Keyboard and Rudder: A blog on the Art of Flying: October 2016

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

A tribute to Bob Hoover

"Legend" is a word that is overused these days. Adjective inflation has stolen the true meaning of legend and turned it into a watered down compliment. Bob Hoover, however, was a legend among legends. If Michael Jordan had someone to look up to, Bob Hoover would be the guy.

He is probably most famous for pouring iced tea into a glass while doing a roll. You can see him do it here just past the 2:20 mark of this video, which does a good job condensing many the things that made him the real World's Greatest Fighter Pilot:

That video is a trailer for a documentary made about him called Flying the Feathered Edge. It has 5 stars over 79 reviews, which—like many things about him—is a record that few things can match.

In 2013, I wrote a post called "Bob Hoover reveals the secret to learning anything" about how he got as good as he was. Like all of us, he didn't start off already knowing how to fly. He had to learn it just like everyone else. He just happened to learn it better than most of us put together.

He had the right combination of determination that let him not make a setback into the setback, an internal strive for perfection, the ability to look at a failure as a marvelous opportunity to learn from and improve for next time, and a curiosity or thirst for knowledge that made him not just want to know what to do, but the why behind it. Knowing the why creates

In the early 1980s, Tom Wolfe wrote an outstanding book called The Right Stuff. In it, he mentions how fighter pilots would talk about who had the "right stuff". There is no one, set answer as to exactly what that is; it's one of those things that you know it when you see it, but you can't exactly say exactly what that "it" is. Bob Hoover is probably the closest we can ever come to a hard definition of what that "right stuff" is.

Wolfe's book (and the pretty decent movie it was made into) has the story of the day Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Chuck Yeager is a household name: you ask a random person if they've ever heard "Chuck Yeager" before and they can probably say he was the one who broke the sound barrier. Probably 99% of the world will have no idea what the answer to the question, "Who was Chuck Yeager's wingman when he broke the sound barrier?"

That answer: Bob Hoover. And that's not the only amazing story that almost nobody knows outside of the aviation community:

This picture is of another famous pilot, Harrison Ford, and Bob Hoover. The caption refers to yet another incredible Hoover story. He spent 16 months in a German prison camp during WWII. He escaped by stealing a Nazi fighter—a plane which he obviously had never flown before and with all the controls marked in German—and flying it to the Netherlands! (He tells this story and others in his 1997 autobiography, Forever Flying: Fifty Years of High-flying Adventures, From Barnstorming in Prop Planes to Dogfighting Germans to Testing Supersonic Jets.)

Although he retired from the aerobatics for which he was legendary, his influence still lingers on today. He is in many ways the Michael Jordan of aviation. Both of them had a burning passion and drive to do whatever it took to be the best. Both of them were serious students of their respective fields, constantly pushing themselves to find that next little trick that will make them .1% better. And both of them are still talked about two decades after they left, and are the yardstick against which everyone else is measured.

To me, the lesson he leaves in how he flew and how he lived his life is one of excellence, and that mastery is not a place but a journey. Like him, I know that there is no stopping point on the road to excellence. And like him, I try to get a little bit better every time I fly, and I try to make no hour in the logbook void of some lesson, no matter how small. The fact that he was that good means it is possible to be that good, and he is the standard toward which I will continue to strive each day. If he could do it, it means it can be done. Blue skies, Bob.

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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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Wednesday, October 19, 2016

What does a laser pointer do to pilots?

I've been hit with a laser from the ground a few times. The first time it happened we were going from Washington-Dulles to Fayetteville, North Carolina. We were heading south and just northwest of the Richmond, Virginia airport at around 12,000 feet.

Sitting back in my seat, I saw some bright green light scattering around bottom of the windscreen. Since there's an amusement park (King's Dominion) not too far away, I sat up and looked out the cockpit window thinking it was a fireworks display. To my surprise, I saw this instead:

Still frame from RT YouTube video.

