Lesson 5: Flying with the Chief

Tuesday, July 25, 2017: I know. I’m telling the pilot training story out of order. My last post covered lesson 7, where I wasn’t at my best. This post will be about lesson 5. Lesson 6, I’ll talk about it at the end of this post. Warning, this is a long one. There’s a lot to talk about.

My typical flying schedule is Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday. Last Tuesday, I had a 5:30 lesson on the schedule with Grant. I need to leave right at 4:30 to be able to navigate Seattle traffic to get down to the airport. My last meeting of the day was supposed to end at 4, but I was having a great discussion with a colleague which went until 4:25. After my meeting ended, I picked up my phone and realized that Grant had texted me that he wasn’t feeling well, and needed to cancel. I was pretty disappointed. In the first couple weeks of training, there were some weather cancellations, a mechanical problem with the plane, and a couple times we had chosen ground training over flying. The cancellation brought all that back. As I was still basking in the disappointment of the schedule change, my phone rang. It was Jim, the chief pilot at the flight school. “Rick, I saw that Grant cancelled. My schedule’s clear, if you’re still up for it, come on in and I’ll fly with you.”

When I arrived at the airport, Jim and I shook hands, then talked about what we’d be working on. Definitely some slow flight, some stalls, and maybe some pattern work. As with any flight, we headed out to preflight the aircraft. When I started training, I was handed a checklist for the Cessna 172 that I would be flying. It has all the critical procedures (before takeoff, takeoff, cruise, landing, after landing, etc.), and it’s exactly what you’d think a checklist for a pilot would be. It included two sets of preflight checklists. One was for inside the airplane (a quick evaluation to make sure that the engine instruments and avionics are working properly), then an external check. I had been following these checklists religiously - a miss of a single step could prove disastrous. Jim wanted to show me a different way. He used the word “flow” a lot. Find the flow of things that need to be done, then use the checklist to ensure we did everything. Rather than looking at each item of the checklist as a prescribed “Thou shall do this now. Not before the next and only after the previous,” Jim did what made sense, and then double-checked. This theme would come up again in our flight.

Given that I’m writing this a week after the fact, I don’t remember many of the details of taxiing, taking off, and heading to the practice area. It might have been the first time I made the radio call to Ground - “Ground, Skyhawk Four Four Four Victor Whiskey, with Bravo at Rainier, I’d like a Lake Youngs departure”. The “Bravo” is the code that is used for the weather report. Each hour it changes to the next letter. By saying I had Bravo, it meant that I was up to date with the latest info, including barometric pressure (important for setting the altimeter) and winds (important for judging takeoffs/landings).

Anyways, we headed out to the southeast practice area, and Jim suggested that we start with slow flight. The idea here is that we get the airplane REALLY slow, like 5 kts above the airplane’s stalling speed, and we hang out there without losing altitude. If I remember correctly, we also put the airplane in the landing configuration, with flaps extended, to make sure we could go as slow as possible but still not stall. In order to do this, you pitch the airplane’s nose up quite a bit and you need a fair amount of power. This wasn’t too bad. The air over the plane sounded different, and the controls felt mushy (because there wasn’t as much air going over them), but it was manageable. We did some turns in this configuration as well. Then Jim suggested we practice stalls. This felt less manageable.

I found out afterwards that Jim used to be a spin instructor at another airport. A spin, if you aren’t expecting it and don’t know how to control it, pretty much means you’re going to crash (or “uncontrolled flight into terrain”). If you notice in that video, the pilot pulls the nose up pretty high, and then the thing goes over into the spin. That nose-high position is the pilot stalling the airplane. In a stall, the angle-of-attack (AOA) is so large that the wings stop working properly. If you don’t correct it quickly, you lose altitude in a hurry, and at worst, a spin can develop. It’s important to train stalls for a number of reasons. When you’re taking off (with full power), a common mistake is to pull the nose too high, perhaps to avoid an obstacle at the end of the runway. On landing (with low power), you’re going so slow that a stall can develop quickly. Learning how to recover from a stall, and making it automatic, is important so that if you get into these situations, you can recover quickly.

