Fifty years makes an out-of-this-world difference

Friday is April 12th. Two aviation firsts were set on the 12th, fifty years apart. The difference between them takes us from a short hop by today's standards to going all the way into space. Here's the entry for that day from What the Fact?! 365 Strange Days in History:

French aviator Pierre Prier piloted the first nonstop flight from London to Paris on April 12, 1911, covering a distance of 290 miles in 3 hours and 56 minutes. Exactly 50 years later, on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed the first orbit of the earth, covering 25,000 miles in 1 hour and 45 minutes. Prier peaked at an altitude of about 200 feet. Gagarin topped out at 200 miles.
 
Both airmen were in their mid-20s when they made their groundbreaking flights, and both died shortly after during routine flight trainings: Gagarin in 1968, when his aircraft crashed near the town of Kirzhach, in Russia; Prier in August 1911, when his pupil shot him in the chest.

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There are worse ways to practice

My last post was a little on the serious side, so this time I'd like to lighten the mood a bit.

I've written many a post on practice in this blog; in some ways, that's the fundamental theme of this whole thing. How to use flight sims to practice, how to create efficient practice sessions, how airline pilots practice, and so on. The first video I ever posted on YouTube was a pattern lesson with the glass panel turned off.

Flight simulators are a wonderful tool to practice inexpensively and safely. But let's say that instead of a student pilot, you're a student proctologist. How can you practice then?

Well, it turns out that instead of flight simulators, they use butt simulators. No, really. I'm going to let you take a look at this post from Now I Know in case you want to know what a butt simulator looks like.

It certainly gives new meaning to "touch and go", doesn't it?



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This is where it's probably going to happen.

It is almost midnight on a mid-January day. In front of me, the windscreen is filled with clouds. The landing lights in the nosewheel light up the snowflakes that are still making their way slowly down to Earth, causing an eerie hyperspace effect as they streak by at almost 200 miles per hour. Behind me are 23 people: more than half the seats are empty, which is typical for this route. All around me is the wind which rocks the plane during this instrument approach.

The unseen ocean of air through which my jet swims is stirred up turbulently by the mountains which surround the airport on three sides in a C shape. The terrain gives me and my co-pilot little margin for error should one of the Rolls-Royce turbofans strapped to the back decide it doesn't want to play the big blowtorch game anymore.

The turbulence increases sharply, then dies down to a more normal level. Although I still cannot see the runway, this last burst is a good sign: I've been here before and I know it means we've passed the top of the southern ridge of the C. We're through the "shoals" of the air and ahead will soon lie safe harbor. Or at least what passes for safe in this remote winterland.

At 400 feet above the ground, we break out of the clouds. On a night like tonight in a place like this, there isn't much difference between being in the clouds and out of them: everything ahead is white. What little difference there is lies in the two white lights identifying the runway threshold and a narrow patch of gray in the vast blank expanse ahead. Black asphalt plus a white covering of snow makes for a narrow gray strip only 20 seconds ahead.

Although I'm out of the soup, I still can't let my guard down. In some ways, the easy part is over: this is a dangerous airport in the winter. Several of my colleagues, many of which I know to be good and experienced pilots, have their own stories of near-trouble here. If my flying career ends before I reach mandatory retirement at 65, I'm pretty sure it will end here.

As the Captain, it is up to me who flies what legs. On nights like these, I make sure it's always me. My skills sometimes seem to depend on the level of challenge presented to them: some of my best landings come in the harshest conditions. Tonight, I put it on so nicely that the flight attendant has to wake one of the passengers when we arrive at the gate.

As the wheels touch the pavement, they pass over the same place that hundreds of aircraft used on their way to Europe during World War II, back when this was an Army Air Field (later an Air Force Base). The tires—and I—connect through history with Clark Gable, who was stationed here in WWII; John Wayne, whose movie Island in the Sky was set here; and the real-world exploits of one of the most famous names in aviation literature, Ernie Gann.

