Rediscovering an old friend

Cramped. Slow. Lethargic. Those are all things you're likely to hear when you ask people their opinions about the lowly Cessna 150. My memories from completing my flight training in the 150 weren't completely fond, either. Particularly so is the memory of my private pilot checkride: a Cessna 150 on an August day with a 300 pound Designated Pilot Examiner is just not a fun place to be. I learned that day that fat sweats. Trust me. I digress...

However, I've had an opportunity to rediscover the 150 as a training ariplane recently. My new flight school acquired N22959, a low time (really---less than 2,000 hours. "Low time" for a 150 usually means somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 hours.) 1968 150. She's pretty outside and inside, well-rigged, and as it turns out, is an excellent teacher.

The vast majority of my teaching to this point has been in 172's. Skyhawks are nice, docile airplanes, but compared to 150's, their stalls are non-existent, they land themselves, and are overly forgiving of sloppy rudder work. It has been entertaining to watch my 172 graduates strap into the 150 and find to their surprise that some airplanes DO require coordination in a stall and some airplanes MUST be flared in order to land properly. Maybe all those dutch rolls their evil instructor makes them do actually serve a purpose :).

This little bird has a way of putting a magnifying glass on those stick and rudder skills that I love to teach in a manner second only to what the Cub could do. (Unfortunately, I can't just teach 'em all in taildraggers).

Maybe I'm just infatuated with it due to the pure bliss of flying something different and the crush will fade, but for now I really love teaching in this airplane. Probably more than in the 172. And that's saying something for a tall-ish dude who weighs 230 pounds. In a way, I kind of feel like I've "arrived" as an instructor since I'm doing some teaching in the favored trainer of the generation previous to mine. I usually identify with old stuff and old people better anyway.

Give the Cessna 150 a little love. There's a reason it has been regarded as a great teacher all these years, and in this era of flashy light sports and girly-birds like the Diamond DA-20, it's still worthy of your consideration as a training platform. And, they're cheap to acquire and cheap to rent.

If you're a Skyhawk baby like so many of my students are, go get checked out in one. Your stick and rudder skills will thank you.

Post Script: I once saw a cowbird chasing a Diamond DA-20, yelling, "Mama! Mama!"

Failure Is An Option

Why do applicants fail checkrides?

I think I'm a pretty decent instructor, and I'd like to believe that my students and the Designated Pilot Examiner I typically use agree. But this week, I've had two students fail first-attempt checkrides on eerily simliar manuevers. Bear with me---I'm not writing this for a pity party or trying to call students out. You'll see I'm going somewhere constructive with this.

Well-prepared applicants don't fail checkrides because of lack of knowledge or poor instruction. That's not self-insulating rationalization---I've observed the phenomenon enough to consider it a fact. Other things get in the way. Fatigue and stress are two of the biggest factors.

Students get pretty worked up and wired prior to checkrides and forget to take our advice to take a chill pill and get some sleep. They have to be aware of that, because fatigue is something that sneaks up on you and steals your situational awareness and self-control when you're not expecting it.

Stress over minor mistakes also adds up. People who are attracted to aviation are usually at least borderline perfectionists, and they don't take mistakes lightly. The danger with that personality type (and I'm one of them) is that you can let a mistake on one manuever or task bug you until it becomes a mental snowball that derails a whole flight.

The bottom line is that we can prepare a student to the best of our abilities, and then it's out of our control. We're flight instructors, not psychologists, despite our efforts at trying to be observers and modifiers of human behavior. It's obviously useful to teach a few testing strategies before sending a student off to the judges, but you have to ask yourself how you're really helping them become a better pilot by expending that time. Do you teach them how to be a pilot, or how to be a test-taker?

A rock and a hard place

So then, we have a choice. Forty hours with a student is not a very long time. We can spend that forty hours trying to teach them with scenarios, teach them good judgement, and make them safe, effecient, everyday pilots. Or, we can spend that time teaching them the checkride. I think that the latter mindset is an overlooked cause of a symptom that's been all-to-present in the public conscience due to events like the Colgan accident in Buffalo and the subsequent Congressional actions on airline training and safety.

I want to be careful about making a big generalization, but it's beginning to occur to me that those two mindsets are in many ways mutually-exclusive. We're supposed to employ scenario-based training (thinking your way through a situation and controlling/solving it with knowlege you've gained) and then send them on their ways to dog-and-pony shows where they string together manuevers and tasks that would never on their face be linked together in the course of an operational flight. Operational, as in the important ones with passengers and family members on board.

