RV7 Flying Adventures

Zulu When pilots get on the radio and talk to other pilots, or a control tower, or an Air Traffic Control Center, they have to identify themselves by using their "N" number. The "N" number of our airplane is N708X. Sometimes radio communication is quite indistinct, and certain letters might not be heard correctly. Therefore, all pilots use the Aviation Phonetic Alphabet to identify letters. My husband would say, "Tower, this is November 7-0-8 X-ray ," and the tower wouldn't be confused, thinking he might've said "M708X." The letter for Z is Zulu, and this ends my A-Z Challenge with the theme of Flight Terminology. I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing about flying--this passion of my husband's and mine--and its terminology. Have you ever had reason to learn the Aviation Phonetic Alphabet?

Yoke If you've never been inside of a small airplane, you probably think they have a steering wheel. Well, some do have something that is close to a steering wheel, called a Yoke. But most small airplanes are controlled by a stick instead. In our airplane, my husband has a stick, and I have a stick. Yes, it's quite the phallic symbol, blush-blush. His stick. My stick. This little thing replaces a steering wheel, or yoke, and is what is used to "steer" the airplane. You hardly have to breathe on it, and the plane will turn one way or another. That's what's called "being responsive."

X on a Runway:"Do Not Land" This isn't an issue for commercial airliners, but sometimes when a private pilot is getting ready to land on a crude runway, i.e. a grass strip or a mountain runway, he will run across a big red "X." That means he's not supposed to land there. The big red "X" on this mountainous grass runway is in Elk River, Idaho. It was the morning of July 5th. Elk River'd had one big, drunken bash the night before. They'd set off fireworks on the runway, and didn't want planes landing there, just in case there was still some debris that might cause trouble. We landed our RV7 and our friend landed his Cessna 180 on the long runway, but quite a ways down from the "X." If you ever get a chance to see Elk River, Idaho, it's quite a scenic spot, with many sites for camping. People go there to fish and to pick huckleberries.

Wheel Pants On airplanes that do not have a retractable landing gear (see "T" for Tail-Dragger and Tricycle Landing Gear), wheel pants are little ferrings for wheels. They're little covers that help the plane to be less "dirty" and more streamlined in flight. In other words, the air doesn't get caught up on the wheels, but flows right over them, just as it flows over the wings and the fuselage. The picture above shows our fiberglass wheel ferrings before they were painted. See how the streamlined shape allows air to glide right over the wheels? In this picture, the gear ferrings, Wheel Pants , have been painted. It's July 4, 2013, and we've just landed in Regina, Saskatchewan, almost 750 miles from home. It would've taken 14.5 hours to drive. It took less than 6 hours to fly ... although we're not yet at our destination. We're still 300 miles away from it. Have you ever noticed while flying on a commercial airliner, the "bump-bump...

Victory Lap There are a couple of aviation terms that begin with "V", but I've already mentioned V.F.R. (Visual Flight Rules) as opposed to I.F.R (Instrument Flight Rules--see letter "I"--Instrument Flight Rules). The other aviation term beginning with V is VOR, which has to do with old radio technology that has become obsolete. There used to be a VOR tower in our area, but it's been gone for years. Instead, I decided to share a picture that Mike calls his " Victory Lap ." It took him six years to build the RV7 in his spare time. He flew its maiden flight, wherein he soloed the plane he had put his heart and soul into building, on December 21 of 2007. Getting good flying weather around here in the winter is always iffy, but he was able to fly it again on Christmas day. Then, the weather got bad and stayed bad until March 6, at which time he flew his baby again --home! As you can see, the grass is still brown and gungy. He landed it on our landing s...

Ultralight The U.S. definition of an UltraLight, according to Wikipedia, is a powered vehicle weighing less than 254 pounds empty. Though it flies, it is not defined as an aircraft, which enables enthusiasts to own and fly something that doesn't need to be registered with the F.A.A. Nor does the person flying it need a pilot's license. Ultralights were a craze back in the 1980's, and I think people do still fly them. They cost less than $10,000, thus are an inexpensive way to scratch the flying itch. The picture below is of my husband flying our Ultralight back in 1985. He had a lot of fun with it, but I was glad when, after one too many forced landings, (see letter "D" for Ditch), he decided to sell it.   Are Ultralights popular where you live? We never see them where we are, here in SE Washington state.