We reach the gate, immediately causing the gate occupancy of the airport to go from 0% to 100% as our solitary aircraft comes to a full stop. Since we're in the middle of nowhere, there is no comfortable jet bridge for the passengers to walk onto. The ramp workers roll stairs up to the aircraft door and the passengers exit into the 8°F weather onto the tarmac just as if it were still sixty years ago. They walk the fifty feet to the door through the subzero wind chill and enter the terminal which (if you don't include the office space) is smaller than my house. Welcome to Presque Isle, Maine, population 9106.

I pack up my things and shut down the plane. The taxi ride to the hotel is through a canyon of snow, the snow banks a dozen feet high on either side of me. I have 30 hours here, and to take my mind off of the last 30 minutes, I look forward to trying that odd, decidedly New England game called "candlepin bowling" tomorrow evening.

The night slowly dissolves into just another line in the logbook. Other crews will not be so lucky, but fortunately this night's flight takes a quiet place among the 3167 entries covering 5112.3 hours so far. Some are beautiful, others less so... but each one is an experience I've been privileged to have.

Thus the day ends: 2/16/2019 N11193 EWR-PQI Total: 1.73 Night: 1.73 Instrument: 0.1 Pax: 23



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X-Plane to Real Plane

One of the original themes of this blog was supposed to be bridging flight simulators and the real world, with occasional diversions into other topics. It may be hard to tell that anymore, since I've spent much more time on the "diversions" than the core themes, but the universe seems to be reminding me of that this week.

I've encountered two interesting articles on the subject in the past couple of days. Although I rarely post "hit and runs" (posts that just link to other articles without much discussion), this week also happens to be the start of yet another semester for me. Since I also work a full-time job as a pilot, I'm unfortunately too busy for a deep post this time around. Nonetheless, these articles (especially the first one) were too good to just let pass by.

The first one, Learning To Fly on Simulated Wings, is a very nice look at how Bill Forelli (no relation to Sonny, I presume), saved himself a ton of time, money, and embarrassment by learning much of a standard pilot curriculum in X-Plane before transferring it to the real world. It's a success story for FS to IRL training, with a particularly notable accomplishment within:

Forelli... soloed in less than 10 hours, which includes two discovery flights followed by 6.7 hours of focused training in a Piper Archer.

As an instructor, I only soloed one student in less than 10 hours, so that is quite an accomplishment indeed. Back in the old days, when flight training was just "keep going around the patch until they've got it down," single-digit hours to solo wasn't all that uncommon. However, in the modern world, the regulations have so much that is required to be covered before solo there is just too much to go over it all and still solo in less than 10 hours. Since Forelli learned much of that beforehand, he was able to do something that not many people can do nowadays. Kudos to him.

The second one, From Filmmaking to the Flight Deck: An Animator’s Guide to Training in VR, is one person's approach to creating a customized flight sim solution for herself to aid in her flight training. Her approach to it is interesting, even if it may be a bit more than most people are willing to put into the effort. Nonetheless, her list of five advantages that flight simulators have over the real world is right on the money:

1. There’s no drive to the airport — your virtual plane awaits you whenever you have the time to fly.
2. Your flight time is never canceled due to inclement weather — you can change the weather in X-Plane.
3. You can pause the simulation and look up questions you may have or zoom in on an instrument dial to see exactly what’s going on.
4. You can inexpensively train in a plethora of planes from every era that are never grounded for maintenance.
5. You are flying in complete safety.

I have written more than one post here on how important #3 is when learning to fly, and especially how useful that is when it comes time to expand one's skills and get an instrument rating.


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Not within a thousand years

Monday will mark the 115th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk. With the passage of time, major breakthroughs like this sometimes seem inevitable. The hard work, sacrifices, and doubts along the way are long gone, wallpapered over by the glow of success.

While it is an amazing achievement that the Wrights started their aeronautical research in 1896 and managed to make history at Kitty Hawk only seven years later (and this while running a successful bicycle shop at the same time), the outcome wasn't always certain. After all, many bright, hardworking people had spent decades of their lives trying to solve the mystery of flight. Some of them went bankrupt—and those were the lucky ones, since they only lost their fortunes. Others like Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher lost their lives.

