MY FLIGHT-TRAINING JOURNEY
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Note: Red links are only accessible from within the Boeing network. Sorry :[
Pilots love to talk about flying. There's that joke; You show up at a dinner party and one guy in the room is a pilot... How do you know who it is? The answer: He'll tell you. ;) Pilots - even recreational pilots who have only flown airplanes that are powered by a single propeller and that could not out-race a Honda - clearly think that flying is the most special thing they can do. It makes them happy. They're proud to have worked hard enough to earn that pilot certificate. The road to the certificate can be long and arduous.
Recently, as I have thought about the next ratings and endorsements that I want to earn, I have reflected about my own experience learning to fly. During my flight training, I unfortunately learned a couple of lessons the hard way, despite the fact that these lessons are well known to all instructors and were described to me before I ever flew an airplane. Lessons such as: The more often you fly (more hours per week), the more quickly you get through training (i.e. fewer total hours, not just fewer weeks). And: Trying to do a whole bunch of training in just a week or two by training full-time is generally a bad idea, since it gives you no time to learn context (i.e. WHY you do each of the steps of each procedure) and divorces book learning from practical experience (by requiring that you pass the written test before you start actually flying).
This past September marked two years since my first solo. I started out learning to fly Light Sport Airplanes, I now have a Private Pilot certificate and a tailwheel endorsement and about 150 hours. I'm checked out to rent three different kinds of airplanes, will buy an airplane over the next couple of months, and am contemplating what ratings/endorsements to pursue next. So it occurs to me that this might be a good time to look back, appreciate where I am, and jot down my memories and thoughts about how I got here, before they fade away.
I've been meaning to write about this for a while. Heck, during each step of my flight training, I have been wanting to capture the unique mix of frustration and excitement. I think I can still remember it all.
Let's start at the beginning.
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Part 1 - Fantasies of Flight
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I've been wanting to be a pilot since I was three years old. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a pilot as a profession. But as I learned more about science and wanted to do more technical work for a living, I decided that it would be better to be a pilot just recreationally. I read magazines about kitplates, ultralights, and other niches of general aviation that sounded like a lot of fun. I fantasized about landing floatplanes in remote lakes, putting tiny bubble-canopied airplanes through high-energy aerobatics, flying open-cockpit biplanes and feeling the wind in my hair, maybe even building a kitplane someday, or designing my own homebuilt.
When I was old enough to start taking lessons, in the late 1990s... my parents refused to pay for them. The lessons were too expensive, for one. And even more importantly, my parents refused to pay for me to do something they perceived as being very risky. If someday you want to learn how to ride a motorcycle, and maybe to buy one, then you can do that with your own money, we're not going to help! Same for Cessnas. So I knew I was going to have to wait until I had a job that gave me enough disposable income.
Once I became a Boeing engineer, in early 2006... I still didn't start to learn to fly. For one, because I didn't like my first Boeing job, and was continuously trying to get transferred. So I didn't want to start flying lessons, knowing that they would be interrupted soon when I moved. Also, I was not doing a superb job with my finances, and most of my extra money went into trips and camera gear.
When I got a job with Boeing that I liked, in late 2007, I did decide to enroll in Private Pilot ground school. Long Beach City College offered it in the spring, and Learning Together would pay for it (since it's a college course), so I took it in the Spring of 2008. The course-completion document was an instructor endorsement of the kind that is required for taking the FAA written test. But I didn't take the test. The endorsement was good for a couple of years, so I figured I should get some actual flight instruction and then take the test sometime before my checkride.
But a few months after I finished ground school - before I had gotten around to getting any flight instruction - I got transferred from Long Beach to Washington. The time and energy required for the move, the financial impact of buying a house, and the fact that I made good friends here and was having a great time hanging out with them (and dating) during much of my free time, all meant that there was no time for flight lessons. But once I was feeling more settled in, around the summer of 2009, I started to seriously think about how I was going to do my flight training.
In college, while reading EAA magazines, I had learned about the new Sport Pilot rules that the FAA was about to implement. They basically said that, for half the amount of training that it takes to become a Private Pilot, you could get a Sport Pilot certificate that allows you to fly small airplanes (up to 1320 lbs, carrying up to one other person, i.e. a tiny two-seater) during the day in good weather. A little more limited than the Private Pilot certificate, but I could get it much cheaper and faster, and then do the additional training to become a Private Pilot later if I wanted. Googling around for information about Sport Pilot instruction, I stumbled upon this article. It blew my mind. Apparently the flight instruction required for the certificate could all be done in less than two weeks, if you flew every day and really dedicated your full time to it. I had been planning on spending my two weeks of vacation in 2009 by going to the Moscow airshow in Zhukovsky, but then I decided I ought to get my priorities straight and go learn to fly instead.
I searched for instructors and flight schools that offer full-time flight training. Several instructors say on their website that they'd be happy to train you full-time for a week or two, for Sport Pilot. I contacted pretty much all of them. A couple of the flight schools stood out, having relatively large fleets: a few Cessnas and a few Pipers, including twins and complex airplanes... and a couple of Light Sport airplanes, which meet the Sport Pilot limitations. And lots of experienced instructors. And maintenance facilities next door, ensuring that the airplanes were well taken care of, that any little issue was addressed right away.
One of these flight schools was in St Louis. (Well, in St Charles, which is just a few miles away). I had never been there. But since I have a friend who lives there, and I had always been curious to look at the old McDonnell facility where Boeing now manufactures F-15s and Super Hornets, and my friend could give me a tour... and there's the Arch and the historic downtown... I figured, sure, why not. Vacation in St Louis!
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Part 2 - St Charles
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One thing that all the full-time flight-training programs ask for is that you take ground school and pass the FAA written test before you go. My ground school had been over a year before this trip, so I thought I'd look at some practice tests to see how confident I still felt with the material. When I did look at some tests, it became clear that the ground school course was not very well taught, since it never covered many of the issues addressed in the questions... and the issues it did cover, I did not remember well enough to answer most questions. So I needed to take ground school again. I emailed back and forth with the flight school in St Louis, and my instructor-to-be recommended that I take the online ground school offered by Gleim.
This was about three weeks before my trip, so for a week or two, I did Gleim's online trainings (very similar to Boeing trainings) for an hour or two every evening. A few days before leaving on my trip, I took the Sport Pilot written test and passed. The Sport Pilot written test, and the Sport Pilot ground school, cover a little bit less material than if I were doing Private Pilot (since Sport Pilots can't fly at night, can't fly above 10,000 feet, can't fly by instruments, have requirements for visibility and cloud separation that are more conservative and simpler to remember, etc) but this was fine by me. So I took the ground school, took the test, and went to St Louis.
Getting there, I met my instructor, Jake, and we got to work right away. We went into a little classroom so that he could tell me what the plan was for our first flight. He explained what a lap around the pattern entails. Climb-out, cross-wind, down-wind, base leg, and final approach. Each of the four sides of the racetrack-like path, and the transition from each to the next, had associated with it certain power settings, speeds, altitudes, radio calls, flap settings, and things like carb heat settings and trim and other small adjustments. I would never have guessed that I needed to do such a long list of things just to take off, fly most of a rectangle around the airport, and land again. And that's not counting all the stuff we have to do on the ground to get the airplane ready. We spent about an hour in the classroom. I wanted to just go fly, of course. But with only two weeks to get a lot done, each flight had to count towards my training, and I knew I would get more out of each flight when I knew what I was supposed to learn.
We went outside, and Jake introduced me to our ride, the Evektor SportStar, an extremely fun little airplane.