Tail Dragger and Tricycle Landing Gears The type of airplanes that the average Joe flies, like our friends and us, will have one of two types of landing gears. We're not fat cats who fly private jets or twin engines with retractable gears, i.e. gears that fold up into the belly once the plane is airborne. No, people like us fly either Tail Draggers or airplanes with Tricycle Landing Gears. The picture below is of our friends, Vince and Sharon, who built an RV8. Like our RV7, this airplane is a Tail Dragger. A Tail Dragger has two wheels in front and a tiny little tail wheel in back. It takes more skill to fly a Tail Dragger, as it is squirrelly when accelerating down a runway just before takeoff, and also when landing. It's pretty easy for an inexperienced pilot to ground-loop a Tail Dragger. Heck, when my husband was first learning how to fly the KitFox2, which is also a Tail Dragger, he ground-looped it. He has almost three thousand of hours' worth of flying time. But at...

Squawk A squawk is a signal sent out by a Transponder that lets an Air Traffic Control Center know where you are on radar. You would be seen on radar anyway, but the Transponder actually identifies you by a code attached to the little airplane blip on the radar screen. You've probably heard a lot lately about how the Transponder had been turned off on Malaysia Airliner Flight 370. When the pilot (or whomever) turned off the Transponder, air traffic controllers lost all contact with them. Flight 370 became one of hundreds of unidentified blips on a radar screen. When flying I.F.R., as airliners do, that blip allows air traffic controllers to know the altitude at which a plane is flying in addition to its location, which prevents mid-air collisions. When Mike and I were making an International Flight into Saskatchewan in our RV7, we were required to use our Transponder. We were given a 4-number code that was picked up first by Seattle Air Traffic Control Center, and then Salt Lake A...

Rate of Climb (Image source: Wikipedia) The Rate of Climb is an aircraft's vertical speed measured in feet per minute. An F-15 like the image at left has the power to climb straight up, like a rocket.    A Vertical Speed Indicator measures the Rate of Climb. When an aircraft is descending, the Rate of Climb becomes the Rate of Descent, or Sink Rate.   There are optimum speeds and Rates of Climb. Typical jetliners climb anywhere from 2000-4500 feet per minute. This rate reduces as the plane gets higher. After about 15,000 feet, the air isn't thick enough to maintain that high of performance. When an airplane reaches its performance ceiling, it will use all of its power to maintain that altitude.   Our little airplane climbs at 1000 feet per minute, generally. It depends on several factors: The initial altitude at which we're starting out, our loaded weight, and outside air temperature and humidity.     Standard Rate of Descent is 2500 feet per minu...

Quick Fix In aviation terminology, a Quick Fix has the same meaning as you might think. It's devising a quick solution to an immediate problem. It's not a permanent solution, but one that will get you by temporarily, or for as long as you need it. Duct tape seems to be the universal, creative quick fix. When we flew into Canada last summer, we discovered that in Canada, a plane's "N" number needs to be 10" tall instead of 3" tall, as in the U.S. So what was Mike's quick fix? Duct tape.   It looks awful, but it did the trick. When we got home, he ripped the tape off. It left a sticky residue that cleaned off nicely using AvGas--aviation gasoline. Have you ever used duct tape as a quick fix? We seem to use it all the time.

