Flight to Kirksville - Part 3
Talk about a Freudian slip. During my first write-up of this leg, I totally forgot what was one of the more important things about it. I’ve added that to this write-up. Look for changes surrounding the Rogers departure.
I had never been in this part of the country before. As we plugged northeast toward Fort Smith, I gazed at the long highway bridges on the ground, grey cement ribbons braced on arches that spanned miles, carrying car traffic north and south. Beyond, the brown land twisted into mountain green. Ahead of us, I could see the large expanse and crossed runways of Fort Smith Regional Airport, and we listened to the approach controller vector a helicopter and a Cessna practicing instrument approaches around the airport, though we saw neither. Slowly, we ambled across the wide girth of the Arkansas River just north of the airport, passing east of the Twin Cities airport on the river’s north side. Approach switched us to a different controller on a different frequency, and as the GPS showed us rolling inside of thirty miles to go, I requested lower. Approach cleared me to descend; and once again, I reduced power only slightly and started a gentle but higher speed approach, clicking off 120 knots over the ground for the first time this trip.
The city of Springdale crawled underneath us as we looked down one of the long runways of Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport to our left. I could see a clearing on my nose that could be Rogers, but the GPS was telling me that our destination was further away. Still descending, we crossed slightly to the west of Bentonville’s Municipal Airport, gazing down at the airplanes on its ramp, when Approach cleared me for a straight in approach to runway 01 and told me to switch to Rogers tower. I called them ten miles out.
“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, not in sight,” the controller said. “Report a 3 mile final. Winds two four zero at six.”
“Wilco,” I replied. No sooner had I said that than I wondered if I had heard the winds right. Surely, the tower wasn’t landing me with a tailwind.
We pressed toward the runway, easily in sight now. I kept the letdown going, called three miles, and started trying to slow the airplane down. As I crossed the runway threshold, I felt fast as hell; and as we settled toward the runway, me fighting turbulence, the bottom dropped out when we were still about ten feet up. I slammed on the power and caught us but had added a little too much; we started climbing. I pulled the power back again to stop the climb, gauged the remaining runway as adequate, and settled us back down again. We touched down a bit firm and close to the mid-field turn off. Not wanting to go all the way to the end of the runway, I stood on the brakes pretty hard and got us slowed just enough to spin us onto the taxiway. The tower told us to taxi to the ramp and remain his frequency. I acknowledged the call.
Beaver Lake Aviation’s white, small, Southern mansion style building was to my left next to a ramp full of corporate jets. Trying to stay clear of them lest my airplane get blown over when they left, we taxied around their right side, angling toward a humble spot near a fence where the only other single-engine airplane sat. I spun my airplane around in front of it and waited for a second to see if a lineman came out; when no one did, I shut the engine down and Connie and I crawled out. So far, things just weren’t going well here.
Several people in business suits were filing out of a corporate jet we passed as we walked toward the FBO. We also passed a lineman who asked us if we wanted gas, and I answered I did. We pressed on inside the building where the large lounge and travelers in business attire let us know that this FBO was owned by Wal-Mart for a reason. I immediately felt out of place, especially when no one behind the desk even acknowledged us. But I had more pressing matters at hand and searched the hallways for the bathrooms. I found them just down the hall, past the car rental agency where the woman there became the first to say “hello” to us, and next to the Café that I discovered had closed at 1:30 p.m. It was open for breakfast and lunch only. Good thing Connie had made a couple of sandwiches and put them in the airplane. We wound up buying some Cokes from a vending machine and eating the sandwiches at an empty table in the café and feeling neglected.
I paid for my gas at the desk and we wondered back out to the Cheetah. As we walked out to the airplane, I was a bit nervous. I had tried to spot the airplane out of harm’s way, but any of the Gulfstreams or Challengers or Lears sitting on the ramp could easily damage my airplane with a careless move. One of the jets was manning up, but it was far enough away where it wasn’t a threat. Another Lear spotted behind and to the right of the Cheetah was starting its engines, though I wasn’t too worried about it since it could easily taxi around the airplane on its far side. Whoever had fueled the airplane had put a single set of chocks around the nose gear, and that made me feel a little better, though not much. With its freely castoring nosewheel, the only effective way to chock the airplane is to put chocks on either side of both mains. Chocking the nosewheel was the second best move. It had at least some chance at being effective.
