CASCADE FLYER June 2006, Vol. 06, Issue 6 Website: http://co-opa.rellim.com/ President's Message: Many thanks to Dave Kelly and his wife for dropping by last month. Dave is Chief Pilot at Butler Aviation and had some great stories to tell and great pictures to share. Who knew that you could dive a DC-7 like that? I still find it hard to believe that a C-130 flies like a DC-7, but when you have flown as many airplanes as Dave I guess the little details hardly matter. This month we are really going to have Joe Smith as speaker. Fingers crossed. Joe is President Elect of the OPA and has been trying to bring us his road show and discussion on the Oregon Pilots Association. This will be a good night to hear what the OPA is doing and what we can do for the OPA. Let's have a good turnout to welcome Joe. We also need to discuss the imminent Bend Airport Aviation Day on June 17th. The EAA will have their famous Pancake Breakfast at 7:30am. It would be nice to get our membership out to help set up the chairs and tables in the morning and take them down in the afternoon. In between it would be nice if our members could open their hangers and move their airplanes up for the crowd to see. Safety is always an issue, so the more of our membership on the ramp just keeping an eye out for trouble the better. Calendar: 15 June - Monthly Meeting 17 June - Bend Airport Aviation Day 18 June - Flyout #1 - Olympic Air Show (OLM) 24 June - Flyout #2 - Grants Pass (3S8) 20 Jul - Monthly Meeting 22 Jul - Monthly Flyout 17 Aug - Monthly Meeting 19 Aug - Monthly Flyout 19 Aug - OPA Annual Membership Meeting, Eugene 21 Sep - Monthly Meeting 23 Sep - Monthly Flyout Web doings: The San Francisco Sectional and the Seattle and San Francisco Terminal Area Charts have been added to the "charts" area on the web site: http://co-opa.rellim.com/ To access the members only areas the username is "S07" and the password is "123.0". In honor of our new airport ID(s) the username can also be AEB or BDN. My Inbox: Wow, what a difference a few months make. Bend Airport has been S07 for a long time. Starting June 8th, the Bend Airport became AEB. But not for long; 56 days later, on August 2nd, it will become BDN. Hopefully it will stay that way for a long time. For those of us that only occasionally update their GPS databases you probably want to hold off until August. Any guesses how confusing this will be to ATC? Random Thoughts: Local knowledge is often the difference between being able to make a safe and enjoyable flight in less the perfect weather or the alternatives of not going or cutting VFR minimums a little close. Last month we had some "low" weather over the Cascades and yet I had to get over the rock pile to my son's swim meet in Corvallis (CVO). The clouds were halfway up the cut between the South and Middle Sisters. Knowing that the Sisters are just over 10,000 feet let me guesstimate the ceiling there at around 9,000. The clouds were higher to the south and lower to the north. Santiam Pass was likely cut off or very low. Of course there were SIGMETs for icing over the mountains. That removed IFR as an option to get over unless you have a much better airplane than mine. Bad weather and icing forecasts are an inseparable pair around here. This is the sort of weather that I see grounds many pilots without local knowledge. As well it should. It takes a lot of local knowledge to get a feel for whether the weather is piled up on the far side of a ridge or not. It also takes local experience to get the proper gut feel to tell the weather that will be stable from the weather that could turn ugly quickly. A pilot in a rush and without local knowledge might still try the trip. He would head south until the headroom between the clouds and the ridges met his personal limits. On a day like that I would like to see 2,000 feet and visibility well past the next few airports on my path. It should go without saying that the weather should also be very stable as well. On that day a transient pilot would have been most of the way to Klamath Falls before heading West. Luckily I had local knowledge and have spent time cruising the valleys in the area even when the weather was good. My plan was simple, added only about 20 minutes to the flight, and always gave me a choice of outs should things turn out worse than expected. The path headed down Century Drive to Waldo Lake. Passing by Mount Bachelor the clouds were just over its top. So the 9,000 ceiling was confirmed. This allowed a peek over the ridge to the west to confirm the headroom was about 1,000 over the ridges, with visibility all the way to the Willamette Valley. Since I was over the highway my headroom was much better. My outs were to the south, or to the east and Highway 97. In a real emergency I would be over Century Drive. Near the south end of Century Drive is Waldo Lake. This would be the primary decision point for the trip. If the weather was worse than expected then I could head further south or even return home. As expected the ceiling was still 9,000 and I could see to Springfield from there. Instead of cutting across the ridges I was able to follow one of the two river valleys from Waldo lake over the Willamette pass to Oakridge (5S0). From there it was all down hill to Springfield. Always high over a highway and able to peek over the ridges to see that the weather was