Pilot Training II
December 27- 30, 2000. 4.4 Hours Flown
For the remainder of 2000 I had the luxury of flying almost every day in the beautiful weather of Northern California. Let me highly recommend that if there is anyway to start out your flying lessons with a week like this it will really accelerate your learning. There is nothing like the continuity to keep help you get proficient more quickly; you forget too much flying once a week on the weekends.
During this week I progressed quickly and mastered the take-off, turns, stalls, and flying around the pattern. I was starting to land the aircraft, andwas really beginning to discover how hard that was going to be. Darn it, I had mastered all these other manuevers, but in the end, the one that really counts is landing! By this time I had done about 8 landings. My difficulty was in flaring, or actual the general lack thereof. You see, the 182 has very heavy controls in pitch (i.e. up and down). You really have to trim the airplane constantly to make it at all comfortable to fly, and you have to push or pull really hard on the yoke sometimes. Steve had warned me this plane would be harder to learn, so I didn't sweat it too much.
My other problem was I just didn't have a good eye for how to guage the flare. Flaring is when you pull the nose up at the end of the landing approach and let the aircraft sort of settle gently onto the runway. Steve was very patient. He felt this was something you just had to osmose from seeing it and doing it over and over again. As he put it, "One day it'll come to you, and you won't be able to screw it up if you try." Well I was trying very hard and screwing it up very successfully, thank you!
January 2001. 7.6 Hours Flown, 12 Hours Total
I had to get back to work, so couldn't fly quite as often, but I did manage to go about twice a week during January. I got in 6 lessons at any rate, and most of them involved at least a half dozen take-offs and landings. We'd average between 1.5 and 2 hours of flight per lesson, with 3 hours budgeted for the lesson. Landing remained frustrating, but the rest of the process was becoming routine, and occasionally I would make a good landing, sometimes even 2 or 3 in a row. I also became proficient with radio work for the uncontrolled airport. For some reason the radio always gave me stage fright. I couldn't learn anything about it in the air, so I would study how it was supposed to work on the ground with the aid of a book, a King video tape, and a nifty piece of software called Comm1. Highly recommended.
The other thing I did that really cleaned up my landings was to create a diagram. I find that when learning, I need to try to reach both halves of my brain. I am more visually dominant than verbally dominant, so pictures are critical to maximizing my understanding. I knew what I was supposed to do at each point in the pattern as I flew to a landing, but boy did it help to turn that into a diagram. I just drew the pattern around the Watsonville airport with notations at each point about what was supposed to be happening. How fast should the plane be going? Lower flaps? Carb heat and throttle back? Getting all this stuff right before you get too close to landing is the real key to a good landing. It's called making a stabilized landing. If you do it right, the plane will almost fly itself down to the runway. If you screw up, you'll be trying to manhandle the plane near the ground, and that' s a difficult and dangerous thing to be doing. Once I created the diagram, I never really referred to it again. The act of creating it crystallized it in my mind, and I didn't have to think so hard. I started flying the landing with the diagram back there in my brain reminding me what to check at each stage to make sure the plane was flying as it should for that phase of landing.
January 25, 2001. 7.2 Hours Logged in a Piper Navajo Twin!
Cowabunga! This was a real exciting trip for me--my first time flying with Steve Elefant since becoming a student pilot. I won't repeat the details, but you can read all about it at Good Morning Seattle Center. While the time looks fabulous in my logbook (how many students get to log twin time?), and I did learn a lot about navigation and operations, I didn't really advance my direct handling of the plane with these hours. You have to take trips like this to see what flying is "really like." It's just so different than a lesson when you are actually going somewhere with pilots who know what they're doing (unlike myself). This trip was the most fun I had yet had in a plane. That flying fever was burning hotter than ever in my head!
February through end of March, 2001. 0 Hours Flown
Bummer! I had too much to do at work and too many family demands on my time to fly at all for nearly 60 days. I did manage a couple of $100 Hamburger lunches in there with Steve Elefant, but this was a long dry spell, and at a time when I felt very shaky about landing. I knew this furlow was coming, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I was really worried I would forget everything I had learned and be back at square 1. What a letdown after that spectacular Piper Navajo trip to Seattle.
March 30, 2001. X-Country to Harris Ranch
I think Steve Blackwell must have intuited this malaise after my flying haitus because he suggested a novel plan for my first lesson coming back. Instead of trying to jump right back to hardcore learning, we would fly to Harris Ranch for a hamburger. What a good idea, Steve! This really took the pressure off with a fun outing. My flying was a lot better than I expected. I hadn't forgotten much, and I even learned a new manuever, the slip, to slow down and lose altitude rapidly. I didn't land at Harris because that runway is tiny and I was feeling rusty, but by the time we needed to land back at Watsonville, I was ready to go for it and actually made a half decent landing. It wasn't a greaser, but it was very acceptible by most standards. Cool, maybe I would become a pilot after all!
Steve also gave me a tremendous ego boost by remarking to the friend that accompanied in the back seat that he thought I would've already soloed had I not struck out to learn in the C182, which is a harder plane to fly. Driving home I felt back in the saddle and much more confident in my ability to move forward.
