Tyrel's Blog

Code, Flying, Tech, Automation

May 07, 2022

An Update On Flying

I took ten years to get my pilot's license. From March 17, 2010 to December 30, 2020. It was amazing. I now find myself a year and a half later from achieving my goal and I don't find myself interested enough right now to go flying. There's a gas crisis, there's a pandemic, there's a lot of political things going on, a war in Ukraine, that it kind of feels bad wasting hundreds of dollars just going sight seeing.

I just completed a ground school course for my Instrument Rating -- I still need to take the written test part. With that out of the way I can start actually flying with an instructor to get my instrument rating. One of the planes the club that I am a part of has is a Mooney M20J. This requires 250 hours of flight time, or 100 hours and an instrument rating. I'm at that annoying 145 hour mark that dissuades me from wasting 100 hours just to fly that plane, and wanting to get my instrument rating.

I left my previous job last December so I didn't have the excess money to fly for a month while job hunting, and well, habit becomes habit... I haven't flown since October! I'm definitely in a better place now, with a much nicer job and salary though. I'm hoping to maybe pick it back up again this fall. I wasn't pleased AT ALL (those who follow me on twitter will probably know this, online class is not the environment for me) with the ground school over Zoom, so I want to redo this by watching the Sporty's ground school. I need to put aside some time over the next coming weeks to actually sit down and watch it. Hopefully I can start flying with an instructor soon. I'm not looking forward to taking the written test, as I have to go visit a testing center at RDU airport - so there is that kind of delaying me too.

 · · ·  flying

Jan 09, 2022

Garage Door Opener

I bought a house on October 9, 2020. This house has a garage door, and like any normal person of course I had to automate it.

One of the first things I did when I moved into my house was research some automation. I initially bought a half dozen ESP8266 devices and tried to figure out what I could do with them. I found Home Assistant and set that up on my server computer, along with ZoneMinder for security cameras.

NodeMCU ESP8266 module

NodeMCU ESP8266 module

I knew I would need some sort of relay (domain purchased from is gone) and reed switches to trigger the door and sense its position, so I purchased some from the internet. But my friend Paul said all I needed was a MOSFET so I bought one of those too. I tried to figure out how to trigger the door with a mosfet, but I was never able to. I won't document those failures.

Magnetic Reed Switch

Magnetic Reed Switch

Home Assistant has a plugin called ESPHome where you can write yaml files to configure an esp8266 module. This then builds a binary which you need to flash onto the esp8266 at least once via usb. From then on you can then on you can upload from a web form and drop the bin file in manually, or just press the UPLOAD button from ESPHome. I set my relay up on pin 19/D1 for the digital pin, and 16/GND,10/3v3 for the power. The Reed switch I tossed on 15/D7 and 11/GND but that could have been anywhere. See Schematic below. It still doesn't have an enclosure.

Relay in blue, and wires going to the NodeMCU

Relay in blue, and wires going to the NodeMCU

Schematic

Schematic

With the relay triggering, I still had one problem - I'd trigger the door and it wouldn't do anything! Something else was a problem. The wiring for the garage door terminates in four screws, two of which are the door trigger. I tried poking it with a multimeter and having someone push the door button on the wall, but I was never successful that way, as any contact between the two poles would just open the door anyway.

After some unsuccessful thinking, I figured it was time to purchase an oscilloscope. I've always wanted one, in fact I bought an old Heathkit one once, but never got it working as I would have had to replace all the capacitors, and the insides is all perfboard - A NIGHTMARE.

I found this USB Logic Analyzer and Oscilloscope on amazon and figure I'd try it out. It came while my father was in town, so he was pretty interested in seeing it work as well. Of course I'm very fond of open source software so I downloaded PulseView and found out that the LHT00SU1 is a fx2lafw driver device. The interface to connect is really simple, you just look for your driver, and Scan for any usb devices that are using that driver and they show up to choose from.

I plugged the 1ACH and GND cables in and hooked them on the +/- wires where they attach to the door motor. Once you have a device connected, you then click Run on the top left, and trigger what ever mechanism (my garage door button) and see what happens.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw some movement on the A0 line!

