An Eclectic Mind

Some great shots from my left seat.

One of the things that’s so frustrating to me as a pilot and photographer is that I can’t do both activities at the same time. You see, when I fly, my hands are full. I can’t let go of the cyclic to frame a shot — the helicopter would begin aerobatic maneuvers that would make me sick (or worse). So although I get to see some pretty amazing things from the air, I rarely get a chance to take a decent picture of any of it.

So I was tickled pink today when I went through my Google Alerts and found that photographer Ann Torrence had mentioned me in two recent blog posts. In each post, she shared a photo she’d taken from the left seat of my helicopter when we flew from Page to Marble Canyon and back on August 16.

The first post shows a great — and very unusual — shot of Horseshoe Bend. Everyone takes the same picture of this place, primarily because they all take it from the same viewpoint, on the east side of the cliff. But when you’re in a helicopter, above the terrain, you can shoot from anywhere. And as I circled this outrageous bend in the Colorado River, Ann shot from the northwest. As she said, it’s the first time she’d seen it from that angle. And it’s the first time I’ve seen a picture taken from there.

The second post shows the two Navajo Bridges — historic and newer — over Marble Canyon. Marble Canyon is the extreme starting point of the Grand Canyon. It’s a narrow, deep gorge cut through relatively flat rock plateau. As I used to tell my Grand Canyon passengers, it was named by John Wesley Powell, one of the original explorers of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, who thought the walls of the canyon were made of marble. (They’re not.) From the air, it looks like a crack. Ann’s shot of the bridges is pretty good, although I did have a passenger take a nice shot for me, years ago, from the other side of the bridge looking downstream. Trouble is, the bridge is in restricted airspace, so you can’t just fly around it. You can only fly past on landing or takeoff from Marble Canyon’s little airport.

I should point out here that there are other images taken from my helicopter in the Page, AZ area on the Web. Photographer Mike Reyfman has a number of galleries of Lake Powell and Monument Valley. And at least one photo taken from my aircraft in this area has wound up in a Cessna magazine ad.

Anyway, I’m up in Page, AZ, offering photo flights in the area through American Aviation. I’ll be here through the end of September and possibly into October. If you’re in the area and want to see a different perspective for your photos, give American a call at 928/608-1060. They’ll set you up for a photo flight you’ll never forget. And maybe — just maybe — you’ll get some photos as good as Ann’s and Mike’s.

Another video blog entry.

I brought my laptops to the airport today. The air conditioning there works a lot better than the air conditioning in my trailer. There’s a big empty space with desks on the second floor of the terminal building and that’s where I set up to work. I got a lot written today on the book I’ve been working on this month, but when 5 PM rolled around, I was burned out.

I made this video from the adjacent room, which we call the “tower” room. It’s just a second floor room in the corner of the building with windows on both walls. Excellent views of what’s going on at the airport. There’s a UNICOM radio there, too, so you can hear the pilots giving their position calls as they do their tours, as well as the occasional non-local pilot flying in. The room is right next door to where I work, so I can hear the radio while I’m writing. It’s a bit distracting, but with my backache, it’s good to get up and walk around every once in a while anyway.

This video shows the pilots at American Aviation loading up their passengers and taking off on a tour of Lake Powell. I narrate it so it’s not too boring. Near the end, I show off some more of the ramp while planes launch into the blue sky. I hope you enjoy it.

Flying in a cool place.

Since I haven’t had time to post to my blog, I thought I’d upload a new video clip. In this 4+ minute clip, I’m taking off in the helicopter from Marble Canyon Airport and climbing out toward Page, AZ. You’ll see my takeoff “roll,” the cracked pavement of the taxiway, and the narrow runway at Marble Canyon Airport, before I bank sharply to the right past the Vermillion Cliffs, near historic Navajo Bridge, over Lees Ferry, and up the canyon to Page. No real audio on this one; just some muted helicopter sounds. Comments are welcome — and appreciated!

