I did it! (Revisiting a childhood favorite game)

When I was 12 years old, one of the most impressive simulation games ever to come out for the Commodore 64 was released: MicroProse's Gunship. I spent months and months and hundreds of hours flying missions in it, trying to get the game's highest award: the Congressional Medal of Honor. [Yes, I know it's actually just "Medal of Honor". The game refers to it as the Congressional Medal of Honor, so that's how I refer to it in this post.]

Winning the ultimate medal was actually secondary to just flying it and having fun flying. It was one of the hardest games ever on the Commodore because it wasn't a shoot 'em up; it was an actual simulation. It strove to pack as much realism as possible into a platform that had a 1 MHz processor (approximately 4000 times slower in raw clock speed than just one core of a 4 GHz 8-core processor) and 64 kilobytes (not megabytes, not gigabytes, kilobytes) of RAM, and it wasn't afraid to be complex and intimidating to learn. The graphics were very, very good for the time (1986), but nowadays the closest competition is Minecraft.

All those hours playing Gunship turned out to have a major impact on me learning to fly; not just in kindling my interest in it but in invisibly burning piloting concepts into my head without me realizing it. It simulated things like ground effect, translating vertical components of lift into horizontal ones in a bank (meaning if you wanted to lose altitude quickly, you could go into a tight turn), trading altitude for airspeed, and so on.

I came across a copy of it the other day and figured I'd spend a half hour or so revisiting it just to see if I could remember how to play. At first it was a little rough just remembering all the keys for the controls, but not long in, it came back to me. Although I hadn't played this game in over 30 years, once I got the hang of the controls again, I was actually better at it now than I was then!

In large part, that is because I have 6000 hours of flight time behind me now, whereas I hadn't even been in a small plane then. That actually helped a lot because my instrument scan is automatic now. It takes so little of my cognitive resources to keep track of what the aircraft is doing now that I was able to devote much more of my mental effort to devising strategies, carrying out assault tactics, and performing evasive maneuvers when those didn't work.

Way back when, I struggled like hell to get that Medal of Honor. Very few who played it managed to do it, but after hundreds of hours, finally, FINALLY, I managed to become one of the few who did. Of course, not knowing the criteria for receiving it made it even harder to get; I just took the approach of shooting everything that moved and never returning to base with ammo left over.

(Remember, this was long before the web had a hundred walkthroughs for every game, YouTube had a thousand playthroughs, and there was no Google to get you through the hard parts. Most games didn't even have paper strategy guides—and there was no GameStop or Amazon to buy one from even if there was one. It turns out that there actually was a book written about Gunship... which I found out 34 years later when researching Gunship medal criteria!)

As it turns out, that approach is pretty close to what it takes to get the CMOH anyway, but Richard Sheffield's Gunship Academy lays out the criteria:

The question most frequently asked of the game designers at MicroProse is "What the heck do I have to do to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor?" Well, it's really quite simple. All you have to do is

• Score 5000 points
• Complete both missions
• Shoot down at least two Hinds
• Get wounded
• Live and don't get captured
• And do all that in less than 22.5 minutes

What I had intended to be only a quick stroll down memory lane turned into me playing several missions in a row. After a few hours, I managed to do something that took me hundreds of hours back then: I actually won the Congressional Medal of Honor again!

The mission that won me my second Congressional Medal of Honor in Gunship, only 33 years or so after the first one.

The coveted medal in all its 8-bit glory.

Probably one of the reasons I had a hard time getting the medal back then was because I tried to avoid getting into dogfights with the enemy helicopters (the Russian Mi-24 Hind-D) because their cannon could tear you to pieces quickly and ruin the whole mission. If I encountered one after completing both objectives, I'd run back to base as fast as possible instead of engaging it. I didn't know that bagging a second one was a requirement because, well, no one knew that, least of all me.

One of the things the list above leaves out is that you have to have won a campaign ribbon from all four theaters first. There is some debate over whether you have to win all the lower medals first. All I can say is that I had a mission where I fulfilled all the criteria and I had all the medals, but I didn't have all the ribbons. (I skipped straight to the fourth theater because the first three were too easy.) I was not awarded the CMOH for that mission, but when I did receive it, it was for a mission with a lower score after I went back and picked up the first three campaign ribbons. You can see what I'm talking about below, where I didn't have the CMOH at 5460 points but did get it at 5190 later:

That's a full salad bar in Gunship.