Pulses of about 180ms and 140ms

Pulses of about 180ms and 140ms

I added some markers to figure out what I needed to imitate in ESPHome, and saw that it's about 150ms high with a 225ms low, then another 150ms high and then low again.

This looks like this in yaml:

switch:
 - platform: gpio
   pin: D1
   id: relay
 - platform: template
   name: "Garage Remote"
   icon: "mdi:gate"
   turn_on_action:
   - switch.turn_on: relay
   - delay: 150ms
   - switch.turn_off: relay
   - delay: 225ms
   - switch.turn_on: relay
   - delay: 150ms
   - switch.turn_off: relay

I'm pretty sure I jumped and screamed with excitement when it opened!

Once the door was opening and closing, I was able to add more yaml to set another binary sensor to show whether it was open or closed (from the reed sensor):

binary_sensor:
 - platform: gpio
   pin:
     number: D7
     inverted: true
     mode: INPUT_PULLUP
   name: "Garage Door Closed"

All together this is shown on my Home Assistant Lovelace dashboard using two cards, one that shows a closed door, and one with an open door (both actual pictures of the door!) with a button to open it. Once it opens or closes the other card switches into place, Home Assistant at least at the time didn't have good conditional cards like I wanted.

type: conditional
conditions:
  - entity: binary_sensor.garage_door_closed
    state: 'on'
card:
  type: picture-glance
  title: Garage (Closed)
  image: 'https://tyrel.dev/house/garage_door.jpeg'
  entities:
    - entity: switch.garage_remote
  hold_action:
    action: none
Closed door state and button

Closed door state and button

Happy with the state of my Garage Door opening button, I can now yell at my phone to open the garage door (it's a "secure" switch so it requires the phone to to be open before OK Google will trigger the door).

There's a couple more pictures in my Instagram post about it.

I know I could have bought a device to do this myself, but this is fully mine, my code, and my experiment with learning how to automate things at home, I gained way more out of this project than I did if I just bought a MyQ or what ever is popular these days.

Notes

This is no longer in service, as I replaced the door and have a Chamberlain MyQ system now. Less fun, but at least it's serviceable.

Nov 11, 2021

Postmortem of a fun couple bugs

Story at my previous job:

Tieg: Hey Tyrel, I can't run invoke sign 5555, can you help with this?

This is How my night started last night at 10pm. My coworker Tieg did some work on our CLI project and was trying to release the latest version. We use invoke to run our code signing and deployment scripts, so I thought it was just a quick "oh maybe I screwed up some python!" fix. It wasn't.

I spent from 10:30 until 1:30am this morning going through and looking into why Tieg wasn't able to sign the code. The first thing I did was re-run the build on CircleCI, which had the same error, so hey! at least it was reproducible. The problem was that in our Makefile scripts we run tidelift version > tidelift-cli.version and then upload that to our deployment directories, but this was failing for some reason. We let clients download this file to see what the latest version is and then our CLI tool has the ability to selfupdate (except on homebrew) to pull this latest version if you're outdated.

Once I knew what was failing, I was able to use CircleCI's ssh commands and log in, and see what happened, but I was getting some other errors. I was seeing some problems with dbus-launch so I promptly (mistakenly) yelled to the void on twitter about dubs-launch. Well would you know it, I may have mentioned before, but I work with Havoc Pennington.

Havoc Pennington: fortunately I wrote dbus-launch so may be able to tell you something, unfortunately it was like 15 years ago

Pumped about this new revelation, I started looking at our keychain dependency, because I thought the issue was there as that's the only thing that uses dbus on Linux. Then we decided (Havoc Pointed it out) that it was a red herring, and maybe the problem was elsewhere. I at least learned a bit about dbus and what it does, but not enough to really talk about it to any detail.

Would you know it, the problem was elsewhere. Tieg was running dtruss and saw that one time it was checking his /etc/hosts file when it was failing, and another time it was NOT, which was passing. Then pointed out a 50ms lookup to our download.tidelift.com host.

Tieg then found Issue 49517 this issue where someone mentions that Go 1.17.3 was failing them for net/http calls, but not the right way.

It turns out, that it wasn't the keyring stuff, it wasn't the technically the version calls that failed. What was happening is every command starts with a check to https://download.tidelift.com/cli/tidelift-cli.version which we then compare to the current running version, if it's different and outdated, we then say "you can run selfupdate!". What fails is that call to download.tidelift.com, because of compiling with go1.17.3 and a context canceled due to stream cleanup I guess?