High density altitude with heavy ship.

During our ferry flight from Seattle, WA to Page, AZ, we decided to make a fuel/lunch stop at Bryce Canyon airport (BCE). Although I think we could have made it to Page with the fuel we had on board — about 1/3 tanks or 18 gallons to go 60 miles — we’d barely make our legal requirement of 20 minutes of reserve fuel for the flight. We’d also be flying direct over relatively hostile yet strikingly beautiful desert terrain. Not the kind of place you want to make an emergency landing prompted by a low-fuel light.

Bryce Canyon Airport is at 7590 feet MSL. We listened to the AWOS as we approached and learned that the temperatures were in the 80s (can’t remember exactly) and the density altitude was 9400 feet. (Whoa.) There was a 4-6 knot wind coming from the north.

Louis, a sea-level pilot, was at the controls. I figured we weighed about 2300 lbs. I knew we could hover at 6300 feet/104°F at max gross weight. Although I could have pulled out the manual to double-check the performance charts for our exact combination of weight, altitude, and temperature, I didn’t think it was necessary. After all, the 6300 feet/104°F combination equaled almost 11,000 feet density altitude (consult the chart; you can click it to see a larger view on Wikipedia). 9400 feet was well within that.

And Louis did well on approach. Although he came in a little fast at the beginning, he had a good approach speed and angle — at least by my standards — as we flew into the wind for landing direct to the ramp. He even got it into a hover where we’d park. But then the low rotor RPM horn went off. The helicopter wasn’t generating enough power to keep the blades spinning at the required RPM.

We were about three feet off the ground when this happened, so it wasn’t a big deal. I told Louis to just put it down. He was either fixated on the RPM gauge or trying hard to put it down gently, because he didn’t set it right down. He drifted backwards a few feet as we descended with the horn blaring. Finally, he put it on the ground. The rotor RPM shot up, but didn’t overspeed into redline.

I should make a few things clear here, especially for non-pilots, non-helicopter pilots, and non-Robinson pilots.

• Rotor RPM is life. If your rotors slow beyond what’s necessary for lift, the helicopter will indeed drop like a brick. That’s a very bad thing.
• The emergency procedure for low rotor rpm is to lower the collective and increase the throttle. We’re trained to do this so much that it becomes automatic. But lowering the collective isn’t always practical. The pilot needs to evaluate the entire situation — primarily height from the ground or obstacles (how close are you?) and rotor RPM (how low is it?) — before taking action. You don’t, for example, want to simply lower the collective if you’re at 95% RPM 3 feet off the ground in rough terrain at 2,000 feet density altitude. (Of course, you’re not likely to get a low rotor horn in that situation anyway.)
• Most modern helicopters have electronic governors that work with the throttle to make sure the engine delivers enough power to keep the blades spinning within an acceptable range of rotor speeds. My helicopter has such a feature. It works very well — except in high density altitude situations when the collective is raised quickly. Then it doesn’t always keep up rotor demand. In those situations, it doesn’t fail — it just doesn’t always spin the blades at the ideal 102% speed.
• On a Robinson helicopter, the low rotor RPM warning system, which consists of a loud horn and a light, kicks in at 97% RPM. That’s really high and it gives the pilot plenty of time to fix the problem before it becomes very serious.
• A Robinson helicopter can fly at 80% RPM + 1% per 1000 feet of density altitude. That means we could fly, in this situation, with 89.4% RPM. It isn’t recommended, but with a good pilot at the controls, it is theoretically possible.

The horn at landing had me concerned. After all, I was at the airport to have lunch and add fuel — both of which would add weight to the aircraft. (Okay, so lunch wouldn’t add that much weight.) If I couldn’t get it flying with what we had on board, adding fuel would only make matters worse. It was midday, after all, and we’d have to wait hours before the temperature started to drop. There was a chance we could get stuck there for a while. In that case, I wanted to know before I went to lunch so we could do something interesting in the park rather than sit around the airport terminal.