holding near Springfield. Now the outs were any of the airports that I could see well within the flight visibility at the time or head south to the higher ceilings. If things got really bad at least the plane was still over highways. As usual, the bad weather was piled up from the west against the Cascades. - From Springfield to Corvallis was only high overcast; still 9,000 feet, but high above their ground level. By having the local knowledge, and flying the over valleys instead of over the ridges, the flight was easy VFR the whole way instead of being LVFR. The return trip the next day was similar, and similarly uneventful. After landing at Bend, I ran into a pilot going the other way back to Portland. We discussed the weather and I suggested that he might not want to go. He countered by explaining the current weather in The Dalles and Portland. The weather at both was 6,000 and descending slowly. His local knowledge, being from Portland, told him that he could easily navigate down the Columbia River Gorge in much worse weather. Clearly his local knowledge has led him to an easy go/no-go decision that he could live with. So off he went. Local knowledge can turn a dodgy flight in to a much better one. That is why my personal minimums in unfamiliar areas go way up. When traveling afar I always try to corner a local pilot or two and see what local knowledge they have to share. GPS moving maps and Sectionals are great, but when a local pilot tells you what to look for you are going to have a much safer flight. Gary Miller We Were Young and Crazy Well, speaking for myself of course. Maybe you weren't crazy when you were younger. I was very inexperienced at least and in retrospect some of the stuff I did was pretty crazy. Take the bamboo and Visqueen Ragallo hang glider in the early sixties. Hey, it was just a big model airplane of advanced design that was conceived by a credentialed aerodynamicist. Like almost every kid, I'd built many model airplanes and dreamed of flying so this should be a real blast to build it and fly it. The construction techniques were a little different but uniquely appropriate to the materials. Bamboo has a fine tradition of being formed into structures with twine binding techniques. The advent of modern materials like hose clamps and tape, lots of tape, made a pretty sound structure I'll save stories of the test "flights" and the rather inappropriate neighborhood audience reactions for another time. Now fast forward a year to the second hang glider project of much higher sophistication. A friend, Rod Moorehead, and I actually used aircraft aluminum. We had to sign a liability release before the distributor would sell it to us. I don't understand what they were worried about. Just a couple of innocent kids buying a bunch of 6061-T6 aluminum alloy tubing. So this project was loosely modeled on a glider design called a Quicksilver that had a conventional plan form with tail surfaces and controllable rudder. Pitch was controlled by weight shift and yaw by a rudder connected to the pilot who shifted side to side to augment the roll which was coupled to the yaw with the help of generous dihedral, or something like that I was an experienced pilot right? Soloed before drivers license, and an amateur aeronautical engineer with hundreds of model aircraft constructed over my youth. I felt confident in introducing a few enhancements to the design like increasing the chord and reshaping the wing section camber It was sort of hard to tell what the intent of the designer was anyway from the bad pictures we were working from. So with a hacksaw, a drill, and a couple of wrenches we built the most beautiful glider ever. We sewed the Dacron sailcloth wing coverings on my friends mothers sewing machine. I don't remember how many needles we broke The finished machine was a wonder to behold and was hard to hold too. It weighed about 70lbs. and we were proposing to pick this thing up and run off a cliff with it. Hmmmm. Now the flight training commenced. I somehow got the honor of doing the first hop on a little hill. I didn't get airborne; instead I tripped and fell with the leading edge landing on the back of my neck. So the result was sort of like a rat in a trap, I couldn't move. My friends came running up expecting me to be dead. A more experienced flyer suggested it might be a good idea to go over to the coastal sand dunes for further tests. Additional crashes proved the wisdom of his suggestion. As confidence and control continued to come together we ventured out and up to higher venues. In some locations we would lug this contraption up an 800 foot butte so one of us could get a five minute sled ride. There are so many memorable flights that progressively pursued the possibilities of the Icarus promise. The launch from the Coburg Hills northeast of Eugene resulted in an immediate altitude of about 1200' AGL and on one occasion I had a Cessna circling below me! I terminated that flight in a farmers grain field and I think that family will never forget seeing a guy carrying an airplane up to their house. Kids came running from everywhere. I had more help and questions than I knew what to do with. An expedition usually started by trying to find a road to the top of something high, they usually had antenna farms on top, and then find a way to pick up at the bottom without a fifty-mile