Okay so we need to downgrade to Go 1.17.2 to fix this. Last night in my trying, I noticed that our CircleCI config was using circle/golang:1.16 as its docker image, which has been superseded by cimg/go:1.16.x style of images. But I ran into some problems with that while upgrading to cimg/go:1.17.x. The problem was due to the image having different permissions, so I couldn't write to the same directories that when Mike wrote our config.yml file, worked properly.

Tieg and I did a paired zoom chat and finished this up by cutting out all the testing/scanning stuff in our config files, and just getting down to the Build and Deploy steps. Found ANOTHER bug that Build seems to run as the circleci user, but Deploy was running as root. So in the build working_directory setting, using a ~/go/tidelift/cli path, worked. But when we restored the saved cache to Deploy, it still put it in /home/circle/go/tidelift/cli, but then the working_directory of ~/go/tidelift/cli was relative to /root/. What a nightmare!

All tildes expanded to /home/circleci/go/tidelift/cli set, Makefile hacks undone, (removing windows+darwin+arm64 builds from your scripts during testing makes things A LOT faster!) and PR Merged, we were ready to roll.

I merged the PR, we cut a new version of TideliftCLI 1.2.5, updated the changelog and signed sealed delivered a new version which uses Go 1.17.2, writes the proper tidelift-cli.version file in deployment steps, and we were ready to ROCK!

That was fun day. Now it's time to write some rspec tests.

 · · ·  Go  dbus  bugs

Nov 05, 2021

Finished my GitHub CLI tool

I never intended this to be a full fleshed CLI tool comparable to the likes of the real GitHub CLI. This was simply a way to refresh myself and have fun. I have accomplished this, and am now calling this "Feature Complete". You can play around with it yourself from the repository on gitlab.

TESTING

With that accomplished, I then added pytest-cov to my requirements.in and was able to leverage some coverage checks. I was about 30% with the latest changes (much higher than anticipated!) so I knew what I wanted to focus on next. The API seemed the easiest to test first again, so I changed around how I loaded my fixtures and made it pass in a name and open that file instead. In real code I would not have the function in both my test files, I would refactor it, but again, this is just a refresher, I'm lazy.

I decided earlier that I also wanted to catch HTTP 403 errors as I ran into a rate limit issue. Which, I assure you dear reader, was a thousand percent intentional so I would know what happens. Yeah, we'll go with that.

Py.Test has a context manager called pytest.raises and I was able to just with pytest.raises(httpx.HttpStatusError) and check that raise really easily.

The next bits of testing for the API were around the pagination, I faked two responses and needed to update my link header, checking the cases where there was NO link, was multiple pages, and with my shortcut return - in case the response was an object not a list. Pretty straight forward.

The GHub file tests were kind of annoying, I'm leveraging rich.table.Table so I haven't been able to find a nice "this will make a string for you" without just using rich's print function. I decided the easiest check was to see if the Table.Columns.Cells matched what I wanted, which felt a little off but it's fine.

The way I generated the table is by making a generator in a pretty ugly way and having a bunch of repo['column'], repo['column'] responses, rather than doing a dict comprehension and narrowing the keys down. If I ever come back to this, I MIGHT reassess that with a {k:v for k,v in repos if k in SELECTED_KEYS} and then yield a dictionary, but it's not worth the effort.

Overall I'd say this project was fun. It gave me a glimpse back into the Python world, and an excuse to write a couple blog posts. My next project is to get a Django site up and running again, so I can figure out how to debug my django-dbfilestorage.

Closing Thoughts

If I had to do this again, I would probably have tried some test driven development. I've tried in the past, but I don't work on a lot of greenfield projects. I tend to be the kind of engineer who jumps HEAD FIRST into code and then tests are an after thought.

I also kind of want to rewrite this in Go and Rust, two other languages I've been fond of lately, just to see how they'd compare in fun. I haven't done any API calls with Rust yet, only made a little Roguelike by following Herbert Wolverson's Hands-On-Rust book. The Tidelift CLI is all Go and a bazillion API calls (okay like ten) so that wouldn't be too hard to use like SPF13's Cobra CLI library and make a quick tool that way.

