're above the clouds and it is pretty nice and smooth for the first hour or so. We finally arrive at the mountains and there is obvious buildup. Doesn't look bad but you never know. I talk to flight watch and they say it isn't bad. We continue on. It starts looking a little worse on our path so I ask the controller what weather he's seeing. He suggests we turn 20 degrees to the east for 15 miles or so.

We take his advice and avoid going into any clouds. It's really been IFR for a half hour or so because we're between layers and it is so hazy we have no horizon. Looking out the window gives me vertigo so I keep my head in the cockpit and on my scan. After we go 15 miles or so it seems like there is nothing on our present south east course and things are worse to the south and our filed course. So I ask the controller if we were cleared to Greensboro from here how did that look weather wise. He said it looked good and we got cleared that way.

The rest of the way was completely uneventful, we didn't get a chance to fly through even one cloud. We cancelled IFR just outside of Greensboro's airspace and headed in for landing in Pittsboro at home.

All in all it was a great trip. About 4 hours after we landed we had a big time thunderstorm come through with hail a little larger than marbles. It was very stormy all night. Thanks goodness this stuff was slow to develop or we'd have had more excitement than we'd have wanted.
Jul 31 2005, 10:42:26 AM EDT Permalink

Oshkosh Day 3 - Global Voyager Arrives

Well today (Wed.) is going to be our last day here we should leave tomorrow assuming the weather cooperates.  Richard Branson and Burt Rutan are supposed to announce some "big news" on the commercial spacecraft front. It seemed very obvious that they were going to announce a new venture for building the vehicles that Virgin Galactic was going to fly. So to little surprise Branson (Rutan had an important golf date) announced the formation of the "SpaceShip Company". This company was going to build the replacement for WhiteKnight which will be called "Eve" and the new spaceship unimaginitively called SpaceShipTwo. Eve and SS2 will be twice as large as their predecessors and SS2 will carry five passengers and two pilots. Supposedly Virgin Galactic has 100 people signed up at $200k for flights. Two people presented their checks during the press conference. When asked if they could name any celebrities that were going Branson said that none had allowed their name so far but he could say that a famous TV show starship captain had already paid. The most surprising thing I got from this press conference was what a poor public speaker Richard Branson was. I'd expected that for someone in his position and in the public eye would be much more polished.

After that somewhat anti-climatic announcement was the start of the various airplanes in the showcase. I happened to notice a Velocity with a diesel engine. This engine is built by a company called DeltaHawk and I've been following their progress for a year or two since I hope to use one of their diesels in the Velocity I build. This engine is serial number 1. They've been flying it for quite a while but today was going to be the first time they ever flew for a crowd. It started up and went out to the taxiway to get sequenced.  Then I waited and waited. After waiting for an hour and a half I gave up. If it ever flew I never saw it.

After that disappointment I spent time walking through the various pavillions looking at the stuff vendors have for sale. I was sorely tempted and came close to buying a PowerFlow exhaust for my Tiger but decided that it would be better to spend that money on getting my panel mount GPS installation IFR certified.

A little after 3pm Steve Fossett finally flew in the Global Voyager. As it made several passes my Canon Digital Rebel decided not to work. Everytime I tried to take a photo it displayed "Err 99". After "rebooting" a few times and taking the lens on and off it eventually decided to work again. By then Global Voyager was on the ground :-( so my photo of it flying is from my friend Pat.

After the day's airshow I visited with flight service to see what the weather was going to be like on Thursday for our trip back to NC. The FSS guy had a computer and it was running Mozilla. The computer was acting kind of weird and I was about to make some disparaging comments about Windows and needing to reboot when I noticed he was running RedHat Linux. Go figure. Anyway the FSS guy showed me the maps of the fronts for Thursday and Friday and told me he'd skip Thursday and go Friday because of the storms likely at the NC/VA border. This was kind of strange because the maps he showed me were identical for both days. When question he said "well yeah they maps look identical, but the Friday prediction was wrong and the front won't really be were the maps showed". Kind of makes you wonder why he showed me the map...