April, 2001. 4.8 hours flown, 23 Hours Total
Since I did well on the Harris Ranch flight, Steve decided it was time for me to continue learning new skills; no back tracking required. The first lesson we went off to do ground reference manuevers. There were strong winds that day as well, so I got to try crosswind landings for the first time. The initial briefing made it all sound very complex. The controls had to be smoothly manipulated to offset the effects of wind as the airplane was continuously changing its direction with respect to the wind. This sounded very hard to do! My newfound confidence faded a bit. I knew there was no way I'd remember all those complicated diagrams once we took off. The human mind only has so much bandwidth, and flying uses up an awful lot when you are a student. Normally bright people can barely do simple arithmetic in their heads while trying to fly and airplane at this stage.
It turned out my worry was for naught. Somehow, I had already developed the right habbits and the manuevers seemed very natural. I didn't really have to think to much about what I was doing or why, I just watched the ground and manipulated the controls until the airplane did the right thing. Steve actually seemed surprised at how well the ground reference manuevers went and I think that's when he decided we needed to shoot some crosswind landings. We tried two new airports I hadn't been to and here again, things just seemed to work naturally. I was very pleased as it was pretty gusty that day. Most of the credit goes to my instructor, who had instilled good "feel" in my hands, and in my trusty steed, which is a very stable aircraft. In fact, part of the reason its harder to fly is that it has too great a tendency to want to be stable and you have to beat it with a stick to make it do something different, like turn or slow down.
The next lesson we tackled another biggie--landings at airports with control towers. Knowing how apprehensive I am about radio work, you can guess I was worried about this, but again, things seemed to magically go better than I thought they would. It was really neat landing at the big Monterrey Class C airport alongside the big jets. We even got a "Caution Wake Turbulence" warning when one took off in front of us. I also got a little Deja Vu vignette that was rewarding.
I had flown with Steve Elefant before starting lessons to Las Vegas to a trade show. This was my first long trip in his Piper Navajo. As we flew into the busy Las Vegas airspace, there was an awful lot going on. We were being vectored around quite a bit to avoid all the jets coming in and out. I was trying to keep up but found it was beyond my bandwidth to really be on top of what was going on. Steve was handling it with aplomb. As we were on short final to land, the tower suddenly asked Steve to go around because the airplane that had just landed was still in the runway. Didn't look like it to us, but Steve started the go around process all the same. Almost immediately, the tower came back on and said, "Go ahead and land, if you still can." If you still can? We were very close to the ground, things were happening very quickly, and we'd already had to make one unforseen change, and I was sure Steve would opt to go around rather than rush a landing.
He never batted an eye. After muttering happily, "I knew he was going to do that," he dropped the gear again, lowered full flaps, and greased it in like nothing had happened. Boy did I feel intimidated by that display! Steve was so on top of what was happening that he never hesitated or was even the least bit harried by what was going on. I was just along for the ride but was drenched in sweat. At that time, I knew I wanted to learn to fly, but I marked this down in my mind with the question, "When will I be good enough to do what Steve just did and stay fully in control of the aircraft?"
Flash back to Monterrey. We were on short final when, guess what? The tower tells me to switch runways! And you know what, I did it smoothly, comfortably, and without thinking. It wasn't until after I'd landed that I thought back and compared the two experiences. I felt so good about that!
Mind you, I am not in any way even thinking of measuring myself against Steve Elefant's flying capabilities. He was flying a heavy twin much faster, much harder to fly, many more things to do on landing, at a dramatically busier airport. He was a lot closer to the ground when this controller asked him to change, he was asked to make two changes, and it was dark besides! He did not have the CFI sitting there ready to jump in if there was a problem either, and I knew from his remark that he had even anticipated properly what the controller might do (a move I've seen him make a number of times, BTW), but it still felt good to me.
The other thing I was doing at this time was getting used to learning how to land at a strange airport. Students become too familiar with their home airfield. They start to judge manuevers by the local landmarks. For instance, there is a little lake where I like to turn base when landing at Watsonville runway 20. When you go to a strange airport, you have to think more abstractly. You don't know the landmarks, and you've never landed there before. Perhaps the pattern is a strange configuration--Watsonville has all left turns while Half Moon Bay uses right turns. Airports with towers don't really use a full pattern per se, you are flying as the tower says. The elevations are different, so your altitudes have to change. Steve was trying to familiarize me with as many of the nearby airports as he could.
Another milestone occured at the end of this last May lesson. As we were flying the downwind leg to land at Watsonville, Steve suddenly cut the throttle to idle and announced, "Your engine just quit and you need to make an emergency landing." This was a new game! I thought quickly and decided to land on a completely different, but closer runway than the one we were headed for. We had already passed it, and we were almost too close to the beginning of it, but my reaction was to get us landed with as much margin for error as possible. I made a quick turn and lined up and then slipped the plane in. We touched down about 1/3 of the way down the runway and made the normal taxiway turnoff without incident. Steve was very happy with this performance and announced that he would be conducting this sort of drill frequently in the future. I, too, was amazed at how well it had gone. I was called on to think quickly and fly the plane into a landing from a completely unfamiliar direction and without the use of any engine power and I managed to pull off a darn good landing on top of it. Who knew this could be done?