This is a regular blog post. Looking for show notes or links to show audio? Check out the other posts.
This morning, I headed to Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas. There’s a locker in the life support equipment room there with a helmet, mask, harness, and gee suit.
The locker is labeled “Mr. Tupper.” (Too stinking cool!)
Long story short, I just got a ride in the mighty T-6A Texan II with Maj Jarrett Edge of the 559th Flying Training Squadron at Raldolph.
I’ll post more as I gather in the pictures and video that Jo Hunter of Futurshox and Will Hawkins of Wilco Films shot during the process. We got great images in both cases and I’m very excited about the processof putting together both audio and video episodes covering the experience.
For now, I have the pictures pretty well organized from yesterday, so let’s talk about that.
I spent yesterday morning getting the training and fitted for the ride. The initial phase involved spending an hour or so with Reynaldo (“Ray”) Gutierrez.
I brought my own flight suit and boots. (Yeah, that’s the mark of a real aviation fanboy – “Ray, he brought his own zoom bag . . .”) All I needed to do was pull my Civil Air Patrol patches and cut the rank off of my shoulders.
By the way, if Civil Air Patrol aircrew members meet the Air Force height, weight, and grooming requirements, they can wear Air Force issue Nomex flight suits – Yet another reason to join CAP if you’re not a member already!
Then it was time to get familiar with the gear. Ray hooked me up with a gee suit and harness and taught me where and how everything connects. Then the helmet and the face mask. A quick tour of the seat kit (a small bag of vital survival stuff with an emergency beacon, a UHF radio, flares, and the like), and then it was time to meet the hardware.
First stop was the seat. It’s a full mock-up of the ejection seat and it’s used to familiarize the pilot with the straps, garters, and other stuff that makes you a part of the aircraft. It’s really necessary because you have seven buckles holding you in or holding onto the stuff that’s attached to you. Then you have your oxygen and your gee suit connection.
After you understand the hook-ups, you need to understand how the ejection system works. I flew with the safety pin in my ejection seat so I couldn’t inadvertently pull the handle. I could still remove the pin and punch out if Maj Edge in the front were to become incapacitated, but only then. Generally, the drill was that, if we were going to bail out, he’d announce “bail out, bail out, bail out!” and I’d simply assume the position (head back, chin in, elbows in, feet on the rudders) and prepare for the ride.
Here, I’m demonstrating for Ray that I understand the correct position for bailout. In this case, I’ve pulled the pin and I’m pulling the handle and punching out.
You don’t unstrap until you’re sure that the canopy won’t open. Unstrapping basically eliminates your ability to eject and you don’t want to abandon that option until you’re sure that there’s no hope of ejecting. The T-6A is rated for zero-zero ejection, which means that you can punch out right there on the ground and still get a full canopy deployment and decent chance at a survivable landing. Ideally, you don’t want to eject unless you’re at least 6,000 feet AGL in an uncontrolled ejection or 2,000 feet AGL in a controlled ejection. But the aircraft will give you the ejection option under lots of circumstances and you don’t give that away until you know that ejection isn’t an option.
Anyway, I completely strap in and put on the helmet, gloves, and oxygen mask. Ray closes the canopy and talks to me over the headset. He tells me that there’s a fire in the cockpit and “egress, egress, egress.” I get the canopy open, unhook myself (two harness points, one lap belt point, two seat kit points, and two leg garter points. Then I stand up with authority and all of the hoses and other stuff tears away so I can get out.
Then comes the dangle. Ray goes over the parachute. What it’s supposed to do, what it looks like, how to use the toggles, and how to deal with malfunctions. It covers everything from line twists to how to land (toggles at eye level, eyes on the horizon, knees bent, toes down and just wait for contact). The idea is not to flare or otherwise pay attention to the landing, other than to assume the proper attitude and just wait for it.
And this isn’t just a stand-there-and-listen exercise. The facility has two hoists with parachute risers on them. Ray connects the risers to my harness and hoists me up off of the floor. I get to demonstrate what I’ve just learned while hanging in the harness.
After that, it’s on to life support. I’ve used generic equipment thus far in the training, but now it’s time to fit me for the harness, gee suit, and other equipment that I’m actually going to wear. The gee suit (“speed jeans” in the parlance of some) is basically a pair of high-waisted Nomex pants with air bladders around the calves, thighs, and midsection. It gives you a squeeze and helps you to strain against the gee forces in flight to maintain good consciousness.
The T-6A is rated for a fairly high gee load, but it’s generally not flown out to high gees like the F-16. For that matter, although it is pressurized, it’s generally not flown at really high altitudes that would require an oxygen system. But I think that it’s good that this aircraft allows you to become intimately familiar with all of the life support systems that you’d find in the Viper, the Eagle, etc. And I’m certainly not going to argue with a big hug around the lower body when I experience acceleration four times what I’m accustomed to.