One fun thing I learned while moving things over to GitLab is that my user Tyrel is a super early adopter. I was in the first 36,000 people! I showed a screenshot of my user ID to my friend Sunanda at GitLab and we had fun finding that out.

 · · ·  python  cli

Nov 04, 2021

Python3 GitHub CLI tool as a refresher

It's no lie that I love terminals. I wish I could live on a terminal and never really need to see a GUI application again.

Last night I migrated a lot of my old code from one GitLab account to another (tyrelsouza to tyrel) in an effort to clean up some of my usernames spread across the world. While doing that I noticed my django-dbfilestorage Python module that has been sitting and rotting for three years. I played around a little bit in order to port it to Python 3.9, but I ran into some base64 errors. I tried a little bit but it was late and I couldn't figure it out. My resolve is that I have been away from Python for too long so the little things - that I knew and love - had fallen away. I mentioned this to my friend Alex and he said "make a barebones github cli (readonly?) with issue viewer, and stats display". I've embarked on a journey to refresh my Python well enough to repair DBFS.

Me: "okay python frioends, what should I make as a quick refresher into the Python world?" alex: "maybe: barebonx github cli (reasdonly?) with issue viewer and stats display"

I knew I wanted to use httpx as my network client library, it's new, fast, and I have a couple friends who work on it. I started with a barebones requirements.in file, tossed in invoke, pytest, and black. From there I used pip-compile to generate my requirements.txt - (a tip I picked up recently while adding Pip-Compile support to the Tidelift CLI) and I was good to go.

The docs for the GitHub API are pretty easy to read, so I knew all I really needed to do was set my Accept header to be Version3 and I could view the schema. With the schema saved to a .json file I then wrote a GHub class to pull this data down using httpx.client.Client.get, super simple! The only two endpoints I care about right now are the user and repos endpoints, so I made two get_ functions for each. After a little bit of work - which I won't bore you with the super intricate details - I have a functional cli.py file. For now, the only interaction is a propmt from rich for a username, and then you get a fancy table (also from rich) of the first page of results of repos, stargazer/watchers/forks counts, and a description.

Prompting for the username and showing my table of repositories.

Prompting for the username and showing my table of repositories.

It was a fun evening of learning what's changed in Python3 since I last touched it, especially as I've spent the majority of my career in Python2.7. Type annotations are super awesome. I'll probably pick it up again once I get some more free time later in the week. It's also nice blog fodder! I already have a million things I want to do next - pagination, caching, some more interaction.

Showing py.test running

Showing py.test running

I know the tool I'm writing is nothing special, especially with their own cli now, but I'm not looking at reinventing the wheel!

Check out the code so far on my GitLab (heh, ironic it's there).

Dependencies: httpx, pip-tools, black, invoke, pytest, pytest-httpx, rich.

 · · ·  python  cli

Oct 31, 2021

Hello, world!

This blog here I want to keep some permanent tech thoughts in more written form than my Wiki where I keep the majority of my written work. I do have a flight blog, which has a lot of customization for maps and such that I don't want on here.

I have revived some old blog posts from previous blogs, to give some life to this blog while I'm writing new articles.

Oct 17, 2021

Back Above Keene

Mom and I hugging in front of the right wing of N43337

Mom and I hugging in front of the right wing of N43337

It's my brother's wedding weekend and he asked me to take him and his new father-in-law flying. On October 16th I get to the airport, very well knowing that it's still too foggy for my 8am-10am flight that I was about to cancel in person. I still went in, because I haven't seen Beth in almost a year and wanted to say hi. We caught up, talked about how I've been going to Monadnock Aviation since I was in college - after my first flight on March 17, 2010! I called Levi and told him that we weren't flying, so he should just go finish getting ready for his wedding at 11:30.

The next day I had booked for my mother to go up the first time with me. We get to the airport at 9:55 and the FBO is locked up, Uhhhh. I email/text some people and no one knows how to get a hold of the desk attendant. We had apparently JUST missed David, one of the CFIs, who was getting into N44836 with a student I presume. So we waited a bit and it seems he was called away to do some fueling with the fuel truck. No fault of his at all, Sundays can get a little rough with only one person being at the FBOs desk.

