Copied: 2 of each Flight plan figures & trip log pages.
Flight#1 Grand Junction Walker Field to Durango-La Plata County and back
I see that this information is given in the questions, so I copy it to my planning notes.
FT 12,000 18,000
FNM 2408-05 2208 -21
Total usable fuel on board 68 gal.
Average fuel consumption 15 gph
wind & velocity at 16000 2308-16
Answer to number one:
Groundspeed. Those are winds aloft numbers. There will have to be an interpolation for the altitude. In real life I usually have to interpolate between different winds aloft forecasts, too. I wonder where FNM is in relation to my route. Checking AirNav.com, I can't find KFNM airport. OK, it makes sense to assume these are winds aloft in the area of the flight.
I go to the flight log to fill in groundspeed, distances, times and fuel.
The times that they have inserted in the flight plan are double what I'm figuring. 35 miles at 174mph ground speed is 12 minutes. Right? Right??! Why do they have ::24:0 in the box??? I'm penciling my times in the box for the time being.
When I do the times on the return flight log I get the 14 1/2 minutes for the first leg, which matches the time inserted in test version of the flight log. BUT this doesn't include taxi & climb-out. What are they thinking here? And how do you figure time for the descent? Missed approach? This looks like something I should know, but I don't. I'm noticing that the test flight log has put 18 1/2 minutes for descent to Durango and 12 minutes for descent and landing to
There's an answer only one minute off from my answer. OK. I'll take it. I'm not checking my answer with the test. I'd like to work through all seven and then check answers. It's pretty obvious I'll have to refigure it all when I do.
Question 2
Question 2 gives a scenario about not being able to land at the Durango destination, how much time can I hold before returning to the starting point (as the alternate airport). Well. That's going to depend on the time it took for the first one. Without checking any answers yet, I can see (from the information they give in the problem) that at least we're on the same track about one thing. The interpolation I used for wind speeds is the wind speed and direction that is given in this problem.
I'm taking my times from the flight logs I filled out. I assume that what has already been used is the amount I'd figured for enroute--15 gallons. Now I add the total figured for the return trip. Enroute, reserve, missed approach is 37 gallons, and subtract all that from my starting fuel of 68 gallons, which should give me 16 gallons to spend holding at Durango. At 15 mpg the whiz-wheel says I can hold for 65 minutes.
Looking at the possible answer for the test, the book has 1 hour 33 minutes, 1 hour 37 minutes and 1 hour 42 minutes. (Sigh). I look back over my numbers above, checking for simple addition & subtraction mistakes. Nope. It's got to be in HOW I figured all that time and fuel. I glance at the rest of the test questions and decide to slog on before getting help. I record the closest answer (since on the FAA test it's better to put anything than nothing), but I know if it's right it's only the luck of the draw.
Question 3 What fuel would be consumed on the flight between Grand Junction & Durango assuming the avg fuel consumption is 15 mpg? Well, I do have an answer for that, and it's only one gallon off from the least answer on the test. I mark it down.
Question 4 This is a map interpretation question about the highest MEA. There's a flag at Grand Junction for the crossing altitude, but that doesn't apply, and I don't see any other hard-to-notice notations, so I'm taking the number beside the airway. (not the starred one, which should be obstruction clearance). It is one of the possible answers.
Question 5
A scenario for lost communication wants to know what radio frequencies to attempt to contact Denver Center. I look on the En Route Low-Altitude Chart segment provided with the test and find two frequencies in the info box for DENVER ARTCC. One of these is one of the answers on the test. However, isn't that the frequency that had been in use and was lost? I see from the nearest VOR there is an underlined frequency, which I interpret to mean you can listen, but transmit. This would be a possible frequency to try next. So is the emergency frequency 122.1. I'm choosing the answer that says transmit on emergency and receive on the nearby VOR. Whatever aviation strong points I may have, radio navigation is NOT one of them, so I really want to see how this turns out. But not yet.
Question 6
This is easy. It just wants to know where the changeover point is. Whew!
Question 7
MOCA? Minimum obstruction clearance altitude. That's the starred altitude that I looked at before. Ka-ching!