So I took the controls, bought everything back up to 102% RPM, and started raising the collective. I’ve done a lot of flying in high density altitude situations, so I know from experience that it takes a certain “touch” to avoid low rotor situations. I pulled the collective up slowly, felt the helicopter get light on its skids, and kept pulling. We were off the ground at 22 inches of manifold pressure, in a nice, steady hover. The engine sounded good, the low rotor RPM horn kept quiet. Keeping in mind that it takes more power to hover than to fly, I was satisfied that I’d be able to take off at our current weight and density altitude situation. I set it back down and we shut down.

But when I placed my fuel order, I asked for only 5 gallons. That’s 30 lbs of 100LL.

The line guy at the airport told us about how he liked watching the R22s take off from the airport. He said they only come in the late fall and early spring. They almost always do running takeoffs. I kind of wondered why they’d come at all. That helicopter, with two people on board, simply does not perform well at high density altitude.

We went to Ruby’s Inn on the free shuttle they offer from the airport. Three other folks who’d come in from Scottsdale in a small plane joined us for the ride. We had lunch in the restaurant there, ordering from the menu rather than waiting on line for the buffet. I had salad. I’m trying to lose weight and this seemed like a good time to stay on my diet.

After wandering around the huge “General Store” there, we hitched a ride back to the airport on the shuttle. I paid for my fuel, stopped in the restroom, and headed outside.

I admit that I was a little nervous about our departure from Bryce. One of the reasons for this was a recent R44 accident in Washington State that involved Louis’s old flight instructor. She’d been flying a Raven I in the Snowqualmie Pass area with three passengers on board when she’d crashed on takeoff. The NTSB report is still preliminary as I write this, but most folks are pretty certain that density altitude played a part in this fatal crash.

I’d wanted to depart into the wind, using the 6 to 8 mph breeze to help me get through effective translational lift (ETL), which occurs around 24 knot airspeed in an R44. The trouble was, the wind was blowing across the ramp area and a small jet was parked at the edge of the ramp, making a low-level obstruction there. If I hover-taxied over to the taxiway, I could takeoff downhill, but with a quartering tailwind that would not help the situation. Of course, a running takeoff — that’s where you get the helicopter light on its skids and run on the skid shoes until you’re through ETL — would be possible on the taxiway, which was smooth. In the end, I decided to pick it up into a hover and take off with a quartering headwind toward the runway and big empty space beyond its approach end. I’d have pavement under me for at least 200 feet, so I could always slide along it or abort the takeoff with a running landing if I couldn’t get enough lift to clear the fence and the road beyond it. You can see all this in the diagram; we were the red X.

I started up and we listened to the AWOS. Density altitude was now 9900 feet. (I guess it had warmed up a bit because there hadn’t been earth-shifting earthquakes while we ate.) Mike and Louis were quiet as I pulled pitch and brought the helicopter into a hover. I’m not sure if they were as surprised as I was that we didn’t get a low rotor horn. I pointed the helicopter in the direction I wanted to go, pushed the cyclic forward gently, and started my takeoff run. We varied from 3 to 8 feet off the ground before I felt the familiar vibrations of ETL. Then we were climbing nicely, well clear of the fence and the road. No horn.

I turned to the southeast toward Page and flew for a while before handing the controls back to Louis.

Scud-running, defined.

In a recent post titled “Almost Scud-Running,” I recounted a flight through Snowqualmie Pass in Washington with low clouds and limited visibility. I said that was “almost” scud-running. But what we did on departure from Seattle’s Boeing Field (BFI) on Saturday was definitely scud-running.

So I guess a definition is in order here. This is my definition — other pilots might define it differently.

To me, scud-running is flying in weather that is so questionable that you’re required to alter your course to get around it. I’m not talking about an alteration planned before takeoff — we did that, too. I’m talking about multiple in-flight course changes to find your way around weather you can’t fly through. And that’s what we did on Saturday morning.

