The mission
Went flying yesterday for the first time since I got my private pilot license. It was intended to be a practice flight for me, with three goals to plan around: 1) build time toward the 50 hours of cross-country experience required for my instrument rating, 2) get in three night landings and takeoffs to stay current for carrying passengers at night, and 3) get in some precision landing practice on a small runway.
For goal 3), there are fewer airports to choose from than for the other 2 goals, so I started with it. A friend of mine told me about Whidbey Air Park near Langley, WA (W10) one day while I was complaining about not having much practice on small runways. (The "small runway" at my home airport, Boeing Field in Seattle, WA (KBFI), is 100′ wide and 3700′ long–which has a tendency to spoil us a little.) I decided that W10 looked and sounded like a nice challenge.
Having selected an airport for precision landing practice, I started looking for airports to satisfy my other goals. W10 was too close to KBFI to meet the 50 nautical mile straight-line distance requirement in order to count as cross-country. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to successfully get on the ground there especially expecting sunset shortly after I got there. So I chose Skagit Regional Airport near Burlington, WA (KBVS) a little further to the north, still along Puget Sound. It has a couple of nice runways to choose from and is appropriately lighted for night operations.
Finally, for my last goal, I figured I would just try to do my night landings at Boeing Field. We are encouraged to not do pattern work at night there out of consideration for minimizing noise over houses in the area, but I knew it wouldn’t hurt to ask. If the controller wouldn’t let me, I could easily move to another airport in the area, or even scratch that off the list for the night–I still had around 30 days left to get in the appropriate landings to keep current.
I read through and wrote summaries of all the information I could find on the unfamiliar airports that were going to be involved on the flight. Next, I double-checked that the runway at W10 would be long enough given how warm it was outside–it easily met the requirements. Finally, I filed a flight plan with the Seattle Flight Service Station, partly because it’s a good idea for safety’s sake, but mostly because the flight school requires it for cross-country flights. With the planning out of the way, it was time to go fly!
The flight
Since Jennifer’s out of town, I took Paul instead. He had never been up in a small plane before. When I took him out onto the ramp at the airport and showed him the airplane, he expressed shock at how small it was. ("I’m not sure what I expected, but I was definitely expecting it to be bigger than this…")
I preflighted the airplane and discovered we only barely had enough fuel to land with a whole hour in reserve. I always like to have way more than enough if weight&balance will allow, so I called line service to request a top-off. We had to wait a while for fuel, so I pulled out my charts and showed him where we were going and how to read some of the symbols. Fuel finally arrived, and we finished the preflight and took off.
We left the ground around 30 minutes before sunset, and headed directly for W10, which was about 20 minutes away. The airport was completely hidden in the tall trees around it, and would have been very difficult to find without either a GPS or someone along who already knew where it was. Once we spotted it, I descended to the traffic pattern altitude for the airport and set up to land. The wind was calm, so I chose the direction with fewer trees, runway 34.
(There were a couple of other aircraft playing around in the area that I was careful to keep track of. They looked a lot like hang-gliders to me, only they definitely had engines–clearly ultralights of some sort.)
I came in way too high and a little fast on my first pass. The biggest reason was that my downwind leg was only about half-mile from the airport since it disappeared behind trees if I flew any further out. Having nearly landed at the airport, however, set me up for a perfect rectangular traffic pattern second time around, so I was comfortable losing sight of the airport on my better-placed downwind. (One of the ultralights decided it was getting dark, and came in for a landing in front of me.) This second landing was set up nearly perfectly, but I was still a little above my ideal short-field landing speed, so I opened the throttle up wide again for a go-around. We decided it was getting dark enough that we should move on. One of these days, I’ll use my new-found ability to find the airport and go try it again.
After an uneventful 20 minute transition to Skagit Regional, the sun was far enough below the horizon that it was pretty dark out, but it was still before the total darkness of night had set in. We could see the airport on the ground even before I keyed the radio to turn on the runway lights. After debating with myself over which runway to land on, I decided to set up for runway 28. Made an uneventful landing on my first try. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Paul flinched slightly just before the landing flair. He later mentioned that his mind projected the airplane onto the ground at the same rate of descent as the descent for landing. He said he actually heard a mental sound effect "thump", before noticing that we were still flying along just above the ground.
From the ground, we tried calling up the Flight Service Station to close my outbound flight plan and activate the plan for the return, but the radio wouldn’t reach them, and we couldn’t get cell signal, so we took off from runway 10 and took care of that in the air.
On the way back to Boeing Field, we took a detour over Redmond to show Paul what Microsoft campus looks like from the air at night. We headed back to Boeing Field, called them up just south of downtown Bellevue, and requested stop-and-goes. The controller cleared us as requested. We did the requisite 3 landings and 3 takeoffs, and taxied back in for parking.
Paul claims he had a lot of fun, and would love to go again sometime. I can only hope that I might have recruited one more pilot for General Aviation.