The T3 Helistop at PHX

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I show a fellow pilot my favorite LZ at Sky Harbor.

It’s a little-known fact that there’s a helistop atop the Terminal 3 parking structure at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. This is where I pick up passengers for Flying M Air‘s multi-day excursions. It’s extremely convenient, not only for my passengers, but for me.

PHX Helistop
This diagram of the Terminal 3 Helistop refers to the old tower, but it no longer exists. This is part of the Sharp Echo letter of agreement for helicopter pilots operating at Sky Harbor.

I’ve been landing at the helistop since it reopened in 2007. It’s been there for a long time but was closed while they built the new FAA tower beside it. When the new tower opened and they took down the old one, they opened the helistop back up.

I blogged about landing there at night. I also put a video of a daytime landing there on this site and Viddler.

When I say few people know about the helistop, I’m not kidding. The last passengers I picked up there said they’d asked at least six people at Sky Harbor how to get to it and every one of them had told them it didn’t exist. Then they followed my instructions to go to the top of the Terminal 3 parking structure and there it was. Just as I’d told them.

I don’t think too may pilots know about it either — and that’s okay with me. There’s only room for one helicopter up there and if someone’s already there when I need to use it, I’m out of luck until it leaves. It’s not a parking spot — it’s a landing spot. That means that although I can land there, I can’t leave the helicopter there for any extended length of time. I also can’t just walk away. That’s why it’s up to my passengers to find it without my help. I simply can’t leave the helicopter to find them.

My friend, Don, who also flies an R44 Raven II, often needs to pick up his wife and other family members at Sky Harbor. When I mentioned the helistop to him, he wanted to know more. So I explained the intricacies of flying into Phoenix Class Bravo airspace in a helicopter, which is much easier than you might think. I also told him how I make my approach to and departure from the helistop. The conversation ended with me promising to fly with him for a landing there.

Don't Helicopter at PHX
Are we a bunch of tourists or what? Mike jumped out to take this shot of us when we landed on the helistop. Don’s flying; I’m in the front passenger seat.

We made the flight yesterday afternoon. My husband, Mike, came along for the ride, too. I recommended to Don that he not do the trip with a heavy load. The landing is a confined space pinnacle — yes, there are such things — so it needs to be approached with care. As shown in the diagram above, there’s only one way in and out. A heavy load on a hot day — or with a tailwind — could make for a dangerous situation.

Anyway, the flight was uneventful. The airspace was pretty quiet. Just one Southwest Airlines 737 landing as we came in; Don slipped in behind him. He came into the pad a bit lower than I would have, but the landing was smooth. Mike hopped out to take this photo. Then he climbed back in, Don called the tower again, and we took off right behind the next landing 737.

I just hope that Don’s helicopter isn’t sitting on that helistop the next time I need to land there.

The Junk Drawer, Revisited

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Not so junky now.

Junk Drawer ReorganizedIf you saw my office, you’d never believe that I truly like to be organized. I hate clutter, I hate piles of junk lying around, I hate not being able to find things.

So it was with great pleasure that I cleaned out my junk drawer the other day and reorganized it with some dividers. The photo here shows the results.

I don’t have time to blog about this in detail right now. And let’s face it — who really wants to read about it? The picture shows all. We made the dividers with a divider kit I bought at The Container Store in Scottsdale the other day.

Now if only I could reorganize my office!

Helicopters 101: Weight

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Gross Weight ≠ Center of Gravity.

Articles in the Helicopters 101 series:
– Flight Planning
– CG
– Weight
– Hover Charts
– Ground School

I was recently pointed to a blog post by Tim McAdams, AOPA’s helicopter blogger. [A side note here: It’s nice to see that AOPA has finally realized that the first “A” in its name, which stands for aircraft (not airplane), does indeed include helicopters. I’ve been waiting more than 10 years for this. But I digress.] The post, titled simply “Gross weight,” is a brief discussion of helicopter gross weight and an accident caused by a pilot attempting to fly over max gross weight.

Commenters Miss the Point

Many of the comments following this post mentioned Center of Gravity (CG) or Weight and Balance (W&B). At least two commenters offered links to their Excel worksheets to perform weight and balance calculations for the aircraft they fly. (I also have my own Excel solution for my R44.)

It seemed to me, however, that they were missing the point. The article wasn’t about CG or W&B. It was about weight. You can do the calculations in your head for that:

+ Helicopter Empty Weight (including oil and unusable fuel)
+ Weight of Fuel On Board
+ Weight of pilot and Passengers
—————————————————
= Gross Weight

Take my helicopter, for example. Using the above formula for a flight with half tanks of fuel, me, and two people weighing 150 and 200 pounds on board, the formula would be something like this:

+ 1500
+ 150 (that’s 6 lbs x 25 gallons)
+ 500
————————–
= 2150

Because the max gross weight of my aircraft is 2500 pounds and this total is less, I’d be flying within max gross weight limitations. This does not mean I’m within CG — that’s a different calculation.

This is not higher math. A pilot should be able to make this calculation in a matter of seconds without a piece of paper — and certainly without a computer.

