What’s Up
By LeRoy Cook
We were privileged to have some
nice flying conditions last week, other than the short cold-front line that
blew through Friday evening. The dry air behind the front gave us blue skies
instead of white haze.
All types of aircraft were in this
week, from a Bell JetRanger helicopter to a Piper Twin Comanche. A Cessna
Skylane and a Piper Archer came by, a Piper Arrow shot touch and go landings,
and a Cessna 172 stopped in. Any number of practice instrument approaches were
tallied.
The Butler-based pilots
contributed to the traffic count as well. Roy Conley took one last flight in
his experimental gyrocopter, I had a couple of hops in the Cessna Skyhawk,
Jeffery Adams ventured out in a Cessna 150 and Jeff Arnold took the Cessna 172
to Pittsburgh, Kansas. CFI Eric Eastland did some training sessions in Cessna
150s.
I was pumping fuel into an
airplane one day while my 17-year-old student was watching, when it occurred to
me that I was doing the exact same thing when I was his age, in the exact same
spot, a half-dozen decades ago. The fuel pump was in the same place, except the
tank was safely underground instead of sitting in a tin box. There was a
swinging sign on a post, advertising Mobil avgas with a “flying red horse”
trademark. I had to stand on a rickety wooden stepladder, instead of Tom
Winters’ nice welded roll-around cart we still use. And there was no
air-conditioned waiting room for shelter; the only convenience Butler offered was
an outhouse situated over a pit north of the fuel island. Because the entire
airport was grass, we hauled some truckloads of pecan shells, donated by Max
Harwick of Osage Pecan Co., to spread around the gas pump so planes wouldn’t
get stuck in the mud.
At last week’s airport commission
meeting, there was discussion of pavement rejuvenation by late summer, long
overdue if further deterioration is to be avoided. Other projects needed are
replacing the rotating beacon light and getting the wi-fi connection restored;
the former’s been out for a year and the latter merely a month. The inoperative
PAPI (precision approach path indicator) lights are probably not going to be
replaced, due to the expense. The PAPI beams are helpful for high-performance
business-type airplanes trying to land in poor visibility, but are largely
ignored by the pilots of smaller general aviation aircraft.
“Is it a nice day for flying?” we
got asked by a non-pilot on one of those warm days last week. It was indeed a
beautiful day, with lots of puffy white clouds floating around the blue sky, a
light breeze blowing out of the southwest. What she didn’t understand was that thermal
turbulence is almost a given on such days, as the earth heats up and starts
belching updrafts, with matching downdrafts. The building cumulus clouds are
created by rising air. So, the better flying days are really the overcast ones,
with stable air.
The week’s question wanted to know
what amount of clouds constituted a ceiling. It has to be a layer covering half
of more of the sky’s dome, more than four-eighths coverage under international
rules. So, the scattered clouds floating around at 500 feet don’t count, as
long as they don’t cover a majority of the sky. For next week, what was a
“toilet paper cutting” contest sometimes staged at old-fashioned airport fly-ins?
You can send your answer in to kochhaus1@gmail.com.
