Post by Allen Peterson on Jan 29, 2009 1:51:57 GMT -5
I'm setting here on Troughton Island, having a beer and thinking about my flights down.
After taking off from Dili in the Apache and picking my way through the mountains, I set the AP to NAV to fly the GPS direct course to YTTI, and settled back to enjoy the flight.
A couple of Sudoku puzzles later - remember I flew my test flight as slowly as possible - I began to feel a little guilty. Here I am, relaxed, tweaking the power occasionally to keep the desired numbers in the GPS ETA window, while other guys are slaving away over their VORs and ADFs and DMEs and computers and whatever else to keep on course and on time. The flight plan I had was to do a straight in approach to runway 14.
I'm about 20 minuets out of YTTI and I'm thinking that the least I could do was to come in on the downwind leg, turn back and land on runway 32. And maybe the wind would be better that way, too.
I calculated how much time I thought I would need for that,
throttled up and went for it. Piece of cake.
Soon I noticed that I needed more speed but the throttle was against the stop and hitting F4 didn't help. I dawned on me that I just wasn't going to make up enough time.
By this time the old girl had built up quite a head of steam, like a tad over max. cruise, and then it dawned on me that I needed to start my descent and get her slowed down enough to lower the gear. So forget about FltTime, back to a straight in approach and just concentrate on making a good landing. Which I did, the lesson learned is that there are limits to things you can"fix" in the last 10 minutes of the flight. But not to worry, I'll try again in the P-38.
After taking off from Dili in the Apache and picking my way through the mountains, I set the AP to NAV to fly the GPS direct course to YTTI, and settled back to enjoy the flight.
A couple of Sudoku puzzles later - remember I flew my test flight as slowly as possible - I began to feel a little guilty. Here I am, relaxed, tweaking the power occasionally to keep the desired numbers in the GPS ETA window, while other guys are slaving away over their VORs and ADFs and DMEs and computers and whatever else to keep on course and on time. The flight plan I had was to do a straight in approach to runway 14.
I'm about 20 minuets out of YTTI and I'm thinking that the least I could do was to come in on the downwind leg, turn back and land on runway 32. And maybe the wind would be better that way, too.
I calculated how much time I thought I would need for that,
throttled up and went for it. Piece of cake.
Soon I noticed that I needed more speed but the throttle was against the stop and hitting F4 didn't help. I dawned on me that I just wasn't going to make up enough time.
By this time the old girl had built up quite a head of steam, like a tad over max. cruise, and then it dawned on me that I needed to start my descent and get her slowed down enough to lower the gear. So forget about FltTime, back to a straight in approach and just concentrate on making a good landing. Which I did, the lesson learned is that there are limits to things you can"fix" in the last 10 minutes of the flight. But not to worry, I'll try again in the P-38.