So, the 1976 Cessna 177RG Cardinal operated by the flying club is back in service after a lengthy maintenance interval, and – having allowed other club members the privilege of putting the first dozen or so hours on the machine after the layoff – your correspondent is all set to get reacquainted with her tomorrow, with a club CFI riding shotgun only for the safety that’s in it.
It’s a so-called “complex” aircraft by general aviation standards, having wheels that come up and a constant speed propeller. Operators of the Cardinal are graced with an active forum of support known as the Cardinal Flyers Online, producing everything from expert opinion to earnest conjecture on such arcana as after-market exhaust systems (Power Flow Systems tuned exhaust for the 177 is considered quite the thing, providing airspeed increases that would amount to pointer error on a fighter, as well as certain specific fuel consumption efficiencies) and cabin door hanging. A quite bewildering degree of technical data is provided daily – sometimes more often – in the form of a digest sent out to members in good standing.
Having registered, a couple of local Cardinal operators from Gillespie Field graciously offered me the opportunity to bounce questions off of them, which I was certain to do whenever the plane came up again. One even offered a cautionary tale.
Seems the club had a different retractable Cardinal back in the day, before a relatively low time, but certificated private and instrument pilot with 18 hours in the C177RG flew his family up to South Lake Tahoe on a warm summer’s afternoon. The airport is high, the day was hot, the aircraft overloaded and the flight sadly abbreviated. High, hot and heavy is quite literally no way to go through life; the plane was destroyed, there were no survivors.
Well, it’s all quite a lark until the trees and terrain loom up on you with no excess airspeed and the VSI needle trembling around zero, which is something you scarcely had to worry about in aircraft where performance charts were only consulted for annual check rides. But, perhaps out of morbid curiosity, I determined to set up the same scenario as the Tahoe tragedy on a desktop simulation and see what was what.
I’ve got two simulators on my machine, X-Plane, by Austen Myers for the Mac side, and Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X (FSX for the cognoscenti) on the dark side. I booted up X-Plane, set up a 177RG on Runway 18 at South Lake Tahoe (not the preferred departure routing, but the way the mishap flight took off), over-loaded the machine with fuel and cargo, dialed the density altitude up with altimeter setting and temperature and adjusted the winds for a quartering headwind.
Even with the engine running full rich on the mixture control (not recommended for high density altitudes), I got the simulation airborne with room to spare, and – although it would have been hair raising – easily cleared the terrain and trees on the departure end. (Although it was not possible to replicate the characteristic downdrafts at KTVL’s RW18 departure end.) Not as who should say “easy”, but definitely in the realm of “wouldn’t do that again” do-able.
Switched over to the dark side, loaded up FSX and chose AOPA’s Cardinal 177 fixed gear simulation, since I couldn’t find a (free) RG on line. The fixed gear Cardinal apparently climbs better than the RG, although it trues out a little slower in cruise, both on account of the increased weight and decreased drag of the retractable gear.
Made the same changes in weight (keeping all things in proportion), winds and density altitude for the FSX simulation, took RW 18, ran her up and promptly – well, agonizingly – flew her into departure end terrain with the stall horn blaring. She just wouldn’t climb.
Those had to be some awful moments for the pilot in command.
Made a second attempt with the throttle leaned out, full brakes on until the manifold pressure had topped out and held the machine on deck until achieving not just rotation speed but best climb angle and just barely cleared the trees and terrain at the departure end. Which I can tell you would be a damned hard thing to do with family in the machine, since it took nearly the whole runway with the departure end terrain and trees growing ever closer to get to Vx prior to raising the nose.
There are no real conclusions on the relative merits of X-Plane vs FSX to draw there, since the Cardinal model used by X-Plane was provided – free of charge – by a third party outside Myer’s domain. Nor yet would I recommend hanging my hat on the accuracy of any desktop flight simulator when it’d be my own bacon cooking, no matter how advanced. Although I do have to admit it is good, cheap practice for IFR procedures for those of us pampered in days gone by with gratuitous quantities of excess thrust, GPS-aided inertial navigation systems, digital moving maps and ejection seats, worse comes to worst.
