Flight to Brenham
It was Connie and my fifth anniversary, so I had taken a few days vacation so we could spend some time together. We had decided not to do anything grand this year just to keep expenses down. We had spent the time just going out to dinner, watching some movies, and doing a little flying in the airplane. In fact, we had picked the airplane up from our mechanic the Wednesday morning that was my first day off. So, after doing a couple of local flights, we decided to take some time Friday morning to fly up to Brenham, Texas in the hopes of eating at the airport diner and maybe getting a tour of the Blue Bell ice cream factory. The diner opened at 11 a.m. and Blue Bell offered afternoon tours at 1:00 and 1:30 p.m. If we timed it right, maybe we could eat lunch and then make our way over to sample Blue Bell ice cream for desert.
We left for the airport at about nine-thirty a.m. The blue skies were dotted with waves of white, puffy, cumulus clouds building into rain showers and thunderstorms around us in the climbing morning heat. While skies had been clear on our drive out, the clouds were increasing in number, especially to the west, our intended direction of departure. I had hoped to fly at 2500 feet until we were out of the Class B airspace and then climb to 4500 feet for the rest of the trip, but the bases of the clouds looked lower.
We preflighted the airplane leisurely, not finding anything wrong, with gas right about at the tabs, a total of 37 gals usable, more than enough for a forty-five minute flight. I hopped in the cockpit and hooked up our headsets and a handheld GPS programmed with our planned route for Connie to use; I intended to fly the leg to Brenham with chart and compass alone. I had marked out course on both a Houston Terminal and Sectional chart, both of which I folded and stuck in the canopy bow between it and the forward windscreen on the left side. I strapped in and then Connie boarded, and we started the engine and taxied out. The run-up all went fine, though we both noted that the right mag drop was more than we remembered and close to the maximum limits. We roared down Pearland’s runway 14 at a little after 10 a.m., lifting off and turning right to head out west.
I climbed us up to sixteen hundred feet. The base of the Class B airspace was two thousand feet, and I wanted to navigate strictly VFR so I didn’t bother to call Houston Approach. We did listen to the frequency to see if we were ever called out as traffic to anyone else. I could see for probably twenty miles and was already spotting the black strip runway of our first checkpoint, Houston Southwest airport. As we approached, I switched the comm radio to the Unicom frequency to inform the airport traffic of our overflight, but we were the only one around. We tracked over the airport as I rechecked my compass against the directional gyro and turned us slightly to the north, the course tracking south of Sugarland airport’s airspace toward the town of Rosenburg to our west. My courseline tracked almost along a railroad track just to our left, so I aligned my nose with it and the compass as I searched for the buildings and highway junctions ahead that would signal we had reached the town. A few moments later, we were flying over the top of Rosenburg, and I turned us more to the north to head us toward Sealy as we dropped off the Terminal chart and moved to the Sectional.
The green flatland beneath us emptied of its buildings, and we flew steadily on past towers flashing red lights below toward the winding curves of the Colorado River. The cloud bases were still at only a little above two thousand feet, and we were cruising along at about seventeen hundred. Since the holes in the clouds didn’t leave me room to get up through them without a lot of maneuvering, they were fairly tall, and I had good ground contact where I was, I decided to stay down low and just concentrate on my navigation. As we crossed a highway that had a bridge crossing the river on my right, I told Connie I was a little left of course and showed her how the line on the sectional crossed the river on the bridge’s right. I flew us over to the right about a half mile and then turned us back on course, looking at the white water tower ahead I knew was somewhere close to Sealy. But I couldn’t see the town’s outline clearly enough to know exactly how we were approaching us, so it took a few minutes more before I could correlate what I was seeing on the ground below exactly with the map. We crossed over the top of Sealy and I turned us more northward again. Our next checkpoint was a small airport near Grunwilder only some eleven miles away. I was taking the airport down the left side of the airplane before I saw it. I jogged the airplane over to put us right over the airport and then turned us onto the last leg. I could see the town of Brenham off the nose and angled the airplane toward where I thought the airport was. We flew toward it and were approaching Brenham when I finally saw the airport to the right of where I thought it was.
