Keyboard and Rudder: A blog on the Art of Flying

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Proficiency by pieces

As I made my way through Redbird's "Winging It" series, I came across a nice description of progressive practice: "Proficiency by Pieces".

It is a short mention inside this video where Brittney Miculka simulates an in-flight problem. (I say "problem" because some of us would look at it as a full-blown emergency, whereas others call it a minor annoyance. Each pilot has their own mix of skill level, recent experience, and risk tolerance, so there is no One Right Answer.)

What I like about the phrase is that it sums up nicely what I've been discussing a lot this year: learning by little. Instead of looking at any task or skill as something to tackle all at once, break it up into smaller, more manageable tasks. Then break those small tasks into microtasks. Then start on one of them and just do it!

This approach is one also taken by an app I recently came across: Duolingo. It breaks down learning any of several languages into small chunks, then lets you work on however many or few of those you want to work on each day. This hits on two parts of effective and efficient learning: small and daily.

What my French tree looks like in Duolingo. Notice the 29-day streak!

I originally got my degree in Spanish. That, unfortunately, was almost 15 years ago, and I haven't had a chance to practice it much since then. I decided to take the pre-test to see how bad I had become. As it turns out, I wasn't as bad as I thought. I've been using it to shake the rust off, and the thing I had forgotten most about Spanish was how much I enjoyed Spanish!

Since I get flight benefits as a pilot, I'm planning on taking the wife to Paris sometime in the near future. It might help to learn French, obviously, so I've been using Duolingo to help me with that and to see how others put modern learning research into practice. I've been rather impressed on both accounts.

One of the things about becoming proficient in pieces is that even little chunks of time (I spend approximately 10 minutes a day on Duolingo) add up in the long run. According to Duolingo, I've learned over 500 words in French already! If you put a list of 500 French words in front of me and told me to learn them, I'd probably get up and walk away. However, by breaking the process into small bites and making those bites small enough that I can squeeze 29 consecutive days of them (it keeps track of that for you!) into my schedule, I've already learned 1/6th of the words that an average fluent speaker of most languages uses regularly.

It's free, so give it a try yourself. Although there isn't a "Duopilot" yet to help you learn aviation, you can do the same sort of thing yourself by doing things like studying five questions for the written exam you might be taking; opening up the FAR/AIM, the Pilot's Operating Handbook for your plane, or the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge to a random page and reading it; or looking at a random approach plate and mentally flying through it for five minutes (or setting it up in a flight simulator on your computer and flying it, although that might take 10-15 minutes instead).

If it's been effective for you, leave a comment and let me know. See you next Wednesday! (If time permits, that is. I'm away in St. Louis doing the final phase of my ERJ-145 training.)

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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 a DHC-8 type rating, 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, August 24, 2016

You never know who you'll meet

As a pilot, I have some amazing co-workers. One of them happens to be a former NFL player and fellow Northeast Ohio native. Here's a story about one of my fellow pilots, Flying High with Kevin Houser.

Most of us would be happy to have one of our childhood dreams come true. He made two of them happen!

One of the things that jumped out at me in the story is that when he was a kid, he actually asked pilots for autographs! The reason that is so interesting to me is that a lot of pilots—all the way from private pilots to other airline pilots—look at my job as routine. It's not routine to me, and I can't imagine it ever becoming so. Sure, there are some aspects of the job that become rote, but the job itself doesn't. To a kid, it's still an amazing job, and we have a responsibility as pilots to encourage kids to become pilots themselves. Learning to fly is a life changing experience, even if it's not a career.

There are many reasons for this, and I've covered many of them in previous posts. One of the most important ones is that when you think about it, I'm privileged to have one of the most amazing jobs in the world: I connect people safely and quickly in a modern aircraft at hundreds of miles per hour. In an average day, I can wake up in one state, have lunch in another state, dinner in yet another, and still be home the same day! Sure, that is a part of life in the 21st century, but I cover more miles in one day than 99% of humans ever covered in their lifetime just a century ago!

The High Poet of aviation, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, once said, "Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures -- in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." I still consider it an honor to be able to be part of it. It is an honor that took a lot of work to earn the right to be part of, but despite what others may say, it is an honor to do what I do for a living.

Houser himself echoes my sentiments at the end of the article:

With one dream in the rear-view mirror and the other dream afloat, Houser is loving life. “Just like other professions, flying has its ups and downs. However, everyday I fly, I get to see the world from a view that the good Lord has day in and day out. From my vantage point, I have a front row seat to watch glorious sunrises and sunsets, the beauty of active weather, and the tremendous accomplishments of society. Looking out and seeing the Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Tower, and Times Square never gets old, and the overwhelming emotion of spectating all of God's glory reinforces that this second career continues the blessings of the first.”