We finally grab the book and keys and I go out and preflight. I'm in N43337 today, my favorite plane. I'm even wearing my "WARRIOR 337" shirt I got for soloing, for good luck! Preflight was easy as usual, once you've done it a hundred times in the same plane, you know what you're looking for from the checklists.

I waved to mom and Lauren to come over and we got in, I showed mom and Lauren how to set up the headphones and get into the back seat. Following a safety briefing we were off!

We taxied over from the Northwest ramp (The FBO area) to the East ramp and I did my run up there, the winds were 340° at 7kts gusting to 17, so the other planes were using runway 32. Waited around a bit for a radio check, the PTT button was sticky and no one was replying to my ask for radio checks, even though there were a few planes around, oh well.

We took off on runway 32 after waiting in line (it was busy today, wow!) and I did a lap around the pattern. It was not clean, I haven't flown in just over two months, and we had the added weight of a back passenger, so I was a little nervous the first pattern loop. But I will always do one pattern loop with a new passenger - just to give them a chance to bail out!

I'm not fond of runway 32, it has a high hill over Marcy Hill in Swanzey, NH and it always throws me off (probably because I have like 300 landings on runway 02 and maybe 15 on runway 32). The landing was fine, Lauren was taking pictures from the back and my mom said it was "wicked smooth, and you barely even felt the tires hit, I thought it was great, especially with the wind and everything" which as a first time passenger in a "oh my god I didn't know it was quite this small" airplane, I feel good about!

We then taxied back to 32, and took off again, this time it was a west departure out to Spofford Lake and over my mom's house in Chesterfield. I probably should have headed to Brattleboro first after Spofford. Had I done this, we would have been in position to fly Brattleboro, VT north to Putney, VT west of the Connecticut River and my mom would have gotten a MUCH nicer view of her house. Instead we flew over the lake and through a little valley over Westmoreland and went south along the river.

At one point I saw a dark cloud above and said "Okay we're about to go under a dark cloud, I'll try to avoid it but it might get turbulent", so mom and Lauren would know to hold on and probably 10 seconds later the plane went "woomp" down a bit because of turbulence - so they were prepared. After that small cloud we found a tiny patch of clean air and I turned to the right a little bit above Exit 3 and headed north again towards moms house, staying a little bit west of the river. I paralleled I91 again for a minute or two and then we got in line that I could fly close enough to mom's house that she could see it.

After that fun bit we headed back, directly over Spofford Lake for some more sights, and onward to KEEN.

We flew over Yale Forest, and I saw a cool cliff face I had never seen before - as we were entering RWY32 on a 45° entry. Entered the pattern and found myself VERY high (900msl at at 488msl airport) on final, on a 4000' runway with a displaced threshold so I executed a go around there. I probably could have made it, but with the wind and avoiding Marcy Hill, I figure it's always safe to Go Around.

The next loop I had my sight pictures again at runway 32 and we landed, rolled out to Taxiway Sierra and parked the plane!

Mom said it was fun!

Back of my head while turning a bit

Back of my head while turning a bit

Cloudy and Sunny View off the right wing. Monadnock in the distance.

Cloudy and Sunny View off the right wing. Monadnock in the distance.

Turning over route 9 near Home Depot and Hannaford

Turning over route 9 near Home Depot and Hannaford

Cockpit view, a mile out from runway 32/14 with the runway in sight.

Cockpit view, a mile out from runway 32/14 with the runway in sight.

Cockpit view, a 1/4 mile from runway 32/14 with the runway in sight.

Cockpit view, a 1/4 mile from runway 32/14 with the runway in sight.

Looking off the left wing at mount Monadnock.

Looking off the left wing at mount Monadnock.

Just pretty sky views, out the right window above the right wing at the sun and clouds.

Just pretty sky views, out the right window above the right wing at the sun and clouds.

Three degree turn above moms house.

Three degree turn above moms house.

 · · ·  flying

Aug 08, 2021

Two flights and some nice weather

The other day there was a call to action on the Wings of Carolina slack. "Is anyone able to help this pilot get one of our planes back?" Seems this newly licensed pilot, (Congrats!) passed his check ride on Friday and the weather was not great so had to leave N69012 at Asheboro. I said I would be glad to help out if the IFR weather cleared by 9am, I could give him a ride over in N8080A.