He showed me how to go through the checklists for pre-flight walk-around, start-up, taxi, and run-up, then how to keep the airplane going in a straight line during takeoff and climb-out, how to trim it and adjust the power so that it almost flew itself around the pattern and back down, how to announce over the radio what we were doing during each step around the pattern, how to set up for landing with flaps and carb heat and power and pitch, and how to touch down. We did many laps around the pattern, and I was flying it pretty confidently by the end of the first flight. The airplane is easy enough to fly; it pretty much just goes wherever you point it with the joystick. The hard part is flying while doing all the other stuff. There was a lot to do, but it was relatively straightforward once you broke it down: Say something on the radio before you get on the runway and before you make each of the four turns. Climb-out is max power and pitch for Vy, when you get 1000 feet above the ground you throttle back and hold the altitude, when you're abeam the end of the runway you throttle back some more and activate the carb heat and deploy the flaps, then it's just pitching for the right speed and giving the engine enough power for a smooth descent.
After the flight, it was another hour or so in the classroom. Reviewing the radio calls, when to make the turns, how far away from the runway I should be, tips for remembering what adjustment to make, when. I eventually drew a crowded diagram that summarized everything, tweaked it with Jake, and he told me to go to my hotel and "chair fly" it: just sit on the chair by the bed, pretend I'm in the airplane, and talk myself through flying in the pattern. It was cheaper than a simulator, and could be done anywhere.
By this point it was late afternoon. I left, grabbed some food, went to the hotel, did some chair-flying, spent some time just reading and relaxing, and went to sleep. Next morning, it was up bright and early, back to the flight school.
A quick review in the classroom showed that my chair-flying had helped me to remember all the things I had to do, and Jake answered a couple of minor questions that had occurred to me. We talked about what he wanted to accomplish that day; slow flight, stalls, and engine-out emergency procedures.
We went out flying. My flying around the pattern was a lot better, with just a couple of minor things that could be further perfected but were basically ok (such as holding pattern altitude more precisely, making fewer power adjustments during final approach, etc). We left the airport and climbed a little higher, and Jake showed me how to fly at the edge of a stall. It was prefectly easy and intuitive, and I did it pretty much perfectly as soon as he let me take over.
And we talked about emergency procedures. He said that, in case the engine fails, the pilot must immediately perform a series of actions that will maximize the chance of a safe emergency landing. I didn't think that engine failures were really worth worrying about, but Jake told me that a key part of being a safe pilot is having a plan for "What would I do if the engine failed right NOW?" during each moment of the flight. During subsequent flights, he would sometimes pull the throttle and say "Hey look, you just lost your engine power. What do you do?". And so would my other instructors, after I returned to Seattle. It really is something that every good flight instructor drills into the head of student pilots. (And little did I know, Jake had put those skills to use just a couple weeks before I had met him).
It was the same overall routine as the day before:
Get back on the ground, debrief, summarize what I am supposed to have learned. Go away, get food, do some chair-flying. Then come back and do a pre-flight brief to review the previous points and to discuss the next bunch of things I will learn. Go flying again, check that I learned the previous bunch of things, introduce the next bunch of things.
And again. Get back on the ground, debrief, summarize what I am supposed to have learned. Go away, get food, do some chair-flying. Then come back and do a pre-flight brief to review the previous points and to discuss the next bunch of things I will learn. Go flying again... you get the idea.
Steep turns, ground-reference maneuvers, navigation, soft-field (grass) and short-field landings, crosswinds and slips, weather, cross-country flight-planning. Each requires certain procedures, certain things to be mindful of while making decisions, etc. Those things are all there for good reasons, and an experienced pilot will do them because they are evidently important, but for a student pilot it just feels like a long list of stuff to memorize.
On the Tuesday just over a week after we started, Jake noticed that I could do all the stuff around the pattern without even thinking about it, and my landings were smooth, and - most importantly - my emergency procedures were finally quick and safe. (They took me the longest to master, since you have to do a lot of stuff really fast, and Jake had a way of surprising me with simulated engine failures when I least expected it). So towards the end of one of our first flights about long-distance planning and navigation, we landed the airplane and he said he was going to get out to let me solo. I had been anticipating this for a few days; After a good landing, he'd say "A few more like that and you'll be ready to fly on your own", which always brought a smile to my face.
The first solo is kind of a big deal. A quick Google search will reveal no shortage of posts on blogs, forums, and personal websites, as well as books and articles, describing that important day. Having the instructor sitting next to you gives you a huge feeling of security, because anything that could happen would be expertly handled by a trained professional. When the instructor steps out, they're telling you that now YOU are ready to deal with pretty much anything that could happen during a local flight. You are now the Pilot In Command, relying only on yourself, not on an experienced guide. The airplane is solely yours, and you assume all risks and responsibilities that come with flying it. It's a huge ego boost, but also very scary.
So on that Tuesday, on our way back from some cross-country training, Jake took out my logbook and jotted down a solo endorsement, then we landed and he he stepped out by the taxiway, and I took off and did a couple laps around the pattern by myself.
I wish I could say it was a joyous and exhilarating moment, but it was more complicated than that. It was a really odd mix of feeling cool and calm, and feeling nervous and a little afraid. A mix of being carefully focused on each detail one at a time and going "This looks ok, that looks ok...", and of zooming out and looking at the big picture and going "Wow!". A mix of feeling totally in control, and of being just a little afraid that I would overlook something and not survive the experience. It's hard to describe. A total superposition of states. Schroedinger's Pilot.
I really like Glenn Pew's account of the first flight of his homebuilt, it captures the feeling very well: I wasn't nervous, but I was definitely in a heightened state of awareness; hyper-aware. I was processing everything fast. I scanned the panel: Air data numbers are going up, engine data steady. I saw the geometry of motion outside and it matched. "This is good," I thought. It was a bizarre, understated elation, like I'd momentarily turned British. There was a frank sobriety behind it all. [...] The thoughts conspired to create one that rang as loud as it was true: "This might not end well." Oddly, that realization brought me an indescribable sense of calm. I guess it doesn't make sense, but in full realization of my mortality, the overwhelming gray matter response was, "You damn well better enjoy this while it lasts." And just like that, I did. [...] It felt both familiar and brand-new. It felt like coming home when you've been gone so long you don't know if you'll even recognize it, or that it will recognize you. But you do and it does and - just like that - all the pieces fit into place. I was whole. It was very personal. It was very simple. It was pure magic.
So, yeah... it was a watershed day for me.
Later that day, after a break to review the flight-planning material we had covered earlier during our flight, I got back in the airplane just as the sun was setting and did a quick half-hour flight by myself, just to enjoy the view and to enjoy flying. I went to the nearby practice area and mainly just did steep turns and turns-around-a-point. It was my first flight "for fun", rather than an explicit learning experience. I had the airplane all to myself, and did not have to worry that a slightly imperfect turn would be followed by a gentle criticism from the right seat. Yes! I loved it! I felt like a pilot! It was a dream come true. I couldn't wait to be able to share this with a passenger. But that would require me earning a pilot certificate. And there was still lots of work to do before that.
By that point, I had less than a week left before I had to get out of there. The main thing I still had to do was fulfill the cross-country requirements. To be eligible for a Sport Pilot certificate, the student must have at least 15 hours of flight with an instructor, at least 5 hours solo, and at least one solo flight that goes to an airport more than 75 miles away and that includes landings at three airports (i.e. the one you start at, the one that's 75 miles away or more, and then a third airport somewhere roughly in between). This is known as a "cross-country" flight, i.e. just a long-ish flight (not to the other side of the US!) as opposed to a flight in the vicinity of your airport. You need to pick waypoints, calculate the direction you point the airplane between each pair of waypoints (correcting for wind and for magnetic declination), calculate the distance and speed and time and fuel burn between each pair of waypoints (so you could theoretically fly the whole thing without looking outside: just "Point south for 10.5 minutes, then point to a heading of 170 degrees for 7.2 minutes, then 195 degrees for 12.3 minutes, etc etc, and then I should be there", a method of navigation called "dead reckoning"), and estimate your total time and fuel burn. You have to call the FAA and file a flight plan with these details and others. You have to check the current weather and the weather forecasts, at all three airports and also in the space in between. Once you take off, you have to radio the FAA to activate that flight plan, and while flying, you have to regularly revisit and revise the calculations to make sure you won't get there too late and that you have enough fuel for the trip. Yes, you have to do these calculations while flying, and using a slide rule, no less. The only way to revise them while flying is to fly over the exact points you picked and time each leg between two points, as precisely as you can. So while planning the flight, you have to pick recogniseable landmarks. Airports and towns work well. On my first attempt, I picked some railroad tracks and small rivers on the map but then was unable to find them from the air. So instead of flying in a straight line to your destination and picking waypoints where that straight line intersects some barely visible features of the terrain, the right thing to do (for educational purposes) is to fly from town to town, from airport to airport, even if this means a little more zig-zagging.