The original flight plan had us going through the pass again and, from Ellensburg on the other side, to Walla Walla and down into Oregon. But there were low clouds over Seattle that morning and a check with Duats and the Seattle FSS confirmed that Stampede Pass had just 1/4 mile visibility. Stampede Pass is one pass over from Snowqualmie and roughly the same altitude, so if it were fogged in, Snowqualmie probably was, too. (Stampede has an ASOS; Snowqualmie does not.) We could wait for the weather to lift - which might not happen that day at all — or take another route. Since I was suffering from severe back pain due to a possibly herniated disk, I wasn’t interested in waiting around. I wanted the flight over with. So we planned to go due south and find a path around the west side of Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens.

Louis was flying and would do 95% of the flying for the entire ferry flight from Seattle to Page, AZ (Lake Powell). He’s familiar with BFI and handled the radio communications with the tower there before guiding us through the narrow corridor between Renton and Seatle airspace. Then we were heading south with the clouds just above us. We had perfect visibility ahead of us, but the mountains were obscured to the east.

How I Run the Scud

I have a technique I use for scud-running in mountainous terrain. This is a technique that’s easy in a helicopter — which has the ability to slow down, stop, descend almost vertically, and make very tight turns. I do not recommend using this technique in an airplane. Actually, I don’t recommend doing any kind of scud-running in an airplane.

In my technique, I fly as close to the desired course as possible as long as I can see the next upcoming ridge or mountain top. When I get near that ridge, I peek over the top of it. If I can see the top of the next ridge, I cross over and continue. If I can’t see the top of the next ridge, I fly parallel to the ridge in the direction of clearer skies, which is normally opposite the direction I really want to go. As soon as I can see the next ridge, I hop over the one beside me and head to it.

Of course, if the skies aren’t clearer in any direction, I just look for a landing zone, preferably an airport where there’s a lounge, restrooms, and vending machines or a restaurant. I do not want to get boxed in by the clouds with no options except down in mountainous terrain. And I’m not stupid enough to fly my helicopter in clouds, even if I wanted to punch out through the top.

I’ve used this technique safely in an attempt to get across the pass at Tehatchapi at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. That attempt was not successful — the pass was completely fogged in — but it did allow me to get close enough to make an informed decision without putting myself in any danger. I subsequently crossed out of the valley at Grapevine after landing at an airport and talking to the local FSS.

On Saturday

That Saturday, I guided Louis on a scud run using the technique discussed above. I had a sectional chart with me and always knew exactly where we were. There were lots of valleys that looked promising, but in quite a few cases, the chart clearly showed that these valleys would simply climb up toward either Mt. Rainier or Mt. St. Helens, both of which were hidden in the clouds. Sucker valleys. It was a good thing that there were two of us up front. If I’d been alone and unable to really study the charts as I flew, I would have tried more than a few of them and wasted a lot of time.

Mike took this photo from the back seat when we were nearly out of it. It was pretty bright at this point and easy to see that the cloud tops weren’t far above us. It was tempting to punch out through a hole to the top. But I don’t like flying when I can’t see the ground. If the engine quits I want to see my spot right after entering an autorotation — not seconds before we hit the ground.

The result of all of this was that we wound up going nearly due south to avoid the weather. Here’s the track from my SPOT Messenger; ignore the numbers and just follow the track from Seattle south and then east:

All this groping around added an hour to our flight for the day and shifted our flight path to the south. The weather was still iffy with low clouds in the Columbia River Gorge between the Cascade Locks and Hood River. You can get an idea of the situation in this photo of the Bonneville Dam that Mike took when we flew by.

But by the time we got to The Dalles, it was clear and sunny — another beautiful day on the east side of the Cascade Mountains. We left the Columbia River behind and headed toward our first fuel stop at Pendleton, OR.