A regulation nobody studies

I'm busy the next two weeks getting emergency after emergency thrown at me as I do my Captain upgrade simulator sessions, so here's a little bit of humor that's been going around the web. I don't know where it originated (it's not mine), but if you've ever found yourself bewildered while studying the FAR/AIM for a written examination, you might get a smile out of this:

FAA Regulation / Part 0, Section 000 (a) 1 (c)

Section I: No pilot or pilots, or person or persons acting on the direction or suggestion or supervision of a pilot or pilot may try, or attempt to try or make, or make attempt to try to comprehend or understand any or all, in whole or in part of the herein mentioned, Aviation Regulations, except as authorized by the administrator or an agent appointed by, or inspected by, the Administrator.

Section II: If a pilot, or group of associate pilots becomes aware of, or realized, or detects, or discovers, or finds that he or she, or they, are or have been beginning to understand the Aviation Regulations, they must immediately, within three (3) days notify, in writing, the Administrator.

Section III: Upon receipt of the above-mentioned notice of impending comprehension, the Administrator shall immediately rewrite the Aviation Regulations in such a manner as to eliminate any further comprehension hazards.

Section IV: The Administrator may, at his or her discretion, require the offending pilot or pilots to attend remedial instruction in Aviation Regulations until such time that the pilot is too confused to be capable of understanding anything.



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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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Don't give yourself far to fall

In the near future, I'm going to be negotiating a part of our union's contract with our airline. To prepare, I've been studying negotiations. I began with a book that comes highly recommended from someone else: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz.

Even if you're not going to be negotiating something, this is still an outstanding read. It is one of the best how-to books I've ever seen on anything, and even if you're not interested in negotiation, reading the stories in each chapter alone is worth it. Voss was the FBI's leading expert in international kidnapping negotiations, so lives quite literally depended on his negotiation skills, and he tells several of his war stories along the way.

One of the things he says in the book has application in almost everything in life: "When the pressure is on, you don't rise to the occasion—you fall to your highest level of preparation."

As it happens, I am also on my way to my upgrade simulator training, the last step in becoming a captain. This "falling to the level of your preparation" philosophy is the core of why we do so much sim training (both initial and recurrent training). When the ship hits the sand, you can't just try to make it up as you go and rise to the occasion with some miraculous piloting skills. You develop those skills ahead of time in preparation, in the hopes you'll never need them.

We do all sorts of preparation, from normal approaches to missed approaches to fires and engine failures at V₁, the worst possible time for an engine to fail. By the time we're done, we do so many of them that the horrible is the routine, and in the event that something bad does happen in real life, the reaction to it will be automatic. In other words, "falling to the highest level of preparation" means there's not much of a fall after all.

You can do the same thing in your own flying. When was the last time you tried to recite the bold items in your POH from memory? When was the last time you flew a go-around? If the big fan in front stops cooling you off, you need to automatically think, "Fuel, air, and spark" and be automatically setting yourself up for best glide speed (which you do have memorized, right?). You don't want to fall to a level of preparation that has you fall out of the sky just because somebody started taxiing onto the runway when you were about to land and you botched a go-around.

As the old saying goes, the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. Spend a few minutes reviewing your emergency or abnormal procedures, mentally fly a go-around (visualize the "power up, pitch up, clean up, and speak up" sequence), or refresh yourself on your aircraft's important speeds and numbers today.

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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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An aviation dogfight on the back of the car

Since I have the best wife ever, I bought her a new car for Valentine's Day.

This meant we had to get new license plates. The old car was in my name, and I had Airborne plates on it:

Photo from Ohio BMV.

We put the new car in her name, so that wouldn't be an option now, since you need a DD-214 to get paratrooper plates. We decided to get the "Leader in Flight" plates with the Space Shuttle and the Wright Flyer on them. They're an extra $25, but $15 of that goes to support the National Aviation Heritage Area.

Photo from Ohio BMV.

Notice that both of those plates (and all recent Ohio license plates, too) have "Birthplace of Aviation" prominently written just below the "Ohio". The plate I got even takes that one step further and proclaims Ohio "The Leader in Flight". But what about this plate:

Photo from NC DOT.

It says "First in Flight", but it's not an Ohio plate: it's from North Carolina. Technically, they're both correct: Ohio is where the Wright Brothers dreamed of, researched, designed, and planned the world's first airplane, while North Carolina was where they brought those dreams to fruition that historic December day in 1903, and where one of the most famous photographs ever was taken:

Photo from the US National Archives.

The first flight took place in North Carolina, but December 17, 1903 would be the only day the Wrights would fly there. After three more flights that day, the first plane was flipped over by the same winds that drew the Wrights to Kitty Hawk in the first place. It was damaged beyond easy repair, and the brothers returned to Dayton satisfied.

Having demonstrated that the concept was indeed possible, all further development for the next several years was done in their bicycle shop in Dayton, with the flying done at nearby Huffman Prairie. They would not be in Kitty Hawk again for almost 8 years, and that was to only test improvements to their designs that they had made in Dayton. The data they acquired there would be used for improvements once they again returned to Ohio, and that's where the first airplane manufacturing plant would be built.

This friendly rivalry resurfaced when the United States Mint created their 50-state series of quarters. North Carolina used the famous photo above and "First Flight" for the back of their quarter. Ohio one-upped them by using an image of a later-model Wright Flyer taken at Huffman Prairie plus an astronaut along with the words "Birthplace of Aviation Pioneers".

So who wins the dogfight? Ohio gets the kill because while North Carolina is where we learned it was possible to fly, Dayton is where flight was born.