Popping open the fuel caps in each tank, I looked in to make sure the fuel was colored blue, especially important at an airport that fuels jets. The tanks were full, which meant that, with me and Connie being the size we are and with our bags, the airplane would be within pounds of its gross weight limit. I sealed the tanks up and did a quick walk around looking for normal function and for damage. I found nothing unusual. So, I climbed in the cockpit and strapped back in as Connie climbed aboard and I fetched my pre-start checklist.
As I did, I knew something was out of whack but didn’t know what until I came to the pre-start step that said “MASTER – ON”. OOPS! It ALREADY was! I wasn’t too worried about it until I hit the starter button. Instead of wheeling around freely, the engine hit twice and the prop stalled, engine groaning. The battery was out of juice! I was shocked I could have run it down by simply leaving the Master on in some forty-five minutes, but then I remembered that the Cheetah’s bastardized light wiring had some of the radio lights wired on even when the light rheostat on the instrument panel was turned off and there was, of course, an electric turn and bank indicator. (In our Cheetah, the fuel tank gauges are always lit and were designed to be; what I have goes beyond that.) OH NO!
“My God!” I gasped. “Damn it! We could be stuck here until we get the battery recharged.”
I shut everything down and we sat for a few minutes, just to see if I might get enough of a battery “bounce-back” to get the engine started. I ran through the checklist again, hit the starter button, the engine groaned and stalled. We waited a few minutes more with everything shut down and tried it again. I got lucky, and the engine roared to life!
“THANK GOD!” I breathed, even as I glanced at the Ammeter with a needle deflected well over into the + side. It slowly moved back toward the center. We were SAVED! HALLEJUAH!
After waiting for a Learjet to get past, I taxied down the ramp toward the taxiway. Calling Rogers Ground on the radio I got no response, so I switched up to Tower Frequency to find out I had written down the wrong frequency. Once I got synched up, Ground directed me to taxi to the runway. Spotting a wide area to my right where I could do my take-off checks, I asked Ground for permission to stop there. They, instead, directed me to a run-up area further down the taxiway I couldn’t see from where I was.
We did the takeoff checks, and everything checked out; so I requested takeoff clearance and got it, lined up on the runway, and pushed the throttle forward. The takeoff was smooth but almost as soon as we got in the air, I started feeling that our climb rate was just too low. As we cleared about three hundred feet, I did the only thing I could do to see if I could get an improvement, i.e., I slowly pulled the mixture out to lean it. Sure enough, the engine cranked up another hundred RPM or so. While the field elevation was only 1358 feet, it was a warm day, so the density altitude could easily have been at three thousand…or more. I had learned early on with this airplane that leaning it was a function of the density altitude, not the altitude shown on the altimeter. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook said leaning was not necessary until five thousand feet, but several climbs at gross weights and on hot days had proven to me that four thousand was more like it.
I had requested flight following, so we checked in with Razorback Approach as we passed through four hundred feet. A few moments later, we got high enough for him to see us and he called “radar contact” as we turned northeast. This would be the last leg of our trip, and I had decided to fly past Springfield, Missouri just to get a look at it from the air. We were into Missouri airspace only a few moments later, and as we tracked the Missouri towns in front of us on the charts, Razorback handed us off to Springfield Approach.
I had thought that since we had cleared the mountains, the turbulence might let up. It didn’t. If anything, it got worse, making me work almost every instant to keep the nose lined up with the correct heading as well as hold my altitude. As we approached Springfield, marveling at how big the Regional airport was, we went through a washboard ride which culminated by the approach controller asking me to turn my mode Charlie off. It was reading 600 feet, he said. I complied, as we pressed past the city heading east northeast. In the distance, we could see the tall buildings of downtown to the south and the runways from Springfield’s Downtown airport. We watched several aircraft land and depart Regional, and then pressed on toward the green, flat plains beyond.
