Tag Archives: TX

Fuel Planning Over The Gulf

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Last weekend was a perfect example of why you must “get good” at flight planning while enroute.

I planned a simple direct flight over the gulf at 16000 FT from Tampa, FL to Galveston, TX.
Conventional wisdom says you do your flight planning on the ground and then simply execute in the cockpit.  It sounds simple … But that rarely seems to work for me.  There are frequently “surprises” enroute that I never seem to be able to predict in advance.

The flight planning on the ground looked quite promising.  The weather was clear and the winds aloft were quite tame along the route (210@10kts)  According to my calculations, the flight should have taken 4hours 9 mins.  This would allow me to land with comfortably more than 1 hour and 51 minutes of fuel to spare, which is about 30 gallons.

Since the weather and fuel looked good, I began my usual preflight.  However, because  this was a flight over the Gulf of Mexico, I took a couple of extra precautions.  First, I made sure my lifejacket was within easy reach. Second, I made sure my Personal locator beacon (PLB) was in my pocket and ready to go.

Shortly after takeoff, things started to change.  Tampa approach was dealing with a lot of traffic in the class B. As a result, my clearance was a bit inconvenient with a heading of 090, followed by several painfully slow heading changes before I was heading westbound. After I leveled off @ 16k FT, I rechecked the fuel projections on R9 and found it predicting 25 gals @ destination.

No problem… (My personal minimum is anything greater than 20) … So far so good …

Then Miami center said the dreaded words “We have an amendment to your routing, advise when ready to copy”.

Uggg… The new routing was direct Seminole (SZW), direct Crestview (CEW) direct destination.

After refreshing the fuel calcs in the R9, it showed 19gals @ destination… This was not good! I have read so many accident/incident reports where pilots “stretched” personal minimums only to realize later that this was part of the accident chain.

I decided if it didn’t improve above 20 by 1 hour from destination, I would divert.  But I still had plenty of time.  In the meantime, I reduced power to 65% to try to conserve fuel.

After about 20 mins, I found myself in and out of a thin cloud deck and facing increased headwinds (240@33).  No immediate danger… But fuel status was now getting worse and the R9 was now predicting 14 gals @ destination.

So I pulled up Foreflight on the iPad and started looking for a place to divert in Louisiana. In addition, I reduced power further to 60% to conserve even more fuel.

I also tried to be clever and “use ATC’s help” to conserve fuel.  Every time I got handed off to a new ATC controller, I asked for “a shortcut of 10 to 20 degrees.  This worked remarkably well.  Before I knew it, the R9 was predicting 21 gals@ destination!

But my optimism was short-lived.  The headwinds picked up to 244@42kts.

Now the R9 showed 18 gals @ destination 🙁

That did it, time to divert… Houma,Louisiana looked like a good spot.  I told myself 50 miles from Houma would be the decision point to change my IFR flight and start a descent.

Miraculously the winds died down before then and I was able to press on to my destination.

When I landed in Galveston, the R9 reported 20.7 gallons remaining! phew!!

I parked right next to a beautiful Citation CJ2 and a friendly lineman, named Eric, rolled out the red carpet for me!

After a wonderful flight, I am more convinced than ever, that flight planning enroute is an even more important skill than planning on the ground.

Thank goodness that there are cockpit gadgets that let us do that!

Unfortunately, with all the fretting over fuel, I forgot to take pictures!!

(Have to make up for that on my next flight)

Cheers,
== T.J.==

Fuel Planning Over The Gulf

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Last weekend was a perfect example of why you must “get good” at flight planning while enroute.

I planned a simple direct flight over the gulf at 16000 FT from Tampa, FL to Galveston, TX.
Conventional wisdom says you do your flight planning on the ground and then simply execute in the cockpit.  It sounds simple … But that rarely seems to work for me.  There are frequently “surprises” enroute that I never seem to be able to predict in advance.

The flight planning on the ground looked quite promising.  The weather was clear and the winds aloft were quite tame along the route (210@10kts)  According to my calculations, the flight should have taken 4hours 9 mins.  This would allow me to land with comfortably more than 1 hour and 51 minutes of fuel to spare, which is about 30 gallons.

Since the weather and fuel looked good, I began my usual preflight.  However, because  this was a flight over the Gulf of Mexico, I took a couple of extra precautions.  First, I made sure my lifejacket was within easy reach. Second, I made sure my Personal locator beacon (PLB) was in my pocket and ready to go.

Shortly after takeoff, things started to change.  Tampa approach was dealing with a lot of traffic in the class B. As a result, my clearance was a bit inconvenient with a heading of 090, followed by several painfully slow heading changes before I was heading westbound. After I leveled off @ 16k FT, I rechecked the fuel projections on R9 and found it predicting 25 gals @ destination.

No problem… (My personal minimum is anything greater than 20) … So far so good …

Then Miami center said the dreaded words “We have an amendment to your routing, advise when ready to copy”.

Uggg… The new routing was direct Seminole (SZW), direct Crestview (CEW) direct destination.

After refreshing the fuel calcs in the R9, it showed 19gals @ destination… This was not good! I have read so many accident/incident reports where pilots “stretched” personal minimums only to realize later that this was part of the accident chain.

I decided if it didn’t improve above 20 by 1 hour from destination, I would divert.  But I still had plenty of time.  In the meantime, I reduced power to 65% to try to conserve fuel.

After about 20 mins, I found myself in and out of a thin cloud deck and facing increased headwinds (240@33).  No immediate danger… But fuel status was now getting worse and the R9 was now predicting 14 gals @ destination.

