Relocating to good ol' USA

Flight hours: 0

Over the last few months, I've been having discussions with the V.P and the Director of Global Infrastructure (my boss), on the decision to continue my career from within the U.S, being based in Philadelphia.

I've made the choice and will be leaving Australia on ANZAC day, the 25th April. The role will be the same and I will still manage my team of infrastructure architects who are placed around the globe.

What does this mean for my flying? Plans have been made so that over the next few years during which I will return to Oz for periods of time, I will do the planned flights into the middle of the country and various other areas.

It also means that I can blog the adventure of getting my endorsements to fly within the U.S, with the plan to find a syndicate and buy a share of an aircraft.

The adventures of an Aussie pilot, taking a long yet interesting flight.

Superhawking

Flight hours: 4.4

You may recall that the engine was well over TBO and although performing strongly, it was time to use the insurance money to buy a new engine.

The decision was made to move to a Penn Yan beast, which also requires a new prop... Who cares? 180 HP, ability to carry full fuel and 4 adults in a 172... Sold.

The engine will take a few weeks to arrive by sea freight and another two weeks for installation.

The outcome should show a 125 kt cruise (130+ kt fast cruise) at around 40 litres per hour fuel burn.

He can fly for another two years!

Flight hours: 2.6

There haven't been many updates over the last 5 weeks due to my travels and planning for relocation to the U.S.

Over Christmas I flew in a human mailing tube to the U.S east coast to suss out the location from the point of view of living and working there. Over the month long period, my girlfriend and I tried to lead a normal life so I could establish some sort of baseline for living costs. This also included driving past an airfield right next to my work headquarters... hoping to find a good general aviation presence at this particular airfield.

So, that leads us to my Biannual Flight Review (BFR). It is due in December and I really don't like the idea of letting my license lapse, so I tentatively booked my flight review to occur sometime over the next week.

I figured I would do the planning early in the week and watch the weather to see when it would improve, then book the BFR. Obviously, this wasn't going to happen. The instructor I had chosen, called me in the late afternoon on Saturday and said "I have a cancellation for flying tomorrow due to weather, how about we do your BFR instead, what time would you like to start? I think 10am will be fine".

The only issue, the weather was quite lame. "The weather isn't the greatest".

"I think you should do your BFR, it would be good to practice in and exercise your decision making".

OK, so it was on, I decided to head down there by 9:30am and plan the trip at the flight school. The trip was only planned up to my first landing destination and minimum planning was asked to be performed. He wanted to ensure I could cope with a maximum cockpit workload. This would include determining the tracks, heading, ETA's etc, whilst in the air to any other location or diversions.

Usually I would use Air NAV and thoroughly do my pre-flight planning, so I can relax and enjoy the flight knowing that all normal operations have been accounted for. This flight was far from that.

The first landing was at Cessnock, a relatively easy exercise as I could follow the coast up north, the only concern being that due to cloud cover, I would have to provide overflying and transiting radio calls for other aircraft operating at the airfields I was to pass within 10nm. The actual landing was a full crosswind, potentially at the maximum XW component of the C172 (15 kts). The windsocks were showing around half-mast and perpendicular to the runway. I did quite a good job.

On the return and randomly selected destination/diversion legs, we finally headed out to the western training area and performed airwork and emergency landings. We stayed out there for around 45 minutes when I also noted that we are at bingo, excluding mandatory reserve fuel (a military term which means there is enough fuel to return to base of intended landing). The return landing was performed as a shortfield.

I passed my BFR and am now authorised to fly for another two years.

Escape to Cowra

Flight hours: 5.2

I have actually been flying quite a bit, but have had nothing of interest to report until now. The SAAA held their national convention at the Cowra airfield, where some of the best in home built aircraft was to be be found along with workshops on home building and some flying displays thrown in for good measure.

I didn't stay for the full event (Friday to Sunday), instead I took my father out for the Saturday which materialised from a rather quick and random comment I made to him just two days prior "I might go flying out bush on the weekend, want to come?" He didn't know until the Saturday where exactly we were going.

On the morning of the flight, the forecast showed FEW and SCT clouds at various levels and from Bankstown, it looked like the layer of clouds extended to the Blue Mountains. Once airborne I could see this wasn't the entire case, so I decided to punch some holes in the sky and get above the clouds before heading further west over the mountains. I do really enjoy flying near clouds and turning and weaving to climb above them. NOTE: Never attempt to fly in or through clouds unless you have appropriate ratings and experience, especially if you are a VFR rated pilot!

Soon after, the clouds cleared to a perfect blue sky and the trip was smooth. As we headed to Cowra, Melbourne Centre (Radar) advised on the area frequency that there are 12 aircraft converging on Cowra with similar ETA's by what his computer could show him. I could not see any aircraft in front of me yet ML CEN was reporting a number of aircraft in my vicinity and near the altitude I was flying. I was actually the only pilot who grabbed a flight following after his announcement which helps to ensure my safety.