See you next Wednesday!

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Wednesday, August 17, 2016

And now I'm back again, Part 2

When I posted this, the entire blog post went Poof! Gone. All that work down the drain. Since it's done in the cloud, there isn't really a backup, either, since the cloud is supposed to be the backup!

Unfortunately, I don't have time to re-create what turned out to be a pretty good post right now, as I'm heading back to St. Louis yet again, this time for the last time for a while. I'm doing two weeks of simulator sessions, the checkride, and I'll have a shiny new EMB-145 type rating on September 14th!

In the meantime, here are some pictures I had in the original post:

The unusual 30-degree bend in the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi.

View of downtown from the bridge. The Gateway Arch is barely visible at center left, in the notch in the trees.

Southwest 737 framed in the girders.

These guys started in Montreal and were doing the ride all the way from there to California via Route 66!

I will redo the rest of this post when I get back and let you all know when it's up. Until then, blue skies!

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Wednesday, August 10, 2016

And now I'm back again, Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I formulated a simple plan of what to study and how much time to spend on it. Now that I'm back from St. Louis and the ground school portion of my transition to the 145 is done, how did it go?

Well, the bad news is that my final exam score only improved by 4% over how I did in ground school for the Dash.

The good news is that my Dash ground school score was 96%, which means I got 100% this time!

The even better news is that I spent much less time to accomplish that, thanks in large part to coming to battle with that plan.

I'll get more into the specifics of how I studied in next week's post. This week, I have a lot to catch up on at home, having been away for almost two straight weeks. However, I am pleased with how the plan turned out. That's because I accomplished more in less time, and time is the most precious asset any of us have.

Money is something that we can make more of. Some have a lot of it and some have little, but we can make more of it if we want and/or need to. Time, however, is given out in the same 24 hour packets to absolutely everyone. It doesn't matter if you're the richest person on the planet or you live in a van down by the river: everyone gets exactly the same amount of time. Saving it is saving life.

As I noted in my original plan, I had no intention whatsoever of studying on the weekend. That time was set aside for me to recharge and explore the city. I absolutely did that, too. In that spirit, Friday we checked out Salt & Smoke, one of the finest BBQ places in St. Louis.

I spent Saturday evening going to see where two of the most important rivers in United States history meet: the Missouri River and the Mississippi River.

Afterward, I hopped across the Mississippi to Alton, IL to check out their riverboat casino, then drove along the river for a while. I have been writing a book on the Mississippi River, so getting to spend some time checking it out was fantastic, and I even snagged a bottle full of water from it for my bookshelf.

Sunday, I headed to the Forest Park area of the city. This is where the 1904 World's Fair was held, and it is in an absolutely gorgeous part of town. I ended up walking over 7 miles all over the area, and along the way I saw the world's largest chess piece outside of the chess Hall of Fame:

It's in an area with old but well-kept houses. This one was obviously a schoolhouse over 100 years ago, but it's someone's very nice home now:

After grabbing a coffee at one of the 5 shops on the same block, I checked out the St. Louis Basilica:

A few blocks away, I came across the biggest fungus I've ever seen, and I have no idea what it is:

I spent the next three hours walking around the park, which also has the zoo in it:

There is a pretty lake in the southeast corner of Forest Park, with a tree that thinks it's the Gateway Arch:

Next week, I'll go into how I managed to get a perfect score and still have time to stop and smell the flowers. See you next Wednesday!

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Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Sleeping on the job

Note: Since I'm away in St. Louis doing ERJ-145 transition training, here's a topic that I wanted to address when it happened but haven't had a slot for. I'll have an update on how ground school went late next week, once it's over.

Almost every airline crewmember has "slept on the job" at one time or another. However, those scare quotes are there for a reason: sleeping on the job isn't what you think of as sleeping on the job, since an airline workday is so much different from the workday that 99.9% of the rest of the world knows.

When Richard Branson (whose book Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way is an absolutely amazing read that I'd highly recommend to almost anyone) dropped into one of his offices last month, he came across an employee sleeping on the couch. In most jobs, this might lead to an immediate dismissal, and since most of the Internet has "normal" jobs, the electronic hills were alive with the sound of outrage.

But not Sir Richard: he laughed it off, took a smiling picture with the napper, and wrote about it on his blog. And that was entirely the correct response from the big boss.

Image from Virgin Australia.

