Official Airport Bum!?

After a bit of a schedule conflict break, back at it today. Today was "wow, I forgot how to fly this thing!" Day. I hate those. Ha. Chasing ass all over the place with power on short field landings and horrible patterns. Ha.

But we did start engine outs today. And being behind the airplane meant a good lesson: CFI is watching me with a grin (always a bad sign) as the airplane won't climb after securing one in the pattern (well, he sets zero thrust at that altitude but guess what you have to say out loud first...)

"Doesn't want to climb. Did you forget something?" (Big grin...)"

"****! Feather!"

Oh look, now it'll hold altitude! Haha.

Sheesh. One of those days. I haz the dumb today. Always one of those during training...

Flying again tomorrow and Sunday if we can get the weather to cooperate. Man it's been a wet year here.
 
1.0 in the Seminole, we did more short field stuff and the landings were much better today - brain was switched back on - good.

We were about to head over to FTG to shoot approaches when the Sandel HSI decided to start rebooting intermittently. D'oh!

Nearly continuous reboots during the last lap around the pattern.

Called off the rest of the flight so in case it was a connector problem or similar we wouldn't fry the poor thing and it was getting worse.

Flying cancelled for the rest of the weekend... Because it's Murphy ... and this stuff has to happen on a holiday weekend of course.
 
The Sandel is fixed, and (unbeknown to me since I wasn't flying) in the meantime the Garmin decided not to fly approaches into APA -- and was beat upon with a laptop and a hammer (kidding), and fixed. The other student is doing good and headed for his ATP ride shortly.

One doggie needs tooth surgery (perhaps, they can't tell if she cracked it) and the other one needs a cleaning and has to be knocked out for that, so tomorrow is doggy vet day and hopefully no major doggy recovery junk tomorrow night. We shall see.

(Country vet noticed the tooth while vaccinating the other dog a few days ago...)

We should be back to flying on Maybe Tuesday sometime. See if we can see anything for all the forest fire smoke...
 
denverpilot said:
See if we can see anything for all the forest fire smoke...
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Both Springs approach and Denver approach quizzed us about the smoke this evening. "Can you see where it is coming from?" All we could say was that it was southwest of us (we were on the DUNNN2 arrival). After we got to KAPA we could tell that it was coming from the other side of the foothills. By the time I drove home it was covering the southern sky. I can smell it as I type this.
 
Everskyward said:
Both Springs approach and Denver approach quizzed us about the smoke this evening. "Can you see where it is coming from?" All we could say was that it was southwest of us (we were on the DUNNN2 arrival). After we got to KAPA we could tell that it was coming from the other side of the foothills. By the time I drove home it was covering the southern sky. I can smell it as I type this.
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Yeah it's pretty strong out here. A friend who lives in a western suburb says he's down to 5 miles vis at his place and it smells worse. I think us eastern plains folks probably have it easy, as far as the smoke goes, but it's amazing that the whole house now smells like it all the way out here.

Bunch of ham radio and firefighter friends "disappeared" today. As in, everything and everyone is committed as resources to the west of town now.

The tanker base photos coming out of BJC are cool. Didn't know they were using smurfjets as fire tankers these days. As best as I could tell, they had six fixed wing aircraft committed all day (two SEATs, two P2Vs, and two smurfjets) as well as a gaggle of helicopters with Bambi buckets.

We sure went from nothing really happening near civilization to "everything's on fire now" pretty quick this summer. Of course there are over 600 active fires right now out west overall, so we were just overdue.
 
Didn't hear from CFI for a couple days. Figured he was finishing up the ATP student. He was. ATP student flew off the remaining time on the 100 hour on the airplane and Sandel is acting wonky still -- some days it's happy, some days it reboots. Current theory is something the Garmin is feeding it is ****ing it off.

Anyway, airplane down until Monday night or Tuesday. It got a new Nav light assembly (it had decided to be intermittent) and other "good stuff", he really does take care of it well, it's just been the summer of hell for broken stuff at bad times, apparently. Happens.

I'm gonna go fly the 182... Just for fun and currency, and just let the annoyance disappear... Haha.