The final event we went to was "Theatre in the Woods". This was supposed to have a talk by Steve Fossett about his experiences on Global Voyager. Had we known we'd have to sit through at least an hour and a half of drivel we'd have skipped it. The first part of the program was a presnetation about Young Eagles and Harrison Ford was on stage as the chairman of the program. This part was ok but a little long. Next however came Marion Blakey the administrator of the FAA. This was truly horrible. I was thinking of slitting my wrists before long. On and on she bored us. Finally Steve Fossett took the stage.

This was a fairly interesting talk. It was sort of humorous to hear about all the problems that he had caused by bad design or lack of testing after hearing Burt Rutan talk about the safety standards for SS1. The worst of the problems was that there was an unguarded switch for the oxygen system that Steve must have accidentally turned on while getting in the plane. So after 2 hours he had depleted his oxygen system. This meant if he lost cabin pressure he would die.  Then there was the GPS system that shut down when he left US airspace where all the testing had been done. Eventually it came back on line.

The talk finally answered what I had wondered about with the fuel situation on Global Voyager. When this flight was taking place as he approached the Pacific there was the issue of the missing fuel and whether he would be able to make it. The guages on the craft were notoriously unreliable so it wasn't clear at the time whether it was a guage problem or a fuel leak. Well it turned out to be a fuel leak. Luckily for Steve his average tailwind was something like 70+ knots and the design spec was for 53 knots so since he had so much better speed it was possible to make it with less fuel.

The fuel leak was caused by a problem in the venting system. In order to reduce drag the vents were just a port in the top of the wings. When the plane was fully fueled it was possible for the fuel to be pushed right out the vent lines. So for the first two hours of the flight until the level got low enough to introduce an air bubble and break the siphon the fuel was being dumped overboard. Now the vents have stacks to prevent this from happening again.
Jul 30 2005, 10:54:58 AM EDT Permalink

Oshkosh Day 2 - All Rutan All Day

After Monday nights storm the grounds here at Oshkosh were pretty wet and we had cloudy skies and much cooler (low 60's) and windy. It was definitely on the cool side to be wearing shorts. Today was to be a day of sessions for the morning and early afternoon. We arrived pretty early so I could go to a workshop on composites. My plan is to build a Rutan inspired fiberglass airplane called a Velocity and I wanted to see what I could learn and try my hand at doing a little bit of composite layup. The session mostly covered stuff I already knew but I did get to do a little bit of layup work. This was the first time I had every used an epoxy resin and also microballons. It was pretty straightforward.

The next session was one by Dick Rutan talking about his experiences while flying the Voyager airplane around the world in 1986. I mostly went to this session because it was the same building where the SpaceShipOne people were going to give two talks following it. I hoped to be able to get a seat this way. Unfortunately a lot of other people had the same idea. :-( So I ended up standing up near the front. As it turned out this was lucky as Burt Rutan, Mike Melvill, and Brian Binnie, the designer and pilots respectively of SpaceShipOne came up and stood right next to me. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture so you'll just have to take my word for it.

The Voyager talk was really quite good and very entertaining. I think it mostly caused me to relearn things I knew back in 1986 but it was definitely worth it. The next talk was about piloting SpaceShipOne. Burt introduced Mike and Brian who then did most of the talking. Brian had a presentation prepared which talked about how they trained on the simulator and learned to fly SS1 down to a landing. The vehicle is hard to land since you have no view out the front. Just a view out the small portholes on the side. They originally tried to land but what is known of as an overhead approach. This involves circling down until you get to a key height and then making a normal style approach. This did not work well. They showed video of two landings where on the first they almost ran it off the end of the runway and the second where they almost landed short. On that latter landing Mike was piloting and didn't drop the gear because he couldn't drop the gear. The pilot flying chase that normally is calling out gear heights above the runway had little to say. The view is of SS1 getting lower and lower over the dirt. Just then the runway appears and the chase pilot calls out "gear down!" The gear immediately pops out and the ship touches down. They were a second away from a very bad landing.

