The week started off in a
fairly unique way. I was standing
outside our hangar with one of the other pilots at Ameriflight waiting for my
load manifest and noticed an awful lot of emergency airport vehicles driving
around the taxiways with their lights flashing. I made some remark like “Hey look, it’s a crash truck party. They must be doing a training exercise.” Next thing I know, I look over and on final
approach to runway 10R is a Horizon Dash-8 twin turboprop with its number two
engine dead and windmilling. It was
quite a weird sight – I thought the only time you fly around with a dead engine
is during training. So the Dash-8 lands
and stops on the runway, and smoke begins to pour out of the dead engine. We have a great view of the area from where
we sit, and start joking around about Horizon and their maintenance, then
realize maybe we shouldn’t be joking in case the plane blows up and 30 or 40
people are killed. Well, everyone evacuated
the airplane just fine and the crash trucks extinguished the fire. It’s kind of funny to see a bunch of people
just standing there on the runway wondering how they are going to get back to
the terminal. My departure to Medford
ended up being delayed by 20 minutes because PDX doesn’t operate too well with
one runway. Heard about it on the news
that night.
For the second consecutive
week, I have had three days of good weather followed by two days of absolute
crap.
I have been flying
Portland-Medford and return this week.
It is a good run because it is fairly easy (only two legs) and still
allows 3 – 3.5 hours of flight time.
This run is also normally meant to be flown in a Piper Chieftain because
it is so heavy. Yesterday I carried
1320 pounds, which left me just 60 pounds under gross weight with the minimum
legal fuel load (one hour reserve).
I also like Medford because
I have internet access here so I have something to do besides consulting or
sleeping during my eight-hour layover.
On Tuesday I borrowed a bicycle from the hotel and went riding around on
the Bear Creek Trail for a couple of hours in the warm 68-degree weather. Very nice.
Flying home last night I
received the most ice I have ever had.
It wasn’t building particularly quickly, but it just kept building
throughout most of the 90-minute flight.
The ice protection in the Cessna 402 does a good job of keeping it off
your props and windshield and a fair job of keeping it off your wings and
tail. My outside air temperature gauge had
two whole inches of ice before it melted off during my descent into
Portland. Still the airplane flew
pretty well, losing about 15 knots of airspeed with the initial ice buildup but
didn’t lose any more as it continued to build.
I also picked up ice this
morning on my way to Medford. However,
today I was picking it up a little more quickly than I wanted so I requested a
climb to get over the tops of the clouds which had been reported at 6000 feet. I broke out at 10,500 feet. The problem was the cloud tops continued to
get higher as I flew south and in order to stay VFR-on-top I had to continue
climbing. As a result, I set a new
personal altitude record of 15,000 feet.
That’s getting close to flight levels!
The tailwind was great up there so I also set a personal speed record on
my descent into Medford of 242 knots, or 278 MPH.
In hindsight, outclimbing
the ice may not have been the best way to go.
If I let my airspeed drop too low on the climb, particularly below Vy
(109 knots), some buffeting would occur which I believe was the empennage
approaching stall. Our cruise climb is
normally 120 knots indicated, and if I kept it there I was still able to get
500 FPM climb up to 15,000 feet, so in the future I will be careful not to let
it drop below 120 knots with ice on the plane.
You have to resist the temptation to pitch up when you see you are about
to break out of the clouds. On the
other hand, the tailwind I got up there pushed me to Medford more quickly, and
at my normal altitude of 9000 feet I would have continued to build ice in the
clouds the entire flight. I’m glad the
C402 carries ice as well as it does.
And I’m glad I have an oxygen bottle.
I’m looking forward to the
summer. Hopefully by next winter I’ll
be either flying for Skywest or flying a turboprop for Ameriflight. Either way, I win when it comes to ice.
Next week I have Pasco (AMF
422a) Monday-Wednesday and Ontario (AMF 413) Thursday-Friday. The schedule bid requests have come out and
are due in a week and I should know by next week’s report, but I don’t
anticipate getting awarded a regular run because we haven’t had any pilots
leave since last bid time. Looks like
another six weeks of “variety”, which has its good and bad points.
Got paid this week and I’m
still not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Just gotta keep thinking – “Free multi-engine time!”