The shortest distance course from where we were to Kirskville would have had us turn significantly northeast. The problem was that there were several Military Operation Areas and even a Restricted area in our projected line of flight. Though I could fly through the MOA’s VFR, using flight following and air traffic control services put doing so in a different light. ATC will generally fly one around those areas; so, rather than get into any kind of a squabble, we purposely followed a Victor (low altitude VOR) airway that paralleled the MOAs’ southern edge. The GPS’s were especially helpful in keeping us clear, the Airmap 100 giving us slightly better resolution than our panel mounted KLN-89B.
Ahead of us, I could see the forested, rolling hills that housed the myriad of lakes that make up Lake of the Ozarks country. The hills came up only a thousand feet or so, but they still looked like small mountains from my perch. I had flown the country north to south and vice versa before instead of our southwest to northeast line; the bumpy relief of the land jumped out at me. It would have been impossible to miss it, though, just from how the airplane was acting; turbulence really kicked us around, again. I was convinced that the mini-mountains had something to do with that. Following the GPS and the VOR, I continued taking us northeast, hugging the southern edge of the Truman MOA’s and hoping the engine would hold up because there were few clear places to land. Forests and lakes took up most of the entirety of the ground below.
Springfield approach dropped us off with Columbia, and I checked in. The controller acknowledged he had radar contact but then said he could not see our Mode C.
“That’s ‘cause I turned it off at the request of Springfield Approach,” I answered. “He said he was reading 600 feet. I can turn it back on if you’d like to take a peek at it.”
“That’s up to you,” the controller replied.
“Okay. Coming back on.”
I switched the transponder from ON to ALT as the GPS units showed us we were just clearing the eastern edge of the MOA’s. A turn almost due north would take us direct to Kirksville. So, we rolled and turned to put Kirksville on the nose. I called Approach and requested sixty-five hundred; they approved it and I climbed the airplane up.
In the distance, we could see the large, rolling Missouri river and Jefferson City, the Missouri capital. A few minutes later, we were approaching Columbia; and were close enough to be able to make out details in the town. Connie began calling out landmarks she recognized, places she’d been, and looking for a hospital she thought a family member was visiting that day.
“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, “ Columbia called, “I’ve been watching your Mode C for a while, and it looks okay to me.”
“Roger,” I said. And that was okay with me. The turbulence had been especially rough just before Springfield had told me to turn the Mode Charlie off, so I suspected a not-so- tight connection somewhere might have scrambled the altitude encoder’s electrical brains. It had been working fine when I left Houston not to mention for most of the trip and was working fine now; I was not going to worry about it.
The air at sixty-five was a bit smoother; but as usual, I could see I was still in a layer of haze that cleared a thousand feet above. There was smoother air up there, I bet; and it was my usual luck not to be able to reach it.
We pressed on north and Columbia approach turned us loose. We flew on past Macon and Monroe City further east where tornados had ravished the town. Pulling the throttle back slightly, I began a long leisurely descent as we watched cars travel down highways below and listened to other lightplane pilots talking on the Unicom frequency of 122.8. We were trucking down at better than 120 knots. I had told Connie to tell her mom we would arrive at approximately 5:45 p.m., and I was working to hit that target. Leveling off at 2500 feet (1000 feet AGL), we pressed in toward the Kirksville north-south runway I had been looking at for at least ten miles. The wind favored landing on 18, so we easily paralleled the runway, making a left downwind, as I slowed us down and ran through the landing checklist. Pulling the power back more, I started us down and turned us onto left base and then onto final. We touched down smoothly on the runway. I was slowing too fast and the turnoff was at mid-field, so I added power to help us scoot down the runway. We turned in toward the terminal, stopping to let a four-place Cessna taxi down the outgoing taxiway. The place looked deserted. We had expected Connie's parents to meet us.