I booked a 9am-12pm block, and got to the airport at 8:55am. Grabbed the 80A book book and went to the lounge to check weather. Luckily the fog had burned off and the skies were clear! The pilot met me in the lounge, I wrapped up the weather briefing (nothing of note) and we went out to preflight. The left red nav light was out, but that's only required at night, confirmed by asking the other pilot. The fuel truck came and filled us up to the tabs (34 gallons) and we were off.

My flight plans were from KTTA -> KHBI (drop off pilot) -> KEXX then back to KTTA. Just under a 2 hour round trip, which took a bit longer because when we got to the hold short line for RWY03, I realized my iPad wasn't connected to the GPS, so we fiddled with it for a few (no one was behind us, but oof Hobbs running) and couldn't get it working. That's fine, we had our GPS and the pilot knew what KHBI looked like form the air. We took off, departed the pattern to the north, got to a little bit higher then turned west.

The pilot was super helpful, having a copilot be able to put in the radios for Siler City as we passed, and the AWOS/CTAFs in for KHBI was actually a really big load off my plate. It's the little things! Flew at about 3000ft over to KHBI because It was only a 20 minute flight so I stayed low. We get to the airport and he lets me know that RWY24 has a papi, so we chose that runway to land on. Land pretty okay, didn't grease it, but it is what it is. Taxi over and get him to his plane. I shut down so he can get out safely, then realize after he got out, I CAN'T OPEN THE DOOR. I had to yell him over to make sure I could open the door again, the bottom latch was stuck! I recorded a video, then instagrammed a fellow pilot who is famous in his circles for getting stuck in his plane and having to call someone down in the area who landed and helped him out. Told him he's not alone, hah.

Anyway, I was able to open the door so I felt like it was okay if I crashed and had to open the door myself. I turn the plane back on, plug in my Stratux for ADSB on iPad, and get ready to take off. I taxi over to the runway (took 24 again out) and hold short for a taildragger and another plane to land. I then take off and woahh there were like 80 birds at the end of the runway at like 300ft up. Luckily I was able to scare them and flew above them, then departed to the right (west) and headed to KEXX. Luckily thr CTAF is the same for both (122.8) so I was able to hear the traffic without fiddling with the radio. I set the AWOS beforehand, so I checked that when I was close, and still winds calm, not bad.

Got 10 miles, out, announced position, 5 miles out, announced I was entering the downwind at a 45. I was on the down when a pilot to my right asked if I was on base, kind of weirded out because I wasn't so I was vigilant and said I was on downwind (again…). Then called base, and final and landed. Final was neat at Davidson county, had to fly over a factory, which was kind of cool.

Landed, taxied back to the runway and lined up and waited again. The taildragger had followed me! Saw him land as I was at the hold short line. Waited for a jet to land and then off I went! I climbed out, departed to the east, and climbed up to 5500msl. Held 5500 very well this trip, the air was super calm and I'm getting better at electric trim, much easier than just wheel trim.

At one point I turn the auto pilot on, with it set to 109° and 5500msl, but for some reason it made me descend and banked me left 45° and I wasn't liking that so I disengaged it. I climbed up back to 5500' for the rest of my trip. By the time I was back to KTTA, the winds still favored RWY03, so I joined the pattern on a 45° entry, and landed smoothly. At around 3000msl descending near Ashbury it was a bit bumpy, but that's the only turbulence I experienced. Such a nice morning.

Well I get back to the airport and land and shut down… I'm stuck again! Door won't open. There was no one around I could yell to, so I called the front desk, no answer. I tried again, using different pressures and trying to see if there was like a little latch that didn't hook. I fiddled for a few minutes and was able to get out, I guess I got it just right.

I then cover the plane, and squawk the door not opening, and posted the video on slack. The next pilot replied to my slack post later that evening that he had no problems. Maybe I'm just door cursed.