Think I'm getting an important lesson but it's not about flying airplanes. It's that airplanes used heavily break all the damned time. LOL.
 
Decided to go get night current last night and since running laps in the pattern is boring, decided to go to Goodland, KS.

Has nothing to do with the whole training thread. Just fun.

So off I went in the 182. It's really quiet on the ramp in Goodland at midnight.

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Seminole is back online Wednesday... And of course it's "get ready to leave for OSH week now". Going to be a busy week.
 
Flew 1.4... Approaches two engine and single engine. Instructor had another student who's scheduled to fly his ATP on Monday come along and we each took a leg.

We're going to knock it off until back from OSH...

Here's the back of the other guy's head and the CFI... Heh. (I didn't ask if I could post his photo so I'm not saying who, but he's a nice guy. Former controller, retired from that...)

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And the view from the back seat...

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Two buddies just passed their ATPs in the last week. We all got in under the wire with the written two years ago.
 
LDJones said:
Two buddies just passed their ATPs in the last week. We all got in under the wire with the written two years ago.
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Yeah the flood of them is about to stop and I'll stop getting bumped from the schedule for them, which will speed things up considerably, I suspect.

It's really obvious at the airport that the big push has been going on. Most months you might see a twin in the pattern about once a day, and right now there's very little time you won't be out there with at least one other in the pattern with you. At least at APA. FTG is a little quieter.

Some Falcon with a Texas flag on the tail and the Longhorn logo on the engine nacelles taxied up at FTG this afternoon. Unique paint job on a unique plane (the three hole version).
 
Talked to CFI. He caught a nasty summer cold so we decided no flying this week. We'll hammer things next week but we do have to work around a two day personal thing for him (family member having surgery) but next two weeks are generally wide open other than that, so I'll go to work and make some $$$ this week I suppose. Haha. No fun.
 
I feel like there are more Posts in this thread about not flying then there are about flying. Lol
But I know that's how flying goes! Thanks for keeping us updated.
 
farmerbrake said:
I feel like there are more Posts in this thread about not flying then there are about flying. Lol
But I know that's how flying goes! Thanks for keeping us updated.
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I think I'm indirectly learning how it is really like to run a small aviation business.
 
Flew today! That's the good news. Ha.

1.7 in the Seminole, instructor says its "time to start a push for the checkride".

The bad news. He's been coughing with a cold for a week and went to th doc today and has to self-ground for a bit for a medication they want him to take.

Hahaha. It's not a tragedy, it's a comedy! LOL.

He sounded bummed tonight when I talked to him about the prescription. Ahh, it's alright man. Stuff happens.
 
Flew the 182 today for 1.8 hours and took two old friends along with Karen to KGXY for lunch. Had a ball. Hadn't flown the 182 at gross in a while. Lots of power on final. ;-)

Ran into CFI working on his 172 at his hangar. He's also an A&P/IA. He looked better and no cough but will be grounded for a bit. He's getting over it the aviation way... Get out to the airport and do stuff. Grin...

I had to run into him, I left the iPad in the back of the Seminole. LOL.
 
CFI feels better and up in the Seminole today! Woot!

Went up to 12,500 and killed both engines (not at the same time of course), fully feathered. Today was essentially a mock checkride, and then...

The %**+>?^ HSI failed again. Haha. Damn it!

CFI has an out of town student coming next week and it has to work so they're going to beat on it heavily on Monday. Avionics guy has looked at this Sandel four times now and it refuses to fail on the ground, so he will probably get a Seminole ride to see what it's doing in flight on Monday.

It's spiffy when it's working! Love that thing coupled to the Garmin 430. Works great.

So we cut the flight short (didn't fly the ILS at another airport since flying over there and back with a dead HSI was kinda useless) but CFI said, "It'll be working... Start calling DPEs and schedule your checkride for week after next... Time to get this done..."

Woot! Multi/Commerical/Instrument ride, here we go!

Prerequisite stuff is all done, we just need one good flight with everything working to nail all the boards together in the same flight. If I do something dumb on that one, two flights. Heh.

A ground photo, but it kinda looked like that in flight later, too... Heh. Much more "feathery" though. Ha.