That's a nice way to start a new year, and unlike Forrest Gump, I didn't have to get shot in the buttocks!



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A Lesson on Christmas

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. My dogs, Orion and Meissa (pronounced "MAY-suh"), certainly did.

Orion and Meissa. They're as opposite as they look.

Orion, the black/tri-color guy on the left with the serious look, is a Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix. Meissa, the merle on the right with the goofy grin who is slightly blurry because she has a problem sitting still, is pure Australian Shepherd. I mentioned Orion in my post Turn the Page: The Downside of Being an Airline Pilot. Since I wrote that in 2017, we've added Meissa. (Basically, we got our dog a dog.)

Although they're the same breed, their personalities could hardly be more different. In fact, we call the pair "Pinky and the Brain" after the old Steven Spielberg cartoon, and one of the nicknames we have for Meissa is "Narf", which is one of Pinky's tag-lines.

Orion is a highly focused, very task-driven dog. Once he sets about doing something, he has to see it all the way to completion, and is very good at ignoring distractions until his task is done.

Meissa, on the other hand, is a much more happy-go-lucky dog. She's very intelligent in her own right, and learns tricks and other things very quickly, but she has the attention span of a hypercaffeinated gnat. This is even more ironic since Meissa is named after the star that forms the head of the constellation Orion.

A perfect example of how these personalities play out is their reaction if their ball bounces through the fence when we're playing. Orion will stand by the fence where it went out, point at it, look back worriedly, and won't budge until I rescue it. Meissa will run around in a circle once, then trot back to me as if to say, "Hey, that one's gone. You got another ball?"

However, this Christmas she showed the advantage of not being so focused that she gets locked into one solution. We got them both a ball that holds treats, so they could have fun trying to get one of their favorite dog biscuits out of it.

They both took quite a while to get their treat out of the ball. Surprisingly, although Orion is the "Brain" of our "Pinky and the Brain" double dog duo, Meissa managed to get hers out long before he did. In fact, I finally had to sneak him a little help when he wasn't looking so he'd think he finally did it on his own.

They both initially tried pinning the ball against the wall and trying to push against it hard enough to be able to get the biscuit in their jaws. Unfortunately for them, the ball was slightly too big for this to work.

However, in this case, Meissa's lack of an attention span worked in her favor. After a while, it meant that she got bored with that approach and moved on to a different one. When that didn't work, she tried another different thing. Then another, and another, and so on. Finally she hit on the idea of holding the ball between her paws while lying on her back and letting gravity help her out as she chewed on it from the bottom. That let her break the biscuit into chunks that were small enough to fall out. Success!

Orion, on the other hand, stuck with the first approach and kept trying it over and over again. He had the determination, but his focus led him down a tunnel that wasn't ever going to lead to his objective. His failure wasn't due to lack of brains—he's one of the smartest dogs I've ever seen—but ironically because of one of his best qualities: his "stick-to-it-iveness".

Unfortunately, this trait is often seen in pilots who have accidents. The long chain of causes isn't linked together by someone who sets out to have an accident: it's often put together by an unintentional, unfortunate perseverance. The "accomplish the mission" mindset common in pilots is usually a good thing: after all, people who aren't willing to put in time, study, effort, and financial commitment don't accomplish the goal of becoming a pilot in the first place.

However, sometimes things aren't going the way they should and a solution is needed. Sometimes the solution is not flying in the first place. This is a hard choice to make when you're trying to make it somewhere for a business meeting or a family gathering or getting back home after a nice vacation and conditions at your destination are above your skill and/or equipment level. This often leads to "get-home-itis", and can be deadly. The AOPA Air Safety Institute's case study called "In Too Deep" is a perfect example of this scenario:

Another good example like that one is another AOPA ASI case study called "Cross-County Crisis":

In many ways, I have it easier as an airline pilot in these situations than general aviation pilots do: I fly a strictly-maintained, multi-engine turbine aircraft with good IFR equipment and ice protection in well-structured, controlled environments. If the weather is too bad for the plane I fly to handle, the no-go decision has probably already been made for me. In the remaining handful of cases where it's iffy, I have chosen to wait an hour or so to see if it clears up or passes through and that decision has never been questioned, but in most cases I've never even been given the chance to try to press on: the cancellation has already been made by that point.

That doesn't mean that airline pilots aren't immune to the danger of overly focusing on one solution to the exclusion of all others: Air France 447 is an example of my saying, "If what you're doing isn't working, doing more of it isn't going to work either."



