Demystifying the process of learning to fly for everyone from the beginning student to the certificated pilot looking to improve their skills. Heavy on the basics of stick and rudder skills, with unscheduled landings on other varied topics like weather and the sheer beauty and joy of flight.
In case you missed it (you were living on the moon, you fell into the Kola Superdeep Borehole and had to climb out, your shady travel agent sold you a fabulous spelunking excursion at the Great Pit of Carkoon, or you somehow managed to be completely disconnected from civilization for the month of July), we Earthlings celebrated the 50th anniversary of stomping on the moon's face this month.
It's easy enough to practice touch-and-goes on the Earth: just show up at the airport with some cash burning a hole in your pocket and they'll let you turn that into burning avgas instead.
But what if you're an astronaut? Obviously you can't rent a lunar trainer from the FBO. In that case, NASA designed an apparatus designed to simulate lunar landings. In the video below from the Smithsonian Channel, you can watch Neil Armstrong have to use the 1960s equivalent of the Cirrus CAPS parachute system as the trainer has a malfunction and Armstrong ejects.
Although the video doesn't say why the trainer went out of control, a NASA page about it says that "a loss of helium pressure caused depletion of the hydrogen peroxide used for the reserve attitude thrusters." Basically, it would be like losing the brakes in your car: once you start going in one direction, nothing is going to stop you. Time to use your ejector seat.
NASA then goes on to quote Armstrong:
"(The LM) Eagle flew very much like the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle
which I had flown more than 30 times…. I had made from 50 to 60
landings in the trainer, and the final trajectory I flew to the landing
was very much like those flown in practice. That of course gave me a
good deal of confidence – a comfortable familiarity." Summarizing its
usefulness to the Apollo training program, Armstrong said: "It was a
contrary machine, and a risky machine, but a very useful one." All
prime and backup Moon landing commanders completed training in the LLTV,
and those who landed a LM on the Moon attributed their success to this
training.
One final quote sums up how there is no substitute for being able to practice: "Dubbed the 'flying bedstead,' the ungainly contraption is 'a much unsung
hero of the Apollo Program,' according to Apollo 8 astronaut Bill
Anders."
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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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One would think that the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be fresh in the minds of the public, since it was only four months ago (March 2019) that it broke. In case four months ago is ancient history to you, the scandal was that an innocent-looking app, "This is Your Digital Life", collected data about users that were used for nefarious purposes.
However, the popularity of FaceApp, a Facebook application that does an admirable job projecting what you will look like when you are old (or younger, or a different gender, etc.), makes it obvious that millions and millions of people learned nothing at all from the revelations of a mere four months ago.
Top Gun meets FaceApp. Credit: no idea
To what should be the surprise of no one who paid attention to Cambridge Analytica, FaceApp isn't just changing your picture: it's collecting it for whatever use they decide to put it to.
One of the more popular psychological models in aviation is the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. In short, you see something, figure out one or more ways to react, decide which one to do, then do it.
The important part is that the OODA loop is a loop. That means that once you've acted, you observe what impact your actions had and start the loop again. The Wikipedia entry for praxis breaks down these post-act steps even further:
Taking the action
Considering the impacts of the action
Analyzing the results of the action by reflecting upon it
Altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection
Implementing these plans in further actions
That's a long-winded way of saying, "After you do something, see if what you did worked. Learn from it either way." If you don't do both, you break the loop. Your powerful "OODA loop" flops uselessly into a limp, wet "OODA noodle". An ooda nooda.
An example of what the OODA Noodle gives you comes from an experience I had this spring. So there I was, flying an approach. The winds are howling out of the west, stirred up and irritated by their passage across the Blue Ridge mountains, and are almost a direct crosswind, 25 knots gusting to 40. Suddenly, at about 300 feet above the ground, I experience a 30-knot gain of airspeed: in other words, some pretty bad wind shear.
Hope is a bad plan in an airplane, so I'm not going to sit there and hope this turns out okay anyway. I push the thrust levers forward and begin the standard go-around procedure. ATC gives us an altitude to climb to and a heading to turn to, and I'm steering the plane that direction, hand-flying it all the way.