Continued…
I had never been in this part of the country before. As we plugged northeast toward Fort Smith, I gazed at the long highway bridges on the ground, grey cement ribbons braced on arches that spanned miles, carrying car traffic north and south. Beyond, the brown land twisted into mountain green. Ahead of us, I could see the large expanse and crossed runways of Fort Smith Regional Airport, and we listened to the approach controller vector a helicopter and a Cessna practicing instrument approaches around the airport, though we saw neither. Slowly, we ambled across the wide girth of the Arkansas River just north of the airport, passing east of the Twin Cities airport on the river’s north side. Approach switched us to a different controller on a different frequency, and as the GPS showed us rolling inside of thirty miles to go, I requested lower. Approach cleared me to descend; and once again, I reduced power only slightly and started a gentle but higher speed approach, clicking off 120 knots over the ground for the first time this trip.
The city of Springdale crawled underneath us as we looked down one of the long runways of Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport to our left. I could see a clearing on my nose that could be Rogers, but the GPS was telling me that our destination was further away. Still descending, we crossed slightly to the west of Bentonville’s Municipal Airport, gazing down at the airplanes on its ramp, when Approach cleared me for a straight in approach to runway 01 and told me to switch to Rogers tower. I called them ten miles out.
“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, not in sight,” the controller said. “Report a 3 mile final. Winds two four zero at six.”
“Wilco,” I replied. No sooner had I said that than I wondered if I had heard the winds right. Surely, the tower wasn’t landing me with a tailwind.
We pressed toward the runway, easily in sight now. I kept the letdown going, called three miles, and started trying to slow the airplane down. As I crossed the runway threshold, I felt fast as hell; and as we settled toward the runway, me fighting turbulence, the bottom dropped out when we were still about ten feet up. I slammed on the power and caught us but had added a little too much; we started climbing. I pulled the power back again to stop the climb, gauged the remaining runway as adequate, and settled us back down again. We touched down a bit firm and close to the mid-field turn off. Not wanting to go all the way to the end of the runway, I stood on the brakes pretty hard and got us slowed just enough to spin us onto the taxiway. The tower told us to taxi to the ramp and remain his frequency. I acknowledged the call.
Beaver Lake Aviation’s white, small, Southern mansion style building was to my left next to a ramp full of corporate jets. Trying to stay clear of them lest my airplane get blown over when they left, we taxied around their right side, angling toward a humble spot near a fence where the only other single-engine airplane sat. I spun my airplane around in front of it and waited for a second to see if a lineman came out; when no one did, I shut the engine down and Connie and I crawled out. So far, things just weren’t going well here.
Several people in business suits were filing out of a corporate jet we passed as we walked toward the FBO. We also passed a lineman who asked us if we wanted gas, and I answered I did. We pressed on inside the building where the large lounge and travelers in business attire let us know that this FBO was owned by Wal-Mart for a reason. I immediately felt out of place, especially when no one behind the desk even acknowledged us. But I had more pressing matters at hand and searched the hallways for the bathrooms. I found them just down the hall, past the car rental agency where the woman there became the first to say “hello” to us, and next to the Café that I discovered had closed at 1:30 p.m. It was open for breakfast and lunch only. Good thing Connie had made a couple of sandwiches and put them in the airplane. We wound up buying some Cokes from a vending machine and eating the sandwiches at an empty table in the café and feeling neglected.
I paid for my gas at the desk and we wondered back out to the Cheetah. As we walked out to the airplane, I was a bit nervous. I had tried to spot the airplane out of harm’s way, but any of the Gulfstreams or Challengers or Lears sitting on the ramp could easily damage my airplane with a careless move. One of the jets was manning up, but it was far enough away where it wasn’t a threat. Another Lear spotted behind and to the right of the Cheetah was starting its engines, though I wasn’t too worried about it since it could easily taxi around the airplane on its far side. Whoever had fueled the airplane had put a single set of chocks around the nose gear, and that made me feel a little better, though not much. With its freely castoring nosewheel, the only effective way to chock the airplane is to put chocks on either side of both mains. Chocking the nosewheel was the second best move. It had at least some chance at being effective.
