Up In the Air

22-23 July 2013; At and Above Sealevel --

As I promised earlier -- but have been delayed writing this! -- I have had some more adventures in the Mooney. I don't have suitable photos to show all of my antics in the air, so the reader will have to rely on their imagination to picture the situation based on my verbal descriptions.

On Monday (22 July), I put 20 gallons of fuel in the right tank (capacity 24 gallons), and topped off (i.e., filled to the brim) the left tank. The sky being clear blue, and the horizon being visible as far as one could see, my destination was the little town of Cle Elum, just East of the Cascades. My "ulterior" motive was to check out the airstrip for this town with the hopes of flying my good and long-time friend, Margaret, over there some day to have lunch and a visit with her daughter who lives there.

Wind was light on this, the "Wet" side of the Cascades. However, as I reached 8,500 altitude and was cruising, I notice that my Ground speed (registered on the GPS) was 145 knots, while my True Airspeed (registered on my aircraft airspeed indicator) was just over 140 miles per hour. Now, since a "knot" is 6080 feet per hour, while a "mile per hour" is 5280 feet per hour, that means I had a tail wind of about 27 mph! When I landed on the nicely paved airstrip at Cle Elum, I would say that the wind there was all of that!

Upon landing on runway 26 [approximately 260 degree magnetic] (nice one, by the way), and taxiing over to the center-runway taxi-way, I discovered that the parking area was "paved" with near-fist sized river rocks. I made the decision to abandon my plans to check out the ground accommodations and instead did a 180 right there on the narrow taxi-way and went back to the downwind end of runway 26 for takeoff and returned to my home field.

Anyway, I got in two landings that day and returned without using very much fuel: 31 minutes over, 34 minutes on the return.

The next day (23 July), I flew up to the Arlington airfield (two nice paved runways, one 02/34 [approximately 20 degrees and 340 degrees magnetic, respectively] and the other 10/26. I had called the Princess (#1 Daughter) ahead of time, inviting myself for lunch and begging a pickup for the ride over to her house. She of course obliged and I made one of my best landings (with the stall warning screaming like mad as I held the Mooney just off the pavement until the main gear finally made a soft (but not "greased"!) touchdown. I taxied over to a vacant tie-down spot and as I pulled the throttle all the way back to cut-off, I noticed a high-pitched scream. I first thought that the stall warning was stuck in the "up" position. The scream stopped as soon as I turned off the Master switch. "Ah!", Grumpy thought. All is well -- for the time being.

However, once out of the aircraft, I spoke to someone "resident" at the field and was told that the "transient parking" is over there. So, I reentered the Mooney and as I turned on the Master switch to check fuel pressure, the screaming began. But it stopped when I started the engine and remained off as I taxied to "over there".

But it began again as I cut the throttle during engine shutdown. "Hmmm!", thought Grumpy. This time he decided to try to figure out what and why that obvious warning whistle was sounding. By checking the landing gear lever, he discovered that, although the lever was fully inserted into the receiving socket in the "UP and LOCKED" position, the thumb button that secures the lever in that position, had not popped into place. Once I pushed the button to help it engage, the whistle stopped and Grumpy was thankful that the landing gear had not decided to "STOW" as he was taxiing or parking!

There to meet me was "Fingers", my piano-playing genius Granddaughter; G-M, my 5 year-old Great Granddaughter and promising piano virtuoso [who had been taking lessons from "Fingers"]; and my#1 Daughter, the Mother of "Fingers" and Grandmother of  G-M.

After lunch, Grumpy was dragged off, "kicking and screaming" [not really; Grumpy looked forward to this opportunity to be out in the woods with these three "girls"] on a hike up a rocky, root-infested trail to a low-land lake. We didn't go all the way to the lake, but instead turned around at a bridge overlooking a little waterfall coming from a stream that came tumbling down from higher up on the mountain side. Grumpy supervised #1 Daughter in taking these two photos -- the second one was "for old time's sake". And Grumpy got tears in his eyes from the memories.

Back at the house for a second helping of Apple Crisp, with homemade Vanilla ice cream, and then a ride back to the airplane to take off to return to home base. For takeoff, I at first planned to opt for runway 26, since the wind was now blowing fairly steady from about that direction. However, after seeing another aircraft, about the same horsepower and low-wing configuration as the Mooney, take off ahead of me on runway 34, I decided to follow him. Sure enough, the takeoff was uneventful until just before liftoff when the side wind began to overpower the runway traction and blow my aircraft sideways. "Crabbing" into the wind as I lifted off maintained my ground track parallel to the runway as I climbed to an altitude of a thousand feet or more above the field. Then I slowly turned to the heading for "home", 163 degrees magnetic.

My landing at "home" was one of the sloppiest I have made in a long time. The wind was no where near as bad as it had been at Arlington, so that was not an excuse. But I got the Mooney on the pavement and back to my tie-down without further ado.

[One of these days, Grumpy may have to dedicate an hour or so to just perfecting his landing technique! One landing per day -- or even two -- doesn't seem to be cutting it!]