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Good luck. The multi commercial is one of the easier ones. Know factors that affect Vmc, systems, and single engine and multi engine performance really well.
 
Well kinda expected that. The Sandel has been yanked to go back to the manufacturer for service so the airplane is now VFR. The hope is the unit comes back early next week and we've tentatively scheduled with the DPE on Sept 4th.

Love flying behind that thing when it's working but it's been flaking out all summer.

So there ya go. We'll see what next week brings.
 
Monday is the big day to see if the Sandel came back and works. If it's not going to be back in time I'll have to reschedule the DPE. Also need to get at least one flight in this week probably.

Meanwhile, flew the 182 up to GXY to see family at a fish fry today. Fun.

Found out GXY now has no keypad for gate entry and you can only access the ramp as a transient through the terminal building. It closes at 8PM and if you want to depart after 8PM you pay $48 for a call out for someone to come let you back onto the ramp.

Terrible policy for transients.

Guess they don't want my business. I even made sure to leave a little fuel off so I could buy some gas from them instead of tankering it from APA -- I can't see why I'll be going out of my way to help them out anymore.

And I'll probably go over to FNL when I see family now. No point in playing the "I have to hurry back to the airport" game. If I wanted that, I'd fly commercial.
 
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Annnnnnd it's gone. Haha. Gratuitous South Park reference...

Sandel is still poking at the HSI. CFI said to push the checkride back into next week. It's supposedly going to show up maybe Wednesday.

Once we finally get around to getting this ride done, I'm starting to wonder what will break on my 182 during the SE ride prep. LOL!

Now I have to decide if I go to work and make money this week. I did a regular 80 hour week last week, so I'm technically going "over" my agreed-upon hours, but I'm behind on those overall through this process anyway... I don't think they'll care if I show up and do stuff.

I managed to get the entire internal server environment patches done last week... Talk about exciting. Ha. Amongst other things, while the co-sysadmin was chilling it in Sweden. I think he had more fun than I did last week.

One observation: Take a summer off from IT and then do desktop support coverage for a week upon your first full week back in a while and the statement, "The printer isn't working again..." will raise your blood pressure by a whole lot of points. Frakking printers and two decades of hearing that phrase will certainly and instantly **** you off at every printer manufacturer on the planet.

Same **** different decade. Someone printed a huge file the whopping 512MB of RAM didn't like because the printer driver writing morons haven't figured it out that people do that, apparently. Kill all the print jobs, yank the power cord out of the small car sized "professional quality" printer, and shove it back in, and smile and tell the folks waiting on their documents that it'll print them just fine now, just go hit re-send...

Let's not even go into the four people on Win7 who suddenly couldn't authenticate to the wifi. That only blew an entire day for users who should have upgraded back when we scheduled their upgrades... LOL.

I'm thinking even 40 year old airplane problems are more interesting than that crap. But like always, playing printer reboot man pays better. Lots better. Haha. Sad.
 
"If you're going to make me use Windoze, you ARE NOT going to make me upgrade! My Win7 is running PuTTY just fine - and that's about ALL it needs to do."
 
Tell them there is a paper conservation policy and remove all printers but one...and that printer is in the basement or on the top floor...and prints 8 pages a minute...black & white...not even greyscale.
 
gkainz said:
"If you're going to make me use Windoze, you ARE NOT going to make me upgrade! My Win7 is running PuTTY just fine - and that's about ALL it needs to do."
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If all you need is PuTTY, it's time to convert that thing to Linux. Haha.

Clark1961 said:
Tell them there is a paper conservation policy and remove all printers but one...and that printer is in the basement or on the top floor...and prints 8 pages a minute...black & white...not even greyscale.
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They do drug testing results for DOT. They're totally in love with paper processes. You should see the "document engine" they store all the PDFs in. The funniest part is long long ago it was converted to 8-bit black and white images to save disk space, and it still takes something like 2TB of raw file storage.

Even better. Last week the new Devops guy asks, "Why did someone recompile ImageMagick to run in 8-bit? Didn't the developers realize there's a PHP flag that'll do that? Recompiling the image library is dumb!"

"You should have seen how many times they forgot to do that and filled the server drives..."