Then comes the harness, helmet, and mask. The mask is probably the next most important system. Even if you’re not going to depend on the mask because of a thin atmosphere (the cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet with normal max of 3.6 psi and a bleed-off point of 4.0 psi.), you are going to have it strapped onto your face and it’d be darned inconvenient if it didn’t seat properly or didn’t give you a good flow of air.
Once it’s sized, you walk over to a machine that allows you to test the airflow, seal, and audio connections. It looks for all the world like one of those vacuum tube testers that I used to see in TV and appliance stores when I was a kid. But it’s vital to make sure that everything is working. You don’t launch and fly the airplane around the edges of its envelope with malfunctioning equipment. Lots of things can scrub a flight like this and it’s important to go through all of the testing right there where you have a dedicated staff of people who can fix what’s broken and swap out what they can’t fix.
At the conclusion of the process, they put it all in a locker in the life support room. Locker 240. And put my name on it. Avery nice tough.
The flight itself went very well and I’ll give some detail on that once I get the pictures in. And I’ll probably head into the studio to cut some original music for the episode that covers the flight. I’m also thinking about shooting video in the studio during recording and making a music video out of it. Ought to be fun!
Anyway, it’s off to get the video offloaded and do a few more things before hitting the sack. Watch for a lot more on the show and here on the blog about this great ride!
This is a regular blog post. Show notes and links to show audio appear in other posts.
Just a brief post to update progress. Five hours of dual, a 1.1-hour checkride, and I’m one of the planet’s newest seaplane pilots! I got my airplane single engine sea (ASES) rating this weekend with Tom Brady near Traverse City, Michigan.
I have something like four hours of audio (including the checkride!) to edit and turn into an episode or two. I also shot some video that I’ll be trying to make into something postable soon.
Contact info for Tom Brady at Traverse Air:
294 N West Silver Lake Road
Traverse City, Michigan 49686
231-943-4128
www.traverseair.com
This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio, please check out the other posts.
How do I know that my Scheyden Retractables stay put at 3.8 gees? A picture is worth lots of words. The lighting isn’t the best (after all, the aircraft is still pretty nose-down on a hazy day), but here’s a shot on the back side of a loop after a good round back side. Pulling and grunting and having fun with my jowls hanging down on my chute straps and giving my best Sean Tucker commentary.
Barry and I got up for another acro session on Wednesday. A pretty dreary and hazy day. 10,000–foot overcast and generally hazy conditions that made the horizon hard to see. We made sure that he had good ground references wherever possible and moved through no more than one axis (e.g. pitch only in loops) whenever we didn’t have a ground reference to use.
One of Barry’s acquaintances had an aviation radio on the ground out in the practice area and he walked us in to his place. A few minutes later, we had a show line set up about 2,000 AGL across his back yard and did a little aerobatic demonstration. (Yes, it’s a rural area and we complied with all of the regs in so doing.) I could hear his wife and the neighborhood kids shouting in the background when he keyed the mic. Very cool.
Planning to head up to Traverse City this evening and go for the seaplane rating Saturday. Weather is not looking good, but we’ll see what happens.
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These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedC47Ground.mp3.
I’m catching up a little on some of the audio I’ve recorded and haven’t yet had the chance to turn into episodes. Sorry about that, but I have a really good excuse. I’ve been flying airplanes like it’s my job. I got all of 40 hours of flying in in the year ended March 31 and I think I logged more than 16 hours this past April alone. Okay, lots of people log more, but few who are juggling family and a really cool law practice.
To give you a quick update, I’m transitioning to the Garmin G1000-equipped Cessna 182T Nav III with Civil Air Patrol, I’m building some cross-country PIC time to qualify for the commercial certificate, and I’m flying a lot of aerobatics with Barry Sutton in the American Champion Super Decathlon to build tolerance to prepare for a really great opportunity with the Air Force at Randolph AFB in May as well as some potential media rides at air shows later this summer.
But, a few weeks ago, I got a call from a contact at the Yankee Air Museum. The Yankee Air Museum is an aviation museum located at Willow Run Airport (KYIP) near Ypsilanti, Michigan. It has, among other things, an operational B-17G Flying Fortress, a B-25 Mitchell, a V-77 Stinson Reliant, and, nearest and dearest to my heart, a gorgeous C-47 Skytrain. For those relatively few who listen to this show who don’t know why it’s so near and dear, the C-47 is the military variant of the Douglas DC-3 and (I get all excited whenever I get to say this) I’m rated by the FAA to fly both the DC-3 and the C-47 as second in command.
