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Week 2 Reflection

Week 2 was spent solving problems on a flying wing, the RV Jet. We switched control links from TBS Tracer to Skydroid. The Tracer system was giving me lots of problems with the receiver, and when I installed a Skydroid receiver system in the aircraft, it connected and I was able to pull up the parameters and configure the Cube autopilot from a tablet. After I got the control link set up, I installed an Orange Cube in the place of the Black Cube that had been in there before. I was hoping that it would clear a lot of error codes, and some did seem to go away, but it brought a whole host of new problems in its place. The most notable being that the Cube was not recognizing that we had a motor, and so we were unable to do a normal motor test. We had to brute force the motor to spin by bypassing the safety switch. The worrying thing was that the motor did not throttle down when we lowered the throttle, so we had to unplug the aircraft to shut it down. That will hopefully get solved when we get the FC to recognize the motor.

I also rented a plane from Purdue Aviation to renew my currency for both Purdue Av and my passenger carrying legalities. I completed a total of three patterns at KLAF. As I am still not comfortable talking to ATC, I purposefully scheduled my time slot so that engine start would happen after tower closed for the night. I do realize that without talking to ATC I will never improve, but I wanted to focus solely on my flying because it had been 89 days since I had last flown, and it was also the coldest temperatures I had ever flown in as well. That turned out to be a good thing, because I got to experience a terrain avoidance system for the first time. When I had flown this plane previously, it was either not installed or set up, so I was unaware that it existed until I got my first callout 100 off the ground on my first takeoff. It warned me of terrain directly in front of me, which was strange, because the only terrain it could be talking about was a grove of trees maybe 50ft tall a couple hundred feet past the airport fence line. It also warned me of the buildings on my base and final turns, which it was supposed to do I suppose, but was unnecessary in my situation considering they were lit up against the night sky. I was unable to find a way to silence it, which was unfortunate and potentially dangerous as it distracted me from flying the aircraft. I had flown the same plane and runway orientation multiple times, but the callouts it gave me were casting doubt on my decisions and I subconsciously flew nonstandard approaches based on what it was saying. I would go so far as to say I would have been a safer pilot had I not had those callouts in my ear.

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