Another quick side note: I’m a pretty big fan of learning new stuff; it’s probably my biggest hobby. It might be a new programming language, it might be a new lift at the gym, and now, it’s flying. When I decided to become a pilot, I found out the key books to buy, and went and bought them, and basically read them cover-to-cover. When it came to stalls, I knew all the mechanics. I knew about Critical AOA, I knew about recovery procedures. Going into it, I was pretty confident. Drop the nose to get wind flowing over the wings, full power, wings to level (if you’re in a turn), then slowly start to climb out. I KNEW this. I was ready for stalls.

Jim suggested we transition from slow flight to power off stalls. We reduced the power to idle, and then kept pulling up the nose until the stall horn was screaming at us. My book learnin’ didn’t prepare me for this. It just felt WRONG. The airplane was really unhappy, it didn’t want to be controlled. The nose kept diving left and right, and Jim was hard on the rudders correcting that. This is where his spin training came in handy. To start a spin, you don’t correct the diving with rudders, then you let the spin happen. Because Jim was so experienced with this, we hung out in that stall for 30 seconds or a minute at a time. I didn’t like it at all. Then, when we did recover (push the nose over), it felt like we were in a free fall. Which I also didn’t like. We did it a couple times. Jim would say, “You feel that? That’s the stall.” I couldn’t feel it, so Jim put us in stall after stall until I did start to feel the “bubbling” and the crazy bumpiness. We then did power on stalls. While I didn’t like it any more than the power off stalls, I started to become much more comfortable with the recovery, and I began to have a deeper understanding of how to control the plane in the stall to avoid the spin.

Jim suggested we head over to an uncontrolled airport (i.e. no tower) to practice some pattern work. As we were flying over there, I asked him about his background. Most of the folks I met at Rainier were on a different path. Grant, my IP, was focused on building enough hours to get his ATP certification (for which you need 1500 hours of flight time, minimum), which would allow him to fly for the airlines. I’ve flown with a couple other instructors, and universally, they have the same goal. Jim is a little different. He’s an 8,000 hour pilot (!), and has been chief pilot for 3 years. He’s about 10 years older than me, and about 10 years ago decided that his desk job wasn’t making him happy. He took a six week vacation to try being a CFI (he already had the cert), and never went back. He told me, “I make half the money, and I’m twice as happy”. With all those hours under his belt, he exudes this sense of competence that seems impossible to fake. I just wanted to absorb a teensy bit of that from him.

This airport (KPLU) was much smaller than Renton. The runway was maybe half as wide, and a little shorter. As a result, the sight picture for takeoffs and landings was different. As I mentioned last time, there’s a bunch of steps to the pattern, speeds/rpms you have to hit to have a safe landing, and Jim worked me through that. One funny story that happened here. Renton is at 34ft MSL (mean sea level), KPLU is at about 500ft. TPA (traffic pattern altitude) is typically 1000 ft above the field, not above MSL. On the first climb out, Jim told me to turn crosswind when it was time. On the second, he said, “Turn at 700ft above the field.” “Got it”, I said. He looked at me, and said, “Rick, what’s 5+7?” Ummm, uhhh… I was so busy managing the climb out, managing the pitch and just focusing on flying the airplane, that basic 2nd grade math escaped me. About 20 seconds later I said, “12?” Jim was making a really good point. When workload is high, it’s difficult to take on more tasks. A primary point of lots of training reps is to make that same workload seem much easier, automatic, like a habit.