(The midwest is particularly featureless. Luckily for me, near where I live, the coastline of Puget Sound makes it very easy for me to look outside and know exactly where I am, then aim for "the tip of that peninsula" or whatever. But in Missouri, where all you see most of the time is flat farmland, cross-country flying really requires a more deliberate approach, which forced me to acquire those skills).
The problem with cross-country training is that it takes a long time. Each training flight, by the nature of having to make and check the time estimates for each leg, had to last over an hour, typically two. Flying 75 miles away and back, and landing at another airport on the way back, and doing some zig-zagging along the way, takes almost three hours in a Light Sport airplane.
So I had a heck of a lot of flying to do, and just a few days to do it in. In a hurry to make my days count, on Wednesday I got in the airplane and made the required three-hour cross-country flight. It went perfectly, but was one of the most exhausting things I had ever done. The Sportstar requires constant attention if you would like it to keep pointing the same direction for more than a few seconds, since the nose tends to wobble and wonder. I presume that this is caused by how the tail sits inside the wake of a pretty chubby fuselage, especially due to the bubble canopy. (Engineering is all about tradeoffs: Make an airplane with a roomy cockpit, and with a big bubble of glass that gives the pilot a breathtaking view, and the price you pay is stability, and of course extra weight and drag). Having to actively fly the airplane all the time, and to calculate my speeds and times on my slide rule, and monitoring the radio, all meant there was not a moment of rest.
But I wasn't done! With my checkride looming that coming weekend, on Wednesday afternoon I got back in the saddle and went up with Jake to practice all my maneuvers, procedures, different kinds of landings, cross-country dead-reckoning, etc. I flew almost six hours that day!
And it was a good thing I got all that flying in, because then the weather got bad, and I was stuck on the ground for a couple days. I was biting my nails, wondering if I would still be able to get my certificate before the end of the following weekend.
I went to St Louis, toured the historic downtown, saw the F-15 and F-18 assembly lines, and had dinner with my friend who lives there. But I was worrying about whether I'd be able to complete my training.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday: crappy weather, no flying.
My checkride was scheduled for the last possible moment. Do the oral part on Saturday night and the practical part on Sunday morning, if the weather permitted. (If the weather still did not improve by Sunday morning... then oh well, I go home without the certificate).
While the first solo is a source of great pride and joy to a student pilot, the checkride is a source of dread. It is the very last step before earning a pilot certificate, the piece of paper (eventually replaced by a plastic card that you get in the mail) that allows a pilot to carry passengers (i.e. to be responsible not only for his/her own life, but also for that of others). The student may only sign up for this evaluation once he or she has completed all the required flying, has taken ground school and passed the written test, and has an endorsement from an instructor saying that the student is ready for the checkride. The student then calls an FAA examiner (and each flight school typically always works with the same one or two examiners) and schedules a few hours of their time. The first couple of hours are the oral examination, and the subsequent hour or two are the practical flying examination. You can't even do the practical part until the examiner is satisfied with your performance in the oral part. And at the end of the whole thing, the examiner can issue you your pilot certificate. Unless you fail. A good fraction of pilots do not pass their first checkride. And pilots who go on to earn more advanced certificates (instrument, commercial, instructor, etc) are quite likely to fail at least one of those multiple checkrides along the way. I don't know what the statistics are, but that's the impression I got talking with all the instructors at the flight school, and with other pilots.
So, no pressure ;]
The oral examination tests the pilot on several areas, pretty much all the material covered by ground school for the written test. For example, aeronautical weather data is presented in the form of certain symbols and codes. Looking at a read-out of such symbols... How high are the clouds in this area? When is it expected to start raining? How high can you fly before the temperature gets so low that you might encounter icing? Which way is the wind blowing, and how fast? Now say you're planning a trip to an airport that's two states away to the east. Looking at a weather prognostic chart of the whole US... how's the weather over there right now? How will it change over the next 24 hours? Can you fly between these mountains or should the extra-adverse weather over there force you to go all the way around them? Here is a report from a pilot, describing unexpected weather [also a jumble of letters and numbers, no full words]. What kind of airplane were they flying? Where were they? And how high? What weather did they observe? Ok, enough about weather. Opening up a map. How long is the runway at this airport? Can you get fuel there? What kind of airspace surrounds this airport? How high does the airport's airspace go? Do you need a clearance to enter this airspace? Who would you call, what radio frequency, and what would you say, when requesting that clearance? What do you need to hear exactly in order to know that you are cleared to enter that airspace? What about that spot over there... If you go straight up from the ground to 30,000 feet, what are all the layers of airspace you go through? How far away must you be from any clouds, and how far must the visibility allow you to see, in order for you to be able to fly in each of these kinds of airspace? How low can you fly over this park? Which airports can you not approach unless you have a transponder? What is the highest point within twenty miles of this airport? If your engine failed right here, what would you do? What's this symbol that looks like a parachute? Which military flight areas can you enter, which ones do you have to stay out of, and who do you call to find out when you don't know for sure? By how many degrees do you have to adjust your magnetic heading to get your true heading when you're in this area? How high would you fly to make it over these mountains? If you had to plan a flight from here to there, what waypoints would you choose? Ok, close the map. Now for questions about the FARs, the laws written by the FAA that govern flying. What kinds of airplanes will you not be allowed to fly yet when you first earn this certificate? How low can you fly? How fast can you fly? Does your certificate ever expire? What flying must you do in order to stay current (i.e. certified to carry passengers)? What equipment must be operational in the airplane in order for it to be legal to fly? What do you do if this essential hardware fails? What do you do if some non-essential hardware fails? What inspections must be done, and how often, in order for the airplane to be legal to fly? How can you find out whether these inspections have been performed?
It was a grueling oral exam. But at the end, he said "Y'know, you could practically teach this stuff". That made me feel better. But the hardest part was yet to come. I went back to my hotel and tried to get some sleep before my last day in St Louis.
Sunday morning. Good weather (Whew!). I meet the examiner bright and early, and explain to him my flight plan for a cross-country flight. (Most checkrides begin with the beginning of a cross-country flight, and after a few miles the examiner calls that off and asks the student to demonstrate other stuff). We do the walk-around inspection, taxi out, run up the engine, take off, and get started on the cross-country. I time my climb-out, and then fly over the first few waypoints, timing the period in between each pair of waypoints and making sure that I'm pointed in the right direction on the compass. I calculate my speeds and see that they match my expectations. The examiner sees that I know how to do dead-reckoning well, and says "Ok, you can fly cross-country. Now let's see some slow flight". Then come all the maneuvers I have to demonstrate. Slow flight, stalls, steep turns, ground-reference maneuvers. He's impressed, and tells me to head back to the airport. I'm so excited, I'm sure my heart rate almost matches the engine RPM.
Like a final exam where you concentrate so intensely that you never even notice the time go by, in this case an hour passed in what felt like minutes.
But it wasn't over yet.