“I’ve got the airport,” I said, turning us toward it as I switched us over to its Unicom frequency. The airport was landing on runway 16, and we were almost perfectly aligned to press straight ahead into a left downwind for it. I began a descent as we heard a Cessna call departing and started looking for him. We swung past him as he flew past the runway’s southern end. I leveled us off at a thousand feet and stared at the runway because we looked too low.
“What’s the field elevation here?” I said. I normally write that little piece of information down on my flight planning sheet but had let the nearness of the landing site lull me into complacency.
“I don’t know,” Connie answered.
Well, I wasn’t going to look at the chart now. I knew we were low and began running through the landing checklist as I turned us onto base leg, keeping the power up more than I usually did. We rolled onto final looking a little high actually, though I didn’t think about what the brown, plowed field between the runway and me was going to do. I pulled the power back and unknowingly dropped the nose a little. We then hit the sink over the field and I had to bring the power back up. We crossed the threshold at a good height; but as I looked down the runway, I said:
“How come we’re not coming down?”
Glancing down at the airspeed indicator, I saw we were at 80 mph. A Cheetah will not land flaps up at that speed, and the power was already all the way back. I pulled back on the nose a little and we began to slow as I gauged how much runway we had left and whether I still had enough to go around if I got into trouble. I felt like there was still time to salvage things; and, indeed, we touched down with a little more than half the runway remaining. Hopping on the brakes a little, I turned us off at the runway’s mid-point. It was the taxiway that led directly to the parking area anyway.
“Well, that sucked,” I mumbled.
“What are you talking about?” Connie asked.
“The approach was all dorked up. Off on the downwind altitude, flailing all over the place with the power, and then fast on final.”
“I thought it was fine,” she said, her fairly standard answer to me self-analysis. Oh, the bliss of the uneducated!
Anyway, we taxied over the first row of parking spaces (being careful of getting wrapped up in the tie-down ropes) and then turned around to taxi up and tie down facing the runway. I shut the engine down and turned off the MASTER, unstrapped, and then began recording the Hobbs and Engine Tach Time as I always do. Connie climbed out of the airplane and I grabbed her headset and mine and pulled them down into her seat, figuring that the airplane’s closed canopy would shelter them from the hot noonday sun after we got out. Leaving that stuff up on the airplane’s black dashboard is an invitation to getting burned when you return to put it back on, if it all hasn’t deformed and melted.
Connie and I tied the airplane down and I pulled the canopy closed and locked it. We headed toward the green building with a slanted roof, a couple of flagpoles, and a parking lot where we figured the diner was located. Inside its twin glass doors, we realized were right. A hostess wearing a white blouse and a poodle skirt greeted us, opening the door to the diner on our left.
We got lucky and got a booth, sitting down on both sides of the jukebox and music selector mounted on the wall. I thumbed through the pages, looking at the old 50’s songs, and the “25 cents per song” sign posted on the box.
“I wonder if it really works,” I mumbled, hosing a quarter into the coin slot and letting it fall. Three songs for a quarter was the deal, and we talked about which of the songs in the carousel of selections we would select. “Under the Boardwalk”, “It’s my Party” and, of course “Wipeout!” became our selections. For a while we thought I had wasted my money as other songs rambled through the place; but a few minutes later, we heard our selections rumble through, one after the other. The jukebox really did work!
A waitress delivered two menus, and I ordered a Diet Pepsi and Connie a Diet Coke. By the time she returned with our drinks, we had settled on burgers with cheese and onion rings. We listened to the fifties music and talked about the flight up as we waited for our food as lots of locals and tourists filed into the place. What had been a sparsely populated eatery when we entered filled to distraction. There was even a small line at the door when we left.