Lilienthal's last words are said to have been "Opfer müssen gemacht werden": Sacrifices must be made. His (and Pilcher's) sacrifice was not in vain, at the Wrights cited both of them as influences on their work.

The Wrights built on the work of those who had given up so much before them, and in 1900 started their first experiments at Kitty Hawk. Their first year there they learned a large amount about aerodynamics, and found that much of what had been hypothesized at the time was wrong. Nonetheless, they had very promising results in regard to the largest aeronautical problem of the time: aircraft control. They finished that year very encouraged and eager to take their new results back to Dayton to work with before next year's voyage back to North Carolina's sand dunes.

It seemed as if all was going extremely well. They thought they were on their way to solving the unsolvable problem of flight. Unfortunately, in 1901, they were unable to duplicate their former success. Nothing came easily. Nothing worked. They gave up a month early and trudged back to Dayton dejectedly. The going had gotten tough, and they thought it might be too tough for them. In 1912, Wilbur said of those days:

[W]e doubted that we would ever resume our experiments. Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute, who was present at that time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At that time I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.

According to Orville, Wilbur was even more hopeless than that, and said simply, "Not within a thousand years would man ever fly."

As we all know, only two years later they would go down in history. So when you're feeling like you'll never manage to fly, remember that the Wright Brothers themselves thought the same thing too.

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Happy Birthday, Dad

My father passed away over 8 years ago. He loved flying with me, and I loved taking him up flying. He died four years before I would fly my first airliner, but I know he would have come out to the airport to see me fly into Cleveland-Hopkins for the first time. (Sadly, my first flight into CLE was also our airline's last flight there in the old Dash-8. It would be over 3 more years before we'd fly into it again, this time as an all-jet airline.)

I still think of him often. I occasionally get sad when I think about how he never got the chance to see me go from the 2-seat Flight Design light sport airplane we used to poke holes in the sky together in to the captain of a jet airliner. I know he'd be happy and proud, which lessens some of the sadness sometimes.

This year, Wednesday also happens to fall on what would have been his 71st birthday, so I'm going to do something I almost never do and go back into the archives. I'm re-posting "Last flight with my best passenger" as this week's blog entry. It is the story of an impromptu flight up the Ohio River with him. What was supposed to have been a much shorter flight with him turned out to be a much longer, much more fun experience, but unfortunately (and unbeknownst to us), it would be our last one together.

You can read it here. See you next Wednesday!

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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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Richard Collins gone west

Yesterday, aviation writing legend Richard Collins passed away at the age of 84. In his over five decades as the timekeeper of aviation history, he influenced an almost uncountable number of pilots, myself included. He'll pull into the hangar alongside such other writers as Bob Buck and Wolfgang Langewiesche as someone who had a deep understanding of not just aviation but how to write about aviation.

Early on in my aviation journey, I read his books Flying the Weather Map and The Next Hour: The Most Important Hour in Your Logbook. The Sporty's private pilot course had special vignettes by him on certain topics scattered throughout the pile of CDs (yes, we still used CDs way back then!) it came on. I still use some of his videos on weather theory when teaching my college aviation courses, as he was able to take weather knowledge and synthesize it into useful technique.

What makes me saddest about his passing is that because he had been flying since 1952, he was one of the last bridges between "classic" and modern aviation in the GA world. He saw everything from Cubs to Concorde, and was able to use his old experience to inform the new world aviation has been moving into in the 21st century.

In a world that prizes technological solutions to human problems, his voice was one that reminded us that skill is more important than glass cockpits and magenta lines. His voice was a thread that sewed together timeless aviation common sense in a tapestry that ranged all the way to Wilbur Wright himself, as many of his columns are elaborations on Wright's famous quote, "What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery."

In an age of highly-sophisticated airplanes and a world of "Direct to - Enter - Enter", we still need voices to remind us that the most important piece of technology in any airplane is installed between the left and right earpieces, with analog outputs of hands and feet at the stick and rudder. The aviation community's greatest loss is that his experience will no longer be there to remind us of the essence of aviation.

Farewell, Mr. Collins. It is a large void you leave.



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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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