Now THIS is a Bad Day

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A good entry in the “worst start for a day” contest.

Okay, so imagine this.

I’m up at my camper at Howard Mesa (read about it elsewhere in these blogs). I have a terrible night sleep, mostly because my allergies are so bad, I’m wheezing. When the alarm goes off at 5 AM, it actually wakes me. (I’m usually up before the alarm.)

Although I set the mouse trap the night before, no mouse.

I spend my usual hour getting ready with no major problems. In fact, everything is normal.

I go outside, take the tie-downs off my helicopter, check the oil, look under “the hood,” and hop in. When I turn the key, bzzzzzt. I get out and tap on the starter. I try again. Bzzzzt. I get out and spray contact cleaner on the electrical do-dads. I try again. Bzzzzt. Okay, I sit there with the master switch on and wait about a minute. I turn the key. The engine cranks. And cranks. And finally catches. But is it my imagination or is it louder than usual? And vibrating more than usual? The clutch light goes off and I wind it up to 75% RPM. That’s when I notice my manifold pressure is 18 inches. That’s the kind of power I need to hover when I’m flying solo, not warm up the engine. And when I apply a little carb heat, the RPM drops about 10%. That’s not right, either. Shit. I throttle down and pull the mixture. I stop the blades, tie them down, and get into the Jeep.

The Jeep starts right away. (That’s a good thing.) I zip out the front gate, stopping just long enough to open and close it, then head down the old state road. It’s 6:15 and I can still make it to work on time if I put the pedal to the metal. Two miles short of pavement, I hear a thump followed by a rhythmic hissing noise coming from the back right. I stop and get out for a look. The tire looks low. And lower. Shit. I hop in the Jeep and race toward pavement. I don’t want to change a flat tire in dust with my uniform on. But soon the tire is very flat and I know I have to either stop or destroy it. So I stop.

I try to use my cell phone to call work. There’s only one bar of battery power and a very weak signal. I don’t have work’s phone number programmed in. I call Mike in analog mode and leave a message for him to call work for me. The battery goes dead. The car charger is back in the camper (four miles up the dirt road) because I didn’t expect to take the Jeep.

I spread a rug I had in the back of the Jeep over the dust beside the tire. (The rug in the Jeep is part of a Girl Scout “be prepared” thing.) I have trouble finding pieces of the jack. A man and his wife, just leaving their house, stop to help me. (Thank heaven I made it past the last house.) The poor guy messes around in the dirt. His jack isn’t tall enough. I can’t find the missing pieces for mine. The high lift jack bolted to the back of the Jeep is obviously for show, because even after we get it off the bumper, it won’t work. I find the pieces for my jack. We change the tire. I thank them and go on my way.

I arrive at work 45 minutes late. I look at the Priority Schedule and discover that I’m the top priority pilot. Shit. I track down the lead pilot to see if that’s right. He tells me he switched me with Scott so I’m the last priority. I breathe a sigh of relief. I recheck the schedule and discover I have only a half hour to get my act together for my first flight.

After my first flight (which was fine, thank heaven), I’m called out to do some TOPS training. (TOPS stands for Tour Operators Program of Safety.) This is inadvertent IFR training and it requires me to put on a pair of doctored up “foggles,” which prevent me from seeing anything except the instruments — and those only if I hold my head at a terribly uncomfortable angle. I endure a half hour of flight time, chasing the instruments, being reminded that JFK, Jr. died because he couldn’t do what the instructor beside me wanted me to do. Of course, motion sickness started to set in. By the time I was allowed to see the world again, I felt pretty crappy.