Connie decided to make a pit stop, and the bathrooms were right outside the diner’s door. As I waited for her, I discovered that the FBO was in a small office immediately across from the diner. A tall, blonde-haired gent was popping in and out of the place, disappearing out onto a porch to wet down parts of it with a hose. Next door to the FOB was a rather nice pilot’s lounge equipped with a TV, a very nice couch, a glass top table, and around a corner, a phone and a couple of computers one could use for flight planning. Once Connie came back out, we wandered through the place. I was looking for a phone book. I found one next to the phone, and a quick perusal of it showed that there was no taxi cab service in Brenham. We still hoped to be able to get to take the Blue Bell tour. We went outside looking for the guy from the FBO; and when we finally found him, we asked about getting into town. He said the courtesy car was in use and the only alternative was for us to rent a car. That was not something I was going to do and I was feeling like I just wanted to go home anyway. After a few minutes of discussion, Connie agreed that heading back was the thing to do.
I needed to gas up the airplane first, though. I knew from my preflight planning that gas was cheaper here than at Pearland (It seems that many places around are cheaper than Pearland.), so we journeyed out to the airplane parked in front of the gas pumps. After performing a brief preflight, I set up the cockpit for flight, hopped out, and pulled the airplane over to the pumps. After topping off the tanks, we took a few pictures of us at Brenham with the diner in the background, all of which turned out to be useless later because neither of us noticed the camera’s controls had been bumped into movie mode. Nothing like taking video of the tarmac!
We manned up, started the engine, checked the winds and weather on the ASOS, and then taxied out of the ramp, turning right to parallel runway 16 up a rather noticeable uphill grade. The takeoff end of 16 was at the top of the hill, but near it we found a small run-up ramp I pulled into to complete the takeoff checklist. As I did, a Cessna 172 in front of us, pulled onto the runway and took off, his radio calls indicating he was headed west. With the takeoff checklist complete, we checked for other traffic as I gunned the engine to carry us forward and called on the radio we were taking runway 16 for departure as another single-engine low winged airplane passed us taxiing in the other direction.
Lifting off, we roared down the runway as I pitched the nose up slightly to climb out at best rate. Best rate wasn’t very high, maybe about four hundred feet a minute. The temperature was about ninety-two degrees at liftoff, and that was pushing the density altitude upward. What I didn’t understand yet was how much. I had listened to the ASOS but hadn’t noted anything that caught my attention other than winds and altimeter setting. A post-flight calculation using data from Weather Underground showed that the density altitude was already at 4100 feet.
As we climbed out of the pattern, we heard another aircraft call he was approaching from the southeast. I responded by calling our position, altitude, and direction of travel out on the radio as we scanned the sky for him. Below, the grey multi-lane ribbon of U.S. Highway 290 was crossing underneath us, and I called out its presence to Connie. As we crossed it, we heard the other airplane radio that he was on downwind, and I relaxed, knowing he was now no danger.
As we approached 2500 feet MSL, our climb rate began falling off; and for a moment, even went to zero. Instinctively, I reached for the mixture control and slowly began pulling it out to lean it. The engine responded by cranking up about another 100 rpm; and as the climb rate started up again, I adjusted the mixture to give me best performance. The Vertical Speed Indicator jumped upward to almost 700 feet a minute rate of climb and we watched the altimeter move steadily upward to my 3500-foot altitude target.
“She’s climbing all right, now,” Connie said.
“Because we’re in a thermal,” I answered. For a moment, I considered pretending we were in a sailplane and racking us over into a hard turn to stay in the upward climbing column of air; but, instead, I did the power pilot thing and plowed ahead, praying we would stay in the thermal until I reached my altitude. That didn’t happen; but by the time it turned us loose, we only had about 300 feet to go. I leveled us off at 3500, trimming the nose down and letting the airplane accelerate toward cruise speed before pulling the throttle back and settling it in at 75% power. The clouds were still above us at about 4000 feet, and we’d pass through the shadows as we plunged in and out of the sunlight.
I was using the GPS to steer on this leg and I immediately noticed how I tended to chase its needle. While that allowed me to make smaller course corrections faster than I could just looking at a chart, I also felt more disconnected from the flight. I made a mental note to do more GPS-OFF flying except in those cases where I’m brushing up against some controlled airspace I’m unfamiliar with. I tend to use airports as my VFR checkpoints when flying not only because they’re usually easy to spot and identify but because they give me a place to land if my airplane develops troubles. So, we flew over the top of Grunwalder and then pointed the airplane slightly southeast to cross a large stretch of flat, green land before finding Lane, a small airport on Houston’s west side I had flown by numerous times but still not seen.
