Cirrus trip to Washington, DC

My friend Tom had to give a talk in Washington, D.C., and I wanted to see my brother’s new baby. So we piled into the Cirrus SR20 on Tuesday and flew from Bedford to Gaithersburg (KGAI). The trip down involved the usual East Coast flying-as-transportation hazards: an airmet for icing conditions, layers of clouds allegedly up to 15,000′, an airmet for turbulence below 12,000′, surface winds gusting to 30 knots. It turned out not to be so bad at 6000′, which we held right over the top of the JFK airport (nyc photo). Winds aloft were over 50 knots in strength, but weren’t right on the nose, so the ground speed wasn’t reduced by more than 20 knots. Just north of Atlantic City, New Jersey, we requested a climb to 8000′ to stay above of the bumpy clouds. The Potomac Approach frequency, 128.7, that is used by low-altitude little airplane guys, was almost dead silent. The Maryland/Virginia area typically has some of the calmest winds in the U.S. and the local pilots were apparently turned off by the winds. When we landed on Runway 32, the wind was more or less straight down the runway at 20 knots gusting 27. Tom wasn’t too impressed by my landing, which was made more difficult by the fact that the runway slopes away downhill just as you are trying to flare. Despite a higher-than-normal approach speed of 80 knots and the downhill runway, we did not need all 4200′ and turned off at a taxiway about 2/3rds of the way down.

Tom’s Town Car pulled up to the side of the plane just as we were pulling back the mixture. Just like the turbine crowd! We were driven to the Four Points Sheraton at 12th and K, whose striped carpet looked as though it had been salvaged from a Holiday Inn circa 1970. My room was small and smelled of smoke. The $325/night price shocked me into thinking that inflation is hitting East Coast yuppie lifestyle items pretty hard.

After lunch, I walked over to the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum, colocated in the recently restored former headquarters of the U.S. Patent Office (web site for the building). At 333,000 square feet, it was the largest office building in the U.S. when completed in 1868 (for comparison, 333,000 s.f. is 3-6X the size of the private houses being built by some contemporary American businessmen and movie stars). The museum has refreshing hours for us computer programmers: 11:30 am to 7 pm. The portrait collection includes mini-biographies next to each portrait, which makes for an educational visit. Lots of great Hudson River School and newer American art as well as creative folk art. Photos:

• map of U.S. in neon and TV monitors (just our route)
• storage space
• gallery space

Dinner was at my brother’s place in Maryland, where his 5-year-old kid proved that you don’t need skill to take a good picture as long as you have a sufficiently capable camera: Nashi, the family Siberian Husky. This was in a living room with dim lighting, ISO 1600, 1/13th of a second and f/4 at 82mm on the 24-105/4L zoom. An adult photographer with steady hands would need 1/80th or faster, typically, to get an image without evident camera shake. The image stabilizer in the Canon lens was good enough to adjust for a 5-year-old kid’s jumpiness.

Tom and I left the Four Points at 0630 and were on the roll around 8:15 am down the runway at Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the winds had calmed down. We were unable to take advantage of the XM weather data subscription that I pay for every month for the Cirrus because, two months ago, the Avidyne radio receiver decided to deactivate itself. XM says that we are paid up, that we were always paid up, that the radio should be active, and that they have sent out activation signals. The Avidyne multi-function display says that our radio is working perfectly, gets a good signal from XM, and that we have no subscription. The Brave New World of privatized digitally rights managed data sounds good, but when you combine complex business strategies with today’s incompetent programmers, the result is that customers probably won’t get what they paid for. In an airplane, in the clouds, this is not comforting. (It is kind of annoying too because the data for which we pay $50/month is all generated by the U.S. government and, in theory, available for free to anyone who can get it.)

At our filed altitude of 7000′, the FAA apparently wants airplanes passing up the East Coast well clear of the jets landing and departing the New York City airports. We were routed through Lancaster and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and then over the Hudson River north of I84 and West Point. The winds aloft were blowing 60 knots, with a 30-knot headwind component (the plane was moving at 150 knots through the air, but going only 120 knots over the ground). Just after we entered New York State, I called Flight Service to provide a pilot report and get the weather between us and Bedford. Winds were as expected, out of the northwest at 20 knots, gusting up to 27. This would be a piece of cake compared to the landing at Gaithersburg. We had a nice U.S. Air Force runway, almost twice as long and fully twice as wide as the runway at Gaithersburg, oriented to magnetic 290 and thus more or less into the wind. We relaxed, fat, dumb, and happy until about 30 miles outside of Bedford when we listened to the ATIS, the prerecorded information distributed by the airport controllers to pilots: “Runway 11-29 closed. Expect a visual approach to Runway 23.” [Runway 23 is the shorter “crosswind” runway, typically only used when winds are strong and from the southwest.] It turned out that Massport had decided to redo the sealcoat on the runway that morning. I called for a wind check. The wind was from 330 at 17, gusting higher. Runway 23 has a bunch of little hills in its approach path, which tend to generate some ugly turbulence 100-200′ above the ground. 230 to 330 is more or less a direct crosswind (with a slight tailwind component). The Cirrus SR20 has a maximum demonstrated (by a test pilot) crosswind component of 21 knots, which was higher than the steady wind, but lower than the gusts. I asked for 29 and was told that we could have it if we waited 30 minutes. The prudent pilot would have circled around in the bumps for half an hour or landed into the wind at Nashua’s Runway 32 and had lunch at Sandy’s. Tom had an important business lunch to attend, however, so we decided to give Runway 23 a try.

We decided to hold an approach speed around 85 knots with half flaps. The standard half-flap approach speed is 80 knots, but we added 5 knots to make sure that we didn’t get too slow in the event of a big gust. The higher airspeed makes the rudder more effective and we would be needing most of our rudder to keep the airplane pointing down the runway. I flew a wider than usual pattern and gave myself a long time to get established on the final approach course and on the visual glideslope, which is a shallower approach than standard in a light single-engine airplane, but about the right angle for half-flaps. We held a more or less constant attitude over the hills and bumps while the airspeed indicator jumped around between 75 and 95 knots. The touchdown wasn’t that bad, in the end, and we shut down in time for Tom to make it to his meeting.

Lessons? Any flight for transportation, as opposed to recreation, requires a high level of training, preparation, and equipment. If you have to be somewhere specific at a specific time, you will probably get into some kind of a trouble. Check the NOTAMs carefully (I had missed this runway closure (two lines) in an online briefing (50 pages) the night before, focusing on the weather, after a couple of glasses of wine; a flight service woman didn’t mention it when I called for an updated briefing from the Gaithersburg airport a few minutes before departure). If you’re going to own an airplane equipped with Avidyne avionics (local MIT spinoff), hire a full-time kid to keep up with the service bulletins, software updates, equipment failures, and shutdowns due to alleged non-payment.