There is a good video of this that unfortunately has embedding disabled so I can't include it as part of this post, but you can watch it on YouTube here.

The video isn't of my experience, as I haven't taken a good video of one myself because my camera is very poor at night and the other times it has happened to me after this were on approach, a time which is way too busy to be playing with a camera. Nonetheless, if I had gotten a picture, it would have looked quite like the one above.

I noticed that many YouTube commenters think that laser pointers don't go high enough to enter a cockpit. Note that the first time it happened to me it was at 12,000 feet. That's way higher than those self-appointed YouTube "experts" claim is possible. Yes, it is quite possible, because it has happened to me, and I am not the only one. Many of my co-workers have their own laser stories.

I honestly don't understand what possesses someone to shine a laser pointer at an aircraft filled with 50 or more people. Maybe they really do think it is harmless and their little laser won't make it up there. Here's your proof that it actually does.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Rich, brilliant people

"I didn’t think it was an option... I thought that was something only rich, brilliant people can do. I didn’t even think that would be an opportunity for someone like me."
—Eirlys Willis

This, unfortunately, is what so many people understandably think about flying. They think it's something only other people can do, and they don't realize that they can experience aviation for themselves! This quotation of 17-year-old student Eirlys Willis from a very good recent news story shows how misunderstood general aviation is in the United States. She learned how easy it is, and it has changed her life.

Eirlys Willis. Photo credit: Gary White/The Ledger

Many people think you have to go to the military to learn to fly. You don't. The only thing you have to do to start flying is go to an airport and take a discovery flight. That's it! If you have a driver's license, you don't even need to pass a medical exam to become a sport pilot now. I know it sounds amazing, but the only thing you really have to do to learn to fly is to take flying lessons!

You don't have to fly for a living to have a pilot certificate, either. In fact, a large percentage of pilots don't fly for a living. (Including, for many years, me before aviation got so deeply in my blood I decided to make a career change.) While Willis says she plans on making a career out of it, that's just one of many options:

Willis said she has long been determined to avoid a career that involves sitting in an office cubicle. She also aspires to travel. The discovery of potential aviation jobs perfectly fits those preferences.

"I have all these different opportunities coming right at me, and it just feels like this is something I need to do,” Willis said. "It’s crazy how everything has been here the whole time and I had no idea."

She's not the only one in the story who has started to learn to fly after finding out about the opportunity. Another is Tiffany Carr, who said, "I remember being behind the yoke of a plane was like magic, and I just knew that was what I wanted to do. It was like my happy place."

But wait, there's more! Genesah Duffy is yet another one in the article with the same story to tell. After getting out of the Navy, she took a discovery flight in a Cessna Skyhawk for the first time:

"It was just kind of a rush, surprisingly enough — I’m super-scared of heights. I didn’t think I’d be able to take it, but it’s a totally different feeling once you’re up in the air. It just sparks a light in you."

I see the same surprise when I'm trying to let people know that they can take their ground school at Lorain County Community College. When I talk to visiting classes from local high schools, the class almost sells itself. All I have to do is tell them it exists and the response is often, "Really? I never knew I could do that!" And then I tend to see some of those same people in class the following semester.

Not only can you learn to fly simply because you want to, there are also a ton of resources available to help pay for it! You don't have to be rich—there are tons of scholarships available to you. The competition for them is also lower because, unfortunately, so few people know there's a whole aviation community supporting them and encouraging them to join it!

AOPA, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, offers a large scholarship and also has links to several more. Many of these are designed to pay for the flight training itself, which generally runs around $10,000 or so. If you're looking at going to college for aviation, the University Aviation Association has a scholarship resource center to help you find even more. (And this is on top of the regular college scholarships you can find through normal scholarship sites.)

You don't have to be rich or brilliant to learn to fly. All you have to do is start with a visit to your airport and the skies will open to you! If you're still not sure where to start, leave a comment below and I'll be happy to help.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Why all the fuss about Lindbergh?