drive and a long walk. Sometimes it would just be myself and my glider partner, Rod, sometimes ten or twenty gliders and pilots of all shapes, sizes, and colors. A group launch from Stukel Mountain east of Klamath Falls International Airport illustrates what this type of flight was like in the early days of hang gliding. The top of the "hill" was always chaos; cars, trucks, kids, dogs, pilots, and gliders in various stages of assembly lying all over the available space. Our airplane style machine always took a little longer to assemble so we got to see others launch and evaluate conditions. We called them wind dummies. Before launch I was always scared, well maybe just very excited, verrrry focused anyway. Assembly and preflighting was a very serious endeavor and took a detailed procedure that was almost a meditation. The pilot, this was my turn, would strap in. The cockpit consisted of a swing seat, you know, like a swing seat you'd tie in a tree for the kids. It had a salvaged automobile safety belt that you tightened very tight so your sweet ass wouldn't slip out. Control check out was very direct and to the point. Swinging your fanny back & forth should produce a similar motion in the rudder and the "control yoke" was this triangle of tubing in front of you that you gripped like bicycle bars. We had equipped this bar with the latest in solid state electronics in the form of a milk carton sized variometer. It added the drag equivalent of a small dog but it worked great even though it was usually indicating down So standing at the precipice, the time had come to get all the butterflies headed in the same direction. I'd been feeling the air movement for some time but at that moment a dust devil came up the hill. There were gliders and stuff flying all over the place in a cloud of blinding dust. All I could do was drop to the ground and have my launch buddy raise the tail as far in the air as he could reach and just hang on. After it passed we were in good shape and it was time to launch. Yeah, like that chaotic scene was so very reassuring that I wanted to go flying right now??? But it was the right time to get with it so here's the go jump off a cliff part. Until you started developing lift the tail was heavy so with my buddy holding it up, at my signal, we started running for the edge. That's why it's called foot launch. It's not easy to accelerate 70 pounds of flying machine with the L/D stuff starting to happen so you just lean into it and push like hell. When you reach the edge you are airborne, no question. Kind of like a carrier cat shot, you're flying now!!! The craft was pretty well trimmed for a fast glide so the first order of business was to "push out" which equaled a little nose up to establish best glide speed. In this case it was also advantageous to start a turn along the ridge as soon as possible to stay in the most likely lift areas for thermals. The launch site is about 6500' and the valley floor is about 4100' so the altitude is spectacular (breath taking actually) from the point of view of a kids swing seat and essentially no structure around you, just wind in your face. The wind in your face is your airspeed indicator, the horizon is right in front of you, and you don't need anything else. Establishing minimum sink speed is by trial and error. If my buns hadn't been going to sleep because of the over tight seat belt I might say this was flying by the seat of the pants in the extreme but since my butt was otherwise occupied I think most of the sensory input was whole body feedback. It's very sensual flight. A little bit of thermal circling, a little rubber necking, a little zooming around for the thrill of it, and a little navigating to try and find the landing zone Landing this thing is about as thrilling as take off. Glide slope adjustment by speed control and pattern is about all you've got. Do not try to extend the glide, you can't run that fast at touch down. Stall is very slow, maybe 5- 7mph, and mushy until you've slowed through the mush and then you aren't flying or mushing anymore, you're just hanging onto a 70 pound falling rock. That's a bad condition to be in more than a foot in the air. Recovery from a bad approach usually means waiting in the wreckage until your chase crew finds you, untangles you, and hauls you off to medical assistance. That's poor form and usually puts a damper on the evening festivities. These events I've recounted all took place a long, long time ago in a land far, far away. It's called my youth. You decide if I was crazy!!! E. Edward Endsley, CO-OPA VALE, OREGON, FLY-OUT. ...The weather report was not favorable for the scheduled fly-out to Vale so Curtis Turner, our Fly-out Chairman, reluctantly but wisely sent out an e-mail canceling the flight. Gary Miller (not usually an early riser) had gotten up for the event and gazed out from his window, perched high in the West Hills, (his view is like looking from the crows nest of a tall ship...He can see forever out to the South and East). He decided it looked like an acceptable option to follow Highway 20 all the way to Vale. The satellite pictured seemed to confirm that the storm was moving North and the weather would improve as the day progressed. Having analyzed the situation Gary picked up the phone and called me (Don Wilfong) knowing that I was game for almost anything and proposed