Still, I found it interesting. And a good reinforcement of the notion that there are certain things cannot be taken for granted in a normally aspirated piston-engine single. Nor are performance charts the kind of thing you only break out annually if you want to spend any time at all flying them.
So, will you submit this to the AOPA magazine or similar general aviation magazine?
Lex, there is a need, and possibly a cash market, for words strung together like this. An accomplished pilot taking a slightly different look at things in the GA world.
Interesting, even to a non-pilot, and probably fascinating to those who wannabe, and instructive to those who are.
Much easier than a whole book….although that should be done too.
Concur. This is the sort of thing that is useful for a GA pilot…although I’ll add that a good GA pilot doesn’t just know the official manual, but the more important performance numbers – his personal limits.
Safe flying demands that you know your limits. And if you aren’t logging 20+ hours/month at taxpayer expense, those limits may be considerably less than those of your mount.
Third in line, here, to concur that such vignettes are one of Lex’s fortes’–and not just anybody can simultaneously condense meaningful technical prose into the confines of a short presentation and make it readable and attention-holding (non-dull) to boot.
I’ll “pile on” here. Good writing Lex, and an excellent approach to a vexing problem for too many GA pilots. It seems density altitude is something lowlanders don’t think about enough, and it occasionally comes up to bite, often with lethal results.
Playing around with “what ifs” is a good Engineering approach. Peter Garrison of Flying Magazine sometimes does this to good and interesting effect. Usually he writes to explain things, something a retired Navy Fighter Pilot could also do.
I certainly won’t try to push you into writing commercially. One has only so much time, and after a high pressure career as a Naval Aviator, one needs to step back,smell the roses and spend time with a family that was often involuntarily neglected during deployments. OTH, the writing is good, and I won’t complain if you entertain us with your talents.
Good piece, Lex. Concur with the above. Bet you can get a column occasionally with AOPA or the like. It may pay for your flying habit.
Lex – I’ll add the ‘ditto’s’ to the above comments and a little further color on the whole subject of high density altitude takeoffs. Attached is a link to an AOPA ASF accident writeup that nearly killed a gent I knew well from my younger days. http://www.aopa.org/asf/ntsb/narrative.cfm?ackey=1&evid=20040409X00440
If the link doesn’t work, look up accident reports for Elko, NV (KEKO).
This gent was a recently retired airline pilot, who’d also flown fighters in the NJ ANG for many years. He’d had his V-35 Bonanza for several years, but didn’t have a good sense of how to lean the motor for high density altitude. Seems he overdid it, and he and his wife have third degree burns everywhere to show for it. The V35 manifold pressure gauge even has altitude graduations to show you where to lean the mixture during climbs, but things happen faster when you’re running it up for takeoff.
All I’d add is that it really pays to spend some time with a CFI who has some real experience with high density altitude takeoffs because getting that mixture just right is so critical. Of course, in a C-177, it would also seem to make sense to avoid hot afternoon takeoffs at KTVL no matter where the mixture’s set.
Thanks, Chip. I couldn’t make that AOPA link work for me, but this NTSB report of the accident was interesting. Thirty thousand hours TT and next to no high altitude flying experience, at least not in a piston-driven machine.
And it’s a good thing he didn’t use runway 30, as originally planned. It’s less than 3000 feet long and he used 5000 feet of runway 5!
I didn’t read the NTSB report, but I would guess from the runway he chose, he expected to use more. What he didn’t expect was a climb rate that was essentially nil.
From a personal standpoint, a turbo-normalized Cardinal would be a good traveling tool in the high west. If he had it he would be among us and not another story for the NTSB to write.
With only 1200 hours of Cessna time (400 in my 177B), including dirt strips in Utah at 95F at 6500 msl, I’ve found that:
1. The book values are the best effort of a test pilot in a perfect airplane with a perfect engine on a perfect day after several attempts on a long runway. Our Cessnas are no longer new or perfect – neither are the engines, the runway, the weather…or us. Adding 50% to the numbers may not make us bold, but it sure helps us grow old.