On the radio, I dialed in the frequency from the chart for Houston Approach. Though I didn’t check in, I wanted to listen in to see if we were called out as traffic to anyone. While we were plugging along east of Sealy this time and across Interstate 10, I noticed that my oil temperatures were running high, almost 240 degrees. While they were still in the green, Connie and I both felt they were higher than we had seen them except when flying on a hot summer day on the way to Missouri and at 6500 feet. Our attention then turned from the oil temps to conflicting traffic that turned out to be a helicopter well in front of us and slightly below us that was making its way into Sugarland’s airport.
Lane showed up ahead as a single strip of blacktop. A low wing airplane buzzed around it below us as we passed over it at 2000 feet on a letdown to 1600. As we flew over it, I noted the time, wrote it down on my flight-planning sheet, and turned us left toward Houston Southwest. The visibility was still very good; and though the airport was some 12 miles away, I could already see it. Connie called out an airplane that was barreling toward the runway from our left. I spotted it, too, and told her it was too low to be a concern.
Leaving Houston Southwest behind, we pressed on toward Pearland Regional, our home. I pointed the nose where I knew the airport was while watching two rain showers just south and west of it. At first, I wasn’t sure if they were sitting in our path of not. As we neared, I could see that the southernmost and heaviest shower was closest, but downwind to runway 14 would be just east of it. ASOS confirmed that 14 was our desired runway, and I swung us onto downwind while making the radio call about what we were doing. Light rain peppered our windscreen as we slowed to our approach speed. I rolled us onto base, and final, touching down just beyond the numbers.
You know, every flight teaches me something. This one showed me how easily I could become complacent. I did the exact amount of flight planning I would do for any cross-country flight (including printing out airport data like field elevation, frequencies, and runway length and orientation) but I assumed that some of it didn’t matter because I was close to home. I was wrong. As they say, “assume” really means “making an ass out of your and me”.
I also saw that there’s great value in navigating by chart and compass alone. It’s a skill that not only keeps me feeling more connected to flying but needs to stay sharp for the day when the GPS quits. There’s value in having all the precision that GPS brings as long as it doesn’t overshadow my own ability to aviate, navigate, and communicate without it.
We left for the airport at about nine-thirty a.m. The blue skies were dotted with waves of white, puffy, cumulus clouds building into rain showers and thunderstorms around us in the climbing morning heat. While skies had been clear on our drive out, the clouds were increasing in number, especially to the west, our intended direction of departure. I had hoped to fly at 2500 feet until we were out of the Class B airspace and then climb to 4500 feet for the rest of the trip, but the bases of the clouds looked lower.
We preflighted the airplane leisurely, not finding anything wrong, with gas right about at the tabs, a total of 37 gals usable, more than enough for a forty-five minute flight. I hopped in the cockpit and hooked up our headsets and a handheld GPS programmed with our planned route for Connie to use; I intended to fly the leg to Brenham with chart and compass alone. I had marked out course on both a Houston Terminal and Sectional chart, both of which I folded and stuck in the canopy bow between it and the forward windscreen on the left side. I strapped in and then Connie boarded, and we started the engine and taxied out. The run-up all went fine, though we both noted that the right mag drop was more than we remembered and close to the maximum limits. We roared down Pearland’s runway 14 at a little after 10 a.m., lifting off and turning right to head out west.
I climbed us up to sixteen hundred feet. The base of the Class B airspace was two thousand feet, and I wanted to navigate strictly VFR so I didn’t bother to call Houston Approach. We did listen to the frequency to see if we were ever called out as traffic to anyone else. I could see for probably twenty miles and was already spotting the black strip runway of our first checkpoint, Houston Southwest airport. As we approached, I switched the comm radio to the Unicom frequency to inform the airport traffic of our overflight, but we were the only one around. We tracked over the airport as I rechecked my compass against the directional gyro and turned us slightly to the north, the course tracking south of Sugarland airport’s airspace toward the town of Rosenburg to our west. My courseline tracked almost along a railroad track just to our left, so I aligned my nose with it and the compass as I searched for the buildings and highway junctions ahead that would signal we had reached the town. A few moments later, we were flying over the top of Rosenburg, and I turned us more to the north to head us toward Sealy as we dropped off the Terminal chart and moved to the Sectional.