As I approach the airport, the wind is pretty calm. From about 10 miles out, I radio my intentions of landing to the East, before finding out whether there are people flying around the airport and whether they're landing to the East or to the West. A pilot radios back and says they're using runway 27 (to the west), and I say all right, I'll set up to enter the pattern for runway 27. First mistake. Not a big mistake, because even if no one had radioed me back (or if I had missed the response), I would probably have noticed the airplanes flying around the opposite direction as I got closer. But still. Anyays, I get closer… and the pattern is crowded. There are four or five airplanes doing touch-and-goes and flying laps around the airport, and I must insert myself into that roundabout-like situation. I had never faced such a crowded pattern; I had only ever shared an airport's airspace with one other airplane, maybe two. With plenty of adrenaline already pumping, I got really nervous really fast. I approached the pattern thinking that I could squeeze myself between these two other airplanes, but then I changed my mind, and said I would fly away and then back in, to enter the pattern once both airplanes had passed. I did so in a very clumsy and messy way, and even then, another airplane was coming so I turned away yet again and then flew back. In my nervousness, I had lost a little bit of altitude, which is really really bad since in the pattern you're already just 1000 feet above the ground and really should not get any lower. Extremely frustrated, I made what I am sure was not my smoothest landing ever. I asked the examiner if I could try again, and he said no, we should taxi back in. I basically shut down emotionally, and coldly taxied the airplane back in. The fact that he did not move on to takeoffs and landings on the grass indicated that he didn't think I was ready to be a pilot.
His debrief was honest and helpful. He said that I knew all the theoretical stuff very well, and that my cross-country flying and my maneuvers were also excellent... but if I get that nervous and error-prone whenever I approach a crowded pattern, then I'm just not ready to be a pilot. And he was right, and I knew it. I had practically no experience in a crowded pattern and I needed to learn how to manage this kind of situation before I go flying with passengers.
In the document that the examiner produced, he noted down all the stuff that I had done well on. To finish a subsequent examination, all that I really needed to was the parts that I had NOT done well on the first time: pattern work, and landings (which we had not gotten around to).
I flew to Seattle disappointed. But the certificate was so close that I could smell it, and that motivated me to keep going.
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Part 3 - Arlington and Paine
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I got back home, and I wanted to finish my Light Sport training.
I live and work right by Paine Field, and I drive by the flight schools there on my way to and from work every day. Problem is, they don't have Light Sport airplanes, and only offer Private Pilot training. If I were to pursue Private Pilot, then I would need another 20 hours of training, another round of ground school for another written test, and another whole checkride. My flight time would count towards the Private Pilot requirements, but the tests and theoretical parts would not, since a Private Pilot has to know more material (such as how to fly at night, what equipment is required for night flying, how to fly using navigational instruments such as directional radios, the nature of certain medical certificates you have to get to be a Private Pilot, how to fly in tower-controlled airspace, how to fly and recover from unusual attitudes using only the instruments, etc). This would be a heck of a lot more work, compared to just finishing up a checkride and being able to carry passengers right away (and then moving on to Private Pilot later if I felt like it).
So I called up the nearest flight school that has Light Sport airplanes, and drove up to Arlington to get right back to flying. Two days after my failed checkride, I got in a P2002 and went flying with my new instructor. I really wanted to get this done.
The Sportstar's wobbly design, coupled with all the thermals and warm air of the Midwest's summer, made it hard to fly in a straight line. I constantly had to keep adjusting the airplane to make it point where I wanted. It was like driving on an unpaved road. But the P2002 is rock solid and flies straight as an arrow. Add that to the cold and calm Puget Sound air, and you have a very different flying experience. It was so easy! I just pointed the airplane and left it alone and it kept going in the right direction, like it was on rails. No wobbling. I excitedly texted Jake and told him "The air here is so smooth, it's like the airplane is sitting on the ground!". He wrote me back saying "That's like cheating!".
I expected that my new instructor would let me solo in no time, and that we would contact the local FAA pilot examiner so I could finish up the checkride asap.
But I was wrong. My new instructor wasn't super happy with the way I flew. I would make tiny mistakes, such as landing off-centerline, or making slightly uncoordinated turns, or not quite making optimal use of my emergency landing field (e.g. coming in to land too high after a simulated engine failure), or making a not-quite-stabilized approach where I was too high or too low and had to keep adjusting the power... and he wanted all those things corrected before he would let me solo. Apparently I had developed a few bad habits, and at St Charles we (Jake and I) were in too much of a hurry and didn't have time to address them. They would have worked themselves out as I gained experience, and even the examiner over there didn't seem to mind them... but at Arlington, apparently, the standards were much higher.
And I didn't make progress nearly as quickly, mainly because I flew a lot less. I would make an appointment to go up there once a week, but then I'd cancel it because of the weather, or to study, or for whatever other reason. To be honest, once it became clear that I was a few flights away from soloing again, and would not re-take the checkride for probably a month, I got discouraged and lost a lot of my motivation. And driving half an hour to Arlington after work, then driving back at night... Big pain in the butt. The inconvenience of going there, plus the time required by my studies (which were kicking my butt at the time) and by a not-super-smooth romantic relationship (which ended a couple months later), and the bad weather, meant that I only flew about three times in the fall and three times in the winter. As 2009 transitioned into 2010, I was basically keeping my flight-training on life support: afraid of letting it slide back too far, but not feeling the motivation or the energy to push it forward.
Towards the end of the winter, something happened that finally sent me in a better direction. Chris Foster, who had recently earned his Private Pilot certificate, asked me if I wanted to join him on a flight. Of course I did! So I, Chris, and another friend of his plus the friend's girlfriend, hopped into a Cessna 172 and flew to Bremerton and Boeing Field and then back up to Paine. I got to ride in the right seat.
I had a ton of fun. Dring the following week or two, I thought about how maybe transitioning to Private Pilot wouldn't be a bad idea. The planes are right here at Paine, so I wouldn't have to drive half an hour (and then another half an hour back) each time I wanted to fly. If the weather turns out to be nice on any given day, I could go flying on a whim in the afternoon, rather than requiring a whole free evening. And apparently the folks at Arlington feel like I need a bunch more training in order to make enough progress for a checkride, i.e. the certificate feels like it's at least month away, so I might as well do that training down here. Sure, it would require more flying, but the location is so convenient, I would probably get in all that flying within a month or so. The fact that it would take just a little longer to get a certificate was outweighed by the convenient location.
So I called up the place where Chris had learned to fly, where he rented the airplane that day when we flew. I talked with their chief flight instructor, explained my experience, said I wanted to transition from unfinished Light Sport training to Private Pilot training. And I said how I'm a Boeing engineer and overall aviation geek. They had an instuctor who they felt would be a great match: Jeff. He, like me, was a full-time Boeing engineer and liked to do some flying as a hobby. So just over a week after the flight with Chris, I was getting back into that same Cessna, this time on the left seat, with Jeff on the right.
Flying the airplane was easy enough. The Cessna was even smoother than the P2002. The fact that it was bigger and heavier and more sluggish may have meant that flying it was a little less fun... however, it was easier to exactly hit the right speeds and angles and hold them, so my flying looked a lot cleaner. Heavier airplanes are so much smoother! I started to understand why people say that Light Sport airplanes handle like toys, while Cessnas and other four-seaters handle "like real airplanes".
Another big difference was that Paine Field is a towered airport. I have to ask permission to taxi, permission to take off, and permission to land. When I ask permission, I have to say who I am and where I am and what I want, all using specific language, and I have to specify that I have listened to the latest weather information broadcast by the airport. And whenever I ask the tower to do anything, their reply also uses specific language and is spoken at a mile a minute. You've probably listened to air traffic control radio communications. They take a while to get used to.
Anyways... My first flight with Jeff was in late March. Less than two months later I had flown an amazing 11 times (more than once a week, compared to how I only managed to drag myself up to Arlington about once a month) and he let me solo the airplane.