Unless you're a doctor, firefighter, or a member of one of a few professions where shifts can last 24 hours or more, you probably are saying, "But if I got caught sleeping on the job, I'd be fired, and he should be too!"

That's because you've never experienced the dreaded reserve shift.

When I was starting on the airline pilot path, I got to experience it for six months. Reserve is something that most jobs don't have because at most jobs, you're either producing something or you're not. You are either producing that report, cranking out that widget, making that sale, etc. or you're not. As normal bosses like to say, "You're not getting paid to just show up."

In the airline industry, we can't just create more flights. We have a pre-set schedule and slots to fill. We can't randomly tell passengers, "Just be at the airport sometime on the day you want to fly and we'll load up a plane by the end of the day. Maybe we'll have an extra flight if we feel extra motivated, so show up and maybe it will be your lucky day!"

Basically, all our widgets are already made for us, and we're there to make sure they get shipped on time. In a perfect world, where no weather ever delays an inbound flight, nothing mechanical ever breaks, and no one ever gets sick, we would have exactly as many crewmembers as we need for that day's schedule of flights.

However, since each of these annoyances occurs almost every day, airlines keep more crewmembers on hand than there are flights scheduled for them. These extras are kept in reserve just in case... hence the name "reserve" (or occasionally, "standby").

When everything goes smoothly that day, there is nothing to do while on reserve. You have no job other than to be at the airport, ready to take over a flight. That is your whole job: to be there. You can't just work harder and magically create flights that aren't on the schedule. Absolutely nothing is expected of you but to be present, in large part because there isn't anything else you could do, and being there is the only thing needed from you.

If you want to spend your time reading a book, surfing the web, walking up and down the terminal, taking courses online, watching a movie, updating the Jepp charts, or just sleeping away some otherwise dull hours—and I did each and every one of those during my time on reserve—that's all up to you. Richard Branson deserves a tip of the hat for understanding that, since so many people don't. (Then again, most people don't run their own airline, either.)

Does this seem a bit wasteful? Well, again, in a perfect world, every flight would run perfectly and no reserves would ever be needed, and there would be no waste. But in the real world, things happen, and there are two main alternatives:

1. Incur extra expense to have people at the airport on reserve so the flights still go out.

2. Have no reserves and cancel a flight anytime something goes wrong somewhere down the line.

Every airline chooses the first option, since in the end it's cheaper to have some extra people hanging around than to refund money to dozens or hundreds of people for any little hiccup. Since each crew and aircraft tend to do more than one leg a day (the airplanes especially have a longer day than the crews), if one crewmember gets sick, then it's not just one flight that would get cancelled: it affects many, many more down the line, like one domino tipping into another.

When you're at the bottom of the totem pole, you're stuck with reserve. However, like many things in life, those at the bottom have not only the hardest job but also one of the most important. Sitting around wondering if you're going to do anything, having no idea what your schedule will be that day or what city you might end up in is tough, as I pointed out when I was on reserve. However, reserves are what keep the operation running. Without them, the whole house of cards would collapse.

So this guy sleeping on a couch in the crew room? Totally fine. Sleeping in the cockpit, however, is another matter for another day.

See you sometime next week!

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Here I go again

It's just over two years since I started on the path I'm on. It's one I've enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would, because although hauling passengers on the same few dozen routes sounds like it would get boring, the fact remains that at the end of the day I spent hours and hours in the sky. It may have been to places I never would have chose to fly to myself, but it was still flying.

As I noted in last week's post, one of the things that keeps this job from getting boring is that even though in the short term it can be routine, in the longer term there's always something new to do, see, or learn. Day to day is the same, but every year is different.

One of the new things for me to learn is an entirely different aircraft: the Embraer ERJ-145. This means I'm right back to Week 0: studying cockpit diagrams, operating manuals, flows, and limitations. My dining room table even looks like it did two years ago, but with a manual that's a different shade of blue and a diagram of a throttle quadrant that, sadly, is missing the prop levers:

Don't ask me why they didn't use a yoke. I'm sure using a set of kid's big wheel handles seemed like a good idea at the time.

This time, though, I'll be using what I learned about learning to help me out. After all, since I spent most of the beginning of the year writing about it, I should practice what I preach. So here's my list of priorities to work on until I leave for two weeks of ground school on Monday:

1. Flows
2. Memory action items (AKA emergency procedures)
3. Blue book
4. Limitations

If you recall from way back when, my hardest thing was memorizing the flows. And, like most people, since it was the hardest thing for me, I spent way less time on it than I should have. Instead, I spent a lot of time on the blue book (our nickname for the Aircraft Operating Manual, since it's blue). I knew the book very well, but my lack of emphasis on flows caused my sim sessions to be harder than they should have been.

