Flying Aces Inc. Newsletter vol.32 #8 August 2001
The Leading Edge
Summer Picnic: Wednesday, August 8, 18:00 at the "Wings of History"
air museum, located across the street from the main entrance to
South County airport. Picnic food will be provided by John Gould.
The museum comprises 2 hangars containing airplanes and other
aviation items. There is a surprising amount of World War I material.
(Board Meeting: Sunday August 26, 15:00 at Christoph's in San Jose
July Meeting Summary:
Doug narrated a slide show describing a remarkable Alaska cross-
country trip, which he made several years ago in a Cessna-150.
August Birthdays:
11-August: Nicolas Lira 14-August: Kevin Shawhan
NOTAM:
This month, the picnic takes the place of the usual General Meeting.
Instructor Humor:
I recently took a 1 hour familiarization trip with CFI Walt Peckham out
of Petaluma. After a short hop over the hill, a landing at Schelville, and
another at nearby Sonoma Sky Park, I remarked that that may have
been the narrowest runway that I'd ever landed on. Walt calmly stated,
"Well, you were left of centerline the whole way, so I believe you can
land on a runway half that wide."
Last month, I flew right seat in Madeleine's Socata TB-9, the model called Tampico, and
found it rather hard to hold altitude, as compared to the Cessna models that I'm used to.
At completion of the climb-out, as soon as I nosed down into what I thought was level attitude,
the tach was at red line. I never seemed to find a throttle setting and pitch attitude that were
quite right. Madeleine said that I was slightly nose-up. The TB-9 has comfortable seating,
and excellent visibility. Steep turns were no problem, except that the horizon does not
intersect the dashboard, because of the large front window.
We then departed LAX for a 1 week SCUBA vacation in Fiji, and got to observe the cockpits
on two inter-island flights, between the major airport Nadi, and tiny Matei on Taveuni:
The outbound flight was in a large Dehavilland high wing twin turboprop. The copilot did
the flying while the pilot did paperwork. Lift-off was at 90 kt, cruise was 120 kt at 7,000 feet,
and he hit 160 kt during the decent into tiny Matei Airport on Taveuni. On final, the copilot
had his left hand on the ceiling mounted throttles, and the pilot crossed his right arm over to
change the prop pitch to the high RPM position on very short final; the braking effect was
needed for the short strip.
The flight back was in a Beech QueenAir, flown by one pilot at 8,000 feet. He appeared to
use a combination of GPS, ADF, and VFR navigation. We also noticed that he took a good
long look for incoming jet traffic as he turned base to final at Nadi, double checked the
landing gear showing 3 green, and used full flaps for the landing on a very long runway.
Four of our party were stranded on Taveuni, because tropical showers interfered with the
normal twice weekly schedule. It would have been OK with me if we had to get stuck there
for another 2 days!
John Nogatch