A special day

So, I gotta admit, despite the hours and tough work, being a flight instructor has plenty of good points.

This week has been hell, flights every morning at 7, hot, bumpy weather, thunderstorms, flights in the afternoon and again into the evening.

Yesterday I flew at noon then again at 3, didn't get done flying until 8:30, home by 9:30, passed out in bed at 10, then up at 5:30 again for another 7 a.m. flight.

It's been challenging teaching and it's been a challenge to not fall asleep on the drive home from the airport. This morning I was a zombie and started to nod off on the drive to the airport. Not good.

The last 30 days saw about 60 hours of flying, which doesn't sound like much but when you factor in at least an hour of ground for each hour in the air, then add in drive time, time spent between lessons, weather delays and cancellations it works out to a long string of 12, 14 or even 16-hour days.

In between all this I've been trying to prepare for my training up at the Cirrus factory in Duluth. I've done all the workbooks, gone through a bunch of powerpoint presentations and worked through the CATS software, which is a type of procedural training exercises used to learn the airplane. On my own, the CATS is sort of goofy but I can see where there might be some value when using it as an instructor.

So, I'm probably as ready as I'll ever be to go up to the factory and go through their instructor standardization course. I'll be glad when I'm done with it and it'll be fun to start picking up some business working in the Cirrus.

Today I got to do something completely different, which was to finish up a flight review for a guy who owns a T-34B.

The T-34 is a 50's era Navy and Marine trainer that's sort of a two-seat Beech Bonanza. It's pretty neat and you do feel a bit like Maverick and Goose when you strap on a parachute, sit down inside, pull on a helmet and taxi out with the canopy open.

With the canopy closed you start to fry after about 30 seconds under the sun, so it's a good thing the thing opens as wide as it does.

It's pretty docile, to be honest, not particularly fast (although still plenty quick) and most folks don't do aerobatics in 'em anymore after a few guys pulled the wings off during those "fighter pilot for a day" type schools pulling way more Gs than is prudent.

So, basically, at this point it's one of the world's most inefficient flying machines with almost no useful purpose in life other than to go have fun and look good doing it. Which means it's my kind of airplane.

The pilot flying is in the front, I got to sit in the back, which means I couldn't see squat forward, although I did have my own set of controls. If I leaned over a bit I could sort of see past the dude's helmet and get a sense if we were going to crash or not. On landing, you really can't see anything at all out the front, which took some getting used to.

After a few minutes the sight pictures made sense and I was pretty confident I could get the thing down on the ground from the back seat if something bad happened.

Still, it was a very cool airplane, all decked out in Marine paint and nice and shiny. I'm certain it never looked so good when it was in active service, but it's pretty darn pretty now.

We'd done the ground portion of the flight review the previous weekend so we just went flying. I had him do some slow flight, steep turns, power on and off stalls then a landing series, all of which went wonderfully and made my job easy.

At one point I was sorta just sitting in back taking everything in when the guy asked if I was ok. I think he was worried I was going to puke or something. I told him I was just sitting there thinking about all the Navy instructors who had sat in that same seat and what a trip it must have been to teach some 21-year-old kid to fly in the thing.

I'd never felt any sense of history flying an airplane before today. I mean, one 172 is pretty much any other 172 and while there are countless tales of people learning to fly in each one of them it's just not quite the same.

But there we were on a 10-mile final for 18 at Anoka and as I leaned my head over to the side to look past the helmet in front of me I could tell the lineup was perfect and we were on the glideslope and for a minute I forgot what I was doing there and instead it was 1966 and we were both much younger, a fair bit thinner, had more hair and things felt just a little bit more serious.

And I knew that some other instructor had sat where I was sitting and made the exact same moves to see around the helmet up front and felt the same sense of comfort and satisfaction when he saw the helmet had us in the groove.

Anyhow, enough ramblings. I'm headed for the beer store.