Pilot in Command The PIC, Pilot in Command, is the one who is responsible for flying the airplane. Commercial airliners have PICs, co-pilots, navigators--all keeping track of important functions. Each one has had thousands of hours' worth of flying time before achieving that position. Usually, it is retired military pilots who get these jobs. Plus, commercial airliners are equipped with auto-pilots. You can be assured that you are in responsible hands when flying commercially. In private aviation, the Pilot in Command is generally the aircraft owner. Or in the case of corporate jets, a pilot with high flying hours and other proper credentials who's been hired by the corporation. The PIC in the picture below is my husband. We're flying beside Lake Coeur d'Alene after leaving Sandpoint, Idaho. He's talking with another PIC who wants to land at the Sandpoint airport. Mike is telling him that we have left the Sandpoint air space, and that it is clear for him to land. Do...

Outside Air Temperature Commercial airliners are completely climate-controlled and not affected by outside air temperatures. If there's a problem with the heating or air conditioning, the plane is grounded until it's fixed. That happened to us once when we were flying on a commercial airlines, leaving out of O'Hare International in Chicago. Thank goodness the air conditioning problem was resolved before take-off. Even with climate-control, I've still been overheated in a crowded airliner. Outside air temperature is more of a concern in small, privately owned aircraft, where there is only a thin aluminum wall or an acrylic canopy between the passengers and the outside air. In the summertime, it's not usually a problem, but a boon. The higher you go, the cooler the outside air temperature. In the winter, though, our airplane heater isn't able to heat the airplane sufficiently when the outside air temperature is 5 degrees, such as it was on the day I took the pict...

The picture below shows how we moved the RV7, which my husband built in his spare time over sixyears, from an old farm shop out to the local airport. The wings were transported in the back of a pickup. It was a distance of about 9 miles.  We think it's a funny juxtaposition of high-tech (the airplane) and decidedly low-tech (the old bucket tractor). We did it this way because we didn't want to spend money renting a U-Haul.  Have you ever moved something in a way that was, well ... creative ?

Mayday : Mayday is a internationally used procedural word in an air or sea emergency. It is given three times in a row to prevent being mistaken for a similar-sounding word, and to distinguish an actual Mayday call from a message about a Mayday call, according to Wikipedia. The civilian aircraft radio emergency frequency used to make the call is 121.5. This radio frequency is monitored by air traffic control centers. If you are in an emergency and you call out Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! on your radio, you will be heard by someone at the nearest center. If you are not in an emergency situation, and you inadvertently fly into Restricted or Prohibited airspace (and you would be really dumb and uninformed to do something like that), the center will also let you know, and you damn well better get out of there! Currently, due to the tragic landslide near Arlington, Washington, private pilots are prohibited from flying in the airspace above it, in order to keep the air space clear for search-...

Log Book : All pilots, at all times, record every flight they take in their log book. Log books tally flight hours, but they are also used to keep track of where the pilot flew, and sometimes other information. Data from the log book is used whenever a pilot applies for a new F.A.A. certificate such as an Instrument Rating, a Commercial Rating, or a Flight Instructor Rating. The F.A.A. needs to know how many hours, for example, were spent in Night takeoffs and landings, if a pilot wants to be certified for night flying. When my husband got his pilot's license 39 years ago, he used a standard Log Book such as the one below. It's a walk down memory lane when he gets it out and looks at all the time he's spent flying, and where he's gone. But these days, instead of an old-fashioned book, he uses an electronic one, an app on his IPad. He has now clocked about 2700 hours of flight. About half of those hours, I have accompanied him! Have you ever looked at a pilot's log b...

Knots or Nautical Miles : Knots and nautical miles are old terms that were first used with sailors, but are now used with pilots as well. A knot measures speed, and if you are traveling at one nautical mile per hour, you are traveling at the speed of one knot. Nautical miles are based on the 360 degrees of the Earth's circumference at the equator. Each degree can be divided into 60 minutes of latitude. Each minute of latitude is equal to one nautical mile.   A nautical mile is 1.1508 miles. The Earth's circumference at the equator is 21,600 nautical miles or 24 ,857 miles. Obviously, knots and nautical miles are not something you can take a picture of! But whenever I think of them, I think about the very large map of the U.S. in my husband's office. He is able to tell how far something is from home by taking a piece of string that is tacked to the map (at our house) and stretching it to wherever he wants to fly. From the length of the string, he is able to tell how many nau...

