Two months down

I was looking through my logbook and realized that I'm just finishing up my second full month of flight instructing.

I passed the CFI checkride on July 20^th, then didn't touch an airplane for over a month. My first lesson with my primary student was on September 4^th.

Then it was down to AEL for the CFII, which I passed on September 13^th and my instrument student started a week later.

So, since that week in September I've given 33 hours of dual. That's not a lot, but more than I thought I had. I'm still feeling my way around a bit most days but it's surprising how used to it I've gotten.

It's been more fun than I expected and certainly more challenging than I'd anticipated.

The funny thing is, the highlights so far haven't been what I would have expected. I don't know exactly what I expected the highlights to be, but I sure never thought I'd be as proud as I was the first time my primary student rolled the airplane so gently to a stop I could barely feel it, for example.

With my primary student, we've been working the traffic pattern to get him ready to solo. He'd been having trouble lining up on the center line when turning final, which meant he was never really getting stabilized. The landings themselves were getting smoother, but the center line was still elusive.

I was starting to wonder if that picture would ever come together so I had him fly right down the runway at about 10 feet a few times and keep the airplane right over the line. We'd done this exercise a few times before but I think he was too overwhelmed by other tasks at the time to really concentrate on what I wanted him to see.

Then, on our last lesson, something clicked. He turned final and automatically crabbed ever so slightly and tracked the center line all the way to the runway, at which point he forgot to flare and we bounced higher than I thought possible.

But despite the bounce I was tickled, since he'd overcome the center line hurdle and I knew the bounce was an anomaly.

I've been saying less and less in the air and letting him get used to making his own decisions since he'll soon be out on his own. If all goes well he'll probably solo in another four or five hours, which will be a big day for both of us.

There's really two kinds of satisfaction in play here. The first is just the overall enjoyment at watching somebody who could barely taxi the airplane 20 hours ago turning into a pilot. The second is watching all the smaller individual accomplishments along the way.

It's pretty damn satisfying to watch somebody get over their own hurdles because I remember just how impossible it felt and then how good it felt once I'd gotten past a particular barrier (of which there were, and still are, many for this semi-skilled pilot.)

I really need to pick up some more students. Not so much for the hours or the money (although more income would be nice) but because it's just so much fun.

Back in the day

The airport where I earned my private pilot license is gone now. The last I heard it was a corn field, which is fitting since that's probably how it began life.

I stumbled across a photo of Martin Field on Paul Freeman's Abandoned and Little Known Airfields site and it brought back some fond memories.

When I was there in 1992, Martin Field was just hanging on. The lifeblood was a small skydiving operation that operated an ancient Cessna 182 jump plane. There were maybe a dozen other airplanes based there, tied down outside in the grass.

When a transient airplane stopped in to buy fuel it was always a big deal simply because it didn't happen very often. We'd walk outside and look at this strange interloper that had disrupted the normally sleepy rhythm of 5D4. I'm sure those transient pilots thought we were all a bunch of crazy backwater hicks and for the most part they'd be right.

It was a wonderful place, with two grass runways and not much else. After the sun went down and the flying was done for the day we'd sit outside drinking beer with the skydivers and talk about flying.

On weekends we'd light a bonfire with aviation fuel and the skydivers would party long into the night, crawling into their tents for a few hours sleep before an early morning jump.

Skydivers are a different breed. One night during a particularly raucous party one of them suggested it just might be fun to waterski across the low spot on the field that had filled up with water after a long rainy spell.

Since the water was only a foot or two deep and there wasn't a boat to be found anyway we improvised and hooked the tow rope to the back of a pickup. Incredibly, there was an old waterski tucked away in a dusty corner of the only hangar so the idea was looking possible.

As the only sober person on the field, I was appointed safety officer. My duties included trying to talk everyone involved out of such madness. When that failed I settled on making certain nobody was in line with the truck's intended path and insisting the waterskiers wear helmets. Since the water was so shallow life jackets were deemed optional.

It all worked out alright and nobody got hurt, although the tow vehicle wound up stuck in the mud after a particularly wobbly run.

One night when we were coming back from my dual night cross country we lost electrical power on the long-suffering 172 that I was using for training.

The winds were out of the southwest, or at least had been when we'd left, so we decided to land on 23, which was the shorter of the two runways but at least it was into the wind. It even had a few lights spread along it's 1,900 feet although most had burned out. Since hardly anybody ever used that particular runway in the daytime, much less at night, replacing the lights wasn't a high priority.

23 also had the advantage of being the only runway on the airport with a clear approach path. 5 was particularly hazardous during the day and suicide at night due to a string of high-tension lines not too far from the approach end. 9 had houses, a road and a set of power lines right at the threshold. 27 wasn't much better, with trees near the approach end.

