Back Into the Wilder Blue Yonder, Part 16

I pushed the throttle forward and our little airplane accelerated down the runway.  Liftoff seemed to take only a second or so more than usual before the runway was falling away like it always did.  At three hundred feet, I popped the flaps up to zero and called our departure and turn to the southeast over the radio as I rolled us left and we arched over Interstate 10, headed out over the brown desert below. Rolling us out on the GPS’ course, I glanced at the sectional to make sure we were not wandering into Mexico.  We were just a tad too far north to use the Rio Grande we could see just off our left as a border; the river laid entirely within New Mexico here.  We would cross over it before we reached El Paso, Texas, on the other side of a mountain lying on our nose.

As usual, I was climbing at best rate and seeing five hundred feet a minute.  But as we approached sixty-five hundred feet MSL, the climb rate suddenly shrank to almost nothing.  I eased the nose up a little to see if I could get it back up again, but nothing was happening.  For whatever reason, the airplane had stopped climbing.  I was convinced that density altitude had gotten us.  I crept our attitude up a tiny bit more but still saw no response.  When we still weren’t climbing after a few seconds more, I made the decision to turn back around and land back at Las Cruces to wait for better conditions in the morning.

Just as my mouth was starting to announce my decision and my hand was starting to roll the stick, I felt a little thump and saw the VSI head upward!  We had caught a thermal or some kind of uplift, and we were shooting up at just short of a thousand feet a minute!  If I could hold this for only a couple of minutes, it could get us up to our targeted altitude! I kept the airplane’s nose just above the horizon, pointing on course but prepared to roll back into the uplift the instant I saw the VSI start to level off.  Much to my surprise, we were still climbing at about five hundred feet a minute as we hit ninety-five hundred feet, and I pushed the nose over and leveled off.  We reached our target altitude and El Paso was still just under twenty-miles away!

What a great advantage of flying a light sport!  I never had thought about being able to ride the lifties with such alacrity.  But just as the little airplane could ride the lifties, Nature was about to show us how it would ride the sinkies as well.

As we approached the mountain north of El Paso and the outer rings of the Class C airspace below us, I decided to let El Paso Approach know we were there and gave them a call.  I gave the controller our position and stated our intentions to overfly them at ninety-five hundred feet.  He assigned me a squawk, told us he had “radar contact” and told me to advise him of any change in altitude.  I acknowledged his instruction and we continued chugging along, crossing the mountain while the city spread out for us across the flat desert.  We could see El Paso International airport just to the right of our nose, and we watched a United airliner lift-off from one of its runways and climb up to our altitude.  It took only a couple of moments for him to reach us before he was turning away and climbing above us.  It felt odd to watch him climb up to us.

We continued crossing the town, slowly chugging eastbound, and beginning to bounce a little as we did.  Thermals from the blasting sun were reaching us, turning our smooth ride into something akin to scraping our butts across a gigantic metal washboard.

The winds had shifted, too, and our groundspeed dropped to just over a hundred knots.  I bumped the throttle up to hold 5300 rpm and 106 knots, something that would keep us somewhat on schedule with a flight plan figured at 110.  We stared out at the west Texas desert capped by the sharp peak of El Capitan off to our left and wallowed in how big it was and how slow we were going.

By the time we neared Fort Stockton almost two hours later, the ride had become bumpy and Connie was not feeling too well.  Surface winds were blowing strongly down runway 12 with a significant crosswind from the right.  We performed a very long right base entry into the pattern with a long straight in, with flaps down to 15 during the last part of the leg.  While I was fairly active during the landing, I still managed a pretty nice touchdown in the first third of the runway.  I let us roll down toward the Terminal building, which appeared to be on our right.

We parked the airplane fairly close to it and, within sight of the fuel pump, shut down.  As we had seen at a couple of airports, the tie downs there were chains too big to fit through the tiny metal loops under our wings.  So, I set the parking brake and then installed our traveling chocks around the nosewheel.  The wind was gusting up between twenty and twenty-two knots, so I wasn’t exactly comfortable with no tie-downs but the chocks were the best I could do at the moment.

The Terminal itself was deserted.  There was a lounge next to the main entrance and a desk containing a computer used by an FBO as well as a small, glass-doored refrigerator holding some complementary bottled water.  Connie went to lie down on a couch while I continued to scout the place for a Coke machine.  I did find one in a back room on the way to the restrooms but it didn’t seem to work.  I also found a small room with a computer I could use to check weather ahead, but I took Connie some cold water before disappearing back into it.  The winds were blowing out of the south at sixteen knots gusting up to twenty-two, and I was looking to see if they were forecasted to die down a bit later.  They were, but by the time they did we would not have enough daylight left to go anywhere else.  Further, a front would move in tomorrow that would likely keep us trapped in Fort Stockton for a day.  I told Connie we’d stay the night if we needed to (i.e, if she didn’t get to feeling better) but she assured me she would get to feeling better and she just needed to lie down a bit.  So, I found a comfortable lounge chair and plopped down in it to rest myself.

CNN was on a TV playing in the background, and a report was coming in about a collision between a Piper and a helicopter over the Hudson River.  They had video that showed the event, though it wasn’t clear exactly how it happened from that.  What was clear was that both vehicles had been destroyed and everyone aboard both were lost.  With our own close-call so recently in mind, I pondered whether we would have survived such an event.  I believe we would have as long as the helicopter’s blades had not slashed through the cockpit or severed the BRS.  Assuming we made it through the initial clash, once it became evident the CTSW was not controllable, I would have deployed the parachute and let it take us safely to the water.  It’s really too bad more general aviation aircraft do not have them.

Not that such a device makes an airplane death-proof.  All one had to do was search through the Cirrus accident records to find accidents where the deployed parachute did not save the occupants.  As is also true for ejection accidents out of military aircraft, a large percentage of those are due to deploying too late so that the chute simply doesn’t have time to work or is deployed outside an envelope where it can survive.  One of the niceties of our CTSW was that the chute system is rated to handle speeds up to Vne; so, for most instances, you could deploy the chute almost under any circumstances without too much concern it won’t work.  The most major limitation is to make sure you have at least three hundred feet of air underneath you (and that assumes your deployment conditions are not too heavily biased in a negative direction).

About a half hour later, we heard a pickup truck pull up outside.  A young man in his late twenties or early thirties came in to welcome us and ask if there was anything he could do.  I told him “no” but thanked him for his interest, and we discussed how to in touch with him if we decided we needed to stay the night.  He then left us alone again, and I went back to the computer to run another weather check.  The winds had died down a few knots, but otherwise, nothing had changed.  I got the sunset time and time of “end of civil twilight” for the next and final checkpoint of the day, and then used the AOPA Flight Planner and real world winds to re-calculate the leg to Fredericksburg.  We were nearing a “drop dead” takeoff time that would get us there just before dark, so I talked to Connie to see how she was doing and whether she wanted to continue on.  The one thing she wanted was not to spend the night in Fort Stockton, so I told her to continue resting while I went out to gas up the airplane.

Once I got that done, I retrieved her from the Terminal and we manned up our little airplane again.  I was a bit nervous about the winds; the gusts were hitting only three knots below the limit where my pilot’s operating handbook said “don’t fly”.  We could feel the wind buffeting us as we taxied out the parallel taxiway for runway 12, feeling every foot of its seventy-five hundred foot length.  As we hit the end and turned to face the hold-short, I swung us into the wind and then ran the takeoff checklist.  After finding no problems, I asked Connie if she was ready to go; and she replied she was.

“Hold on,” I said.  “I don’t know how rough this is going to be.”