See you next Wednesday!

Turn the page: The downside of being an airline pilot

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short post that sums up one of the best things about my job. This week, I'll share what the worst thing about my job is.

It's actually so simple I can describe it in pictures. The worst thing about being an airline pilot is this:

That's the sad look my dog has the night I've left for a trip and it's bedtime and my side of the bed is empty. But there's more:

Our Australian Shepherd, Orion, went from that tiny puppy who was smaller than our cat to a 55-pound ball of energy. Each of those pictures (except the first, which was from the ad the puppy rescue had that brought him to us) was taken by my wife because I wasn't there to see him.

As he was going from the little Frisbee show-off who would catch it and trip over it while bringing it back because it was wider than he was to the solid dog in the third picture, I missed out on a lot of his growing up. As he was going from the runt in the first picture to the dog in the last picture who is so big he would be hard to hold up like the puppy rescue did, I was in a hotel room somewhere. Maybe Maine, maybe Missouri, maybe Florida or North Carolina... I don't know where.

What I do know is that being in a hotel room more often than your home is hard at times. It is wearying living out of a suitcase so many days a month, carrying your whole life with you, city after city. I've said that you're not a real airline pilot until you've woken up in your own bed in the middle of the night and tried to remember what city you're in.

More than once, I've had the chorus to Bob Seger's "Turn the Page" in my head. He does a great, poetic job describing what having a job on the road is like.

Say, here I am, on a road again
There I am, up on the stage
Here I go, playing the star again
There I go, turn the page

That said, I still wouldn't want to do anything else, just as I doubt Bob Seger would want to be anything else but a rock star. This is just a small glimpse into a downside of a job that has a huge upside.

Besides, being an airline pilot lets me afford nice things like new cars. Next week, I get one and examine a dogfight on the license plate. 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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Embrace the Suck, Squeeze, Bang, and Blast

One of the things that any basic pilot ground school covers is how engines create power. Jet engines and piston engines have the same four stages:

• Intake
• Compression
• Combustion (also commonly called "Power")
• Exhaust

It's easier to remember them the following way (although you do need to know the "proper" names above for the written exam)

• Suck
• Squeeze
• Bang
• Blast (or "Blow")

How jets and pistons create these stages is much different. Jets use an almost seamless process, where one stage flows in a line from one to the other. Pistons do them in separate stages, one for each stroke of the piston. This is why 4-stroke engines are called that: one stage of the 4 cycles occurs during each stroke.

Since most people learn to fly in piston airplanes like Cessnas and Pipers, almost all of the time spent on the engine power cycle is spent in ground school on the piston cycle. Unfortunately, it often comes down to rote memorization, since it's hard to see inside an engine to watch what is actually going on.

That all changed recently, however. Thanks to the wonders of high-def, super-slow-mo cameras and YouTube, there are videos that show this process as it happens. Two very good ones were in my email this week.

The first one is by one of YouTube's better channels, Smarter Every Day. They have close to 5 million subscribers for a reason. In the following video, he visits a couple of people who have created a see-through piston engine, gives a review of the basics of an internal combustion engine, and films it in action. If you want to skip the setup, just go to about 4 minutes in:

The second one is by Warped Perception, a channel that films things in unusual ways. It uses the same sort of video equipment and engine, but focuses more on trying different types of fuel to see how it looks different inside the combustion chamber:

These exact principles govern the Lycoming or Continental engine under the hood of your training aircraft. Even if you already understand the power cycle, they're still amazing videos to watch.

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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What pilots and sailors have in common

I've been reading The Perfect Storm this month and I came across this selection:

There's no reason to touch the wheel unless the boat has been taken off autopilot, and there's almost no reason to take the boat off autopilot. From time to time the helmsman checks the engine room, but otherwise he just stares out at sea. Strangely, the sea doesn't get tedious to look at—wave trains converge and crisscross in patterns that have never happened before and will never happen again. It can take hours to tear one's eyes away.

I can make this apply to pilots almost as perfectly as it does to sailors with hardly any adjustment:

There's no reason to touch the yoke unless the plane has been taken off autopilot, and there's almost no reason to take the plane off autopilot. From time to time the pilot checks the engine instruments, but otherwise he just stares out at the sky. Strangely, the sky doesn't get tedious to look at—clouds converge and crisscross in patterns that have never happened before and will never happen again. It can take hours to tear one's eyes away.

This is why I've been flying for a living for two and a half years now and I still sometimes feel like I'm supposed to be getting a "real" job someday. Although anywhere has its bad days, it is true that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

Next week, it's suck, squeeze, bang, and blast. See you next Wednesday!


Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:

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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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Truly Terrific Telegram

Saturday will mark 113 years since the Wright Brothers walked four miles to the Kitty Hawk weather station to send a short telegram to their father:

Image from the Library of Congress.

SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY ONE MILES LONGEST 57 SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.     OREVELLE WRIGHT

There were a couple of errors in transmission (57 should have been 59, and it's "Orville", not "Orevelle"), but the message itself would eventually make history.

I say "eventually" because—as hard as it may seem to believe today—the world as a whole didn't take it all that seriously at the time. In large part, the press didn't believe it (with the exception of Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot, which made up some crazy stories about what had happened), since the brothers had done so much of their work in private. It wouldn't be until they got back to Dayton and started flying their next Flyer at Huffman Prairie where people could see it that the world began to take in the magnitude of what they had accomplished.

Here's hoping you'll be HOME FOR CHRISTMAS too. See you next Wednesday!

Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:

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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.