Julian had a business meeting in Manhattan, so we decided to stretch the legs of the Robinson R44 helicopter. I loaded Mark, a helicopter student friend, into the ship at Hanscom on Tuesday morning and we departed for the Beverly, Massachusetts airport (BVY). At BVY, Mark got out of the front right seat and moved to the back. Julian got in. We proceeded through downtown Boston and picked up the AMTRAK rail line south to Norwood, Massachusetts.
The clouds were less than 1000′ above the ground, but the visibility underneath the clouds was reasonably good at 7-9 miles, so we hugged Interstate 95 all the way through Bridgeport, Connecticut where the ceiling began to lift a bit. Not quite sure of the most polite way to navigate the airspace around New York City, we contacted New York Approach for VFR advisories just SW of Bridgeport. They handed us off to a special LaGuardia Airport tower frequency, 126.05, for low-flying VFR aircraft, especially helicopters. We were cleared through the LaGuardia Airport Class B surface airspace and down the Hudson River. We circled the Statue of Liberty and then called for landing advice at the Downtown/Wall Street heliport. The friendly guy working the radio gave us the winds and directed us to a transient pad where Julian got out and walked to his meeting while Mark moved into the front seat for the short hop over to Teterboro, New Jersey (TEB).
We shut down at TEB for about 30 minutes and loaded my cousin Lynn and her 11-year-old daughter Olivia into the helicopter for a scenic tour up Rt. 17 (mall, mall, mall) and then over their hometown of Allendale, New Jersey. After circling Olivia’s school, we proceeded over the George Washington Bridge, down the Hudson, around the Statue of Liberty, up the East River, over Central Park, and back through the haze to Teterboro. Nobody complained about the haze or the bumps.
Back at Teterboro, Jet Aviation insisted that we land on a dolly, which is difficult enough for most helicopter pilots. The advantage for them is that they can tow the helicopter around and reposition it. The challenge for the pilot is that the dolly isn’t much larger than the skids and any mistake will result in the helicopter falling off the 2′-high dolly and crashing into the ground. The line guys at Jet Aviation made the challenge vastly more difficult by positioning the dolly so that (1) I would have to land with my tail into a 20-25 knot gusty wind (facing into the wind is the more stable way to hover a helicopter), and (2) I would have about 5′ of clearance between my tail and a $5 million business jet parked right up against the dolly. Most of the helicopter pilots who land at TEB are professionals and in theory all of them would be up to the task of putting their tail into the wind and up against a bizjet, but even for a heroic Vietnam vet it probably wasn’t a prudent thing to be doing. I refused to do it, calling on the radio and insisting that they move the dolly to an uncluttered area on the ramp and point it so that the helicopter would be facing into the wind. The line guys never seemed to comprehend the “face into wind” part, but at least they moved it and the set-down would be crosswind rather than downwind. I didn’t see the need to involve anyone but myself in the flaming wreckage of our new helicopter, so I had Mark escort my cousins out and well away from the helicopter/dolly interaction. In the end, the setdown turned out to be uneventful.
Julian checked us into the W Hotel Times Square, one of the few hotels in Manhattan that had rooms left. It is unclear who wants to visit New York City when it is 90 degrees out with 90 percent humidity, but apparently there is no shortage of customers in July. The room was $400 per night. Julian has a fancy Amex card and got upgraded to a “spectacular” room. It was just barely larger than the two beds, which were the room’s only furniture other than a narrow counter/desk by the window and one desk chair. Julian wrinkled his nose “This room smells like body odor”. The A/C didn’t work right. The clock and phone by Julian’s bed shut down when he turned off the overhead light. Escaping to the lobby wasn’t an option because it was deafeningly loud (music, bar, bare stone) and too dimly lit to read a magazine.
Dinner at Lever House was almost good enough to compensate for the crummy hotel. The other Manhattan highlight was a trip to the new Morgan Library.
The trip back to Boston would have been a great advertisement for Amtrak. We waited for about 20 hours for severe thunderstorms, which included tornados and hail, to clear out of the Northeast. We departed Teterboro through haze and made it as far as Hartford, Connecticut before rain and low clouds started making us feel uncomfortable. By the time we got near Providence, Rhode Island we needed a break from following roads and dodging towers. We set at at North Central airport, SFZ, near Smithfield, Rhode Island, and waited for four hours. Our final legs to Beverly and Bedford included some beautiful rain-cleared weather complete with a rainbow terminating in the center of Logan Airport.