9-27 was our main runway and it's most distinguishing feature was a rather large hump about two-thirds of the way down on the Western end. When the wind was out of the east and we were using 9, the hump could be a real bastard. It was positioned such that on landing you needed to flare on top of it, or even better on the backside, if you wanted to be sure of not landing too long.

On takeoffs using 9 the hump was even more interesting, as you'd reach it not quite at flying speed and it would tend to catapult you into the air before the airplane was ready to fly.

But the approach to 23 was over a gently rolling corn field so it was looking to be a good bet.

As luck would have it, I wound up fast and high on my approach. Stupidly, we'd put in 20 degrees of flap with our last remaining electrical power and they would neither go up nor down so we were quickly getting into a tough spot.

To his credit, my instructor never touched the controls. I had gotten us into this mess and I was going to have to get us out.

We finally touched down about half-way down the runway and to my horror the end of the runway was approaching much faster than I expected.

My instructor, who was normally calm and quiet, shouted “Brakes!” and I stomped on the tops of the pedals. It was the only time I ever remember him raising his voice in the airplane.

We skidded to a stop a few feet from the end of the runway then carefully taxied back in the darkness trying to avoid the dips, ruts and tires marking the tie-down spots in the grass.

To this day the fact that my instructor let me land that night sticks with me. It was a tremendous confidence booster but it was also the first time I really understood the balance between letting a student figure a way out of a problem and keeping your own skin nice and safe.

I thought about that night just the other day when the charging system failed on our 172 in the middle of a lesson. As we approached Crystal I told my student to leave the flaps up in case we needed to go around and kept my hands to myself as he made his first no-flap landing.

The last time I flew out of Martin Field was the day of my checkride and my last landing there was over the high-tension wires to the seldom used runway 5.

The examiner looked over at me and said “Well, that sure takes care of the short-field landing.” I couldn't have been more proud than if I'd flown to the moon and back.

It was a great place to learn to fly

Iowa

I've been thinking a lot about Iowa lately.

Maybe it's because I flew across it four times last week.

Maybe it's because my instrument student is from there and one of the reasons he's getting his rating is so when he goes down there a couple times each month he'll cancel fewer flights because of the weather. (I've already explained that he'll probably cancel just as many flights, simply for different reasons, once he gets his instrument rating.)

Maybe it's because Iowa is a very, very dull place to fly over, which isn't a slam on Iowa (a state I happen to enjoy very much while on the ground) but more a reflection on the terrain. It's no more or less dull than flying over much of Minnesota or Illinois, for example.

Despite being boring as hell, I'd rather be flying over Iowa than doing almost anything on the ground.

Aviation is odd that way.

A busy week

The past seven days have been busy, although I'd be happier if they were even busier.

All totalled, 14 hours for the week, 7 as an instructor (including 1.5 in the Elite which doesn't count as PIC), 7 hours of cross-country and 30 minutes of actual.

Or, to put it another way, 14 hours of pure fun.

Last Sunday I flew back from Cedar Rapids after watching the Ohio State – Iowa game in Iowa City with another couple. That afternoon it was back out to the airport to work on takeoffs and landings with my primary student.

He's getting the hang of landings, which has been great fun to watch. While I was pretty tired after an early wakeup and flight back from KCID I managed to find a second wind when it came time to do some instructing.

Wednesday was a two-lesson day, doing more takeoffs and landings with my primary student, heading home then out to Anoka for a simulator lesson with my instrument student.

That simulator lesson saw me get home around 8:30 and I was up at 5 a.m. the next morning to head down to Atlanta with a friend in his SR-22.

Our plan was to stop for fuel in Mount Vernon, Illinois then continue down to the Cobb County airport, just north of Atlanta. The trip turned out to be a great illustration of the value of datalink weather.

The forecast had been for 1,500 foot ceilings at KMVN but that turned out to be wrong, as forecasts often are. As we cruised along at 9,000 we watched the ceilings vary a bit between about 800 and 400 feet. Mount Vernon has an ILS but the glideslope was out of service, which meant the localizer-only minimums were 500 feet.

As we neared Springfield, Illinois Mount Vernon was showing 400-foot ceilings and 1-mile visibilities so we started looking for someplace else to go. The weather beyond Mount Vernon was still iffy however and Springfield was 1,200 foot overcast so I called ATC and asked to divert to Springfield.

They quickly started vectoring us for the ILS and I tried to offer some helpful CFII tips to the 20,000-hour airline captain in the left seat.

Of course, he'd flown a few thousand ILS approaches before so it was fun to watch a pro at work.