After landing in a very busy pattern (6 aircraft at once), we walked through the flight line and looked at some of the show aircraft. As soon as I entered the main tarmac area I saw none other than Jon Johanson, the famous Australian with an unbelievable number of flying world records. He was standing near his plane and was just getting off the phone. I had a nice chat with him and also enquired about his services to ferry aircraft from the US back to Australia for me. I also bumped into a fellow pilot and builder, Richard, who had also taken his father but was staying for the full weekend.

It is fantastic seeing a huge number of GA aircraft parked for an event like this and congratulations to Cowra council and the SAAA by putting on a great event.

Maintenance & APEC

Flight hours: 3

I haven't posted over the last few months so have quite a bit to cover.

The windshield was replaced and is fantastic. Photos turn out so much better and now I will have no problem with glare when landing into the sun.

The hail damage post I made some months back, well it has been decided to take the money from the insurance company offered and increase the premiums a little to bring the insured value of the aircraft back into acceptable figures.

What this means is that instead of total replacement of the hail damaged skins, I will have the control surface skins replaced and use the remainder of the money to buy the new engine (the engine is 25% over TBO, but running really well). This will see an upgrade to 180HP.

Recently I have also taken a few more managers from the US and India for flights around the Sydney basin area. Flying however was put on hold for some period of time due to APEC being in the city. A 45nm radius around Sydney was evoked and if you flew without proper procedures and clearance you would be visited by a couple of F-18's. One such pilot had the privilege of this on the second last day of the restrictions even though procedures were followed.

Apart from that, some more news coming down the line soon regarding my flying and what the future holds.

AirNav VFR

Flight hours: 0
Aviation Reading: Aviation Magazines

Over the last few months I have had a few emails from readers asking about the web-based application I designed to help with tracking the aircraft hours and maintenance as well as whether I use flight planning software. This post will be about the flight planning software I use.

This article was written sometime ago, however I never got around to taking screenshots of the software. Seeing as George, a work colleague from Western Australia and fellow pilot, will be in Sydney for a work junket in the next few months, I decided to quickly whip up a flight plan for a possible trip we will take and present some screenshots on the process as well as telling you why I choose this piece of flight planning software (for Australia).

The software I use is AirNav VFR from Sentient Software.



The reason I chose this software is primarily for its point-and-click interface on official Airservices Australia maps. I can essentially plan flights on suitable maps and instantly cross-check them with airspace requirements, PRD type zones and selecting suitable waypoints. Totally cool!





Below is a planned route. I simply opened the three charts to determine the best route (WAC, VNC and VTC), double clicked on Bankstown for takeoff and proceeded to mark my route via easily identify features or points of interest. Click on the picture for a closer look.



In addition, it has a whole swag of features such as adding notes to the flight plan on the actual map, GPS coordinate uploads into my GPSMap 296 (it's in a standard format so it can be used on most GPS's), moving map display options (if you take a laptop/tablet PC with a GPS connection) etc.

Below you can see how useful it is to make thorough notes in the planning stage so as the flight progresses, you have taken some considerable workload off your in-cockpit decision making. Again, click on the picture for a closer look.



You can then print out official Airservices maps (Best to print them out on a colour printer to obatin the full benefit), customised to your flight along with flight plan details, navigation information, radio frequencies etc. Obviously, a safe pilot will also spend a small portion of the planning stages on basic cross checking of the software navigational plans with old fashioned real map work.



A final checklist helps ensure you have covered the major aspects of planning a cross country flight such as fuel requirements, altitudes to fly and even winds aloft so you can have your magnetic tracks already worked out. Goodbye E6B use for flight planning fuel burn, ETA's and wind correction angles.



I fully recommend that pilots (even students doing NAV’s) or hard-core simulation pilots, forget the competition to AirNav and seriously consider putting this piece of software into your digital flight bag. Primarily due to the fact that this is the only software with approved full colour Airservices maps which is one hell of an advantage as well as being generally easier to use than the others on the market.

The thing that blew me away is the cost of the software, starting at $225 for a map pack for instance Western Australian WAC’s, VTC’s, VNC’s, ERC-L and going to $300 for all VFR maps (You can also get IFR map packs).

Now THAT price is very reasonable, even for pilots flying low hours per year. In fact, if you think about the time you will save in planning a flight from fully traditional methods, you have certainly paid for the software many times over in just one or two cross country flights as well as improving your safety in the air by enhancing your ability to plan thoroughly thus reducing your cockpit workload.

The subscription for all maps currently comes to under $60 per year. So if you purchase the software and all the maps you will ever require, Sentient supplies you with all of the Airservices updates at that low price. You just cannot beat that.

Do yourself a favour and obtain a demo of the software (suited for Australia only unless you are a real hardcore overseas simulation pilot looking for reality planning). Email Paul Boxer and tell him OzPilot sent you. Alternatively give Sentient a call on (03) 9646 3331 (+613 9646 3331 for your overseas folk).

Note: I'm not employed by Sentient Software. This is just an unbiased post about how happy I am with the software and their customer service.