2. Book values and computer simulations are just numbers-you in that plane on that day is reality. Which one are you going to bet your life on?
3. The best 2-seater Cessna ever built was a 177B Cardinal with empty back seats and minumum luggage.
4. You need 50 hrs of serious flying in a particular aircraft before you know how that plane flies compared to the Book. Most renters can’t afford this, so they shouldn’t push the limits.
5. If you only “think” you can make that takeoff, try it once by yourself with minimum fuel and see how you comfortable you are before dragging your loved ones along.
6. Hot and high departures require start/stop distance calculations for everybody, not just the heavies. Again, add 50%.
After using 3500 ft of ground roll on take-off from Vail on a 92F morning in a grossed out C172, I decided neither I nor my passengers needed that kind of excitement again. Thank God the terrain fell faster than we did departing north.
Mike,
I grew up flying with a retired Navy pilot up in Cache Valley, Utah. I also remember hot days in St.George, and how the volcanic cone off the departure end has a number of black splotches over the runway-facing slope.
There was nothing I remember so much fun as flying around monument valley in a J-3 Cub, flying about 100 feet above the top of a mesa, and suddenly having it drop away a thousand feet or more.
Anyone who learns to fly in Utah, Idaho, and around those mountains in those different weather conditions has, I feel, an edge on other folks.
Respects,
Spent the last six months working for “The Man” at OPTEVFOR in the M&S (Modeling and Simulation) shop, with a gifted A-6 LT (wearing a Sliver Star he never discussed from the first Gulf War), who was tasked to figure out how to use M&S, rather than live range time to make sure the taxpayers were getting what they asked for. Chris did an excellent job and it became the way things were done. Just prior to that, oversaw the software development of BFTT (Battle force Tactical Trainer), so between the two “adventures,” I saw M&S from the “players” view and the “testers” side. Quite an interesting ride and the fallout is what we see in the gaming market today, X-Plane leaning more towards the testing mindset (highly accurate modeling of flight parameters) and FSX (yes, THE DARK SIDE!) being the gamers “just pull a probability and give me instant feedback! – screw thousands of runs!” There actually were meetings of gamers and the military programmers for years to help to figure out the generation of
It is most excellent that a regular GA pilot, experienced at what ever level and plan and try out a flight plan under the expected conditions from the comfort of the home, decreasing the chance of starring in a YouTube video (like recently posted here) of a float plane running out of runway and ending up in the grass.
But then us wannabe Lex’s can also dream in those same games.
ODS was almost 20 years ago. This guy is an active duty or SELRES LT? at OPTEVFOR six months ago?
Try this one (in a sim):
http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-not-to-take-off-in-floatplane.html
Larry/
You’re late! You missed it, Lex already posted that a few weeks back–lots of discussion too. Where were you?
BTW, OT here, but go back to my post and your reply on the AP/AirPolice thing–I left a reply for you.
I occasionally use FS X in conjunction with doing cross country planning. The terrain data base is excellent for knowing what to look for during the flight, especially wiht the mountain terrain and a not having all kinds of horsepower. BTW, the Tcraft is for sale.
Two friends of my wife went down in a 177 (’68 model, O-320, even lower T/W than your RG, I expect) last year along with their CFI safety pilot. Too early to call it yet, but the report points a fat finger in the direction of density altitude, with a sideways glance at a worn cam:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20080818X01259&key=1
(Aftermath: The CFI died from his burns, the PIC was seriously burned and the PIC’s wife was much more burned than that, she had 3rd deg over 80%. It was a miracle she survived, but life is very tough for her now.)
Anyway, not cheerful stuff, but it’s another morbid reason to heed Mike Kleihege’s advice: If your planned flight puts your airplane near its published performance limit, check it out light and solo first, then do the math to find where the limit really is.
If anybody here has any comments on that report, I’d be very interested to hear them.