In St Louis, my checkride came just a few days after my solo. I must be almost there, right?
No. The cross-countries for Private Pilot are even longer, so I need to do those again. Ah, and I need to practice flying at night… which is like 11PM now that it's summer. I even have to do a night cross-country, which means doing a lot of work while flying… until 2AM! Not to mention re-taking ground school and the Private Pilot written test.
The Private Pilot standards were very high. I ended up needing months to perfect my approaches, stall recovery, emergency procedures, and all the maneuvers (steep turns, slow flight, etc) and different kinds of takeoffs and landings.
And Paine's tower-controlled airspace meant that I never had to deal with how to insert myself into a busy pattern, or figure out which runway to land on and how to approach the airport; I just radioed the tower and followed directions. This didn't help me with the problem that caused me to fail my first checkride. So I would regularly fly up to Arlington, an untowered airport, to practice getting into and out of a busy pattern. And my instructor regularly flew with me to a nearby airport (there are many airports within a half hour's flying from Paine) to watch me figure that stuff out and give me tips to do it more efficiently.
By the fall, I had completed all the requirements and was feeling pretty ready. But my instructor felt that I was still not precise enough. I practiced. My approaches got good enough, but my power-off stalls needed work. I practiced more. My power-off stalls got good enough, but my emergency procedures needed work. I practiced some more. My emergency procedures got good enough, but now my landings needed work again. Grrr! There was always something I needed to work on! So I gradually slipped back into a discouraged and frustrated mood, similar to what plagued me while I was flying the P2002 at Arlington.
Each time I flew, I was congratulated on having improved a few things, but it was pointed out to me that a few other things needed improvement. I was told "Just a few more flights and you'll be ready for your checkride". Since I had told my friends on a few occasions that I was training for a pilot certificate and looked forward to being able to take them flying, they sometimes asked me how close I was to gettting the certificate. "Just a few more flights", I told them. But every time I flew, it was "Great job! Just a few more flights", for months. I flew another 20-30 times and logged another 60 hours, and kept hearing "You're almost there!".
So I basically stopped believing my instructor. All compliments, and assurances that my checkride was only a few flights away, sounded like the hollow encouragement offered by teachers to poorly-performing students. I became convinced that everyone at the flight school must think I'm a pretty bad pilot, since I kept needing more and more instruction and was apparently not making progress. My friends would sometimes ask me "So, are you a pilot yet?", and I felt more and more embarrassed each time I had to tell them "No, not yet".
And my supposed lack of progress became a self-fulfilling prophecy; the fact that I was depressed about my flight-training led me to fly less often in the late summer and in the fall, so it became harder to make progress. Some half-marathon training, plus going to lots of airshows, kept me from flying for most of August. My vacation to Europe meant I did almost no flying in September. Then the weather started to deteriorate, and my masters classes started again, and I was only able to fly about once every two weeks.
2010 turned into 2011 and I was still in the vicious cycle of feeling frustrated and embarrassed about my lack of progress, and thus not flying very often, and thus not making progress. My friends continued to ask me about this; Once every two weeks or so, one of them would ask if I'm a pilot yet, and then asked "Why not?". That really hurt.
I seriously contemplated quitting. The main reason that I didn't is the thought of what all my friends - especially all my friends and acquaintances who are pilots and who had been regularly cheering me on via Facebook - would think if I quit.
What I realized is that, the more often I fly, the better a pilot I can be. If I only fly once every two weeks, I plateau at a certain level of skill and precision. I can only make progress by flying more often. The plateau does get a little higher as I become more experienced, but the bottom line was; If I want to be good enough for my instructor to feel like I'm ready for my checkride, then I need to do a lot of flying.
This was probably the single most important thing I have learned about flight training. Many experienced instructors who write books and articles about flight training all say the same thing: You have to fly often. If you only fly a couple times a month, you make no progress. It's when you can fly about once a week that you crawl forward. And if you can fly twice every week, maybe even three times, then each flight will make solid progress towards the checkride.
So in late February I decided to prioritize flying more highly. (That, combined with a new romantic relationship that was going a lot better than the previous one, and another really tough class that I was committed to do very well in, all basically took up the time that I had been dedicating to running, and I gained weight... but oh well, c'est la vie). Starting in early March, I flew at least once a week. My skills improved steadily. I also bought a test-prep book for the Private Pilot written test, got Jeff to endorse me to take the test (by showing him that I was doing well on practice tests), and passed the Private Pilot written test. With my knowledge and my skills finally meeting his strict standards, Jeff finally endorsed me in May for my Private Pilot checkride.
But I still felt crappy about it. Each time I walked into the flight school, I felt like I needed to hang my head low in shame. It had been a year since my first solo in a Cessna. It must have been apparent to everyone that I was clearly a terrible pilot. And my friends were still asking me whether I was a pilot yet. I still wished I could quit. The main emotion that I associated with flying was embarrassment. I hated the whole process and just wanted it to be over. (And I have heard this same story from my friends who have been in the home stretch of finishing a thesis and getting a graduate degree. "I just want it to be over!!!". By the way, as I write this, I am still not finished with my Masters, so I guess I still have that to look forward to :P).
The day before I was scheduled to fly with the examiner, I was feeling extremely frustrated and depressed. Because even if I passed (and there were moments when I was sure that I would not pass), I could not be proud of it. Why not? Well... I was sure that, if I announced to anyone that I had become a pilot, their reaction would be "Finally! What took you so long?". So even if I passed, I had to keep it to myself. The pride of passing would be overwhelmed by the embarrassment of having believed, incorrectly, for a year, that I would have a pilot certificate in "just a few more flights".
This frustrated me so much that I was not able to sleep until well after midnight. And the following day, I had to teach at work, which meant I had to get up around 5AM in order to be in early enough. (I'm a structures engineer, but once every month or two I spend a day teaching new structures engineers how to do fatigue analysis). So I was exhausted, and nervous. The weather was marginal, and this made me hope I could get out of the checkride. So in the middle of the day, during a break in my class, I called the examiner... and he said "Haven't you looked at the forecasts? It's supposed to get better in the afternoon". And dang it, he was right. After days of feeling angry and frustrated and embarrassed and depressed about flying, a night with only half as much sleep as I needed, and a full day of teaching, I showed up at the flight school in no mood to go flying.
But up we went. (We had done the oral exam a couple days earlier). Much to my surprise, my cross-country dead-reckoning went well, my maneuvers went well, my instrument-flying went well, and my stalls were my best ever. (I had had some trouble figuring out how to perform a clean power-on stall in a Cessna, it took me a while to learn, and I hadn't really been able to do it perfectly until those last couple of months). So we headed back to the airport.
By then, I was EXHAUSTED. We radioed in, set up to land... and my approach was not my most stable ever, with me getting a little too high and then a little too low and over-correcting with the power. I put the airplane down off-centerline and with some sideslip, so we were jerked to the side as the airplane straightened out with the runway.
I asked if the examiner wanted to see another landing, and he said "No, let's taxi it back in".
Aw, crap. Not again.
He said "I'm not going to fail you. I'll just pause the examination. Get some rest, practice your landings, then come back and we'll pick up here, where we left off".
And that's what I did. First I got some rest. Next chance I got, I got up and did a bunch of landings. They were all just fine, if I just paid attention to what I was doing. A few days after our previous flight, I met up again with the examiner, this time before work (i.e. early in the morning). I showed him a few good landings, and he said "That was not bad at all. I feel confident that you're not going to put anyone in danger when you fly".
And he held out his hand, which I shook. "Congratulations".
I thanked him sternly. I wasn't smiling.
I was as emotionally shut down as I had been at the end of my Sport Pilot checkride, and at the end of my previous flight with this Private Pilot examiner. I was mostly embarrassed by how long it had taken. I was still sure that everyone at the flight school thought I was a terrible pilot. I was still depressed about the whole thing. This was nothing to be proud of.