Datalink weather is one of those deals that once you fly with it once you never want to fly without it again. We had the big picture and were able to really study the problem and make a sound decision about our divert airport.

Without it, we would have motored along until we could pick up the AWOS at MVN and only then start working out an divert plan. Or, we could have contacted Flight Watch along the way and tried to work something out with them. The datalink route is just so much more efficient and gives the pilot an amazing amount of information and situational awareness. Used properly it's probably the biggest safety improvement on light airplanes since, well, I guess seat belts or attitude indicators.

The next leg was long but pretty simple. Again, datalink played a role as we could see some buildups about 100 miles ahead of us. The datalink showed only light rain and it looked like we might be able to clear the tops at 9,000 so I wasn't terribly concerned.

As we got closer the tops started rising, just as I expected so I tried to get higher from ATC. That didn't work out so well. We were working with Ft. Campbell approach at the time and he couldn't coordinate our request to climb to 11,000 but turned us over to Memphis Center.

Turns out the reason he couldn't coordinate with Memphis was because Memphis was busy working a Baron with a fuel emergency. The poor guy couldn't get on the ground, was lost and reporting he had but 15 minutes of fuel left.

Center was vectoring him toward better weather but he was so low they didn't have him on radar and could only communicate some of the time. Another aircraft in the sector was relaying the communication back and forth.

I thought about it for a bit then decided to just deal with whatever was inside the clouds up ahead. The frequency was so busy with the controller working the emergency it was a good 20 minutes before there was a break long-enough for us to check in.

Instead, we just flew along in silence listening to the increasingly frantic calls from the low-fuel Baron. We finally got an idea of his position and started scanning the datalink weather for a nearby airport with decent weather in case we could help out. As it turned out the weather was crappy all around him so there wasn't much we could do.

The clouds were tame, just as the datalink showed and we only got a few bumps along the way. We finally checked in with Center and he immediately cleared us up to 11,000. By that time we were in the middle of the buildups but the ride was fine.

My airline captain wanted to listen to the Baron drama even after we moved into another sector so we wound up switching the comm radios around. By now Atlanta was firing instructions fast and furious and the distraction of listening to two radios at once was driving me nuts.

The Garmin 340 audio panel has a nifty split comm feature that allows the left side pilot to communicate on the number one radio and the right side pilot to use the number two. The beauty is that you can't hear the communications on the other side, so I split the comms so I could concentrate on actually flying the airplane and talking to ATC.

My left-seater kept talking so I turned the intercom volume down on my side and flew along in relatively blissful silence, just me and every airplane going into the Atlanta area listening to a gravel-voiced controller rapid fire instructions.

I wasn't the only pilot having trouble understanding him. About every other airplane would respond to his instructions with “uh, say again please.”

Anyhow, the Baron guy finally got on the ground someplace, my left-seater decided to help out and run the radios so I could concentrate on flying. That worked out okay and we came screaming into the terminal area descending at 190 knots and 1,000 feet per minute trying to cross “BUNNI” at 5,000 feet. (It took three tries to understand the approach controller and I finally had to ask him to spell the damn thing. By the time we got it straightened out we needed to go down in a hurry.)

Approach kept us at 4,000 until we were nearly in the downwind for 27 at Cobb County so I had my work cut out trying to get the SR-22 to both slow down and come down while my left-seater kept reminding me to not shock-cool his big Continental.

Finally I'd had enough of easing off the power and pulled the power back to idle then cranked the Cirrus into a 45-degree break turn to lose some energy. It worked out better than I could have hoped and we rolled out on an extended base right at the Cirrus absurdly low flap-extension speed. I threw out half-flaps, turned final right at 100 knots, dropped full-flaps and the thing settled on 90 like magic.

I got the target 80 knots on short final and was starting to feel pretty good. Bad move.

The landing was ugly, when I started my round-out a little high. I hadn't landed a Cirrus since February and I didn't have the sight picture down. Basically, you fly the thing down at 80 knots until you think you're going to bury the nosewheel into the pavement then eek back a bit on the stick and it'll land beautifully.

I wasn't eager to bounce my friends pride and joy while he was sitting right there so I started eeking back a little sooner and the result was a goofy up-and-down dance.

Finally I added in just a touch of power and we touched down gently.

We headed back the next day and it was more of the same. We left Cobb County at 9:30 local and were on the ground in Minnesota by 1:30. Fast airplanes are very, very cool.

Saturday it was two lessons back-to-back. One with a primary student then on to my instrument student.

The weird thing is that as cool as it is flying a pretty Cirrus to Atlanta and back I would rather have been instructing. The teaching bit is always interesting and stimulating while the cross-country flying is at least 95% pure boredom.