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Today we were in Redmond, Oregon, sitting in the airplane at 6 am boarding passengers when then the skies opened up and it poured down snow. It was literally blowing horizontally. The main cabin door was right in the “line-of-fire” of the snow and there was no way to stop the snow from coming in the airplane. 

There was snow and water everywhere.

Then, when we finally got around to closing the door and de-icing the airplane, they couldn’t do it fast enough with the way it was snowing. We reached out holdover time (HOT) before they finished de-icing. (The HOT is the time when the de-icing fluid becomes ineffective and won’t absorb the snow. When and if that happens, you have to go back to the ramp to de-ice the airplane again. Period.) Unfortunately, RDM only has “Type I” de-icing fluid which has a very short HOT compared to “Type IV” de-icing fluid. Besides, de-icing again would have been a waste of time anyway because now the runway was contaminated with 1/2″ of snow.

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With the summer coming to a close and with the days getting shorter it is time to start thinking about what you are going to do if an engine fails while on a night flight, especially if you are in single-engine airplane.

I was reminded of this recently when I was flying from San Francisco (KSFO) to Victoria, B.C., Canada (CYYJ). It was the first night flight I’d flown in awhile and as I was looking out my window watching the sun set when I happened to glance down and notice that the terrain was quite inhospitable and it was getting dark and I wondered to myself, what would I do if we lost one of the engines.

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If you have been flying a single-engine airplane for any amount of time you probably have a well developed right leg. If you remember from your ground school days about single-engine airplanes, you will recall that when a single-engine airplane climbs, the descending blade, on a right turning propeller, has a larger angle-of-attack, which pushes more air and causes the airplane to want to turn to the left. You then have to apply more right rudder to compensate for this left-turning tendency or P-factor.

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When I was a new pilot flying around Florida building time, I was doing a VFR flight from Daytona Beach to Vero Beach, Florida. I was young and cocky and I thought, “Hey, I don’t need a flight plan,” and set off on my way. That was that a big mistake! It should have been an easy trip. It is practically a straight line from Daytona Beach to Vero Beach along the coast line. Though nothing terrible happened, I did get disorientated a little when I was above the clouds (where it was cooler) and had to ask for help from a controller to get me on my way. I decided right then that I would ALWAYS have a flight plan with me so that I never got myself in that situation again. I decided that I would be absolutely certain about my location at all times, have an alternate airport along my route that I knew I could fly to if the weather went bad even on a VFR day or if I need fuel or was having engine trouble.

So we will talk about a these things in today’s entry so you will be more ready than me and I think you will find it useful and if nothing else, a good reminder.

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Pilots and ”wannabe” pilots have a problem…they LOVE airplanes. Who can say they never looked up as an airplane flew by and just wondered what it would be like. What would it be like to fly? To control and fly an airplane? To sit up front as the airplane rolled down the runway and lifted off! Who hasn’t walked on to an airplane and glanced to look up at the flight deck with all those displays and panels and wondered how cool it would be to fly one.

Well, now anyone can experience the thrill of flight. Most flight schools sponsor “Discovery Flights“. This is your chance to sit in the cockpit and experience actually flying in a general aviation (GA) airplane. If you are interested, contact one of your local flight schools or click here for more information. It runs somewhere from $49 to $99 for between a half hour flight and a 1 hour flight.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilot Association (AOPA) has a website where you can Find a Flight School. Contact the school of you choice and set up the appointment. Take a friend, too. Guaranteed, you will be hooked. If nothing else, you will get to fly. Then once you are back home, start researching where you can get the material that you will need to start your training. Your first stop should be the Official FAA Pilot License Training Kit. This bundle of information has everything that you need to get started and in an easy down-loadable format.

And if you would like to meet someone who is on their journey to becoming a Private Pilot, stop by Todd McClamroch’s MyFlightBlog to follow his adventures.

To Your Flying Success…

Jeffrey