The examiner said "So, you earned it! This is a pretty good day for you, isn't it?". I tried to smile, and I said "Yeah", but I don't think I was very convincing.
During the few days since the first part of my Private Pilot examination, I had talked with a couple of close friends about this. I told them how embarrassed I was about having said for a year that I would be a pilot "after just a few more flights, in about a month". About how, if I told anyone that I had passed, I felt like the only possible reaction would be "Finally! What took you so long?". One of those close friends told me that I HAD to tell EVERYONE. I expressed obvious unease at that thought, but she refused to leave me alone until I promised them that I would make a post on Facebook when I passed my checkride.
Already feeling pretty crappy about the situation, I asked myself that day, What do I have to lose? So after the examiner printed the piece of paper and we signed it, I walked away and took out my phone. First I texted my girlfriend asking if she wanted to go flying that evening, be my first passenger, a ceremonial event about as important as the first solo. Then I fulfilled my promise to my friend, and made a post on Facebook. I also emailed a bunch of friends and relatives who were unlikely to see the Facebook post.
All day, I got back messages of congratulations. I didn't get a single hint of "Finally! What took you so long?" (and I didn't know what kind of mood I would sink into if I had). My mood steadily improved throughout the day, as I got little work done and spent about half my time responding to people's excited emails and Facebook messages. I did end up sending an email to pretty much everyone in my address book, and people who hadn't really talked with me for years re-appeared to warmly congratulate me.
By the time it was evening, my mood had swung around 180 degrees. I was beaming, I had accomplished a life-long goal, there was nothing I should be embarrassed about, and soon I would be flying my first passenger.
Clouds surrounded Puget Sound everywhere except to the west, so when my girlfriend arrived at Paine Field in the evening, we flew off into the sunset, made a turn around Port Angeles, and flew back.
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Part 4 - Only Just Begun
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What's next?
Well, I don't even know where to start.
I want to learn aerobatics! That, to me, seems like true flying, exploring all 360 degrees of all three axes (not just yaw). Learning to fly inverted, knife-edge, do loops and rolls... I have been flown through aerobatics three times at airshows, and (pardon the cliché) I can easily say that it's the most fun I've ever had with my pants on. Flying a Cessna feels like just driving around in the sky, when you're afraid to bank the wings too much or to point the nose too high or too low. I want to fly without these restrictions, go all the way up, all the way down, get squeezed into the seat by G forces, push the nose so hard that I hang from the straps...
Most aerobatic airplanes are taildraggers, i.e. they have a little wheel under the tail and no little wheel under the nose. I also want to fly the legendary Cub, since so many pilots rave about it. So, one thing on the to-do list is to get a tailwheel endorsement, so I can fly these airplanes. Airplanes with a tailwheel are basically unstable in yaw when they're on the ground, and it's very tricky to take off and land when your airplane has two big wheels so far forward. The wheels are always trying to move to the back of the airplane, i.e. it keeps trying to turn itself around, something called a ground loop. It typically takes about 10 hours of training with an instructor in order for a pilot to earn the instructor endorsement that is required to fly these airplanes, by learning how to manage the taildragger's instability. This is done basically by developing a very sharp sense of where the nose is pointing and where the airplane is going (and being able to precisely determine this just by looking outside, no instruments) and reacting to changes in these angles quickly but gently. When the wheels are on the ground, the airplane always wants to turn one way, then the other way, and you can't let it. When you take off or land, the airplane must be pointing right down the runway, and traveling right down the runway. (Airplanes with tricycle gear are much more forgiving; You can land them crooked and they straighten themselves out, instead of swerving off to the side like a taildragger. And they taxi in a straight line without needing constant little corrections). As a result, when you learn to fly a taildragger, all your landings become smoother (even on tricycle airplanes), and you start looking outside a lot more and being more sensitive to things like what the nose's attitude can tell you about the airplane's speed. In short, tailwheel training makes everyone a better pilot.
I want to learn to fly seaplanes! Kenmore Air, and other aerial-tour operators, make sure that the skies around Seattle are always buzzing with the sound of Beavers and Otters and Cessnas with pontoons. Once you have a Private Pilot certificate, a Seaplane certificate typically takes another 6 hours of training, plus a checkride where all you need to show is your proficiency at water operations (no need to go over all the stuff already tested in the Private Pilot checkride).
I want an Instrument rating! Right now I am capable of flying by instruments, but I am not certified to do so intentionally. In other words, I have to check the weather before I fly, and I'll get in trouble if I fly into an area where bad weather was forecast. (I was taught to fly by instruments so that I can get back home if the weather unexpectedly gets bad). By "bad weather" I mean low clouds. I can fly in the rain or snow, as long as I have a few miles visibility. But I may not fly through clouds, and in fact I have to stay several hundred feet away from them (in case something flying through the clouds comes out near me). I also have to fly at the very least 500 feet above the ground (because if the engine fails, I need to be able to get the airplane to a safe spot to land) and 1000 feet above the tallest point within half a mile when over populated areas. So basically if there's a pretty solid layer of clouds less than 1500 feet above the ground, then I can't go flying, since I won't be able to stay 500 feet below the clouds and 1000 feet above the ground. In Seattle, that severely limits my flying in the winter. The solution is to get an Instrument rating. During Instrument training, you learn how to create a special kind of flight plan, submit it to air traffic control, then be guided by them from the moment you leave the ground until the moment you land, so you don't need to see where you're going. Not a lot of fun, I know. Isn't the point of flying to have control and autonomy of a flying machine, and to enjoy the view? Yeah, but; If I want to take a Cessna trip to eastern Washington to spend the weekend with my girlfriend's family or something, then it would be nice to be able to make that trip regardless of weather. I wish I could fly to Spokane to spend Thanksgiving with her family, and to fly to Portland in December when her sister is due to have a child… But without an instrument rating, I can’t.
I want to be able to fly bigger airplanes, so I can go on a trip and take more people. A month or two after I got my certificate, Allen Ball and I took a trip to Orcas Island. He and I each flew a Cessna 172, making for a total of 8 people. Had I been able to fly a six-seater like a Cessna 205, we could have taken two more people. When my parents and my sister come visit me, it would be nice to fly them in a roomier airplane, rather than just squeezing them into a 172. Or for me to visit them in New York (or travel with the three of them to some destination), rent a six-seater with an instructor, and go flying with my parents and my sister in the back. The problem is, airplanes with more than 4 seats tend to have engines with more than 200 horsepower. That is classified as a "high performance" airplane, and they require an instructor's endorsement to fly, and this takes about 10 hours of training. Many of them also have variable-pitch propellers and retractable landing gear, which makes them "complex" airplanes, also requiring an endorsement and some training. So I want to get trained to fly complex and high-performance airplanes (which can usually be done at the same time, about 10 hours in an airplane that has retractable gear and a 200hp engine with a variable-pitch prop).
If I can fly a taildragger, and I can fly a complex high-performance airplane... Then I can fly a T-6, a Yak, and all kinds of other really fun airshow airplanes :D (if their owners are willing to take me flying, and if I'm willing to pay for the fuel).
And, of course, I want to be able to fly multi-engine airplanes (also lots and lots of training and another checkride), maybe get certificates to be a Commercial pilot and a Flight Instructor so that I can teach flying on the side... as well as the aforementioned tailwheel, instrument, complex, high-performance, and seaplane ratings, plus some aerobatic training… i.e. I guess I want all the certificates that pretty much all pilots talk about.
It's hard to decide where to start. The week I got my certificate, I flew around the airspace downtown with my instructor, so that he (or really, I) could check that I managed all the airspace restrictions and radio communications properly. Then I went to a place in Renton that rents Sportstars. Yes, it's almost an hour away by car, but the Sportstar is super fun and I missed flying it, it's tiny and light and snappy and easy to fly, and the view is unbeatable. One quick flight with an instructor and I was again checked out to rent the airplane. The fact that Renton is close to downtown (closer than Paine is, anyways) means that as soon as you take off, that bubble canopy gives you a breathtaking view of Lake Washington and the downtown skyline and the Space Needle. Over the summer I have taken three friends on aerial tours of downtown in the Sportstar.