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"A much unsung hero of the Apollo Program"

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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FaceApp and the breaking of the OODA loop

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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Pilots and Artists

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."

In other words, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, "I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things." I would add to the end of that, "It turns the tyranny of petty things into a litany of pretty things." The mundane becomes the sublime; the pointless becomes the poignant.

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."


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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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I'm great. I said so myself!

I was recently reminded the other day of a somewhat oddball question that I've been asked more than once. This won't be the last time I come across it, and the answer is a little bit complicated.

The question is, "Can I endorse myself for knowledge tests?"

The answer is, "It depends. And even if so, it depends."

The answer is actually pretty clear if you are a CFI and don't hold a ground instructor certificate. In that case, the answer is NO. The FARs are pretty clear on this under Part 61 Subpart H:

§61.195   Flight instructor limitations and qualifications

3(i) Prohibition against self-endorsements. A flight instructor shall not make any self-endorsement for a certificate, rating, flight review, authorization, operating privilege, practical test, or knowledge test that is required by this part.

Things get murkier if you hold a Ground Instructor (either Advanced or Basic) certificate. In that case, there is no prohibition under the ground instructor part of the FARs (Part 61 Subpart I) against self-endorsement. There's nothing that says you can, but there's nothing that says you can't, either. With the way the United States legal system works, that technically means you can.

However, the other "it depends" part is dependent on your testing provider actually accepting your self-endorsement as an BGI, AGI, or IGI. Which of those you're even able to self-endorse for depends on what ground instructor certificate you have:

• If you have a BGI, you can't self-endorse for anything except a Sport, Recreational, or Private certificate.
• With an AGI, you still can't self-endorse for an instrument written—that requires an IGI.
• And if you have only an IGI (i.e., no BGI/AGI), the only thing you can self-endorse for is your instrument written.

If you're unclear on the difference between an BGI and an AGI or what you can do as an IGI, the most popular post on this entire blog goes into that.

As always, if you have questions, I love to hear them. Please ask away!



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POH vs. AFM vs. PIM vs. AIM: What's the difference?

As a student pilot, most flight schools will require you to obtain a copy of your aircraft's POH to study from, right? Well, actually, no.

They will almost certainly require you to acquire a copy of the PIM or AIM, although nowadays you can probably just download a free copy from the Internet. Cessna provides their PIMs online for free, so you won't even be violating copyright laws if you do.

First, let's expand some initialisms:

• POH: Pilot's Operating Handbook
• AFM: Airplane Flight Manual
• AIM: Airplane Information Manual
• PIM: Pilot's Information Manual

The terms are often used interchangeably, and often POH is used for almost everything. In everyday use, this isn't a big issue because they have almost the same information. The PIM for a Cessna 172 looks almost identical to the POH, with the biggest difference being that generic weight and balance numbers are used in the PIM, but the POH has the actual, measured weight for that particular 172.

The ever-trusty Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (the "P-hack") summarizes it nicely in Chapter 9:

While the AFM/POH may appear similar for the same make and model of aircraft, each manual is unique and contains specific information about a particular aircraft, such as the equipment installed and weight and balance information. Manufacturers are required to include the serial number and registration on the title page to identify the aircraft to which the manual belongs. If a manual does not indicate a specific aircraft registration and serial number, it is limited to general study purposes only.

The only way you'll buy a copy of the POH is to buy the whole aircraft itself, because the POH is basically a PIM or AIM that is created specifically for that single aircraft. It is provided for that one airplane and that one only. It contains information specific to that aircraft, and it is the only one that satisfies the ARROW requirements. (The POH has the "O" for Operating Limitations contained in it.)

From FAA publication 8083-19a, which you can download for free here.

For that reason, when I had a student that was about to take a checkride, I'd check to make sure the POH was on board, and when doing general ground training, I would not use the POH itself; in that case, I would use an AIM or PIM. The POH is too difficult and costly to replace, so it was never to leave the aircraft without a very good reason. (AIMs or PIMs can be ordered by the dozen from aviation suppliers; the POH can only be replaced by the manufacturer and has to be approved by the FAA.)

I've been talking a lot about the POH, but what about the AFM? Well, the AFM and the POH are almost synonyms. The difference is that AFM is the older term for older manuals. The FAA didn't standardize the format and the terminology until 1975. After that time, the term changed to POH. That's why in the PHAK quote above, they use "AFM/POH".

Clear as mud now?


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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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