Now that I've laid out what I'm going to study, here is the plan for how:

Flows (30 minutes)

Go through the entire set one or two times. I'm not going for perfection; this is just raising the scaffolding and getting the big picture.

Go through the first flow several times or until I get it correct twice in a row or until the 30 minutes is up, whichever comes first.

Once I get a flow correct twice in a row, move on to the next one until I get that one correct twice in a row or the 30 minutes has elapsed, whichever comes first.

Limitations (10 minutes)

This is just rote memorization. These are broken into groups like weights, speeds, engine, etc. Just like the flows, I'll read them all through, then go to the first section. Once I can recite that section from memory, I'll start on the next section unless the 10 minutes has expired.

Memory Action Items (10 minutes)

There are 20 emergency/abnormal situations we need to be able to respond to from memory. (These are backed up with a checklist later, of course.) This is a bit like a combining flows with rote memorization of steps.

Ten minutes doesn't sound like much for 20 different things, but 8 of them are actually one-step items (for example, the immediate response for "Baggage Smoke" is "Fire Extg Bagg Button... Push in"). The longest one is 10 steps, but the procedure for this happens to be identical to the one we use in the Dash, which means I already have it memorized. So I'm saving the time on these for more important (meaning "more difficult") items to study.

This adds up to 50 minutes so far, which over the years I've found for me to be approximately the amount of time it takes my brain's teacup to fill to the brim. So the next 10 minutes are a break. I'll get up, refill the coffee, play with the dog, and so on.

Flows (5 minutes)

Go back over the flow I'm working on. This time, I'll try the flow without looking at the guide and see how I do. I'm only going to do one or possibly two if I get the first one correct twice in a row. My longest flow in the Dash takes me about 10 seconds, so I should be able to get some decent practice in with only 5 minutes of review.

Limitations (5 minutes)

This time, instead of reading to memorize, I'll say aloud which limitation it is and its value, and only then compare it to the answer. The reason I'm doing it this way with the flows and limitations is to engage the recall function of memory, which does a better job of solidifying knowledge than simply reading and re-reading over and over again does.

Blue book (50 minutes)

This one is the easiest for me, and therefore comes last, after I've depleted much of my mental energy on the harder stuff. Imagine if you wanted to learn to run a 10K. Would you:

Walk 10 kilometers and then run one?
Run 10 kilometers and then walk one?

Obviously, if you want to improve your running, you'd run while you have the energy, and then take it easy. However, when studying, many people tend to do it the first way, then have no mental energy left for the "running" part. I made this mistake myself the first time around.

But if I said that the blue book is the easy part, why am I devoting as much time to it as I did everything else combined? Well, it may be the easiest, but it's still over 1000 pages long, which means there's a lot of it to cover.

I also won't be reading it passively. Fortunately, since I've already read an aircraft operations manual to learn to fly the Dash, a lot of it will admittedly be familiar. As I've already started reading it, I've been saying in many places, "OK, so that hasn't changed," or "This is a little different, so remember not to do it the old way," or "That's totally new," and so on.

That's it. Only 2 hours a day. There is a ton of material to cover, and airline ground schools anywhere are usually described as "drinking from a fire hose", but with a good plan and using good study techniques, I can accomplish what I need to and still have time to have a life. My weekend plan (we do get weekends off in ground school) will remain the same: 2 hours. I'm looking forward to spending the rest of my weekend time exploring St. Louis because I'll have studied smarter, not harder.

This will be my view for the next two weeks.

I will be away in St. Louis the next two weeks, as I'm driving there Sunday. My next update will be on how successful (or not) my plan turns out to be. I probably won't be able to write it next week because my old laptop finally had enough abuse from all the traveling it's done and gave up the ghost. Nonetheless, I'll see you soon!

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Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Farewell, Fair Dash

"That's the smallest airplane I've ever seen."

"I think I jumped out of one of these when I went skydiving."

"I didn't know this was going to be one of those prop planes. I want off."

Sunset on a pretty evening at Washington-Dulles.

It's hot, it's loud, it's ugly, and it's amazing. It's the Bombardier DHC-8, also known as the Dash-8 (or "Smash-8" due to it being one of the hardest airliners to land softly), or just "the Dash".

In my two years flying what I call "The Little Airliner That Could", I have heard all of the above quotes from passengers about it.

"I miss this thing."
"This is real flying."
"What a great airplane."

