I Took A Mooney to the Backcountry: Storms, Mountains, and Stereotypical Cirrus Pilots (Part 2)

hello everyone welcome back to average aviator i'm travis and this video is the second episode in a series that i'm doing on an epic journey that i took from western pennsylvania to the idaho backcountry [Music] now if you haven't seen the previous episode you can check that out in the link in the description below but as a quick recap on the first leg of the trip i had a plethora of maintenance issues some fairly simple and some almost catastrophic but it took me about a week to get those all resolved and now i am in the beautiful early mornings of dayton ohio trying to head as far west as i possibly can but the faith in my airplane is rather low though there were many places that i had considered as potential destinations i had narrowed it down to just three areas i really wanted to hit on the trip yellowstone national park johnson creek idaho and glacier national park yellowstone national park is the closest out of those three so that was goal number one i knew i couldn't make it in one day even if everything went perfect so i just figured i would try to get as close as i could so i was just an average east coast pilot in the most terrain that i had ever dealt with was the 3 000 foot ridges in the middle of pennsylvania and some 5 000 foot peaks in upstate new york but besides that density altitude and mountain wave turbulence are really concepts that i had never dealt with before i had heard that flying out west was a whole different animal and boy does this trip prove that right the first stop that i had planned was washington iowa because it was along my route it had cheap fuel and the leg length was only about three hours which is where i like to keep it because of fuel but also mainly because of physiological limitations the leg from dayton to iowa was nothing but corn and it was only exciting because the entire three hours i was looking for an emergency landing area because even though everything was running fine i had zero faith that it was going to stay that way so i filled up on some cheap fuel and checked the weather during my break and found that there was some low ceilings in ifr along the original route that i had planned i simply just altered my route to the south and found an airport in hastings nebraska that was the new destination that flight was also uneventful though i couldn't go as high as i wanted because of the low ceilings and i cruised towards the end of it at about two thousand to three thousand feet agl but i landed fine at hastings nebraska right as all the clouds were clearing out the fbo there was awesome they had cheap fuel and they let me borrow the crew van to go get some lunch at a place called runzos which if you've never been it's basically sells these loaves of bread with meat and cheese just stuffed inside of it and it was absolutely amazing after refueling and grabbing some lunch in nebraska i again took off with the intended destination of douglas wyoming on my way to douglas i was at my cruising altitude of 8500 feet about 20 miles north of north platte nebraska and i was listening to the local air traffic control frequency i heard a cirrus check on with atc and i realized that on adsb he was only five miles ahead of me eight thousand feet and headed almost the exact same direction as i was now it seems like there's always friendly rivalries between different manufacturers or types of airplanes but serious pilots tend to sometimes rub people especially moony pilots the wrong way because they love to claim that they are just as fast as the retrax without having to have retractable gear so today i was super focused on his adsb ground speed and comparing it to mine because i wanted to see if that claim was true though i was keeping a close eye on the serious pilot's ground speed and doing my best to keep up because to be fair they are pretty quick i was also keeping a close eye on the weather but it really didn't seem like there was any about 20 miles ahead of me there was this cloud deck about three to four thousand feet above me that had some virgo but it really didn't seem like anything serious virga if you don't know is just rain that is falling from a cloud but doesn't reach the ground it looked very benign it was a simple cloud deck it didn't last for very long and and i've flown underneath clouds especially well below clouds like that and never have had anything as i was keeping an eye on the cirrus's ground speed i noticed that it was holding steady at 140 but then all of a sudden it jumped up to 160 and then was slamming down to 120 and then back up to 170 and then right back down to 120 again i really didn't understand why his airspeed was jumping around it didn't quite make sense until i hit it as soon as i got underneath that cloud i was slammed by severe clear air turbulence the turbulence was so severe i had my hands and feet completely full just trying to keep the aircraft under control i've never experienced anything like that and maybe that's a common occurrence out west but it hit me like a brick wall after about a minute of really severe turbulence it finally started to subside and i went and grabbed the ipad back out from underneath the seat and got back on course but i noticed that the cirrus pilot had actually turned around and started diverting to an airport you definitely could tell he didn't intend on going that day so i think it's safe to say that i won that race and i'm actually kind of surprised didn't pull the shoot although that turbulence really wasn't exactly fun in my book i actually am glad that i went through it because it ended up saving my ass as i neared my destination of douglas i noticed that about 50 miles to the south there was a large storm right over camp guernsey and there was some light green blips on the radar to the north of that that to me looked like just rain i could actually see through it and in the east you know you can fly not really close to thunderstorms but if it's just raining with some scattered thunderstorms really far off you're typically fine you know the rain clouds are not typically an issue they're usually pretty benign and that's the way