As my First Officer changes the navigation source, we get a caution chime and the yellow blinking light on the panel illuminates. Since I'm not expecting a caution at that point in the flight, I look to the screen and see a "LATERAL MODE OFF" caution message. No big deal; with this plane, if you enter the navigation mode and then change the navigation source, it turns off the mode.
This makes sense, because it doesn't know what mode you want with the new source. That message is the flight guidance computer's way of saying, "You told me to do something, but you didn't tell me what that something is." In that case, it will put the flight director in roll mode. It doesn't know what to do, so it reverts to leveling the wings until you make up your mind. That's a logical choice by the engineers who designed the system: if you don't know what to do, don't do anything stupid.
My First Officer cancels the caution and continues doing stuff. I naturally figure that one of the things he's going to do is to fix the navigation mode, but he completely ignores the message. When it becomes obvious that he skipped the end part of the OODA loop (in other words, he never took the time to see what impact his cancelling of the caution had), I ask him to put me in heading mode so my flight director will match where I'm actually pointing the plane.
In the meantime, since we were the second plane in a row to have to go around because of wind shear, ATC switches runways and starts using the one pointing into the wind. We land uneventfully the second time around and the flight becomes just another line in the logbook.
I have my own "enhanced" OODA loop, which means that the flight isn't over once it's in the logbook. I spin one last time through the loop as I think about the flight afterward, using the praxis steps above in a post-flight analysis and reflection. I think about how what I did turned out, how it might have turned out had I done something else, and come up with things to learn from and/or do better in the future.
As I said in my previous post, "flying is a constant three-dimensional puzzle that you have to continuously be solving." Once you're done with solving that particular flight, you can use that solution as a basis for solving future flights. In some ways, OODA and the WOPR from the classic movie Wargames have something in common:
When pilots don't do this, they repeat mistakes over and over again. When people don't do this, they fall for two scams in less than a year. That makes as much sense as being beaten with a wet noodle.
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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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One of the parts of the description of this blog back before I had condensed it into two sentences was that it is an "explanation of the art of flying." By that use of the word "art" I was referring to the more colloquial sense in how we sometimes refer to someone who excels in something as "turning it into an art form."
Nonetheless, this week I came across an article that briefly examines the neurobiology of art: what effect does art have on the brain, and why is art important to what it means to be human? While many artistic things have been said about flying, I was struck with the connection flying has with art here:
[P]aintings by Seurat or Mondrian stimulate an area of the brain that also
derives joy from solving puzzles for pleasure.... The idea is that multiple areas of the
brain cooperate to solve this "puzzle" of art that, as a result, creates
a feeling of satisfaction. When this is happening, there are distinct
areas in the frontal lobe that interact and bring together "memory,
experience, [and] learning."
In some ways, what I enjoy most about flying is that it is a constant three-dimensional puzzle that you have to continuously be solving. Your brain has to construct a mental map of where you are in relation to multiple factors at the same time: weather, other airplanes, airports, terrain, fuel, engine condition, and so on, and it has to solve them into one flight path.
Even with the autopilot on, you still have to do this, since you have to know if what you told the autopilot to do is what you really need it to be doing. I find this challenge immensely enjoyable, and one of the things about it is that you don't just solve it once and be done with it: you have to update your solution to that puzzle moment after moment.
This constant puzzle solving is a form of search for truth and beauty in the laws of physics. One of the rewarding things about it is that you have immediate feedback: if you do the wrong thing in an airplane, you'll know about it. This constant process of path prediction is a search for what's constant in a world that is anything but constant.
That is why if you replace "function of art" with "purpose of a pilot" in the following sentence, the thread that connects "flying", "art", and "the art of flying" becomes clear: "I shall therefore define the function of art as being a search for
constancies, which is also one of the most fundamental functions of the
brain. The function of art is therefore an extension of the function of
the brain—the seeking of knowledge in an ever changing world."
Art is sometimes described as an attempt to make sense of the world. Socrates, a man who never flew because he was born over two thousand years too early, said that we can do the same thing through flying: "Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the
atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world
in which he lives."
A quick and easy request: Please do me a favor and subscribe to the Larry the Flying Guy channel. YouTube has changed their policies in a way that makes it harder for smaller channels to be found and grow, so your subscription would help a lot! All you have to do is click the button below and you're done!
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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.
It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.