The solution they came up with to solve this problem with approaches was to do figure 8's off the approach end of the runway. Always turning toward the runway to keep it in sight. When they'd get to a key height they'd then do a normal landing. It was kind of funny to Pat and I because as longtime hang glider pilots this is a very familiar approach. It is very common for people to do this kind of landing. I guess if they had some hang glider pilots on staff they could have learned this idea much sooner.

The final session we went to that day was a talk Burt gave about the future of commercial space development. In a lot of ways this was a long rant about how the government and NASA had really gone nowhere in the last 30 years or so. With no aggressive or risk taking ideas which might really revolutionize the ability to fly into space. I think in a lot of ways this is true but I think the media shares in this blame. When NASA comes under so much criticism whenever things go wrong it doesn't create an atmosphere where you are willing to try wild ideas that might fail but might be ground breaking if they succeed. Instead you end up doing thing that are just small refinements of what has already worked. Burt said he finally decided if he was ever going to get a chance to fly into space he was just going to have to build his own vehicle to do it. He's well on the way to doing it. Burt has talked about a vehicle that could actually orbit earth rather than the sub-orbital flights that SS1 has done and I wondered how this could be possible with this kind of a vehicle. He admitted that there are many significant problems left to solve. He closed with a call for people to come out and work for him building the next generation of vehicle. He viewed his trip to Oshkosh as a recruiting trip figuring anyone that could build their own plane could work for him. So if you think you want to be a part of it and are willing to work in the Mojave you should check it out.

After these sessions were over was time for the days flying events including flybys over various airplanes and the daily airshow. Unfortunately on this day a P51 mustang flying in from one of the staging airports crashed and killed the pilot. So the missing man formation was more realistic than intended. :-(

The airshow was a lot of the same pilots. Again the AeroShell team did some formation aerobatics. There was also a pilot that landed his plane on the roof of an RV driving down the runway. That was pretty amazing.

According to the original schedule Steve Fossett and the Global Voyager was supposed to fly in today but they never showed. Looks like they'll make it tomorrow...

Jul 29 2005, 11:31:07 AM EDT Permalink

Oshkosh Day 1 - the SpaceShip lands

I've taken a few days off to fly my Grumman Tiger along with my neighbor Pat up to Oskosh for the big flyin. The flyin started on Monday but we flew up on Sunday. I had intended to do more daily writing but not surprisingly things happened.

Sunday

The trip up here from North Carolina was mostly uneventful. We stopped in Delaware Ohio which was halfway. Fuel prices were decent at $2.74 for 100LL. When we talked to flight service we found that while we could get there on my original route we could probably take a little bit different route and miss the thunderstorms entirely. We took that option. The path we took had us fly directly across Lake Michigan. We had been slowed by headwinds the entire trip but they were really bad over the lake. We had headwinds of more than 45 knots.  My plane cruises at about 135 knots and we sometimes saw ground speeds of 88 knots. It took us around an hour to cross the lake!

Monday

I had been thinking of flying up here for the flyin this year after not being here since my first visit in 2001. When I heard that SpaceShip 1 was going to be here it sealed the deal and we made plans. Things turned out even better than expected when we found that SpaceShip 1 and WhiteKnight were't already on the grounds but would be flying in at 3pm. At around 2:45 they arrived and made at least four passes over the field. I got some decent photos of it flying by.

After they landed the daily airshow began in earnest. It was great as usual and two of my favorites the AeroShell team and Sean D. Tucker made appearances. Sean has his distinctive Oracle biplane and did his usual amazing bit of flying. They said that during the routine he would pull as much as 10.5 g's positive and 6 g's negative. It's amazing you can take a breath much less fly a plane. My friend Pat who flies some aerobatics in a  Super Decathalon remarked that after this he might as well just fly straight and level from now on.

After the airshow we manged to get over to where SpaceShip 1 was parked. As you might expect there was quite a crowd around it but I still got some good closeups of it. I tried to get a picture with me in it which was pretty funny since as you might expect since on practically every shot someone would step in front of Pat taking the picture.

After the airshow a big storm came up and we had a tornado watch for about 5 hours.  Fortunately all we got was a lot of rain and no damage to the vast number of airplanes parked outside.

That's it for now.
Jul 26 2005, 10:51:53 PM EDT Permalink