So I pulled up Foreflight on the iPad and started looking for a place to divert in Louisiana. In addition, I reduced power further to 60% to conserve even more fuel.

I also tried to be clever and “use ATC’s help” to conserve fuel.  Every time I got handed off to a new ATC controller, I asked for “a shortcut of 10 to 20 degrees.  This worked remarkably well.  Before I knew it, the R9 was predicting 21 gals@ destination!

But my optimism was short-lived.  The headwinds picked up to 244@42kts.

Now the R9 showed 18 gals @ destination 🙁

That did it, time to divert… Houma,Louisiana looked like a good spot.  I told myself 50 miles from Houma would be the decision point to change my IFR flight and start a descent.

Miraculously the winds died down before then and I was able to press on to my destination.

When I landed in Galveston, the R9 reported 20.7 gallons remaining! phew!!

I parked right next to a beautiful Citation CJ2 and a friendly lineman, named Eric, rolled out the red carpet for me!

After a wonderful flight, I am more convinced than ever, that flight planning enroute is an even more important skill than planning on the ground.

Thank goodness that there are cockpit gadgets that let us do that!

Unfortunately, with all the fretting over fuel, I forgot to take pictures!!

(Have to make up for that on my next flight)

Cheers,
== T.J.==

Heading Home VFR

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Today the weather in Houston was not bad… But the weather forecast along my route home and in FL was downright ugly.
Fortunately, PIREPS showed a lot of the weather did not have very high tops along my route.  So my plan was to depart VFR, climb up to 17.5k and if needed get an IFR clearance for the descent or along the way.  In addition, I knew the route quite well, including several possible fuel stops if things didn’t look good.  Shortly after takeoff, I climbed to 17.5k as planned.  Then benefited from a very strong tailwind that was even better than forecast.  Thanks to some miserly fuel consumption, I made it all the way to Ocala!  Since there was a solid cloud deck below me, there was not many photo opportunities.  However, the descent was rather interesting.
I wanted to try to maintain VFR, which involved doing a rapid descent (full forward slip) right through a good sized “hole in the clouds”.  After descending to 3500 FT, Jax Center cleared me for the GPS 18 approach.  The ATIS claimed winds “170@11Gusting18”.  I thought to myself “that was pretty good… Should be an EZ landing”.  When I was on final approach, the tower controller called out a wind check of “170@18Gusting24”.  I thought “hmmm… little worse… But no need to abort”… Then I checked my R9 screen when I was on 1 mile final and it read “175 @ 30”!  Clearly this was the strongest headwind I had ever faced on a landing.  I considered aborting the landing…  But I was on minimum fuel and the plane “felt” stable and under control.  So I proceeded in what felt like slow motion.  Even with 19″ inches of manifold pressure, my ground speed was hovering ~ 70 kts.  I landed right on the numbers and felt like I barely used half of the runway.  In fact, I had to add power on the ground just to get up to the E6 taxiway.
I had purposely picked Ocala as a stopping point because it was a good excuse to catch up with Jason Schappert of MZeroA.  I was hoping to grab a quick meal and squeeze in a “brainstorming session”, as often happens when Jason and I start talking.  But I got a pleasant surprise today… I got to meet his charming, new bride Ashley! (Now I have even more reason to stop in Ocala!!)
Onto the final leg home.  The weather was deteriorating and luckily I was able to get out of Ocala ahead of the cold front.

The winds had not provided any mercy… I had 30kt headwind from 170.  This meant that I should land on the “short” 3200′ runway 18 at Tampa Executive.  This was entirely unusual for me.  I am much more accustomed to landing at big airports with 5,6 or even 10000 FT runways. Tampa Executive airport has 2 runways.  Runway 5-23 is a 5000 FT runway, which I use 95% of the time and runway 18-36 is a 3200 FT runway.  Given the choice of a massive X-wind on the long runway or a strong headwind on the short runway, I chose the “short” 3200 FT runway 18.
The landing was uneventful… But I am glad I arrived when I did… Because after landing, putting the plane in the hanger, and returning some calls, this is what I saw on the drive home:

Just goes to show, timing and weather are way more important than any flight planning!
Cheers,
== T.J.==

Trip To TX

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The trip to Houston this past Sunday happened “almost” as planned.  On the one hand, it reaffirmed my flight planning/route selection process.  But on the other hand, it reinforced the need for flexible plans enroute.   when I was getting ready to depart, I thought the weather was “perfect”.  Shortly after takeoff the visibility (and views) were great:
While there was not a cloud in the sky, something just didn’t feel right…  After reaching a cruising altitude of 16k, I noticed what it was.  There was a nasty 50+ knot headwind.  See what I mean:
Despite a true airspeed of 186 @ 75% power, my groundspeed was hovering ~ 140 knots!  At this rate, the 2hr planned leg would surely be much longer.  But what can you do?  “Nothing!” I concluded other than “Plan B”, which is just find some good music and relax…  Unfortunately, the satellite radio had its own plans.  After about 10 mins of flipping channels and not finding anything, I resorted to Plan C: Iphone4 plugged into Aux input of the Zulu headset:
It was at this point, I discovered a really cool feature of the Zulus… When ATC speaks on the frequency, the Zulus do NOT mute the music.  Instead, it reduces the volume by 80%.  This may not sound all that significant.  But I found it to be such much more pleasant than the typical hard mute!  After a much longer than planned flight, I landed in Bay Minette, AL for lunch and a break and then went on to Houston.  Thankfully, the headwinds were  quite tame for the 2nd leg!  But since I was running, I ended up skipping Galveston.  Maybe I will stop there on the way home…  (Even better maybe I can ride a massive tailwind home!)

Cheers,
== T.J.==