There are a lot of challenges to the future of aviation right now, but maybe the link between an instructional mindset and a practical test mindset is more of a challenge than we think.

I choose the rock

As for me, I made my choice a long time ago between teaching pilots and teaching checkride applicants. I get my nose bloodied occasionally (and more often than I'd like) for it, but down the road I'm betting that my students who passed on the second try are less likely to make the six o'clock news than many who were "taught to the test" and passed on the first try.

That old advice on leadership holds true to flight instruction: There is a difference between doing everything right, and doing the right things.

A Day in the Life

I was told by a prospective customer (who happens to be a VERY casual pilot, like 10 hours a year casual from what I gathered) last week that I charge too much for instruction. Nevermind the fact that this is my living; how could I possibly ask $xx an hour for what I do? I got to thinking about how I spend my time. Here's a little window...

Aviation is such a noble profession. We eagle-eyed pilots get to look down at the rest of the world from such a lofty perch, and leave any and all problems behind with those poor terestrial suckers. A perfect life. We'd all just do it for free if we had to. Right?

January 19, 2011

5:30 AM

My alarm clock was supposed to wake me up for a 7 am flight to check out a renter in our Cessna 150. Apparently this does not happen.

6:50 AM

Alisa wakes me up and I text the renter to let him know I'll be there as soon as I can.

7:10 AM

I'm in the car, waiting for the deep freeze-sized layer of frost to burn off the windshield.

7:15 AM

Still waiting.

7:35 AM

Arrive at the airport to find the airplane (you guessed it) covered with frost. Answered questions from the renter about the plane and squared him away on the preflight and systems (he wasn't used to the stone-age systems of a 150).

8:15 AM

Strapped in and ready to go, and the plane won't start. The 0-200 engine just doesn't like the cold, the battery is weak, and I allow him to succumb to the temptation of over-priming. It finally turns over and runs for about 30 seconds. We know we flooded it because the fuelish smell of an overly-rich start is obvious.

My renter swears he smells something burning, and when we investigate the nose we find the fiberglass moulding around the engine air inlet on fire. We get it extinguised with little damage except for the foam air filter and some soot.

8:45 AM

Air filter changed and our mechanic standing by with a fire extinguiser, just in case. Battery is now exhausted, so our mechanic hand-props the airplane (I do this all the time to our Cub, but it's not often in 2011 that you see a flight school 150 being "propped.").

Airplane starts and runs great, with no fire this time, but now the intercom has failed. Flight is cancelled.

9-11:30 AM

I fly with one of my favorite students. He's turned out to be a loyal customer and something of a business mentor to me, but he's often too hard on himself and today was one of those days. It's hard to convince a perfectionist that a private pilot checkride isn't about perfection. Not sure about my street cred as an amatuer psychiatrist today. We'll be re-flying that mock checkride again.

11:30-1 PM

Check in with the boss, check up on work on the 150, and try to answer a few e-mails.

1-1:20 PM

Scarf a Subway sandwich and shotgun a Coke.

1:30-3 PM

Mock checkride #2 for the day. This student lets stuff roll off of his back, and did well. He's almost ready.

3-5 PM

Unusual attitudes and partial panel work with one of my instrument students. He's a great student, and unusual attitudes are fun from the right seat. Basically, we have the student close his or her eyes and then we maneuver the airplane so they lose track of "which end is up." They, they recover the airplane to straight and level flight using only the instruments...it's good training for accidentally flying into a cloud. Anyway, while we're "maneuvering" it's one of the few excuses a CFI has to really yank and bank on an airplane. Good stuff.

Capped it all off by a well-flown partial panel VOR approach on the part of my student. Maybe I do know what I'm doing.

5-5:30 PM

Paperwork. I'm about to hire at least one instructor, so all the standards and procedures that have only needed to dwell in my head (as "chief" of one at the old Waco Flight Training) for the past two years now need to take up residence on paper. As you can tell, I have tons of time for that.

5:30-7:30 PM

Mock oral exam with a student who, for the most part, is prepared. We worry about when we have to "drag" responses out of a student and he did a little of that, but less than last time. I just sent him home with follow-up items to study on, and I'm finally done for the day. Tomorrow at 8 AM, I'll start it all over again.

