Page 38 - COPA_July2023

FEATURE
Getting a BasicMed certificate, selling the jet, and acquiring a Cirrus would keep me flying into my 80s with less expense and hassle compared to keeping my third-class medical certificate and the jet.
So here I am 10 months and 140 hours into my Cirrus experience. I had thought moving “down” to a Cirrus would be easy given my 6,000 total hours of flying and many years of turboprop and jet experi- ence. Not so at all! Actual hand flying was easy, but landings were difficult because the sight picture from the Cirrus cockpit was quite different from the jet. I would flair much too high for the landing and it took many turns around the circuit before I had the hang of it. You don’t make full stall landings in a jet; instead you fly it in on a slightly nose-high atti- tude while carrying power into the flair. Nothing beats a radar altimeter call out and trailing link landing gear to grease the jet onto the runway. Landing the Cirrus with minimal residual energy and the stick full back took some getting used to.
Straight-legged piston machines cannot win a smooth landing contest with a jet, but then again the Cirrus will never give you the “Oh s...t!” underbelly sparking the runway moment we all hope never to experience. There are trade-offs in life!
The redundancy, capability and com- plexity of the single-engine Cirrus sur- prised and challenged me. When I last flew singles in the 1970s, there was a vacuum pump to power a single atti- tude indicator. If that failed, God forbid, we flew on needle, ball and airspeed. There was no autopilot. A wing leveler was about as sophisticated as it came. VOR and ADF navigation was how we traveled. Somewhat to my surprise the Cirrus was every bit as capable as the jet in its avionics and backup systems. Dual everything, revisionary mode, FMS, an extremely capable autopilot, anti-ice capability and even an EVS camera put the Cirrus in the big league category equipment wise. A lot of time has been spent in the hangar with the GPU running
while exploring the Garmin Perspective avionics system. It’s not easy to learn, but once proficient in its operation it can do anything you want it to. It has been a fun and mind-expanding transition.
Flight planning takes on a whole new dimension in the Cirrus compared to the jet. Since the Cirrus cannot top all weather, I need to consider various alternatives to safely complete a pro- posed flight. Sometimes we can overfly the weather. Foreflight in its “Imagery” section provides tops as far out as the next 18 hours and is invaluable for flight planning. If we can’t top the weather and fly in the sunshine, flying “in cloud” to our destination is the next alternative to consider. This is possible if NEXRAD shows only green returns, no significant turbulence is forecast along the route of flight and temperatures are above freez- ing. It’s easy to check the Flights/Navlog/ Winds aloft section in Foreflight to deter- mine the anticipated temperature at your planned cruise altitude. Flying in cloud in
36
JULY 2023 COPA Pilot
Wolf’s former aircraft,
a Cessna Citation CJ2.