I did a couple good landings there. Jim suggested we head back, but on the way, we would swing by Crest Airpark (S36) for a couple more landings. We had been up for quite a while already, and I was sweaty and a bit tired, but I was absolutely loving this, so hell yes! More, please. On the way to Crest, Jim said, “See that down there? That’s a private airstrip.” It took me a few seconds to make it out, but ultimately I did see it. A grass runway nestled between some trees. You needed to be a member of that club to fly there. Maybe a minute later, Jim reached over and pulled the throttle back to idle and said, “Uh-oh. You’re having an engine failure, what do you do?” Grant and I had just practiced emergency procedures in the previous lesson. On that day, I knew the steps: A-B-C-D-E. A - set best airspeed for the longest glide. B - find the best field to land in. C - execute the checklist to try to get the engine restarted, or prepare for a forced landing. D - declare an emergency. E - Execute the plan, and evacuate if necessary. This was another classic case of, “Rick has the book learning but no experience.” I remembered air speed. I pitched the nose for 68kts. Then I completely choked. Blanked. Had no idea what next. Jim said, “B…what’s B?” Nope, didn’t have it. “Best airfield!” Right! I start looking around for a field to put it down in. Jim let me flounder for a minute or two, and said, “Didn’t we just pass an airfield?” I felt like I had an IQ of 34 during this episode. I pointed the nose at the grass strip. “Ok, what next?” I figured out the checklist items, but I didn’t have it properly memorized, so it took me a while. Jim mentioned that “flow” concept again. He said, “You have to find the flow for an engine failure”. Meanwhile, I had lost my airspeed (going too fast because I had let the nose drop) and I had flown over the strip. I had forgotten to fly the airplane! Jim finally put me out of my misery. “Go round,” he said. That, I knew how to do. Full power, start climbing, clean up the airplane (I had put down some flaps for the possible landing).

This experience really hit home for me. The biggest risk in flying single-engine airplanes is losing the engine (as a side note: the most common reason for losing an engine is running out of gas). Being able to react to that happening at ANY time is an absolute necessity. If it had really happened that day, and I was alone, I probably would have died. Seriously. It would have been game over. In our post-flight briefing, Jim suggested that I “fly the chair”. When I’m home, sitting in a chair, picture I’m in the airplane, and execute the checklist. I’ve been doing this on an almost daily basis, and it’s helped.

We then headed over to Crest. Crest is even smaller than Pierce County, and the approach is over some trees that look awfully close to the runway. Jim said that they weren’t in our path, so I ignored them. I did two landings, went to a full stop, and then Jim wanted to demonstrate one to me. He said that I was over-controlling the airplane, a common occurrence in new pilots. The airplane does want to stay stable, and the pilot can cause their own turbulence by providing too much input. His demonstration was pretty impressive. He essentially took off, flew the pattern and landed, with 1 finger on the yoke and maybe 3 or 4 power adjustments. It was a helpful demo.

After one more landing at Crest, we headed back to Renton and parked. We grabbed a briefing room and debriefed. We talked about pitch, power, trim. We talked about being more preprared for emergencies. We talked about staying calm out there. We shook hands, and I jumped in the car for the ride home. I was utterly drained. My head was spinning. I was up in the middle of the night, as I processed all the new information I had just learned. Don’t misread this - it’s a good thing. While it was really difficult, I learned a bunch that’s going to make me a better and safer pilot. It was good fun.

I said I’d talk about Lesson 6, which was Saturday July 29. I’ll be brief. I took my daughter with me. We intended to do some ground reference maneuvers and some time under the hood. The “hood” is how you can simulate IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, like flying into a cloud and losing visibility). When you have the hood on, you can see all your instruments, but you can’t see outside. We then did “turns around a point”, where we picked a spot on the ground, and tried to fly a perfect circle around it. This improves precision flying ability, and is particularly good on days when there’s wind, as you learn how to compensate for it. On this day, there was very little wind, so while I didn’t learn wind compensation, I was able to practice precision flying.

After these two lessons, I felt like I was starting to get into the rhythm of flying. As I discussed last time, I was up for a rude awakening for lesson 7.