The green flatland beneath us emptied of its buildings, and we flew steadily on past towers flashing red lights below toward the winding curves of the Colorado River. The cloud bases were still at only a little above two thousand feet, and we were cruising along at about seventeen hundred. Since the holes in the clouds didn’t leave me room to get up through them without a lot of maneuvering, they were fairly tall, and I had good ground contact where I was, I decided to stay down low and just concentrate on my navigation. As we crossed a highway that had a bridge crossing the river on my right, I told Connie I was a little left of course and showed her how the line on the sectional crossed the river on the bridge’s right. I flew us over to the right about a half mile and then turned us back on course, looking at the white water tower ahead I knew was somewhere close to Sealy. But I couldn’t see the town’s outline clearly enough to know exactly how we were approaching us, so it took a few minutes more before I could correlate what I was seeing on the ground below exactly with the map. We crossed over the top of Sealy and I turned us more northward again. Our next checkpoint was a small airport near Grunwilder only some eleven miles away. I was taking the airport down the left side of the airplane before I saw it. I jogged the airplane over to put us right over the airport and then turned us onto the last leg. I could see the town of Brenham off the nose and angled the airplane toward where I thought the airport was. We flew toward it and were approaching Brenham when I finally saw the airport to the right of where I thought it was.
“I’ve got the airport,” I said, turning us toward it as I switched us over to its Unicom frequency. The airport was landing on runway 16, and we were almost perfectly aligned to press straight ahead into a left downwind for it. I began a descent as we heard a Cessna call departing and started looking for him. We swung past him as he flew past the runway’s southern end. I leveled us off at a thousand feet and stared at the runway because we looked too low.
“What’s the field elevation here?” I said. I normally write that little piece of information down on my flight planning sheet but had let the nearness of the landing site lull me into complacency.
“I don’t know,” Connie answered.
Well, I wasn’t going to look at the chart now. I knew we were low and began running through the landing checklist as I turned us onto base leg, keeping the power up more than I usually did. We rolled onto final looking a little high actually, though I didn’t think about what the brown, plowed field between the runway and me was going to do. I pulled the power back and unknowingly dropped the nose a little. We then hit the sink over the field and I had to bring the power back up. We crossed the threshold at a good height; but as I looked down the runway, I said:
“How come we’re not coming down?”
Glancing down at the airspeed indicator, I saw we were at 80 mph. A Cheetah will not land flaps up at that speed, and the power was already all the way back. I pulled back on the nose a little and we began to slow as I gauged how much runway we had left and whether I still had enough to go around if I got into trouble. I felt like there was still time to salvage things; and, indeed, we touched down with a little more than half the runway remaining. Hopping on the brakes a little, I turned us off at the runway’s mid-point. It was the taxiway that led directly to the parking area anyway.
“Well, that sucked,” I mumbled.
“What are you talking about?” Connie asked.
“The approach was all dorked up. Off on the downwind altitude, flailing all over the place with the power, and then fast on final.”
“I thought it was fine,” she said, her fairly standard answer to me self-analysis. Oh, the bliss of the uneducated!
Anyway, we taxied over the first row of parking spaces (being careful of getting wrapped up in the tie-down ropes) and then turned around to taxi up and tie down facing the runway. I shut the engine down and turned off the MASTER, unstrapped, and then began recording the Hobbs and Engine Tach Time as I always do. Connie climbed out of the airplane and I grabbed her headset and mine and pulled them down into her seat, figuring that the airplane’s closed canopy would shelter them from the hot noonday sun after we got out. Leaving that stuff up on the airplane’s black dashboard is an invitation to getting burned when you return to put it back on, if it all hasn’t deformed and melted.