I've heard those quotes too... from pilots who used to fly it. I've just finished my last trip as a Dash pilot before I move on to the ERJ-145, so I've now become one of those who used to fly it, and I already say all of those things about it myself.

Me in the Seattle sim the day before the checkride.

Sure, it had its issues. It could be loud inside the cabin if its NVS (anti-Noise/Vibration System) wasn't working, which was often. Cancelling out vibration with a system that vibrates isn't exactly a recipe for reliability.

It wasn't easy to get into, since the pedestal between the seats took up all the available space, meaning you had to put one leg in, then swing the other leg up and over to sit down. Once you were in the seat, though, it was quite comfortable.

It was extremely hot in the cockpit when the engines weren't running, since the -200s had no APU (a small engine in the tailcone that provides power and air conditioning) and although the -300s did have APUs, they worked fewer days in a year than Congress.

But it was still the most elegant ugly duckling I'll probably ever have a chance to fly. It looked a bit strange, as there are hardly any high-wing airliners in the U.S. The 200 was stubby-looking, and had the nickname "Baby Dash" because it looked too small. The 400 looked like a gangly teenager that hadn't caught up with a growth spurt yet. But the 300 was almost the perfect size and proportion.

From this angle, the DHC-8-300 almost looks sleek.

Its strange looks came from its unusual design. It was built to be an odd combination: an airliner that could carry 50 passengers and still land in only about 2000 feet. That's a tiny fraction of almost any runway they go into, and is a lot of overkill.

It doesn't go particularly fast, but it still tops out over 300 MPH. It doesn't go very high, and we very rarely actually went up to its maximum altitude of 25,000 feet, but we didn't need to, because even down low, it burns less fuel doing 300 miles an hour than a lot of planes burn while taxiing.

Since we stayed relatively low, we couldn't get above much of the weather. I liked to joke that we had a hard time topping out valley fog. This meant we ended up slogging through rather than flying over bad weather. Because of this, has a well-earned legendary reputation for being able to carry ice and still fly well—not surprising for a plane that was designed by Canadians.

To address the three comments that started this post and defend my little buddy:

Stepping on board the Dash for the first of approximately 1000 times.

It's not a particularly small airplane. The 300 carries just as many passengers as the 145, which is one of the most popular regional airliners in service today. You can't go into any major airport in the country and not see a 145, and yet both it and the Dash carry the same amount of people.

Looking back from my seat. That's 37 seats there on the stubby one.

Many skydiving operations use the Dash-8's grandpappy, the DHC-6, or Twin Otter. Like the DHC-8, the DHC-6 is a very utilitarian, hard-working airplane, which has led it to a long, successful career in many aviation niches. But the DHC-6 and DHC-8 are as similar as a Ford Focus is to a limousine.
More than once, a passenger has either gotten off the Dash or refused to get on it because "it's a propeller plane". Well, it is and it isn't. It's not a prop like your grandfather's 160-horsepower Cessna with a piston engine. It is powered by two 2200-horsepower jet engines, and those jets just happen to have propellers connected to them. (In fact, before they were called turboprops, this kind of setup was called a "propjet". You can still see that terminology in old aeronautical engineering books.) That means you get the fuel efficiency of a propeller combined with the durability and reliability of a jet engine. It's not the kind of plane you take on a hop around the patch on weekends just because it has props.

Here you can see the jet engine itself inside that long nacelle:

Yeah, that's really a jet engine under the hood.

That long dark tube-shaped object is a jet engine. It looks different from the beefy, high-bypass turbofans you're used to seeing on modern airliners. However, if you're old enough to remember the days before bigger bypass ratios became the norm, it looks familiar.

Here's a picture of an early 737. Notice how long and narrow the engine is—just like the Dash's engine, but without a prop:

Old 737-200 with the cigar shaped engines. Photo by Eduard Marmet.

In its time, the Dash was so popular that Microsoft even included it in Flight Simulator as the generic regional airliner, since it could be found in so many places!

Taxiing the 172 past a -200 in FSX.

Unfortunately, its time has begun to pass. As fuel costs have gone back down, its big advantage on efficiency isn't enough to offset passengers' misgivings about turboprops. As the economy has improved, the lower ticket prices it brings them isn't as big a deal anymore, either. This means that within the next couple of years, all our Dashes will be gone and everything will be jets. An era has passed, but I am glad I had a chance to be one of the last to have a part of it.

Killing time on a rainy day.

Farewell, friend. I'll see you on the other side of that rainbow.

This rainbow was a good way to end my last Dash trip.

Next week, I start preparations to move to the jet. See you next Wednesday!

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