Charles Lindbergh was not the first to fly across the Atlantic. In 1919, 8 years before Lindbergh, the Navy made the first transatlantic voyage, although with a bunch of stops along the way. This was more a technical feat and a test of technology, and was totally impractical for anything else. A couple of weeks later, the British aviators Alcock and Brown were the first to do it nonstop. An airship crossing followed less than a month after them. By the time Lindbergh's trip rolled around, not only was he not the first to do it, he wasn't even the second, or the third or the fourth or... He was nineteenth.

So what made him a household name? When he landed in Paris, the crowd pulled him out of the plane and he involuntarily crowd-surfed the mass of people, such was the excitement. In the meantime, Alcock and Brown are names recognized only by aviation history buffs. Why the difference between him and his 18 predecessors?

(The number is technically 18, but many of them were merely passengers on the airship R34, and there were six crewmembers on the Navy's flight.)

Like the old real estate adage, the important thing is Location, Location, Location. The first practical transatlantic crossing by Alcock and Brown was from a remote location to another remote location (the coast of Newfoundland to an obscure bog near the Irish coast). Lindbergh's flight, however, connected two of the most famous cities in the world: New York and Paris.

This connection is what elevated him to hero status. The heart of aviation, its essence, is connection. Airplanes connect people. That's what they do. Sure, they are fun to look at, to listen to, and to play with, but at the bottom of it lies the connections that airplanes enable. Even when you're flying alone, you're still making a connection with the air, the elements you're surrounded by, the land you're suspended above, but the most important connection you're making is a connection with yourself. That, I believe, is why aviation touches pilots so deeply and why a first solo is something that changes you inside and makes you a different, slightly improved version of yourself: it enables you to connect to a part of you that you didn't know you had.

Aviation is a human story, and by connecting those humans of two of the largest cities in the world together in one flight, he became a legend in his own time.

For that story to take place is an amazing human story all on its own, and this is the second part of the equation that made him famous. We think of Lindbergh as a historical figure and forget that before Lindbergh was "Lucky Lindy", he was an air mail pilot that no one had ever heard of. In fact, the first places he went to when he was trying to buy an airplane for the flight either wouldn't sell a no-name like him one of their esteemed products or wouldn't let a no-name like him fly it if they did.

His grit and belief in himself is what propelled him from the muddy patch called Lambert Field all the way to Le Bourget even more than N-X-211 did. From a farm in rural Minnesota on the banks of Mississippi to pulling off a flight that well-financed and well-known names couldn't accomplish: his is the quintessential "Boy Makes Good" story. He was the very embodiment of good old American values, which made for great newspaper copy.

Would any of the other people who were working hard to attempt the same thing before he did have been as famous had they pulled it off first? Possibly. They would quite likely have been written about a great deal in the newspapers—which were the Internet and TV combined of their day. That notwithstanding, would they still be famous today like Lindbergh is?

My speculation is no. I say this because, among others, there was another man who was also competing with Lindbergh to make the first New York-Paris flight, and who likely would have beaten Lindy had he not crashed on a test flight and had to repair his aircraft. At the time, he was a national hero in his own right, having been the first (along with the other member of his crew) to fly to the North Pole. His fame, unlike Lindbergh's, does not live on to make him a household name today, and I would bet a large sum of money that if I did not tell you, you would not be thinking of Robert Byrd and Floyd Bennett right now.

I think Lindbergh's place in history has endured not just because of what he did, but because of his down home, good old, aw shucks demeanor and his All-American work ethic. He was the perfect representative of everything America dreamed it could be in the Roaring Twenties, with the stock market collapse and the Great Depression still over two years away. He connected with people just as he enabled connections among people.

All of the above is my opinion only. If you have a different opinion, please feel free to share it in the comments. I would love to hear your ideas on the matter. See you next Wednesday!

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