Connie and I tied the airplane down and I pulled the canopy closed and locked it. We headed toward the green building with a slanted roof, a couple of flagpoles, and a parking lot where we figured the diner was located. Inside its twin glass doors, we realized were right. A hostess wearing a white blouse and a poodle skirt greeted us, opening the door to the diner on our left.
We got lucky and got a booth, sitting down on both sides of the jukebox and music selector mounted on the wall. I thumbed through the pages, looking at the old 50’s songs, and the “25 cents per song” sign posted on the box.
“I wonder if it really works,” I mumbled, hosing a quarter into the coin slot and letting it fall. Three songs for a quarter was the deal, and we talked about which of the songs in the carousel of selections we would select. “Under the Boardwalk”, “It’s my Party” and, of course “Wipeout!” became our selections. For a while we thought I had wasted my money as other songs rambled through the place; but a few minutes later, we heard our selections rumble through, one after the other. The jukebox really did work!
A waitress delivered two menus, and I ordered a Diet Pepsi and Connie a Diet Coke. By the time she returned with our drinks, we had settled on burgers with cheese and onion rings. We listened to the fifties music and talked about the flight up as we waited for our food as lots of locals and tourists filed into the place. What had been a sparsely populated eatery when we entered filled to distraction. There was even a small line at the door when we left.
Connie decided to make a pit stop, and the bathrooms were right outside the diner’s door. As I waited for her, I discovered that the FBO was in a small office immediately across from the diner. A tall, blonde-haired gent was popping in and out of the place, disappearing out onto a porch to wet down parts of it with a hose. Next door to the FOB was a rather nice pilot’s lounge equipped with a TV, a very nice couch, a glass top table, and around a corner, a phone and a couple of computers one could use for flight planning. Once Connie came back out, we wandered through the place. I was looking for a phone book. I found one next to the phone, and a quick perusal of it showed that there was no taxi cab service in Brenham. We still hoped to be able to get to take the Blue Bell tour. We went outside looking for the guy from the FBO; and when we finally found him, we asked about getting into town. He said the courtesy car was in use and the only alternative was for us to rent a car. That was not something I was going to do and I was feeling like I just wanted to go home anyway. After a few minutes of discussion, Connie agreed that heading back was the thing to do.
I needed to gas up the airplane first, though. I knew from my preflight planning that gas was cheaper here than at Pearland (It seems that many places around are cheaper than Pearland.), so we journeyed out to the airplane parked in front of the gas pumps. After performing a brief preflight, I set up the cockpit for flight, hopped out, and pulled the airplane over to the pumps. After topping off the tanks, we took a few pictures of us at Brenham with the diner in the background, all of which turned out to be useless later because neither of us noticed the camera’s controls had been bumped into movie mode. Nothing like taking video of the tarmac!
We manned up, started the engine, checked the winds and weather on the ASOS, and then taxied out of the ramp, turning right to parallel runway 16 up a rather noticeable uphill grade. The takeoff end of 16 was at the top of the hill, but near it we found a small run-up ramp I pulled into to complete the takeoff checklist. As I did, a Cessna 172 in front of us, pulled onto the runway and took off, his radio calls indicating he was headed west. With the takeoff checklist complete, we checked for other traffic as I gunned the engine to carry us forward and called on the radio we were taking runway 16 for departure as another single-engine low winged airplane passed us taxiing in the other direction.
Lifting off, we roared down the runway as I pitched the nose up slightly to climb out at best rate. Best rate wasn’t very high, maybe about four hundred feet a minute. The temperature was about ninety-two degrees at liftoff, and that was pushing the density altitude upward. What I didn’t understand yet was how much. I had listened to the ASOS but hadn’t noted anything that caught my attention other than winds and altimeter setting. A post-flight calculation using data from Weather Underground showed that the density altitude was already at 4100 feet.
As we climbed out of the pattern, we heard another aircraft call he was approaching from the southeast. I responded by calling our position, altitude, and direction of travel out on the radio as we scanned the sky for him. Below, the grey multi-lane ribbon of U.S. Highway 290 was crossing underneath us, and I called out its presence to Connie. As we crossed it, we heard the other airplane radio that he was on downwind, and I relaxed, knowing he was now no danger.
