Sunday-First Bush Flight

I don't have a lot of new pictures to post this AM.  I left the B&B for Talkeetna Airport (PATK) around 7:15.  It was raining pretty steady but the visibility seemed to be fairly good and VFR conditions were reported at PATK.  I met John, the Bush instructor.  We sat at the picnic table for a bit but had to head inside due to the increasing rain. We talked through take-off, landing, stall speeds, slow flight approaches, short field landing, short field take-off, and peculiarities of taking off and landing the Citabria 7GCBC on gravel.  After about an hour and a half of verbal instruction from John, we took a look at the plane.  The Citabria sits very high off the ground, has a modified 160 HP Lycoming engine, 35" balloon tires, has vortex generators on the leading edges of the wings and vortex generators on the underside of the tail.  This vortex generator modification, which is just plastic vortex tabs glued in the proper place, creates more of a swirl affect to the air traveling over the top of the wings and the bottom of the elevator to give the plane more lift, reduce the stall speed and increase aileron responsiveness.

Lance had told me yesterday that in the lower 48 states, people spend lots of money to make their airplanes go faster.  In Alaska, people spend lots of money to modify their airplanes to go slower.

Although John had said we would just be doing a couple of take-off and landings in the pattern, once we were airborne and realized we had sufficient visibility to the Southwest, we headed to the practice area, about 7 miles out, and all the while made sure we had the airport runway in sight.  This is important because we cannot fly through clouds under VFR.  If we could not get back to PATK visually, we would have to find an alternate place to land with good visibility.  PATK sits kind of in the middle of all the weather.  There were heavy clouds and precipitation all around us, but where we were located, mostly just scattered clouds.

Kind of a down note here.  There was a collision near the practice area yesterday between two float planes.  The outcome of one of the planes wasn't good.  The other one flew to Anchorage for a land landing to save the plane, which had extensive float damage.  You can land a float plane without wheels on pavement, grass or gravel without incurring too much damage to the plane.  I'm including a link here if you would like to know more about the accident.  I'm trying not to think about it but it warns me to be vigilant continuously while in the air for other aircraft.  http://www.adn.com/2011/07/30/1992961/planes-collide-in-midair-one-crashes.ht

We were out flying for about 1.4 hours.  We were mostly away from clouds at 2,500 feet, except on our eventual return to PATK.  I had to maneuver down through the broken clouds and enter the pattern for landing at a lower altitude to avoid clouds.

I got to really get a good feel for the awesome characteristics of the plane.  Slow flight down to 40 kts, stall recovery, either straight ahead or in a 60 degree turn was very easy and very intuitive.  Power was more than sufficient.  John ran me through all the introductory flight exercises to prepare me for landing short, stopping fast and conducting a fully coordinated approach to a landing strip.

John set up to demonstrate our first gravel landing at PATK (there's a gravel strip off to the side of the paved runway).  It is not advised to land a plane with the bush wheels on pavement due to wear and tear on the tires.

John's approach was too fast and we had to "go around" which means you add full power, bring in the flaps and go back around to set up for another approach.  John let me take this one and other than a bit of assistance just before touchdown in the gravel, I nailed the landing.  I think the most difficult part about landing in the gravel at PATK is there are three taxi lights, which mark a paved taxiway, right before you touch down.  One of the taxi lights has already been taken out by a bush plane and John probably stressed, not hitting what remained of that one or the other untouched lights, more than anything else.  I taxied off the gravel, onto the paved runway, John demonstrated a bush take-off, which happens in about 400'.  You go full power (after an initial roll to avoid your prop vortex), then at 45 kts you jerk up 5 notches of flaps and pull back on the stick at the same time.  The plane virtually launches into the air and begins a very steep climb, first at 45, then nose down to 60 kt climb out.  Very exciting.

We finished after I did a second landing.  Took a one hour break but then our return to the airport, the weather had gotten very bad.  We walked over to the FAA Flight Service building located on the airport, and chatted with the two FAA guys about what they were seeing with the weather.  Weather didn't look good where we were wanting to head, about 20 miles NW, close to one of the glaciers that run up to the Talkeetna Mountain passes.  We watched as a "K2 Aviation" scout plane, a Beaver, headed out to scout the glacier access near Mt. McKinley.  The plane was out and back within 15 minutes.  We heard a couple pilots call in with pilot reports on the weather while at FSS, most of which were not good.  We then walked over to K2 Aviation to talk with the pilots that went out on the scout mission and found out they didn't return due to weather but do to a concern about the plane (which was already in a hanger being opened up as we got there, on the other side of the airport).

We decided to delay any further flights till 4:00 PM, which is rapidly approaching so I'll close for now.  Hopefully we'll get up flying today and I can deliver some great pictures.