i was thinking as i was heading toward douglas in front of me there was just a line of small rainstorm i could see through it and you know how bad could it possibly be but i thought back to the clear turbulence that i had encountered just prior to this and i thought well you know hey if if that could do that without really anything seemingly causing it perhaps that rain isn't benign as i might expect so maybe i should land at the only airport in between me and there so i ended up finding an airport called lusk and i landed there instead i tuned in the weather lusk and it was calling 7 800 feet density altitude which is way higher than i'd ever experienced before but i just flew the airplane like i always had and i kept the speed under control and i landed fine and i even had the plane stopped and turned off at the taxiway 2000 feet down i'm really glad i decided to land instead of trying to fly through those rain showers because no sooner did i have the airplane tied down that i was seeking shelter in the small little tiny pilot lounge and watching the storm roll through whipping the rain sideways and making the moony jump and jostle about like crazy it really made me appreciate the saying i'd rather be on the ground wishing i was in the air than in the air wishing i was on the ground because i would most certainly be wishing i was on the ground if i had tried to fly through that i sat in the pilot lounge for about 20 minutes until the storm subsided once it did i fueled up the airplane and i met a local pilot who had a cessna 182 and i was trying to find a way around the storms that seemed to be popping up everywhere as well as the mountains that were in between me and going further west a local pilot told me of a dam and gorge it was to the north and it looked like i could go head up that direction to get myself away from the storms and on the backside of the mountains so i decided to make my next destination grebel wyoming after fueling up the airplane i took off and i was full fuel and full of baggage and i was probably 300 pounds below max gross weight and i still even with 7 800 feet density altitude was off the ground and wheels up by 2000 feet down on this flight because of the high density altitude i was fighting high oil temperatures the entire time older movies can be known for having high oil temperature problems and mine is definitely one of the ones that likes to run hot i didn't really know exactly how to combat these high oil temperatures because i'd never had them this hot before but i tried the technique of keeping the mixture rich because i figured that might help cool things down but it turns out that keeping the mixture rich really isn't a good way to cool your oil now when i was at lusk i wasn't listening to the weather during the storm so i'm not entirely sure what the winds were there but as i passed sheridan wyoming i noticed there was a line of rain showers and storms that were passing through there as well i was tuned into weather there and i kid you not the weather went from five knot winds to 55 knot winds in the span of a couple minutes it was insane i was very glad that that was 30 miles away from me and not headed in my direction i even gave it a lot more birth which took a little bit more time but i wasn't getting anywhere near that and that really showed me how volatile the weather can be out west i continued up my route and found the dam that the local pilot had told me about and so i turned to the southwest over the gorge this was the first time i'd really seen this parts of the west from that altitude and boy was it gorgeous [Music] my last stop that day was south bighorn wyoming and besides the thousand foot ridge that crossed about a one nautical mile on the approach end of the runway it was really an uneventful landing so i landed at south bighorn i parked i found the pilot lounge which again wyoming you need to step up your pilot lounge game the one at lusk was a windowless shack and the one at south bighorn was pretty much just a room with a chair and i mean at least it had a window but it was also full of spiders so i just plugged in my ipad my phone and stuff like that went back set up my tent i think i made like a wrap or something like that for dinner and pretty much just passed out i had flown 11 hours that day and about 1200 miles so i was absolutely wiped i just set up camp and went to sleep the next morning i had a cliff bar for breakfast packed up all my supplies checked the weather and it looked like that day was going to be absolutely beautiful so i decided to pack everything up fuel up the airplane and head over to west yellowstone which the route of flight would take me directly over yellowstone national park i fired up the mooney and taxi down for the engine run-up but once again during the run-up when i switched mags the engine ran extremely rough i thought maybe it was lead fouling but i tried to burn it off like you normally would by leaning it out and putting high rpm but that didn't work either and i thought ah gosh man like not again i'm broke in the middle of nowhere wyoming i taxied back and shut down and called my mechanic and i told him about how the previous day i had been fighting high oil temperatures and i tried to keep the mixture really rich and he said that it probably isn't mag it's probably just a fouled plug even if i had tried to burn it off sometimes you if you run really rich for long enough you can have a a much higher harder build up in one of the plugs this is where i learned another very important lesson which is if you're going to bring a toolkit with you make sure you tailor it to your aircraft i had brought a generic toolset with me just in case i had broken but i didn't really tailor it to the aircraft and therefore i didn't have anything to actually pull spark plugs with which if you're gonna make an airplane tool kit is one of the basics so that was a failure on me i didn't have the ability to pull one of the spark plugs and there wasn't anybody around to help me so we decided to try to take it up in the air and try to burn it off in the air so that's why i ended up doing i took off in the early morning it was still rather cool but because i had previously