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