The rest of the day wasn’t so bad. I flew a total of 3.5 hours in my ship and someone else’s. Someone at work had a car cell phone charger that fit my phone and volunteered to charge it for me. I dropped off the tire at the public garage in Grand Canyon Village and later discovered that they couldn’t fix it. I called Mike and asked him to bring a new tire with him. I bought lunch at Wendy’s and, while I was there, picked up a salad to bring home for dinner. I left the salad in the fridge at work. I picked up a pair of tickets for the IMAX movie for the people who helped me that morning and didn’t I have to pay for the tickets. (The uniform again.) Then I spent 45 minutes trying and finally succeeding in getting a gift certificate for those nice folks to have dinner after their movie. When I went to drop it off at their house, they weren’t home and I had to leave the envelope on their doorstep under a big dusty rock so it wouldn’t blow away.

I had to eat canned ravioli for dinner. (That chicken spinach salad would have been much better.)

Now I’m summarizing my day in this blog. I still don’t know what’s wrong with my helicopter; we’ll clean the plugs and try it again tomorrow. I just hope it doesn’t need a new engine. I just sent my last big bucks out to Oregon for its replacement.

Ah. That’s probably it. It knows it’s being replaced and is getting back at me.

[Note: It turns out that Three-Niner-Lima had a very stuck valve. My report of our road trip to rescue it can be found in my Pilot bLog .]

Another Birthday Comes and Goes

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How I spent my birthday this year.

Nothing terribly exciting to report.

I started the day at the airport, where I gave a helicopter ride to one of the SEAT pilots. The morning (at 7AM) was cool and the air was smooth. Door off, of course. I was low on fuel so we kept it short — only about 20 minutes. I flew him around Vulture Peak and town, then flew over Jim’s house. When we landed at the pumps, both needles were below E.

I took on 20 gallons and Mike and I flew up route 93, just south of the Burro Creek Bridge. Jim and Ray had been exploring up there and they’d found an old sheep ranch tucked away in a canyon, deserted. Jim described where it was and what it looked like to me, but did not give me GPS coordinates. (Jim is GPS challenged.) His descriptions of possible landing zones were completely useless. Trouble is, we found two places that could have been the place he described. And neither one had acceptable LZs nearby. I almost landed on top of a hill at one of them, but I didn’t like the look of the big rocks that would be beneath and around my skids. At the other one, I nearly landed in a corral, but with a lot of fuel and Mike on board and heat on its way, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to clear the fence to take off. And we weren’t sure if either place was the right one. Next time, I’ll let Jim fly and show me the place.

Our plans foiled, we decided to go to Skull Valley for breakfast. There’s a little cafe there that we’ve never tried. Jerry Kristoferson owns some land with a dirt strip nearby. It looked like the best place to land. A man and his son came out to make sure everything was alright. I guess they didn’t expect a helicopter to land on a dirt strip. It took us a while to figure out how to get to the cafe from the strip and we were a bit dismayed when we had to get through a locked gate. But we managed. Breakfast was good; we had chicken fried steak and eggs. The gravy was really stick-to-your-ribs. I didn’t need to eat for the rest of the day.

It was windy by the time we flew back to Wickenburg. I topped off the tanks, then wheeled the helicopter in to Ed for an oil change. He showed me the Champ, which JD had pretty much totaled at Eagle Roost a few weeks before. With all the work they’ll need to do on that thing, it’ll probably qualify as a homebuilt.

At the office, I took care of some e-mail and packed up my laptop to go up to the Grand Canyon. I also wrote the big check. That’s right. I finally placed an order for a Robinson R44 Raven II helicopter. I did a little wheeling and dealing on the phone and managed to swap the high skids and metallic paint for a pair of hardwired Bose Generation X headsets for the front seats. I haven’t lost my touch. Hillsboro Aviation gave me a smoking deal on the ship. I sent them a check for $25K (which took about a month to scrape together). If I’m lucky, I’ll see the ship in December. I have six months to come up with the down payment and arrange financing. Let’s hope interest rates don’t go up again and that I don’t have any trouble selling my apartment complex.

Bank, post office, supermarket. The usual errands. I bought some milk and other dairy products to bring to the camper with me. Then I went home and threw together my things for the trip to Howard Mesa. Mike took me to the airport where we pulled the helicopter out of Ed’s hangar and loaded it up. Mike watched when I started the engine (to make sure oil wouldn’t come spurting out). I sweated my brains out in the sun with the doors on, waiting for two other aircraft to get the heck out of my way. Then I took off, heading north.