that we give it a go....so I rolled 757 out of the hangar at Pilot Butte International and met Gary at Professional Air...we mounted our trusty steeds and headed East along Highway 20...the clouds were high enough that we could have taken a more direct route but we were having so much fun flying low and following the highway that we decided to stay low and scare the jack rabbits. We separated at Drewsey and I continued to follow the highway and Gary took a more Northerly route. By the time we got there it was noon (Mountain Time) so the breakfast was over...but...they were serving hamburgers for lunch so we didn't starve. There was quite a group of ultra-lites that had flown in from somewhere...but...by the time we got parked and ready to look them over they started up and left like a covey of quail. (The key here is to get out early for our fly-outs...he who hesitates is lost). We wandered around and looked at some of the old time equipment and an assortment of planes. One 1946 Luscombe 8A looked like it had just come out of the factory...I once owned one just 36 numbers off from this one. On a previous fly-out we had already taken the tour of the murals that adorn the buildings of downtown Vale and had been driven out to view the wagon tracks of the Oregon Trail so we opted to skip that and head for home...with lots of blue sky, high clouds and a headwind as we proceeded on a direct route...Gary's Turbo Centurion out distanced the Skylane and he was landing at Bend as I cleared the West edge of Alfalfa... I proceeded to Pilot Butte International and Gary refueled and headed on to Corvallis where his son was participating in a swim meet. We had a great time and as it turned out it would have been a successful fly-out for the group but I, having been in the same position as Curtis, fully respect his decision to cancel the fly-out, due to the forecast and the cloud cover. It is always the wise choice to make go or no go decisions with safety being the determining factor. We are all looking forward to the upcoming fly-outs (we will have really good weather sometime, Won't we??? DON WILFONG JUNE FLYOUT(S) June is a busy month: 6/2nd &3rd for the Fly Safe Clinic - 6/10th & 11th Balloons over Bend - and 6/17th Aviation Day. However; as we have been blitzed for sooo long with poor flying conditions, I am scheduling TWO FLY-OUTS for June as follows: Sunday June 18th: OLYMPIC AIR SHOW - Gathering of Warbirds - at Olympia Regional Airport, WA (OLM). The show is put on by the Olympic Flight Museum and is reported to be a rather good show. Distance is 187NM, about a 1:35 minute flight. Gates open @ 9:30 am, Opening ceremonies @ Noon, Air Show Performance @ 1:00 PM to 4:00PM. Saturday June 24th: Grants Pass Airport, OR (3S8) Air Eventure Breakfast and Lunch Fly-In. Breakfast starts @ 7:30 am. Lunch on the Green, 11:30am to 1:30 pm. Show is PROPS and RODS with classic and Historic aircraft and hundreds of antique and classic cars. We will need to leave early for this one. Distance is 135 nm and about a 1:10 minute flight. More details later. Check your emails. Mark your calendars. Attend one or both of the Fly-Outs. Our Apache will attend both events if the bloody WEATHER GODS finally take a break...... Aloha, Curt Cell: 541/280-6317 Email: curtis@bendbroadband.com COOPA / POSSIBLE FLYOUT DESTINATIONS for 2006 Airport Identifier Comments Albany, OR S12 Restaurant Astoria, OR AST Restaurant & Marine Museum Baker City, OR BKE Air Show Bandon, OR S05 Courtesy Van to great Restaurants Caldwell, ID EUL Restaurant Chiloquin, OR 2S7 Restaurant Coeur d'Alene, ID COE Restaurant - Overnight ??? Condon, OR 3S9 Maybe Brown Bag Lunch Bag location Dalles, OR/WA DLS Restaurant Eugene, OR EUG Restaurant & Aviation Museum Florence, OR 6S2 Courtesy Cars to great Restaurants Gold Beach, OR 4S1 Restaurant & Rogue River Mailboat trips Hillsboro, OR HIO Airshow Independence, OR 7S5 Restaurant & Museum with bicycles provided to get there Klamath Falls, OR LMT Restaurant Lewiston, ID LWS Restaurant Lexington, OR 9S9 Brown Bag Lunch Location McMinnville, OR MMV Airshow. Spruce Goose Aviation.Museum, shuttle provided Medford, OR MFR Restaurant Nehelam Bay, OR 3S7 Maybe Brown Bag Lunch Location Nampa, ID S67 Restaurant & P-40 Museum Richland, WA RLD Restaurant Salem, OR SLE Restaurant Tillamook, OR S47 Restaurant & Military A/C Museum Walla Walla, WA ALW Restaurant - Overnight ??? NOTE: Great Outdoor locations will be chosen for Brown Bag Flyouts PLEASE CHECK THE LIST, & E-MAIL YOUR COMMENTS ALONG WITH ANY ADDITIONS OR DELETIONS THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE. Thanks, Curt Turner. curtis@bendbroadband.com ____________________________________________________________________________ ______ COOPA officer contact info: President Gary E. Miller 20340 Empire Blvd., E-3 Bend, OR 97701 541-382-8588 gem@rellim.com Vice President Nancy Lecklider 3054 NW Clubhouse Dr Bend, OR 97701 541 330-1853 leckone@bendcable.com Secretary/Treasurer Don Wilfong 210 SE Cessna Dr Bend, OR 97702 541 389-1456 dwnw@bendbroadband.com Flyout Chair Curtis Turner 20386 Big Bear Court Bend, OR 97702 541 317-1670 curtis@bendbroadband.com Program Chair Ed Endsley 63505 Bridle Ln Bend, OR 97701 541 382-6414 ed@edendsley.com And finally, send Newsletter inputs to Mike Bond, 22052 Banff Drive Bend, OR 97702 541 317-8443 mvbond@myexcel.com