In my opinion, this should be the first calculation a pilot makes when planning a flight. If you’re over max gross weight, don’t even bother doing a W&B calculation. You’ll need to offload some of that weight — fuel, a passenger, cargo — before you can even consider whether it’s loaded within CG limitations.

Max Gross Weight

Although the blog post was titled simply “Gross Weight,” what McAdams was really talking about was max gross weight — the maximum allowable aircraft total weight on takeoff. The two stories he related in his post dealt with aircraft that were likely over max gross weight on takeoff. One flight was uneventful; the other ended in a crash.

There are two aspects to a helicopter’s max gross weight:

  • IGE Hover

    IGE Hover Chart for a Robinson R44 Raven II. According to this, a helicopter may be able to hover in ground effect at max gross weight at 6,000 feet when it’s 95°F out.

    There’s the max gross weight for the aircraft, which is something you should never — in a perfect world, anyway — exceed. The manufacturer has created this limitation for a variety reasons and the ability to lift off or hover may not be one of them. For example, it could be structural. Would you want to fly a helicopter over max gross weight if you knew that every time you did, you could be putting additional stress on the airframe/blades/etc. that could lead to a failure in a future flight? I wouldn’t.

  • There’s a practical max gross weight as it applies to high density altitude. Look at the performance charts. Can you maintain an IGE hover at max gross weight when the LZ is at 6,000 feet and it’s 95°F out? I do a lot of high density altitude flying in Arizona and I’ve experienced a wide range of weight and density altitude situations. I can assure you, max gross weight might be a limiting factor at sea level, but it’s an optimistic number at high DA.

I flew at the Grand Canyon one season and got to know the operation very well. Some helicopters simply weren’t as powerful as others — even within the same make and model. For example, on a hot day, if I were flying a certain ship, I wouldn’t take a load that put me within 200 lbs of max gross weight. To the company’s credit, they knew which ships were the “dogs” and tended to load them lighter. I distinctly remember being asked over the radio while waiting on the pad if I could take 4000 pounds in the ship I was flying that day — one of the dogs. It was over 90°F and the ship had been flying sluggishly since noon. When I said no, they shuffled the passengers around to lighten my load.

It’s Up to the Pilot

McAdams’ first story explains how one pilot refused to take a heavy load while another stepped right up and took over. He quotes a non-pilot bystander as saying “Now there goes a real pilot.”

This is the attitude that’ll shorten a pilot’s career — and possibly his life. The attitude that says, “I’m a better pilot because I can handle the heavy load that this wimpy pilot won’t try.” The attitude that ignores aircraft limitations and flying conditions just to prove you can do something that a wiser pilot won’t attempt.

You know about old pilots and bold pilots, right?

[Another side note: When I flew at the Canyon, late in the season, the last fight of the day for one of the routes had the pilot facing right into the low-lying sun at a critical point in the flight: just as we were attempting to climb up the side of a canyon wall in a relatively confined area to fly over the North Rim. My eyes are extremely light sensitive — which is why I just about always wear sunglasses outside — and I simply could not see in front of me when I flew this part of the route at this time of day. So I asked the lead pilot to not put me on that route for the last flight of the day. Although he was obviously pissed off, he complied –probably because there were at least eight other pilots on duty who simply didn’t care and would do the flight without question. My point: don’t fly beyond your comfort level.]

Real Weights

McAdams’ second story, about the crashed heavy helicopter, relates how the pilot estimated weights: 150 lbs per passenger. Ah, if only our passengers were that light!

The FAA’s estimate is closer to 190 per person average.

In a perfect world, we’d be able to weigh every single passenger, fully dressed and holding their carry-on things, moments before the flight. Those weights would be used in our calculation. This is exactly what they did where I worked at the Grand Canyon, so they never loaded a ship over max gross weight and always had perfectly accurate numbers for CG calculations.

Nowadays, most of my flights are booked by phone and I have to trust passengers to give me accurate weights when they book. But I don’t. I add 10 pounds to each person. If the caller is estimating the weight of another passenger, I add 20 pounds. It’s better to overestimate the weight than underestimate it.

Center of Gravity

One more thing: being out of CG and being over max gross weight are two separate things. While you can be in both conditions, you can also be in either condition. This means that you can be within max gross weight limitations but still be out of CG.

But I’ll save a discussion of that for another post.

The Storm

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Frightening at night.

Arizona is known primarily for one thing: its brutally hot summers. To be fair, it’s only 110°F + for a few months and only in the lower elevations of the state. The rest of the state has much milder weather — at least in the summer. In the winter, places like Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon can get the same kinds of winter storms that caused me to flee the New York metro area years ago.

Our house in Wickenburg is at a slightly higher elevation than Phoenix: 2200 feet vs. 1000 feet in the Valley. Because of this, we get just about the same weather as Phoenix, although we tend to run 5°F cooler year-round. (This is one of the reasons I escape to northern Arizona or Washington State every summer.)

The autumn, winter, and spring weather, in general, is a monotony of perfectly clear sunny days. In the height of winter, nighttime temperatures might dip to below freezing, but it general climbs back up to the 60s or even 70s once the sun rises high into the cloudless sky. Rain is a welcome treat. Storms are a rarity.