Why am I sharing this? Today was a typical day in the life of a working flight instructor (well, except for the whole fire thing...I wouldn't be cool with that being typical). As with anyone working in any other profession, I had some moments of brilliance and some "why do I put up with this" moments. I try to learn from both, and I think that one of my favorite things about this job is processing that learning.

All things considered, I'd rather have a long, tiring, brilliance-punctuated day here than the best day ever behind a desk.

And that $xx an hour? Totally earned.

Writers block or just lazy?

Back on the writing wagon

It's kind of embarrassing to realize that it has been a year since my blog was updated. It's been on my mind since my friend Jerome got really active on his again, and is writing some good stuff. Not that I haven't had plenty to write about, I just haven't been good about making the time to do it.

To make things easier, I changed the title of the blog a little bit to broaden the focus. Maybe I needed to give myself permission to write about whatever I wanted to. Maybe you don't care about that thought process, or maybe you do since you're still reading.

Plenty to write about

There have definitely been changes at work in the past year. I've now soloed 12 more students since that last blog entry, and had 10 (about to be 11) students successfully complete checkrides. And, I crossed the 1,000 hour mark as a pilot. I've really learned my craft and feel like a true pro. I knew once these things began happening, I'd inevitably face a fork in my professional road.

That fork came this month when the little one-airplane flight school Parker and I started got bought by a mutual friend. I stayed on with the new company as chief flight instructor and am in the middle of getting our instructional methods standardized to 3 types of airplanes, gearing up to hire another instructor, and continuing to teach a full student load in the airplane. Life is busy!

I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. The opportunties as the new flight school begins to grow will get interesting (I'll share more about that as good things progress), and there of course remains the ever-present temptation of an airline career. Surreal though it may be, I'm only months away from qualifying for interviews with most regional airlines.

More to come

Stick with me as I share flying stories and random thoughts. I'm not going to make it my new year's resolution to write more, because we all know what happens to those. It's simply a commitment.

Payoffs

Everybody knows when you become an instructor that it's something you have to grow into. None of us like to admit it, but there is just as much of a "fake it till you make it" element as most other endeavors. So, your first few flights with students you stick to the syllabus and hope you're not screwing anything up. You start seeing some lightbulbs going off, but you're still a ways away from the local Designated Pilot Examiner signing off on your work.

In that vein, I've had two milestones in the past week. They've both demonstrated to me that I actually know what I'm doing and left me hungry for more new pilots to teach.

The Solo

June 21, 1999 is an important date in my logbook. That was the day that I first soloed. It was in the family Cub at Ball Airport. It's also a date I'll never have to look up...it's committed to memory. I finally got to give somebody else an important date in their logbook last week.

In fairness, I inherited this student. He was flying at another flight school and it just wasn't working out, so he came to us with about 10 hours. After flying together a couple of lessons, we both realized that although he had the hours we were really starting "at the beginning" given his experience with the other flight school. He really struggled with landings for quite some time, but I stayed patient and figured out ways to show him what he needed to see. Last Wednesday, I soloed him.

I watched the whole thing from the tower at Waco. It's really a neat feeling to know that this guy you've taught it up there by himself in the airplane you're watching, and hopefully your voice is echoing in his head. "Fly that downwind a little tighter. Control that airspeed on final. Flare it, flare it, not too aggressive, let off on the back pressure momentarily. Good job."

Just like Joe Kosler, the family friend who taught me how to fly, did back in June of 1999, I cut his shirt tail. I still have mine hanging in a frame in my home office, and I know Jeff will keep his too. I'm looking forward to adding to my collection of shirt tail photos.

The Checkride

This week, my first student passed a checkride. It was pretty appropriate because it was an instrument student, which was the first instructor rating I earned back in July. It was even more appropriate because it was Adam, the very first student I really gave instruction to. We started working on his instrument rating back in early September. After the typical delays...weather, life in general, class (he's a college student), we were finally able to get him ready.

Although the oral exam and the flight were a couple of days apart due to some GPS issues beyond our control, he kept his cool and did well. The examiner told us that he's a safe, competent instrument pilot and that I prepared him well. I'm also ready for more conversations like that.

A cool sidenote about this checkride: The oral exam was January 19, 2010. My first instrument lesson was January 19, 2009. That's what I call a productive year :).

With three more students nearing their soloes and a couple of other checkrides coming up in the very near future, this story is most definitely to be continued.

Watching 2009 fly into the sunset...