As for the things that need more substantial training, I ended up deciding to start with tailwheel. So over this past summer I met with a tailwheel instructor who flew with me once almost every week and eventually gave me an endorsement to fly taildraggers. An unexpected side benefit is that he now lets me rent his personal airplane pretty much at cost, for much less than the price of renting a Cessna 172. As for the Cub; I haven't flown one yet, but there's one at Arlington and I plan on checking it out when I have some free time.
If I do complex/high-performance training, or seaplane training, or aerobatic training, then it needs to be at a time when I know I can reliably do it at least once a week. So I'll wait until next summer or late spring. Especially because I know that my classes are about to start in the fall, and it's hard to prioritize flying very highly when there are homework assignments due and midterms coming up. In fact, this works well in general: masters classes in the fall and winter and spring, flight training in the summer. So maybe next summer I'll do complex/high-performance, and/or seaplane. Or maybe instrument. Or I might do instrument over the winter. We'll see.
Well, there is one way to do flight-training without needing to devote hours per week to it for months. And that is, do it full time! For example: other than learning some stuff for the written test, all that is really required for the instrument rating is 35 hours of instrument flying with an instructor, and 15 of those can be on a simulator. (Some flight schools also require that you have 50 hours of cross-country flying by that point, but some do not). Some flight schools say; take ground school online, pass the written test, then spend 7 to 9 days training with us all day every day, and you'll be ready for your Instrument checkride! Fly for about 2 or 3 hours a day (and one nice thing about flight-training for instrument-flying is, you don't have to cancel/postpone when the weather is bad, you can fly in rain or shine), spend 2 hours a day on the simulator, and you'll have those 35 hours in no time! Then fly with an FAA examiner and leave with your rating! Hmmm... I've considered doing this, and to be honest I haven't 100% ruled it out.
But here's the problem. When all you do is memorize stuff for a test, you don't really learn it. Imagine trying to learn how to drive a car, and taking a test on the subject, without ever getting behind the wheel. All the words will be abstract concepts to memorize, not things that you have touched and operated. You don't get as much learning from the written-test requirement if you do the test before you fly. And when all your flying is compressed into a week or two, you don't really have time to learn from your mistakes, to soak in the experience and become a better pilot, to put what you learn into context and understand WHY you do each step of this or that procedure. Even if you get the certificate, you won't be as proficient (read: safe) as someone who took their time. Again, imagine having a week to go from "never drove a car" to "driver's license". You can drive all day every day and log as many hours as someone who did it over a couple months, but you won't be as safe. And this to me is clear as day, thanks to my experience in St Louis. For example, there were lots of procedures I had to memorize: How to do a soft-field landing, how to set up for and recover from a stall, how to plan a cross-country... these lists of steps were things that I memorized without having an intuition about WHY each step is done. When I think about it, it's amazing that I was able to do all those things and almost pass my Sport Pilot checkride. Now, when I look at those lists, it's dead obvious to me why you do each of the things. Obviously you wouldn't want to forget to do X, because if you don't do X then Y will happen, and that's bad! I do all the things on the list because each of them clearly helps me to accomplish some goal, not just because I memorized the list. The difference is vast. One more driving analogy: Think about the first time you had to slam on the breaks, and narrowly avoided rear-ending the car in front of you. (Or maybe you did rear-end them). You will think about following distances differently after this incident (based on practice) than you did before the incident (rote memorization and theoretical abstraction). When you do full-time flight training, you memorize a bunch of stuff, but you don't really feel it, it's not intuitive, done for its own sake. So I would recommend against full-time flight training. That having been said, I really want that instrument rating, and I don't want to have to fly with an instructor every week for months before I get it... But when it comes to flying airplanes, impatience kills, so I need to resist its temptation.
And here are two interesting addenda/postcripts/epilogues that I might as well mention.
My girlfriend's family has a cabin at Priest Lake, which has a small grass strip nearby. So at one point during the summer I rented a Cessna for an entire weekend and flew to the lake. This was my first flight over mountains, and my first flight that was so long that I needed to get fuel at some point in order to have enough to make it all the way back. I talked with an instructor to double-check my plans, and it all looked good. So on a Saturday morning, off we went. On my way east we first followed I-90 and then a series of VORs (since I had never actually used VORs for navigation, only to show my instructor that I knew how to work the directional radio. So, might as well do it for real at least once). I stopped in Spokane to fill the tank and to pick up my girlfriend's mom, and then the three of us flew to the lake. Her dad would be driving, and would need a couple hours to get there. So since we got there only half an hour after leaving Spokane, we then flew a circuit around the lake, which is very large and is surrounded by spectacular mountains. I made the softest grass landing ever - and decided that from now on, I should land airplanes always pretending that my girlfriend's mom is aboard. We spend two lovely days at the lake, with the airplane parked at the grass strip. The way back was more of a straight shot (withouth stopping in Spokane), over the Grand Coulee dam and Lake Chelan and other places I kept hearing about but had never seen. And I had to put all my weather knowledge into practice, since there was a cold front moving in and I had to time my departure such that it would have hit eastern Washington (and thus started to dissipate in the desert) before I got to it. I did time it just right. All in all, it was seven hours of flying; Most of it on the way back, flying into a headwind from the oncoming cold front. The trip gave me confidence in my ability to fly somewhere new, navigate properly, be directed by air traffic control around a strange airport, and do what I have to do in order to avoid bad weather.
The last thing worth mentioning right now is that I have decided to buy an airplane, along with Allen. He had been bugging me for a while about maybe buying a Cessna 152 or 172. I told him that if I were to buy an airplane, it would have to be an aerobatic airplane, because I will want to fly aerobatics, and it would be a shame to own an airplane and have to rent another one to do aerobatics. And aerobatic planes are very expensive, right? Also, I would ideally like something with a bubble canopy, so the view would be as good as in a Sportstar. I was pretty sure that this would be well beyond what I could afford. However…
• …I
talked with someone who has a Van's RV-4,
and it turns out that those sleek little
kitplanes sell for reasonable prices. They're aerobatic, they have a
bubble canopy... so I asked Allen if he'd like to buy one. He would. We
investigated. Problems arose. One: The cheaper ones are not in good
shape. If we wanted to buy one that was in good enough shape to not give
us any maintenance worries, then that would cost two or three times the
cost of a Cessna, about twice the cost of other similar aerobatic airplanes like a Citabria
or a Sundowner or a Thorp. Two: You
can't do aerobatics in an RV-4 while carrying a lot of weight. You can't
really do them with a person in the backseat who weighs more than ~100 lbs, since having the Center of Gravity so far back means that if you get into a spin, you might not be able to get out. Not only that, but at max takeoff weight, the RV-4 is only good for 4.4G (compared to 6G at the aerobatic weight. The aerobatic weight basically means just one occupant and a half-tank of fuel, because in total the airplane must be under 1375lbs, which is quite a bit lower than the max takeoff weight of 1600 lbs). In other words, it's POSSIBLE do aerobatics in a fully-laden RV-4, if you keep the Gs low, but you'd risk breaking the wings off if you don’t manage those Gs very carefully...
and I don't know whether I can trust myself to keep things below 4.4G
while doing loops and rolls. Later-model RV airplanes like the RV-7 and -8
can do full aerobatic at full weight, but they're way out of our price range.
Ok, so, probably no RV for us, for now. What other options do we have for low-cost aerobatic airplanes?