The R44 is just about ready for its first 100-hour inspection. So far the machine is rock-solid. By contrast, our Cirrus airplane is just out from its annual inspection, which took three weeks and constituted the plane’s fourth month in the shop during its first year of ownership. Immediately after coming out of the inspection, one of the cylinder head temperature probes began to give erratic readings. Today Avidyne called and said not to fly the plane on instruments because they are recalling our primary flight display (PFD). The PFD was removed from the airplane and upgraded with some new software back in January, with a cost in downtime of about three weeks. This was supposed to fix the PFD’s tendency to crash during flight. Apparently there are some other issues and now Avidyne wants to shut the plane down for about two weeks.
I was wondering why there haven’t been any posts about adventures of the fixed-wing type. Now I know, it’s been in the shop. Do you still wish you had the DA40 or are you hereby converted to the even smaller club of rotorwing drivers? : – )
–ken
Ken: I still have an airplane, a 2005 Cirrus SR20. I haven’t gone anywhere very exciting in it lately. Nobody would want to hear about a VFR trip to Pittsfield, MA or Martha’s Vineyard. A friend needed to retrieve his daughter from Glens Falls, NY the other week and we went there in the Cirrus. It was raining and, though the forecast called for 1200′ overcast, we ended up having to fly down to about 300′ above the runway (near the minimum for the ILS) before breaking out. No RADAR coverage out there either. Had that flight turned into an “adventure”, I would have been pretty scared. (Taking off in the rain and climbing into the clouds didn’t seem to bother the 5-year-old girl in the back seat.) And effectively I still have DA40s to fly. East Coast Aero Club has one and I’m one of only two instructors qualified to teach in it (G1000 glass cockpit). A friend has one and we’re going to Las Vegas at the end of July.
Since the first time I laid eyes on one, I’ve been of the opinion that the Cirruses will spend more time in the shop because they are more complex.
My experience with the four Cirruses (1 SR20 and 3 SR22) at Sunrise bears this out. From simple things like a GNS430 data card malfunctioning to an autopilot that intermittently fails to capture a pre-selected altitude, it’s just a more complex ship. TKS, glass panel, parachute, Skywatch, TAWS, Cmax charts, these are all things that cannot fail on older planes because they just don’t have ’em.
Simpler airplanes like the 1941 clipped wing J3 Cub we have on the line are essentially trouble free. It may be 65 years old, but it’s quite reliable.
The EGT probe failure is very common. I’ve seen that in every Cirrus I’ve flown for any length of time. I took delivery of a new Cirrus in Duluth and the #6 probe died on the flight home.
On the plus side, the new ones are a lot better than the old Cirruses. They’ve fixed the nose wheel fairings, door handles, sun visors, and other weak points in the design. Also, it’s worth noting that the Cirrus was not designed as a trainer. It was meant to fly long distances on autopilot. We use our 20 for training and the poor thing is really starting to look bad.
I don’t know if you’ve flown the SR22, but it’s worlds apart from the 20. Every SR20 I’ve flown runs quite hot, and the climb rates are miserable. So. Calif. is surrounded by high mountains, and when it’s 100 degrees outside with 80 percent humidity, the climb to 10,500′ is going to be a long one in an SR20. The engine works hard, runs hot, and I don’t think it’ll be as reliable as the IO550 in the SR22.
Ron: I have some time in the SR22 and it is indeed nice when you’ve got four fat guys in the plane and a short runway. My SR20 certainly does not run hot here in Massachusetts. I have trouble getting the oil temp to 180; the cylinder head temps are down in the low 300s. The climb rate at gross weight is poor, though, in hot weather, and it takes a distressingly long time to get into a 500 fpm climb after takeoff.
The mechanics I know report much less engine trouble with the lower power SR20 engine than in the SR22’s fire-breather. High-power piston engines are never especially reliable, though I guess the Continental IO-550 might be as good as it gets within that category. The SR20’s engine is considered quite the workhorse in the old Cessna 172XP.
You sure make flying the helicopter sound fun. When the clouds are at 1000, can you even fly a fixed-wing plane vfr? And landing in Manhattan must be cool. How’d you get back and forth between Manhattan and TEB? (It sounds like you parked the helicopter there overnight.)
Ghengis: We used a car service to get from Manhattan back to TEB. You can’t fly a fixed-wing VFR in controlled airspace when the ceiling is 1000.