As we approached 2500 feet MSL, our climb rate began falling off; and for a moment, even went to zero. Instinctively, I reached for the mixture control and slowly began pulling it out to lean it. The engine responded by cranking up about another 100 rpm; and as the climb rate started up again, I adjusted the mixture to give me best performance. The Vertical Speed Indicator jumped upward to almost 700 feet a minute rate of climb and we watched the altimeter move steadily upward to my 3500-foot altitude target.
“She’s climbing all right, now,” Connie said.
“Because we’re in a thermal,” I answered. For a moment, I considered pretending we were in a sailplane and racking us over into a hard turn to stay in the upward climbing column of air; but, instead, I did the power pilot thing and plowed ahead, praying we would stay in the thermal until I reached my altitude. That didn’t happen; but by the time it turned us loose, we only had about 300 feet to go. I leveled us off at 3500, trimming the nose down and letting the airplane accelerate toward cruise speed before pulling the throttle back and settling it in at 75% power. The clouds were still above us at about 4000 feet, and we’d pass through the shadows as we plunged in and out of the sunlight.
I was using the GPS to steer on this leg and I immediately noticed how I tended to chase its needle. While that allowed me to make smaller course corrections faster than I could just looking at a chart, I also felt more disconnected from the flight. I made a mental note to do more GPS-OFF flying except in those cases where I’m brushing up against some controlled airspace I’m unfamiliar with. I tend to use airports as my VFR checkpoints when flying not only because they’re usually easy to spot and identify but because they give me a place to land if my airplane develops troubles. So, we flew over the top of Grunwalder and then pointed the airplane slightly southeast to cross a large stretch of flat, green land before finding Lane, a small airport on Houston’s west side I had flown by numerous times but still not seen.
On the radio, I dialed in the frequency from the chart for Houston Approach. Though I didn’t check in, I wanted to listen in to see if we were called out as traffic to anyone. While we were plugging along east of Sealy this time and across Interstate 10, I noticed that my oil temperatures were running high, almost 240 degrees. While they were still in the green, Connie and I both felt they were higher than we had seen them except when flying on a hot summer day on the way to Missouri and at 6500 feet. Our attention then turned from the oil temps to conflicting traffic that turned out to be a helicopter well in front of us and slightly below us that was making its way into Sugarland’s airport.
Lane showed up ahead as a single strip of blacktop. A low wing airplane buzzed around it below us as we passed over it at 2000 feet on a letdown to 1600. As we flew over it, I noted the time, wrote it down on my flight-planning sheet, and turned us left toward Houston Southwest. The visibility was still very good; and though the airport was some 12 miles away, I could already see it. Connie called out an airplane that was barreling toward the runway from our left. I spotted it, too, and told her it was too low to be a concern.
Leaving Houston Southwest behind, we pressed on toward Pearland Regional, our home. I pointed the nose where I knew the airport was while watching two rain showers just south and west of it. At first, I wasn’t sure if they were sitting in our path of not. As we neared, I could see that the southernmost and heaviest shower was closest, but downwind to runway 14 would be just east of it. ASOS confirmed that 14 was our desired runway, and I swung us onto downwind while making the radio call about what we were doing. Light rain peppered our windscreen as we slowed to our approach speed. I rolled us onto base, and final, touching down just beyond the numbers.
You know, every flight teaches me something. This one showed me how easily I could become complacent. I did the exact amount of flight planning I would do for any cross-country flight (including printing out airport data like field elevation, frequencies, and runway length and orientation) but I assumed that some of it didn’t matter because I was close to home. I was wrong. As they say, “assume” really means “making an ass out of your and me”.
I also saw that there’s great value in navigating by chart and compass alone. It’s a skill that not only keeps me feeling more connected to flying but needs to stay sharp for the day when the GPS quits. There’s value in having all the precision that GPS brings as long as it doesn’t overshadow my own ability to aviate, navigate, and communicate without it.