• The Thorp T-18 is sometimes called “the poor man’s RV”. It costs about half as much as an RV, but can do 90% of what an RV can. It can even do more aerobatics at higher weights than the RV-4 and -6. Some Thorps also have folding wings so you can fold it up after flying and tow it home. Their main disadvantage, other than being kinda ugly, is that they need a lot of runway. They land at pretty fast speeds. Several times, people have died in a Thorp because they tried to make an emergency landing but simply couldn’t stop the airplane before hitting something… or during a landing, they got too slow and stalled. While it’s technically within the numbers, I would not feel comfortable taking a Thorp to the grass strip near my girlfriend’s parents’ lake cabin. (Even a Cessna 172 with just two people in it barely cleared the trees at one end, when I took off from there). So, it’s probably super fun to do aerobatics in, and one can be had for quite cheap, and the folding wings are nice… but, sorry no. Other cheap aerobatic planes?
• A Glasair 1 or 2 or 3 would be a good option. They're like an RV, but have better numbers for speed (they're actually just about the fastest two-seaters you can buy, some even have retractable gear... we're talking 300 mph), payload (their fancy carbon-fiber and fiberglass construction means that the empty airplane weighs a lot less than if it were aluminum, so you can carry more stuff...), and range (... and/or carry more fuel). They, too, are aerobatic: here are videos of a Thorp dogfighting a Glasair, and a Glasair flying an airshow aerobatics routine. And, they're absolutely gorgeous, probably the slickest-looking two-seaters out there, along with the MySky and (of course) the RV-4. Pointy-nosed, but full of blended curves, with a huge smooth single unbroken sculpted surface rather than a bunch of panels riveted together, thanks to the composite construction. The main disadvantages of Glasairs that they tend to be a little on the expensive side (especially since most have glass cockpits decked out like a 777's), they don't quite have the unrestricted bubble-canopy view of an RV or Thorp, and they need a lot of runway and land pretty fast. Probably not something you could land on the grass by the lake. So, no go. Besides which, as a structures engineer, I don't feel 100% comfortable with old composite airplanes. My concern is that light damage to composite structure is sometimes impossible to detect during an inspection and can grow with time. This has changed over the past 10 years or so, especially now that the 787 is in service. However, until recently, the knowledge and technology to evaluate the impact of light damage onto cyclically-loaded composite structure simply wasn't advanced enough for me to feel comfortable flying in a 25-year-old composite airplane. I am sincerely impressed by Glasair's truly amazing and innovative work figuring out how to make airplanes 100% out of composite materials... but given that even Airbus was having trouble evaluating composite damage in its airplanes as little as 10 years ago, I think I'll only trust composite aero structures if they're in a modern commercial airliner (or maybe in a Burt Rutan airplane).
• When it comes to learning aerobatics, the
Citabria is supposedly
THE airplane to start with.
They can carry more weight, the
7KCAB model can sustain inverted flight... but they're not nearly as
cool-looking as an RV or even a Thorp. Their high-wing configuration means they're
just about the least exciting-looking airplanes out there. As for the view, it's nothing
like a bubble canopy, no panoramic view of the landscape below you and sky above
(especially due to the high wings).
And they're really slow, so any kind of long trip would
take forever. Still, they're built in factories (unlike RVs and Thorps and Glasairs, which are
built in garages), and they're supposed to be tons of fun to fly. So, definitely a finalist. What else?
• Well,
there's Cessna’s attempt to compete against the Citabria: the Cessna 150/152 Aerobat. However, that has a
yoke instead of a joystick, which makes flying aerobatics a work-intensive
and less-than-intuitive hassle. And the roll rate is relatively sluggish (or so I hear)
when compared to other aerobatic planes. And it looks like a wimpy little Cessna.
But it's cheap, and very reliable, and inexpensive to maintain. (It is a Cessna
after all). If we wanted no headaches, no surprises, low maintenance, and
low insurance costs, then this would be the perfect airplane.
• The last contender, now that we're into "trying to do
aerobatics with a yoke" territory, is the
Beech Musketeer Custom/Sundowner. It's a
four-seater, i.e. the only airplane on this list that would
allow me to go flying with more than just one passenger... and it can
hold 60 gallons of fuel (versus 40 in a Cessna) so it's excellent for
long trips (but no, it can't hold all that fuel AND four people at the same time... the
total payload weight of "fuel + people + bags" has to stay under 1000 lbs, which I
guess means you could take full fuel and four people if the four people each weigh ~150 lbs). And it's
aerobatic! But it's relatively slow, and it doesn't climb very fast.
And it's not as snappy as an RV kitplane or a Citabria, it probably flies more
like a Cessna. But it can carry three passengers, not just one. That's really nice.
And with 60 gallons, I can fly to Spokane and back, easy.
Which airplane to get? Well, I started out wanting an RV. But then I decided that the RV is quite a bit more expensive than the others, and what you get for that cost is more of a “cool factor” than anything else. Also, I remembered a time when two college friends of mine showed up in town this summer, and we went flying, and this made me think that it would be nice to have an airplane where I can take up more than just one other person at a time. So I focused on the Musketeer. Well, as it turns out, the aerobatic ones are also somewhat expensive (maybe 75% of the cost of an RV), their maintenance costs are supposed to be relatively high, they make hard landings because they have stiff landing gear, and there's the aforementioned anemic climb rate. All right, maybe not. Cessnas? No, too sluggish, not fun enough. Citabrias? Their problem is that most of them have a wooden wing spar that is prone to splitting over time. Some have had it replaced with a metal spar, but those also cost a good fraction of what an RV costs. Also, I want to take those IFR trips during the months when the weather is not so great, and the Citabria may not be IFR capable… and even if it is, I don’t know if I can get IFR training in an airplane where the instructor does not have access to the panel, since the Citabria has tandem seats. That got me thinking about how nice it is to have side-by-side seats: You can see your passenger's face, both people have full access to the panel, and it's much better for training. And then, as the weather has gotten worse recently, it became clearer to me how important it is to have an IFR-capable airplane.
So, you know what? I’m getting an RV. If I get the RV-6, which is like the RV-4 (and just as aerobatic) except with side-by-side seats instead of tandem, then I avoid the unrecoverable-spin aft-CG issues, since both people sit pretty close to the front. And if I do plenty of aerobatic instruction and solo aerobatics until I feel confident that I can do certain maneuvers and keep them under 4.4G, then I will be ok to do those maneuvers with a passenger. Sure, the airplane only seats one other person, so I couldn't take 2 or 3 friends up at a time... but in the couple times a year when I want to fly more than one other person, I can still rent a Cessna. Now, the only tricky part was finding an IFR-capable RV-6, since most of them do not have enough instruments for zero-visibility flight. I looked for months, until one finally went up for sale. So now I'm figuring out the processes involved with buying and owning an airplane, and hopefully I will own (or, rather, co-own) that RV-6 before the end of the year. And I’m very, very, very excited about it :D
And that’s where I’m at.
Maybe in a year I can do an update to this, talk about the airplane I will have bought, and about seaplane and complex/high-performance training.
One way or the other, it has been a long and interesting journey so far. I have fulfilled a childhood dream, I can go explore the Pacific Northwest by flying little four-seat airplanes, I can give aerial tours of downtown Seattle to my friends and family, and even without doing aerobatics I can give my friends a pretty wild ride with tight turns and zero-G push-overs. On a sunny afternoon, work permitting, on a whim I can step outside and drive down the road and hop in a Cessna and go enjoy the view from a mile up in the air. It's pretty sweet :]
And the main lesson, like I said: Flight training has to be done often. You can't make progress as a student pilot if you fly only once a week. You need at least a few months when you can fly at least once a week. Otherwise, it will literally take years. And the second main lesson: Full-time flight-training is a temptingly quick way to earn a certificate in a week or two, but you don't learn the stuff as well as you would if you took your time.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any feedback, or any questions, feel free to comment at this Reddit thread.
Blues skies and tailwinds!