Lauren and I then went to lunch before my next flight where I was taking her up in a Cessna 152 (N89333). Well we do the preflight dance, go taxi and take off. At like 300' above the runway, the damn pilot side door opens up! It's fine but I don't want to worry my wife, on her second flight with me ever, so I have her hold the door closed while I go finish the pattern loop (I was doing that anyway). Well MORE fun happened the pilots PTT(push to talk) button got stuck off, so I had to use her microphone to talk, (I could have just switched the plugs, but we were in the base turn). I kind of overshot base so had to over correct a little bit, but we landed okay, taxied back and agreed we were discontinuing our flight. We could have gone back up and carried on - we had the allotted time - but you know what? The rest of the flight wasn't in the cards.

Video of me trapped in The Warrior - https://youtu.be/0uAL30nCuYE.

Selfie in the cockpit, me wearing a blue shirt.

Cockpit Selfie

A look at the ground behind the left wing

A look at the ground behind the left wing

Looking at a runway in the distance, not sure which one now.

Looking at a runway in the distance, not sure which one now.

Looking in front of the left wing, at a highway, the sky is hazy

Looking in front of the left wing, at a highway, the sky is hazy

Hazy sky with a runway a couple miles away.

Hazy sky with a runway a couple miles away.

 · · ·  flying

Aug 04, 2021

Cessna 152 Checkout

Today I got checked out in a Cessna 152. It was really my first time (besides spin training) flying high wing planes and I was a little nervous. We had a pretty standard pre-flight check, took a lot longer than just a "I'm out here to go on a flight", again because Luke was explaining things to me. There's a lot of differences like with the warrior, all the flaps are on hinges, but in the Cessna, there's one pulley hinge and some rollers you need to check, not just actuation hinges. Pointed out how the landing gear is different, there's plastic fairings that we need to repair quite frequently, and there are no dampeners.

After the pre-flight we took off, Vr is pretty low, at 50 so the plane just wanted to float almost immediately in my opinion. It was also a cooler day outside than my most recent few flights, so that helped too. We took off, headed north to the practice area. I get up to 3000' msl and we level off, trim for cruise flight and lean the engine. This plane also has a vernier mixture control, so it's nice to be able to dial in the mixture, even if there's no on screen display of the gallons per hour like the M20J. There were some clouds at 4000' I think, but they were tiny, and we figured we didn't need to go above them, so we stuck at the 3000' level.

This is where Luke says to just take the plane and do tiny things with it, like turn it uncoordinated, see how much rudder I'd need to do a turn. So I did that for a bit, did a standard rate turn to the left, and we switched to some 30° turns, leveled off then did two 45° turns, back to back. I hit my prop wash at the end of the second one, that always feels great. The first few turns were gross, this plane has old cables for the ailerons, so there's a lot of play when turning, so it took a few tries to be able to maintain altitude and find that comfortable dead spot with cable tension. The last plane (M20J) I flew, everything was much stiffer for turning.

After the few turns, he said "oh no, there goes your engine" and throttled to idle. I looked around for a place to land, and didn't see one immediately. One thing I could have done better is look out the back window, because the 152 actually has one! Well I found a spot to "crash land" so I brought the plane to Vglide (60) and slowly descended towards the place to land. I guess in my "everything is okay" did the A B part of the emergency checklist, but I didn't do ABCDE, so we did it again. This time I:

  • A- pitched for best airspeed (60kts)
  • B- found the best place to land
  • C - Checklist, pretended to check fuel, master, key, primer, etc.
  • D - pretended to switch to 121.5mHz and declare an emergency
  • E- executed the landing, and prepared to exit (opened the door, turn off mixture, etc so the plane doesn't blow up and I can get out)

and found a cute little field to land in. That was successful so we headed back towards the airport.

At the airport everything was standard traffic pattern. There were three of us in the pattern, one tail dragger that was always just behind us, really friendly guy who liked chatting on frequency, and one low wing - maybe a warrior? - I can't remember. Well I did six landings. One normal landing, three short field (the last one I did great, landed on numbers and was done before A2 taxiway entrance) and then a few more normal. Luke said that I was death gripping the yoke, so he did one lap around the airport - where he trimmed and only used his two fingers lightly to move the yoke. Watching him do that, I copied and did a lap around the pattern the same, much easier this time.