Popping open the fuel caps in each tank, I looked in to make sure the fuel was colored blue, especially important at an airport that fuels jets. The tanks were full, which meant that, with me and Connie being the size we are and with our bags, the airplane would be within pounds of its gross weight limit. I sealed the tanks up and did a quick walk around looking for normal function and for damage. I found nothing unusual. So, I climbed in the cockpit and strapped back in as Connie climbed aboard and I fetched my pre-start checklist.
As I did, I knew something was out of whack but didn’t know what until I came to the pre-start step that said “MASTER – ON”. OOPS! It ALREADY was! I wasn’t too worried about it until I hit the starter button. Instead of wheeling around freely, the engine hit twice and the prop stalled, engine groaning. The battery was out of juice! I was shocked I could have run it down by simply leaving the Master on in some forty-five minutes, but then I remembered that the Cheetah’s bastardized light wiring had some of the radio lights wired on even when the light rheostat on the instrument panel was turned off and there was, of course, an electric turn and bank indicator. (In our Cheetah, the fuel tank gauges are always lit and were designed to be; what I have goes beyond that.) OH NO!
“My God!” I gasped. “Damn it! We could be stuck here until we get the battery recharged.”
I shut everything down and we sat for a few minutes, just to see if I might get enough of a battery “bounce-back” to get the engine started. I ran through the checklist again, hit the starter button, the engine groaned and stalled. We waited a few minutes more with everything shut down and tried it again. I got lucky, and the engine roared to life!
“THANK GOD!” I breathed, even as I glanced at the Ammeter with a needle deflected well over into the + side. It slowly moved back toward the center. We were SAVED! HALLEJUAH!
After waiting for a Learjet to get past, I taxied down the ramp toward the taxiway. Calling Rogers Ground on the radio I got no response, so I switched up to Tower Frequency to find out I had written down the wrong frequency. Once I got synched up, Ground directed me to taxi to the runway. Spotting a wide area to my right where I could do my take-off checks, I asked Ground for permission to stop there. They, instead, directed me to a run-up area further down the taxiway I couldn’t see from where I was.
We did the takeoff checks, and everything checked out; so I requested takeoff clearance and got it, lined up on the runway, and pushed the throttle forward. The takeoff was smooth but almost as soon as we got in the air, I started feeling that our climb rate was just too low. As we cleared about three hundred feet, I did the only thing I could do to see if I could get an improvement, i.e., I slowly pulled the mixture out to lean it. Sure enough, the engine cranked up another hundred RPM or so. While the field elevation was only 1358 feet, it was a warm day, so the density altitude could easily have been at three thousand…or more. I had learned early on with this airplane that leaning it was a function of the density altitude, not the altitude shown on the altimeter. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook said leaning was not necessary until five thousand feet, but several climbs at gross weights and on hot days had proven to me that four thousand was more like it.
I had requested flight following, so we checked in with Razorback Approach as we passed through four hundred feet. A few moments later, we got high enough for him to see us and he called “radar contact” as we turned northeast. This would be the last leg of our trip, and I had decided to fly past Springfield, Missouri just to get a look at it from the air. We were into Missouri airspace only a few moments later, and as we tracked the Missouri towns in front of us on the charts, Razorback handed us off to Springfield Approach.
I had thought that since we had cleared the mountains, the turbulence might let up. It didn’t. If anything, it got worse, making me work almost every instant to keep the nose lined up with the correct heading as well as hold my altitude. As we approached Springfield, marveling at how big the Regional airport was, we went through a washboard ride which culminated by the approach controller asking me to turn my mode Charlie off. It was reading 600 feet, he said. I complied, as we pressed past the city heading east northeast. In the distance, we could see the tall buildings of downtown to the south and the runways from Springfield’s Downtown airport. We watched several aircraft land and depart Regional, and then pressed on toward the green, flat plains beyond.