I’ve been a member of the organization for years and, when they heard that I was typed, the public relations people and the chief C-47 pilot at Yankee offered me the opportunity to sit through the annual ground school for the pilots who are going to fly it during the upcoming season. Bear in mind that I’ll probably have to get my commercial certificate and add a few hundred (if not thousand) hours before the museum’s insurance company will let me fly the 47 as aircrew, but it’s nice to be included and I really do plan to make myself useful to the museum in connection with that aircraft, even before I can be aircrew.
Anyway, I showed up early all equipped with my DC-3 manuals from Dan Gryder’s type rating school down in Georgia and a couple of caffeine-bearing beverages. It turns out that the heat in the building is boiler-based and it has exactly two settings. “On” and “off.” It was comparatively warm for Michigan in March, so the setting of the day was “off,” even though that meant leaving the jacket on in the classroom upstairs.
But that’s fine with me! It’s a hangar building and the sweet smells typical of a hangar holding round-engine aircraft wafted gently upstairs as the comings and goings of volunteers stirred the air about. Heck, this building started out as part of a bomber plant located at Willow Run during World War II, so I like to think that some of the smells and other ambience had been up in the rafters since the 40s and chose those moments to float down on me.
The room was a little gray. I’m 42 and may be two or three people out of 25 or so in the room were younger than me. But that’s what you expect at a museum ground school like this. I found myself wondering how many total hours were represented by the pilots in that room. If I dragged the age demographic down a little bit, I definitely dragged the total time demographic down with my comparatively measley 240 hours.
But I was welcome as a pilot. Nobody pounced and demanded to know why a poser like me was there. If I was a little defensive-feeling at first, it’s only out of respect for all that experience. But nobody pounced and, in fact, I struck up a couple of good conversations with the other pilots. I sat between two corporate guys in the second row and each assumed from my manuals that I might be a regular DC-3 driver. I quickly disabused them of that notion.
The guys primarily giving the instruction were Jerry Nichols, the chief C-47 pilot, and Randy Hotton, the museum’s operations director. Randy and Jerry did most of the presenting. I suppose I could try to summarize some of the content or try to tell you what it was like, but it’s probably better if I just let you sit in for a segment or two of the school.
[School audio.]
One moment bears particular mention. Some good-natured acrimony broke out over whether the brakes on the C-47 could be set and/or released from the left and/or right seats. Unlike many other hangar arguments of that kind, the parties to the dispute – get this – went downstairs to the C-47 to resolve the argument. Very cool.
I had been fairly focused on the ground school and didn’t go downstairs until lunch. But what a sight to behold when I did! It had slipped my mind that it was the time of year at which the museum holds its bomber buffing party. Yeah, it’s what you think it is. Let a few hundred volunteers in with aluminum polish and towels and let them have at the aircraft.
Everyone from World War vets to babes in arms. Some polishing more capably than others, but everyone pitching in to get the aircraft ready for the summer season. And the attendant hot dogs, chips, and other food in exchange for a donation.
It was hard to go back upstairs for the afternoon session, but it was well worth it. I think that we all think at one time or another about what goes into operating these grand dames of the golden age of aviation. I got to spend a Saturday finding out. It’s about safety culture, understanding the aircraft, training, and quiet competence.
It’s hard to get parts for these aircraft when they’re available. And some parts are just plain unavailable. You actually have to maintain your own dies so that you can remanufacture some of the parts yourself. As it is with any classic aircraft, it takes extraordinary courage and faith to maintain and operate these birds and I’m always grateful to see them fly each year.
In the case of the Yankee Air Museum, that courage and faith is doubled. On October 9, 2004, fire destroyed the Museum’s hangar, taking with it nearly all of the museum’s ground support equipment, tooling, and several aircraft in the process of being restored. Fortunately, the fire did not consume any of the museum’s airworthy aircraft and the museum is working toward building a new facility.
Helping with that will be the annual Chrysler Jeep Superstores Thunder Over Michigan airshow, which will again feature the US Navy Blue Angels. It’s Saturday and Sunday July 18 and 19 at Willow Run Airport and it’s one of the best assemblies of warbirds you’ll see anywhere and this year also features once-in-a-lifetime lineup of C-130 Hercules aircraft. Make sure that you attend if you can.
Yankee Air Museum
PO Box 950
Belleville, Michigan 48112-0590
Telephone: 734-483-4030
Fax: 734-483-5076
Web: http://www.yankeeairmuseum.org/
The museum is located in Hangar 2 near the southwest corner of the airport just east of the approach end of Runway 5R. If in doubt, take Exit 185 from I-94 and go north to Tyler Road, head east until you hit the airport fence, then turn right and follow the airport perimeter fence around until you see the hangar. If you get lost, just keep circling the airport on the access road and you’ll get there sooner or later.
Airspeed, LLC
620 Wilshire
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan 48302
Phone: (248) 470-7944
e-mail:steve@airspeedonline.com
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