Heh. Ahhhhh the fun of IT. And hacks. On top of hacks.
 
Ugh. DPE is leaving for vacation almost right after originally scheduled checkride date, for two to three weeks. LOL.

It's just comedy now, at this point.

Might be able to schedule one day only a couple of days past the original date...

Or it's call up a different DPE and see what their schedule is like...
 
denverpilot said:
If all you need is PuTTY, it's time to convert that thing to Linux. Haha.
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running a macbook, so linux ... 2 ex windows boxes sitting on the floor beside me with linux ... so nope - don't need windows. That Winders box just happens to be conveniently sitting on a desk inside the DMZ and can RDP ... no further action required. :)
 
Airplane might be fixed tomorrow. Knock on wood.

Which also means a mad scramble to maybe reschedule DPE and perhaps do the checkride this weekend again now. Haha.

Airplanes. Sheesh. Bang head on desk...
 
I thought my fortune cookie from Panda might have some insights as to the upcoming checkride...

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Of course not. It just bitched about IT. Hahaha.
 
Annnnnnd it's back...

Now it looks like due to schedule changes...

IF the Sandel arrives on time...

And IF it works properly in the airplane...

Checkride prep tomorrow (ground), Friday (flight), and checkride Saturday split between a morning session to do the oral and a later afternoon session for the flight portion due to DPE and aircraft scheduling.

Holy frijoles Batman...

I'm off to go study up...

After poking through PoA while rounding up the doggies and feeding them.
 
Annnnnnnddddd it's gone...

Checkride cancelled again. For reasonable reasons again.

But I'm almost just in total resignation mode now.

Not even enough energy to be frustrated about it anymore.

Okay so the story... For posterity when someone wonders why I snapped... Hahaha...

Sandel didn't arrive.

DPE was also trying to slam me into his schedule for an airplane that still may not be ready by the weekend but was nice enough (he's a really nice guy) not to say anything to me and try to do it anyway. He's fried and headed for a couple of week vacation. He deserves it. I know how many rides he's given this summer.

CFI is dropping all the formality of me trying to schedule my own DPE at this point and said, "I'll get this scheduled and let you know when. We aren't going to fly until a couple of days before because that would be wasting your money."

Everyone's doing the right things, it's just amazing how well Murphy has been on a rampage this summer around here.

Additional info. Plan change. Not switching to my 182 after this ride.

Straight to multi Instructor as the initial CFI ride.

Then add on ride in my 182 afterward.

The plan is to completely hammer out the multi rides as quick as possible before something else happens (or breaks).

That'll be interesting. I'll be a multi instructor before I'm able to teach in a single.

Which interestingly may speed up the whole process on the back end after all of this.

But for the moment I'm just stuck. And mildly annoyed at nobody in particular because it's nobody's fault.

Well, maybe I hate Sandel. Haha. Maybe. I know I'd never buy one of the damned things after this.
 
jordane93 said:
Man you can't catch a break. Keep studying!
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Yep. Especially if you're going to go right into the MEI. Study and know the how and why things happen and be able to teach it. This is the time I'd be using to work on writing my lesson plans too.
 
mondtster said:
Yep. Especially if you're going to go right into the MEI. Study and know the how and why things happen and be able to teach it. This is the time I'd be using to work on writing my lesson plans too.
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Ummmm yeah. Kinda went from "I'll get a little break doing the single Comm to OH HOLY CRAP!" LOL.
 
I applaud every MEI. I don't know if I have it in me to eventually get it.
 
denverpilot said:
Seemed like a good way to my ultimate goal...

Meet nice people.
Let them try to kill me in airplanes.

;)
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Teaching in singles doesn't bother me, even with a marginal student. Having someone you don't trust in a tailwheel and/or in a twin can get ugly in a hurry, if you're not vigilant. Thankfully the student is doing most of the work so your attention can be focused on keeping yourself out of trouble. :)

By the way, what's your end goal here? Do you want to teach in a twin? If not, that will be a kind of expensive way to get an initial CFI rating if you don't plan on using it much or at all. You'll have to get 15 hours PIC in the twin before you can go take that checkride.
 
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