started the engine and ran it up to temperature the oil got extremely hot on takeoff the red line on oil where you should immediately pull the power back and find the closest airport to land at is around 250 degrees on takeoff that day i was nearing 2 30 which is concerning so i pulled the power back and i circled around the airport just in case and i kept the the the climbing to a minimum i kept minimum power on the on the engine and it seemed like the oil temperatures were coming down and they had only spiked because it took a second for the engine the oil to absorb the heat from full power on takeoff once the oil temps came down to about 215 i pushed the power up again and started heading west away from the airport everything seemed to be running fine i did a mag check in flight after i leaned it and it seemed like my missing problem had gone away it was probably a fouled plug i was climbing up to 12 500 feet as i passed over cody wyoming and i headed up the right side of a canyon with the shoshone river at the bottom the views were absolutely stunning i had never been that close to mountains of that size before there seemed absolutely still there was no turbulence coming off the mountains it was actually kind of cold up there which was good for the engine seeing yellowstone from the air was absolutely amazing and i found myself staring down at all the mountains lakes and geysers even i crossed over yellowstone national park and i ended up landing early that morning at west yellowstone airport west yellowstone is a really cool airport that i had heard about because it has a dedicated campground on the airport you can literally just park your airplane and then take all your stuff in the woods and camp out there you can rent a car and go into the park or you can just stay there and they have free bikes that you can take into town or ride around some of the trails around there so that's what i did so west yellowstone was an awesome airport and had a great time there and i probably could have spent a number of days there i really wanted to get to my next destination which was johnson creek idaho so i filled up on fuel in west yellowstone and i headed out pretty much direct to johnson creek which took me over mountains pretty much the entire time again the entire time i was looking for potential landing areas but this route really didn't have very many favorable options but it was absolutely beautiful so my plan on this flight was to approach johnson creek from the north and then turn around and land to the south after completing a normal pattern but what i didn't understand is that johnson creek is in a very narrow valley i mean i knew it was in a valley or canyon but i didn't realize exactly how narrow that canyon was as an east coast guy i had never been in anything like that so i had no way to really understand exactly how narrow the canyon was so as i approached johnson creek i had this plan of a normal pattern and when i got to overhead the the runway i realized that that was not going to work and so i had to figure it out on the fly which when you're dealing with a plane like the mooney that doesn't like to bleed off air speed as as as well as others and is a lot less forgiving when you're fast it really when when things throw off your planning procedures and you're not ready for it it can make an approach a lot more hairy in order to compensate for this i figured that i needed to get as much room as i possibly could which meant putting the wing as close to the trees as i was comfortable with which meant that i pretty much was shoving my wing into the trees and i descended a little bit on my downwind and just followed the terrain contour of the canyon walls which ended up turning into a keyhole during the keyhole the other thing that was extremely important that i had thankfully i learned earlier was figure out how to bank sharply but not pull normally if you try to over bank the airplane especially over the ground and try to load it up by pulling you can get slow and end up stalling or spinning the aircraft into the ground which is really bad obviously but i learned that if you bank the airplane relatively steeply but don't pull and just let the nose slide through you can either gain airspeed or maintain your airspeed but also still keep your turn radius a lot tighter once i got back around from the other side of that and i could see the approach under the runway i realized i was right on glideslope right on my airspeed and i landed there without any issues it was absolutely beautiful i'm sure there's faster and heavier and harder airplanes that have landed there before but being a relatively low time pilot that had come all the way from western pennsylvania and absolutely sticking the landing at johnson creek which i understand is not the most difficult runway in the the idaho back country but it really didn't matter to me that was such an accomplishment to be able to do that that i felt so great when i was taxiing in and shutting down so that amazing sense of accomplishment after finally landing at johnson creek idaho after flying all the way from western pennsylvania is where i'm going to leave you in this episode in the next episode i'm going to make my way further into the idaho backcountry and eventually make my way to just 20 miles south of the canadian border where you guessed it i find myself having even more maintenance issues so if that interests you please consider hitting the subscribe button and waiting for the next episode or if that episode is already out you can click the link in the description below if you have any questions feel free to leave some comments or leave me a message on instagram averagespaceaviator and that is all i have for you today thank you for watching and i'll see you you

Channel: Average Aviator

Views: 13,400

Keywords: Mooney, Flying, Cross Country, Airplane, general aviation, aviation, M20, M20C, airport, Backcountry, back, country, xc, grass, mountain, yellowstone, aerial, footage, mountains, mountain flying, solo, maintenance, airplane, ownership, single engine, mooneyzoom, air traffic control, mooney, mooney m20

Id: lFBiHJ77O7A

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021