We then landed, taxied back and went to park. Parking is WILD, you sit on the tail and then back then walk backwards to get the plane in place. I guess when your plane's max ramp weight is 1675lbs, that's easy to do! Three times as much as my motorcycle… After we chatted, he said he feels safe with me flying it, and I agreed. "I feel safe, but not super comfortable, but that only comes with time so I feel safe to take it up and get more comfortable".

I then had to fill out the quiz, and scanned it, then emailed it to him.

Picture of me in the cockpit being a weirdo with a big smirky mouth

Picture of me in the cockpit being a weirdo with a big smirky mouth

The cockpit of a Cessna 152, yokes, gauges, etc. Outside you can see other planes on the ramp.

The cockpit of a Cessna 152, yokes, gauges, etc. Outside you can see other planes on the ramp.

Just a 3d diagram of the flight, not sure what I was focusing on here.

Just a 3d diagram of the flight, not sure what I was focusing on here.

Just a 3d diagram of the flight, not sure what I was focusing on here.

Just a 3d diagram of the flight, not sure what I was focusing on here.

 · · ·  flying

Jul 25, 2021

Mooney M20J checkout... Sort of

Tuesday night I emailed my instructor saying "Hey the Mooney is available Sunday afternoon, could we start getting me ready for a checkout", and he said "sure, book it", so I did. Then last night I started reading through the POH. There's a lot of neat differences. Cowl flaps, retractable landing gear, constant speed prop. I definitely wanted to start getting my complex rating. I read through that POH, and look up a lot of videos on how to work the prop. I'm used to just throttle and mixture in the Warriors, but this has throttle, manifold pressure, and mixture levers. I learned the cool parts about how the oil pressure, and springs set the propeller angle.

So I get to the airport at about 1pm, and we start talking about what I know. I explained how the undercarriage stuff works, under 132kias for lowering, and under 107kias for raising, and learned from Luke that there's two different speeds because of gravity and fighting gravity. We spend the first hour talking about why you need different manifold pressures. Then we head out to the plane and do a very comprehensive pre-check. I learned that the M20J doesn't have a trim tab, the whole tail raises and lowers on a pivot, NEAT! The flaps are suuuper wide and the ailerons are kind of thin. The landing gear was an interesting inspection because of how the poles and hinges open/close the gear.

After the pre-flight we get flying. Things are pretty similar on the ground, as the propeller lever is pushed all the way forward, and the throttle is the main control. Luke points out that the propeller is rounded, so there's an RPM range that you shouldn't idle in, (1550-1950ish), vs the squarer prop that the other Mooney had.

We take off, and one thing I check different is if I have available runway left, and when I don't, I can raise the landing gear at that point. It was pretty cloudy, so we had to climb up to 5500′, and eventually we hit 7000′ to jump over some clouds. First time really being above clouds this much, for the first hour we were over them. For the climb out he told me to set the plane to "twenty-five squared" - 2500rpm and 25in/hg. And every so often I would need to add more manifold pressure because of the atmosphere lapse rate while climbing.

We got up to 6000′ ish, initially and then did some straight and level flying, super smooth above the clouds today. Then we did some 30 degree turns, did a few of those okay. When we did 45 degree turns, my first left one was kind of bad - lost a lot of altitude. One to the right was okay, and then the third one to the left I kept my altitude right.

After turns we did slow flight, and it's pretty much the same controls. The power off stalls I was I guess putting in unconscious left aileron, because we kept starting to spin a little to the left, next time I fly I definitely need to practice that more.

Well we ended up going pretty far east, at one point we were like 15 miles southeast of RDU, felt uncomfortable not talking to anyone there, but I guess it was out of the normal flight path for the jets so we were fine.We ended up needing to head back to the airport for 4pm, so I put the plane in a 750fpm descent while heading back, at one point I was able to punch through the clouds at around 2500′, and we joined the traffic pattern on the 45 for downwind on 21. I landed VERY well he said. He said that people transitioning from Warriors to Mooneys land hard because the M20J is a lot lower of a plane than the PA28, so they flare early and land hard. I didn't flare early both times we landed so he said we could just end for the day. I always love when instructors say I do well with landings!

We then get back to the airport to do some payments and find out "Oh, Tyrel needs 250 hours without an instrument rating, to fly the M20J, or 150 with an instrument rating." So Oops, I guess it'll be a while before I can rent this, and get an actual check out.

 · · ·  flying
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