All right. I've spent 2 hours on all of this, which is similar to how long it takes me to plan a VFR trip in a familiar area. I could have looked it over and learned the answers in a much shorter time. I feel really SURE about only three of the answers. I expect three of them to be wrong. But now I'm ready to check my answers and read the discussion. I have a lot of questions of my own to answer, and hopefully the discussion will be enlightening.
Putting on my peril-sensitive sunglasses, I go to check my answers and.....I have gotten questions 1 and 5 wrong, and the others correct.
Question one is the one about time enroute. It's not a difficult question to answer if you just take what's given already, figure the one part that is missing. They have given the first and last leg legs (which I questioned and decided to do myself). OK. I'm not going to find out the answer to HOW they figured the climb-out and descent. All I need to know for the test is that they did figure it. What I needed to do was take the wind direction and velocity, convert it to magnetic, figure ground speed and time enroute for that middle leg and add it to the time enroute they'd already figured. I'll do it now. " 230º at 8 kt becomes 216º magnetic. Airspeed is taken from the flight plan filed, course from the flight log, distance from the enroute chart. There it is. Simple answer. "Piece of cake," as Martha says.
Now I'm going to work question two again, before I look at the answer discussion. I got it right by luck, since my figures weren't even close. I work it again, even with what I've learned, and I still get close to the same answer. By my figures, I can hold for a little over an hour. By theirs, it's.....an hour and 33 minutes. Checking with Dr. Gleim, I've got flight logs filled out for both trips, and he has laid out the figures in his discussion. The difference is....
...I had added some time for a missed approach. Dr. Gleim and the FAA do not. I am surmising now, that this is not necessary for planning, but there is a box for it on the form. Missed approach must come out of the reserve. I'll see what they do with the other scenarios, I guess.
I check the other questions, even the ones I got correct, because I might have done it by luck, right?
The second question that I missed was the scenario about losing contact with ARTCC. The correct answer would have been the first one I considered and discarded--to contact DENVER CENTER on the Denver Center frequency. I'll be able to remember that one for the test, for sure.
Thinking through the scenario, though, it's interesting to see what other things I erroneously considered possible. The emergency channel sounded plausible, and even though I've never used it, if I was not able to contact the people I needed, I'd do that, I think. What Dr. Gleim explains, though, is my complete misconception about the underlined frequency on the VOR information. I was thinking that the underline would let me receive on the VOR channel and transmit on another. This is NOT the case. The underline means there is "no voice capability, i.e. there would be nothing to receive." This is a detour I'm happy to take here on the ground rather than in the air.
I'd love to work these kinds of questions with an instructor and other students, but that's not a situation I find myself in. I consider it time well spent. Now I'm going to review the approaches and departures, fire up X-Plane on the computer and see whether I can fly this baby.
Sim notes: I'm probably 10 nm short of MANCA, but I'm hitting Pause on the sim to regroup.
I transferred my flight plan to an IFR Flight Plan that one of my instructors gave me. I figured for current winds
I got a Piper Malibu PA-4630P that I thought would be fast, but actually it's not much different that a C-152 on speed. I've not flown it before. It's got good instrumentation for this work. HSI (which I've never flown before, but I like). VOR, DME, ADF.
I love X-Plane, but there's one feature I can't get a handle on, and that's the pitch trim. I spend 85% of my attention trying to get some semblance of trim for pitch, bounding around up and down most of the time. Other people don't seem to have this problem, but I can't figure what it is that I have set wrong. At least I know a real plane is MUCH easier to fly than this. I was constantly having to fight to gain altitude, which might have been authentic, as this is in Colorado, 15,000 ft.
I did check my groundspeed after crossing the 2nd fix, and updated my plans accordingly.
The flight plan doesn't have a clear space for your fix information, and I made a big mistake that I tried to correct while flying. I neglected to write in the VOR frequency that defines the other end of the V187 segment that I'm following. Little detail. Ordinarily it would be on the chart, but I'm flying from a testing copy ("not for navigation"
So I'm parking the sim, finding out my information, and checking my flight path, and while I'm stopped I'll review that approach some more. Not ready for prime time, here. I don't know how to ident in X-Plane, and I'm going to see if I can't find that out before I resume.
No comments:
Post a Comment