We had a storm yesterday, however. A low came in from the Pacific coast, dragging along tons of moisture as it moved in from the southwest. We had low clouds all day long — it was one of the 10 or so days each year when it’s impossible to fly VFR. The rain came and went — a good, soaking rain that the desert really needs. The radar showed various shades of green throughout our area, with pink and blue (icy mix and snow) in higher elevations just 10 miles north.

It got dark and the rain continued into the night. Then the wind started. The weather forecast warned of a Wind Advisory with winds gusting as high as 58 mph throughout the area. It even suggested that vehicles stay off of I-10, which runs from the Los Angeles area through Phoenix and then south to Tucson before turning east again toward New Mexico.

I was alone at home last night with Jack the Dog and Alex the Bird. Jack wanted no part of the outdoors yesterday and it was tough just getting him out there long enough to do his business. We closed up the house around 7 PM, shutting off the lights downstairs so Alex could sleep. I watched a movie on our DVR while the wind started to whip up around the house. By the time I climbed into bed to read, the storm was in full swing.

It was the sound of the wind that prompted me to write this. I want to remember, in the future, how it sounded, so I figured I’d write it down in my journal — after all, that’s what this blog really is.

The wind had an otherworldly sound. It was the low frequency moan of a male voice, almost ghostly, rising and falling in pitch as as the wind’s intensity rose and fell. Rain pelted the flat roof and big windows. All this noise was accompanied by the rattling of the french doors that lead from our bedroom to upstairs patio and the pulsating of the window panes. More than once, I got up to check the doors to make sure they wouldn’t suddenly blow open.

Sometimes I heard a deep rumbling sound off in the distance. I’ve read time and time again that tornadoes sound like freight trains. I wondered whether there was any danger of that. Nothing in the forecast; I told myself not to worry.

Occasionally, the house shook on its foundation. It made me wonder what the wind speed really was. I dialed up the AWOS for Wickenburg Municipal Airport (E25) and listened to the automatically generated recording. Winds from 220 at 26 gusting to 39. I thought about how hurricane force winds would sound and feel against the house. I resolved yet again not to move into an area likely to get hurricanes or tornadoes.

I grew tired of reading and turned out the light. But I lay awake for a long time, listening to the sounds around me, comforted by the steady drone of the heat pump keeping the upstairs warm until its set-back time at 11 PM. Just as I was thinking about how unusual it was that we hadn’t lost power, the power failed. The heat-pump went quiet and the ambient light from my neighbor’s yard went dark. Now the only thing to hear and feel was the wind and the vibrations on the house.

I fell asleep a while later and slept remarkably well until 4 or 5 am. I woke suddenly and looked out the bedroom door toward the big window facing southeast. A bright splash of moonlight illuminated the shelves and floor there. The storm had cleared out. The waning moon, approaching its last quarter, was shining like a beacon over the desert.

Outside, the wind still howled. I fell back to sleep.

I Don’t Care How Many Return Address Labels You Send Me

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I still won’t donate to your religion-based charity.

Christmas LabelsThis year, I received a bumper crop of pre-printed return address labels. I got some with autumn colors and decorations (leaves and pumpkins), some with Thanksgiving themes (turkeys and cornucopias), and plenty with Christmas themes (Christmas trees, snowmen, candy canes, and wreaths). I kept them all. After all, I still do send out the occasional piece of mail, and it’s nice to have a colorful return address label to put on it.

I also got a bunch of religious-themed ones (crosses, Mary, baby Jesus). I threw those away. I’m not a religious person and certainly don’t want anyone to think I am.

Of course, all of these return address labels came with a pre-addressed return envelope and donation form. I threw those away, too.

Religious-themed or not, every single return address label I received as a “gift” was from a religious charity. If I’m not a religious person, why would I donate money to a religious charity? There are so many other non-religious charities that are just as noble — if not more so — than ones waving a religious banner.

I have Covenant House to thank for all of these labels. Last year, at the request of an author who had given me an autographed copy of his book, I made a $20 donation to his pet charity. It wasn’t until after I made the donation that I realized what the charity was all about. Yes, they do help battered women and children, etc. But they do so in their special Christian way. That way obviously includes using a direct mailing campaign to nag the hell out of anyone who has ever donated a dime so they keep sending money. I get at least one mailer a month from them, despite multiple requests to get off their list. That way also includes selling my name and address to all the other religious charities they know so they can pester me as well.

Of course, they do send those useful labels, so it isn’t all bad.

I believe that many people donate when they receive these “gifts” because they feel guilty if they don’t. Like God is going to strike them dead or sick or something. Or they’ll just get bad karma.

But the way I see it, a “gift” is a gift. It doesn’t require anything in return. I didn’t ask them to send me these labels. I don’t really need them. Why should I pay for them?

Think of it this way: If someone were to park a new car on your driveway and then ring your doorbell, hand you the keys and a clean title, and ask you for $25,000, would you pay him? Other than the perceived value, how are the labels any different?

And wouldn’t it be wasteful to throw all those pretty labels away?