Jet Stream : The Jet Stream consists of strong, high altitude winds that fly over the earth. The Jet Stream isn't of much concern to pilots of small aircraft, because small aircraft never fly that high. But the Jet Stream can be of use to commercial jetliners. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Jet Stream and commercial airliners: Commercial use of the jet stream began on 18 November 1952, when  Pan Am  flew from Tokyo to Honolulu at an altitude of 7,600 metres (24,900 ft). It cut the trip time by over one-third, from 18 to 11.5 hours . [27]  Not only does it cut time off the flight, it also nets fuel savings for the airline industry. [28]  Within North America, the time needed to fly east across the  continent  can be decreased by about 30  minutes  if an  airplane  can fly with the jet stream, or increased by more than that amount if it must fly west against it. Have you ever been on a commercial flight when the pilot gets...

I.F.R. or Instrument Flight Rules Instrument Flight Rules take effect when weather conditions are such that you need to fly through clouds. The airplane needs to be equipped with additional instruments beyond the usual, and the pilot needs to have an Instrument Rating in addition to a regular pilot's license. Commercial airliners are always equipped with these types of instruments, and the pilots are always flying I.F.R. Our first airplane, a Maule, was equipped with such instruments. When my husband was a new pilot, he got an Instrument Rating, as well as a Commercial Rating, and even a Flight Instructor Rating. He just ate all that stuff up! And it made him a safer pilot, so no complaints there. But for our current airplane, a Vans RV7, he decided not to equip it for I.F.R. flying. That would've added $20,000 or more to the cost. But besides that, we've become fair-weather flyers, thus we follow V.F.R.--Visual Flight Rules. That is, we don't fly unless we can see whe...

Hangar I couldn't decide whether to write about the Horizontal Stabilizer, or about Mike's "Man Cave," but decided the hangar might be more interesting. We have a dirt-floor hangar out on the farm where we live. We keep the KitFox2 there during spring-summer-fall. Then for the winter months, Mike flies it to our hangar at the local airport, where we always keep the RV7, pictured below. The RV7 is strictly a runway airplane--no field landings.   Mike tries to find every excuse possible to spend time in his Man Cave with his airplanes. There are a good number of other hangars at the local airport and are similarly "man caves." Mike hopes that when he retires, there will be enough activity that the pilots can form an "old farts" club and hang out, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze--when they're not out flying somewhere! The summer we built the hangar, we hosted a hangar party and invited our flying friends. It was early August, right before ...

Ground Speed . Image Source As you can see from the explanation above, if a plane were flying at 100 mph on the ground, and if it were to become airborne and there were no winds aloft, the air speed would be the same as the ground speed. But if the 100 mph air speed were given a boost of a great tail wind, the airplane would then be moving over the ground at a speed of 120 mph. Conversely, if flying into a 20 mph headwind, the speed at which the airplane were flying over the ground would be reduced to 80 mph. Our airplane, a Vans RV7, cruises at about 160-180 mph. It can go faster, and especially with a strong tail wind. Once when we were crossing Snoqualmie Pass, I looked at the Air Speed Indicator and discovered we were flying 212 MPH! Both pictures below were taken by me, of our friend Steve, who built a RV6. We were crossing Snoqualmie Pass, enroute to the Arlington, WA, airshow. The pictures were taken mid-July of 2009.

Fixed-Base Operation : An F.B.O. is an airplane terminal for private aviation, as opposed to public aviation/transportation. It's always off to the side of an airport. If the airport has a tower (command center), the tower will verbally guide the private pilot over to the part of the airport that caters to private airplanes and jets. At the F.B.O. you can buy AvGas, go inside to use the restroom, make flight plans, and/or rest for a while in the lounge. F.B.O.s often operate flight schools, where you can learn to fly! The F.B.O. shown below is Holman Aviation in Great Falls, Montana. We stopped there last year on July 4, our way to Saskatchewan in the RV7.  Holman Aviation was an exceptionally nice F.B.O. Read more about our flight to Saskatchewan: Flying Adventure, Saskatchewan, Part One Flying Adventure, Saskatchewan, Part Two Flying Adventure, Saskatchewan, Part Three Have you ever hung out at a F.B.O.? They're usually busy places, with lots of flight instructors and student...