What a year! I've already done one of those counting-the-hours posts (back in August, right after I completed my CFI), so I'll spare you more numbers. Suffice it to say, in 2009 I just about tripled my lifetime flight experience and earned almost 100 hours of instruction given as a CFI. Even a year ago right now (January 2), I couldn't have imagined just how well 2009 would go.

Thank you for following me so far. I haven't been as good about updating here since I actually started working as an instructor, but you've followed me from a 10-hour-a-year private pilot who could barely center a VOR needle to a confident CFI/I.

What's ahead for this year? For me, there are a couple of housekeeping items I need to take care of. I have exactly "0" hours in multi-engine aircraft, and I plan to solve that this year by adding multi-engine rating to my commercial certificate. I'd also like to upgrade my seaplane rating to the commercial level. There's no reason for anything on my license to say "private privileges" anymore :). Of course, I'll take you along for the ride on both. Somewhere in there, I also plan to keep gently nudging Alisa in the direction of learning to fly. She's willing, but she needs a few extra pushes. If you're reading this, you could help with that!

Also, I'll be teaching the same Aviation History class at Baylor that I co-taught as a TA last spring. The difference is, this time it's all me! I'm excited about doing this. Not only do I like the curriculum, but presence among these students is a great way to get the word out about my full-time gig and being back on campus in a faculty capacity proves once and for all that the problems at my old job lay with the management.

For Waco Flight Training and Legacy Aircraft (our parent company), the sky literally is the limit. WFT will probably begin a radio ad campaign later this spring, and we are continuing to add students. Legacy Aircraft is about to expand into some cool new markets, and I'll share more about that as things happen. Parker and I really are working on turning ourselves into what I think of as general aviation solution specialists, and that's pretty exciting. It may keep me in a place where I can wear boots to work and keep me out of the cockpit of a Saab or ATR for a while, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I may have actually stumbled into a career here.



I'll close with a photo I took from N2150G the week before Christmas. Parker and I had flown down to my old stomping grounds at David Wayne Hooks in Houston to do some work on his CFII and I caught this sunset on the way home. Really good metaphor for 2009, I think. A day that I wasn't really in a hurry to see end, but ended beautifully all the same.

Blue skies!

Geez, it's been a while...

It's a cold, rainy day here in Waco so I'm doing some work at home today. It occurred to me this morning that I hadn't blogged in forever. I'm actually surprised that I remembered the password. Anyway, I'll make this kind of an update of what's been going on for the past two months.

What a fall it's been! It feels like just yesterday I was giving my first intro flights and now I've given almost 80 hours of flight instruction. I began 2009 with less than 200 flight hours and will end it somewhere near 500.

I've flown into airports I've never been to before. I've given an Instrument Proficiency Check to an 8,000 hour pilot with tons of Citation and Learjet time (and been amazed by watching his work on raw-data approaches after he told me he'd been spoiled by the FMS/Flight Director). I've figured out how to teach students with very different learning curves (yes, it is possible to give the exact same lesson two days in a row and have both versions of it look completely different). I've parked N2150G next to EAA's WWII B-17 bomber. And, I've become so comfortable in the right seat the flying from the left just feels downright weird!

I've picked up two primary students (working on their private pilot licenses), and it looks like I'll be adding 2 or 3 more in the spring. From an operational standpoint, that means I'm going to be very busy if everything pans out. Not that the past couple of months haven't been great. Between flight and ground, I've given between 30-40 hours of instruction in October and November. Not stupid-busy, but certainly better than you'd expect in Waco, Texas when two other flight schools already exist.

And, your humble flight instructor has accepted a part-time faculty appointment at Baylor! I'll be teaching the same aviation history class as a part-time lecturer that I taught last spring as a TA. There are 13 students registered so far---should be great!

When I finally got my freedom from my caustic former work environment almost one year ago (16 December), Alisa and I agreed that we wanted to make 2009 a year that we'd look back on and say "wow---what an amazing, productive year," and it's happened.

The Lord has blessed us with great friends and family and an unparalleled opportunity for me to provide for us by doing my dream job. We can't wait to see what 2010 has in store! In the mean time, we're going to celebrate this Christmas season knowing that the faith involved in this leap of faith was well-placed. I'll try to post some pictures soon---in the mean time, blue skies!

Post script: If you read this and you're on Facebook, become a fan of Waco Flight Training. We're only 6 away from 100 fans!