This is a report to friends and family on my main activity this week, a trip from Boston to Las Vegas in a Diamond Star DA40. The owner, my friend Tom, started the trip with 150 hours and a Private pilot’s certificate. His goal is to get an instrument rating within the next few months. Tom’s knowledge is almost perfectly complementary to mine. He knows about running marathons, living in the suburbs, keeping and wife and kids happy, and investing in bonds.
The trip started Saturday morning with a 4:00 a.m. alarm clock. Tom showed up at 4:45 a.m. in an Aston Martin convertible. We struggled to fit our luggage and flight gear in the trunk and back seat. Only the British could make a car that is more expensive to own, less reliable, and less capacious than a trainer airplane. We lifted from the Minuteman airport in Stow, Massachusetts (6B6) at 6:15 am and went to Worcester, MA for a practice ILS approach then onward to Ithaca, NY for another ILS and a fuel stop. Our next leg was to Youngstown, Ohio where haze and cumulus clouds forced us to get a real instrument clearance and fly an ILS through actual conditions to land in the withering heat and humidity of the late morning. Our final destination was Chicago Midway where we went downtown to meet Jen for “Venetian Night” (crowds, lit-up boats), then collapsed at the Hampton Inn next to Midway.
On Sunday we departed Midway at 7:30 a.m. for Iowa City, Iowa. The temperature was well into the 90s and a crazy high school girl was preparing to take her first flying lesson. After pounding back some cold drinks and chatting with folks at one of the country’s friendliest FBOs, we departed for Lincoln, Nebraska. We landed in 102-degree (39C) heat and got organized with a rental car and rooms at the Cornhusker Marriott downtown. I walked over to the university to check out the three art galleries, including one designed by Philip Johnson. There are enough interesting paintings and sculpture to inspire rebellion in the soul of the next Jackson Pollock (born in Cody, Wyoming, but the same general idea). We had a good dinner in the Haymarket district with Doug and Amy’s friend Jill.
Over dinner at Fireworks, Jill told us of a sad local case involving a medevac helicopter pilot whose fancy turbine Agusta’s tail rotor failed. He must have done some sort of autorotation because there were survivors, but he was not among them. He left behind a wife and seven children who are suing the manufacturer. It is hard to believe that anyone can make money in aviation because, under the American legal system, Agusta ends up selling insurance when they thought they were selling helicopters. The engineering reality is that it is impossible to make a helicopter that won’t break. If you made everything incredibly strong, the helicopter would be too heavy to fly. Pilots are aware that at any time the engine or transmission or tail rotor could fail and it will be time for an autorotation. There are areas of the planet and phases of flight where this won’t result in a soft landing and that is one reason why being a commercial helicopter pilot is probably the most dangerous job in the U.S. (I’ve not seen the stats broken out separately, but commercial pilot is one of the most dangerous and it includes airline 747 crew, whose jobs are not dangerous at all). Nobody with a wife and seven kids depending on his next paycheck should take a job flying a helicopter unless he has a lot of life insurance.
On Monday, after donning our oxygen cannulas, we departed Lincoln at 7:00 a.m., planning to follow I-80 to Salt Lake City. The sensible ways to cross the Rocky Mountains are I-80 (passes up to 9,000′ or so) and I-40 (passes up to 7,500′). There were some thunderstorms and/or rain developing over both of these routes, so we diverted to Jeffco airport in the northwest suburbs of Denver, Colorado and refueled. I called flight service for an update and found that the winds aloft were light and mostly from the north, which meant that we wouldn’t have too much lee side turbulence approaching the Rockies. More interestingly, there were a couple of pilot reports from small Cessnas that had made it across in the preceding hour or two. We were emboldened. We took off from Jeffco around 11:00 a.m. and climbed up to an indicated 14,500′ on the altimeter. Due to the high heat, we were closer to 15,000′ above sea level, a fact confirmed by the GPS, and well above the numerous 14,000+ peaks that I-70 threads its way throught. For flatlanders, this kind of flying is unnerving, but it was never unsafe. We landed in the early afternoon at Canyonlands (CNY) in Moab, Utah. This was Tom’s first landing at a high density altitude (8000′ or so) where he had to fly a pattern (at Jeffco we’d done a practice ILS approach). I said “you’re going to be going really fast over the ground at normal pattern airspeeds, so be sure to widen out”. Tom did so, but got down to a slower than normal airspeed of about 70 knots without realizing it. The ground rush was consistent with our 85-90 knot groundspeed, so he thought he was flying a standard DA40 downwind at 85 knots or so. We rented a brand new Jeep Wrangler, which was much noisier and bumpier than a 1995 Kia, did a short hike in Arches National Park, and had dinner at Buck’s Grillhouse. An older biker couple walked out to their Honda Goldwings. The guy wore a badge on his leather jacket that had exactly the right shape and color for Harley Davidson’s logo, but instead of reading “Harley” the badge read “Asshole”.
On Tuesday, we enjoyed a smooth morning flight over Bryce and Zion national parks, then did a practice instrument approach and landing at St. George, Utah. It was getting bumpy and windy by the time we landed, just after noon, at Henderson, Nevada (HND). 22.9 hours on the Hobbs meter.