It was still windy. Very windy. Fortunately, the wind was out of the south, blowing at about 25 to 30 knots. It was gusty, though, so I got bumped around a lot. When I climbed over the Weavers near Antelope Peak, turbulence hit very hard, reminding me just how tiny my helicopter is. But I kept a ground speed of at least 100 knots all the way up to Howard Mesa. The wind wasn’t quite as bad here. I landed, unloaded, made some dinner, and settled down to read and write.

Right now, I’m sitting on the sofa, listening to classic rock, sipping a glass of Australian Shiraz, writing this blog. It’s about 7 PM — that’s 12 hours after the start of my day. The sun’s still up. To the east, I can see the stream of smoke from the fire near Payson — I got a good look at the smoke plume most of the way up. The wind is carrying it far to the north; I bet I see it on the east side of the canyon when I fly tomorrow. To the west, there’s a small fire near the Grand Canyon. I wonder whether it’s close to my route and I hope they put it out soon.

Another quiet evening alone. Not a bad way to end a busy day.

On Accidents That Aren’t Accidents

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How I’m spared from being the victim of the government’s bureaucracy.

If you read my jumper story (in an earlier entry of this blog) and you know anything about the FAA and NTSB and the rules and regulations they operate under, you might be wondering why they hadn’t classified the event as an “accident.”

Unfortunately, they did.

If you search the NTSB’s Web site for accident reports, using the word “suicide” as a search word, you’ll find one case very similar to mine. In that case, the jumper went up with a CFI and dove out during a steep turn that he’d requested. Although the CFI was not at fault — heck, the passenger committed suicide! — the case was classified as an accident.

And my case was going the same way.

Papillon fought back. Not just for me, but for them, too. They didn’t want an accident on their record any more than I did. Although the event met the definition of an accident (which really needs to be revised, in my opinion), common sense says that the word “accident” does not apply to a suicide. There was nothing accidental about it. (The guy purposely undid his seatbelt, pushed his door open against a 100-knot wind, and jumped.) The trick was to get the NTSB to disregard their definition and classify this as something less damaging to the pilot’s or operator’s flight records.

It went all the way to Washington, involving people from the FAA, NTSB, Department of the Interior, and HAI. I even tried to get AOPA involved, but they lamely claimed that you couldn’t fight NTSB on its accident definition. (Good thing I didn’t pay for their legal services plan.) Someone must have talked sense to the bureaucrats, because the other night I got a voicemail message with the good news: they’d changed the classification from accident to something else. What that something else is is still a question. I’ll find out tomorrow.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s this: don’t let a passenger jump out of your helicopter. Not only is it a traumatic experience, but it results in a ton of paperwork.

Happy Birthday to Me

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I get another year older and think about my added experiences.

Tomorrow is my birthday.

I’d rather not say here how old I am. I will admit that I’m one of the oldest pilots at Papillon (although not one of the most experienced). And I’ll admit that among my circle of friends, I haven’t been the youngest in quite a while. And I’ll also admit that the signs of age are beginning to show in the way I look and feel.

But I’m not over the hill yet. And I certainly haven’t even reached the top of that hill. I don’t expect to do that until I’m in my 60s.

What has happened in the past year? Let’s review.

On this date last year, I was at Bar 10 Ranch on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, hanging around with the pilots and the folks who were preparing to take a trip down the Colorado River. I’d spent the morning at the bottom of the canyon, chatting with the river runners. I played pool in the afternoon, with pool cues so bad that I bought two new ones when I got home and immediately shipped them to Bar 10 as replacements.