Experimental   We currently own two experimental airplanes, a KitFox 2 and a Van's RV7. The FAA definition for experimentals is as follows:  A special airworthiness certificate in the experimental category is issued to operate an aircraft that does not have a type certificate or does not conform to its type certificate and is in a condition for safe operation.  Additionally, this certificate is issued to operate a primary category kit-built aircraft that was assembled without the supervision and quality control of the production certificate holder. I'm not crazy about the F.A.A.'s definition, which makes it sound as if experimentals are inherently more dangerous than factory-built airplanes.The truth is, about 8000 Vans RV7, kit-built airplanes have been completed and are being flown. 99.9% are doing it safely. That's not to mention all the other Vans kits--RV6, RV8, RV9, RV10, RV14, that have been safely built as well. And, there are other kit manufactures besides V...

Ditch Sometimes when there is an engine failure, or other malfunction, in an airplane, a pilot needs to make a forced landing, otherwise known as needing to "ditch the airplane." The definition of "ditch" is to land safely on a surface that it not a runway. The picture below was taken in 1985 when Mike owned an UltraLight. The U.S. definition of an UltraLight, according to Wikipedia, is a powered vehicle weighing less than 254 pounds empty. Though it flew, it was not defined as an aircraft, which enabled enthusiasts to own and fly something that didn't need to be registered with the F.A.A. Nor did the pilot need a pilot's license. I'll have a better picture of the UltraLight when we get to the letter U. But for now, here's a picture where Mike had to ditch it in a wheat field. It looks quite broken, as its wings should be straight and parallel to the ground. Mike was able to walk away from it with only a twisted ankle. But after a number of forced ...

Contrail .  A contrail is a vapor trail, which is something we see all the time in the sky, and take for granted. The one time in recent history when there were no contrails for almost two weeks was after 911.  All flight was grounded, even for private pilots like my husband. It felt very eerie for us, here in Eastern Washington and so far removed from the terrible tragedy, to look up into the sky and see no contrails. It was a constant reminder of the terrible thing that had happened.   Are you aware of contrails? Do you live in an area where they criss-cross the sky?

Barnstorming During the early days of aviation, "Barnstormers" flew around the countryside, landing in fields and giving rides and demonstrations to earn money. There were even Wing Walkers, although nobody does that anymore, due to the extreme danger. If you attend an airshow now, you are sure to see some terrific, truly dangerous stunts. However, stunt pilots are highly skilled and have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours practicing their maneuvers. You seldom hear of accidents, although sometimes you do, such as at the Reno Air Races a few years back. The picture below shows wing walkers playing tennis--unbelievably ridiculous! For write-ups on the history of barnstorming, check out these websites: The History of Barnstorming Barnstorming Biplane Pictures and the Golden Age of Aviation Barnstormers and Racers image source: Barnstorming Biplane Pictures    The closest my husband gets to barnstorming is ... landing our KitFox2 in the field behind our barn! See picture...

Altitude and Altimeter . As everyone knows, an altimeter is of utmost importance when flying. The pilot needs to know the altitude of the ground he's flying over. He needs to know the altitude of the surrounding hills and mountains, if flying in a mountainous region. He needs to know the altitude of any airplanes flying in the vicinity, and he obviously needs to know his own altitude. To do these things, the pilot checks his altimeter. Our airplane, a kit-built, Vans RV7, has several instruments capable of reading altitude. One altimeter looks like the one at left. Although this type is old technology, often called a "steam gauge" instrument, it's on the instrument panel for redundancy. If the electronic gadgets hubby relies on for altitude readings were to give out, he could use this. Otherwise, he mostly relies on the Dynon  and the AvMap to give him altitude readings as well as a host of other necessary information. The electronic devices give a colored, moving ma...