The shortest distance course from where we were to Kirskville would have had us turn significantly northeast. The problem was that there were several Military Operation Areas and even a Restricted area in our projected line of flight. Though I could fly through the MOA’s VFR, using flight following and air traffic control services put doing so in a different light. ATC will generally fly one around those areas; so, rather than get into any kind of a squabble, we purposely followed a Victor (low altitude VOR) airway that paralleled the MOAs’ southern edge. The GPS’s were especially helpful in keeping us clear, the Airmap 100 giving us slightly better resolution than our panel mounted KLN-89B.
Ahead of us, I could see the forested, rolling hills that housed the myriad of lakes that make up Lake of the Ozarks country. The hills came up only a thousand feet or so, but they still looked like small mountains from my perch. I had flown the country north to south and vice versa before instead of our southwest to northeast line; the bumpy relief of the land jumped out at me. It would have been impossible to miss it, though, just from how the airplane was acting; turbulence really kicked us around, again. I was convinced that the mini-mountains had something to do with that. Following the GPS and the VOR, I continued taking us northeast, hugging the southern edge of the Truman MOA’s and hoping the engine would hold up because there were few clear places to land. Forests and lakes took up most of the entirety of the ground below.
Springfield approach dropped us off with Columbia, and I checked in. The controller acknowledged he had radar contact but then said he could not see our Mode C.
“That’s ‘cause I turned it off at the request of Springfield Approach,” I answered. “He said he was reading 600 feet. I can turn it back on if you’d like to take a peek at it.”
“That’s up to you,” the controller replied.
“Okay. Coming back on.”
I switched the transponder from ON to ALT as the GPS units showed us we were just clearing the eastern edge of the MOA’s. A turn almost due north would take us direct to Kirksville. So, we rolled and turned to put Kirksville on the nose. I called Approach and requested sixty-five hundred; they approved it and I climbed the airplane up.
In the distance, we could see the large, rolling Missouri river and Jefferson City, the Missouri capital. A few minutes later, we were approaching Columbia; and were close enough to be able to make out details in the town. Connie began calling out landmarks she recognized, places she’d been, and looking for a hospital she thought a family member was visiting that day.
“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, “ Columbia called, “I’ve been watching your Mode C for a while, and it looks okay to me.”
“Roger,” I said. And that was okay with me. The turbulence had been especially rough just before Springfield had told me to turn the Mode Charlie off, so I suspected a not-so- tight connection somewhere might have scrambled the altitude encoder’s electrical brains. It had been working fine when I left Houston not to mention for most of the trip and was working fine now; I was not going to worry about it.
The air at sixty-five was a bit smoother; but as usual, I could see I was still in a layer of haze that cleared a thousand feet above. There was smoother air up there, I bet; and it was my usual luck not to be able to reach it.
We pressed on north and Columbia approach turned us loose. We flew on past Macon and Monroe City further east where tornados had ravished the town. Pulling the throttle back slightly, I began a long leisurely descent as we watched cars travel down highways below and listened to other lightplane pilots talking on the Unicom frequency of 122.8. We were trucking down at better than 120 knots. I had told Connie to tell her mom we would arrive at approximately 5:45 p.m., and I was working to hit that target. Leveling off at 2500 feet (1000 feet AGL), we pressed in toward the Kirksville north-south runway I had been looking at for at least ten miles. The wind favored landing on 18, so we easily paralleled the runway, making a left downwind, as I slowed us down and ran through the landing checklist. Pulling the power back more, I started us down and turned us onto left base and then onto final. We touched down smoothly on the runway. I was slowing too fast and the turnoff was at mid-field, so I added power to help us scoot down the runway. We turned in toward the terminal, stopping to let a four-place Cessna taxi down the outgoing taxiway. The place looked deserted. We had expected Connie's parents to meet us.
Continued…
posted by Andy Foster at 9:35 PM
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