PhotoI wrote a bunch of books, mostly revisions. Quicken 2004: The Official Guide, which I finished earlier in June, was published. That was followed by Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart Guide (expanded to 600+ pages!), Microsoft Excel 2003 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide, QuickBooks Pro 6 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide. As I write this, I’m finishing up Quicken 2005: The Official Guide and have two new titles and a revision under contract for the rest of the summer. Oh, yeah. I revised the Spreadsheet chapter for the latest edition (I’ve lost count) of The Macintosh Bible. The Panther book sold like crazy and continues to sell well, although returns from the Jaguar book are eating into royalties now.

I also wrote two 10 QuickStep Guides for David Lawrence. One is about writing a book proposal and the other is about the new features in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

I don’t think I wrote a single magazine article. I did, however, write a white paper for FileMaker, Inc. about using Excel with FileMaker Pro. They paid me a nice sum of money for the work. And I got to revise it for FileMaker Pro 7, too. (I really ought to finish that up.)

PhotoI bought a new car. It’s my midlife crisis car, a Honda S2000. Very fast. Very difficult to keep clean on the dusty roads where I live. In 10 months, I put only 4500 miles on it. Heck, this car has to last the rest of my life. I’ll drive the Jeep into the ground first. I sold my RC Helicopter, which I wasn’t flying. Heck, it’s easier to fly the real thing.

I flew my R22 all the way to Placerville, CA. I discovered, on arrival, that I’d forgotten to pay my insurance bill. I got that settled and flew home via the Owens Valley. I’ll never do THAT again.

I leased Tristan Charney’s R44 for the winter, using it to give short rides all over the desert. That convinced me to buy my own R44.

I got a job with Papillon Grand Canyon Airways, doing helicopter tours over the Grand Canyon. I learned a lot and I’m still learning a lot.

I gave up my contract as the Fuel Manager at Wickenburg Airport. Or at least tried to. I’m still on the hook until August. Am I going to party THAT DAY!

And now, as I sit in my sweltering office (the air conditioner must have turned off a little while ago), I’m trying to decide what to do for my birthday. I’m not coming up with too many ideas. On July 1, I have to report for duty at Papillon again, so I only have one day and I’d better not blow it.

Tonight, I think we’ll do a night flight to Falcon Field so Mike can buy me dinner.

Writer’s Block Sucks

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For the first time in my life, I suffer from a serious case of writer’s block.

Prolific. That’s the word that has often been applied to me. And so it should. After all, I’ve produced more than 55 books in 12 years. In one very busy year alone, I did 10 revisions.

But things just aren’t the same these days. Writing the books that pay the bills — computer how-to books about software like Quicken, Microsoft Word, and Mac OS X — has become real work for me. The kind of work I try to avoid doing because I simply don’t want to.

Writing Blog entries has become tough, too. I think of topics while I’m driving or showering — my two best times for thinking — and when I get in front of a computer, the words just won’t come. So I waste time surfing the ‘Net (a form of procrastination) or, worse yet, watching television.

But what’s really bothering me is my complete inability to write fiction. I’m working on a number of projects. Some of them have been in progress for years and I don’t expect to ever finish them. But one of them is something I want to finish, something I want to try to have published. I’m about four chapters into it and I’m at a complete standstill.

I’m not happy about that.

I try to force myself to write, to make personal deadlines for pages or words or chapters. But when the word processing screen is before me and the insertion point is blinking away at the start of a fresh line, I just can’t make the words come.

So I write blog entries (as I’m doing now) as a kind of consolation prize. I’m writing, aren’t I? That’s better than surfing or watching television.

I feel lost and frustrated. I have a number of other book ideas that I want to work on. They’re not fiction and I’m pretty sure I can sell them. They’ll have longer shelf lives than the computer books I usually write. But I can’t seem to get started on them.

And then there’s the 10 Quick Step Guides that I promised David Lawrence. He’s all ready to publish them. He has a willing audience. But I can’t seem to write them.

Writer’s block. That’s what it is. Like insomnia: you want to sleep but you can’t. You need to sleep but you can’t. I want to write. I need to write. But I can’t.

Let’s hope I get over this soon. I don’t know how long I can handle this lack of productivity.