Ten Days

Yesterday marked my 10^th straight day with at least one lesson.

I thought I had Sunday off but I got a call in the morning from a guy who wanted to go fly some approaches so I headed out to the airport and rattled around in a 172, just like I do every other day.

The next five days are booked as well, so if the weather cooperates that'll make for one day off out of 15.

Today, I have nothing scheduled so I have to figure out what to do with myself.

In what can only be described as a bout of mental illness I thought about going flying.

I checked the schedule to see if the 182RG was open so I could go fly it. I need to fly the thing pretty soon to stay current in it and I need to log some approaches to stay instrument current so I figured today would be a good day to find a safety pilot and knock out those two tasks.

Thankfully, I think, the airplane was scheduled so I guess there will be no flying for me today after all and I can tackle some home-improvement projects.

Another instructor and I were joking last week about how we were “Living the Life.”

From the outside, being a full-time flight instructor can look like a pretty sweet gig. For the most part it is.

I'm fortunate to be this busy and I appreciate it. I get to go flying pretty much every day and I get to spend time with people I really enjoy being around.

Flying 10-days in a row is a dream for a lot of pilots who might only get to fly 10-days in a year. Getting paid to do it sounds even sweeter.

The reality is a bit different. There are hours spent in freezing hangars, hours spent in traffic getting to and from the airport, hours spent doing paperwork, hours spent preparing for lessons and hours spent sitting around not making any money.

For all that I make about what I could make flipping burgers at McDonalds.

Sure, I work fewer hours than I'd need to at a burger joint and I don't smell like fries when I get home, but at the end of the week the pay is about the same. Unless of course there's bad weather or an airplane breaks, in which case the burger jockey is making more.

Add to that the notion that my license is on the line every time I set foot near an airplane and I'm just an engine-failure or bad landing away from getting hurt or worse and flipping burgers seems like a saner choice.

There are a scant few full-time instructors who can really make a decent living at it. Even if you teach 1,000 hours a year it's tough when the going rate for flight instruction hovers around $40 an hour. If you're experienced and specialized you can probably charge $50 or even $60 an hour in this market, but then there's no way you'll get 1,000 hours of business in a year.

Teach through a flight school? Forget it. One school offers $15 an hour and another $20. Since they're charging the student $48 an hour for my time that shows the degree to which they value their own flight instructors. Thanks but no thanks.

But even with all that, it's still a great job. I knew what to expect going in and I did it anyway.

I mean, I got to fly 10-days in a row. And I get to fly the next five days in a row. How cool is that?

Old School

As part of his deal when buying a used 172, one of my instrument students got 20-hours of simulator time on a sim the seller owns.

The sim (technically a Level 1 Flight Training Device) is an ATC 610J, which was probably pretty amazing technology in 1976.

In a moment of weakness I agreed to use it as part of my student's instrument training.

Having done a fair amount of training and instruction in a modern Elite simulator I was, um, skeptical.

Actually, when I first saw it I thought “No freaking way.”

Turns out the ATC is surprisingly good, in an old-school, analog sort of way. Once you get your head around how to set it up and get creative it does a pretty darn accurate job of emulating instrument procedures.

The thing is a hoot, totally analog right down to the plotter that draws your ground track on a big piece of paper.

You can fly either in the New York or Chicago areas and to switch between them you pull out a big card full of resistors and slide another big card full of resistors into place.

To set the wind you crank up two big knobs on the back of the box. Why they were put there I have no idea since you can't actually see the damn things. I've just taken to reaching around and dialing in some random combination of wind direction and velocity.

In a way I guess that makes the training that much more realistic because the student needs to determine the wind direction and estimate the velocity based on what the instruments are telling him.

The downside is that the instructor, that'd be me, needs to do that as well, so I spend precious bandwidth trying to figure out how to run the ATC, what random wind I've dialed in and how I'm going to configure this old analog box to do what I want which makes it harder to concentrate on just teaching.

On the upside, it's a challenge. Plus, it's in my student's basement so at least it's warm.

Amazingly, it's also certified by the FAA and loggable. We even have a brand-new letter from the Minneapolis FSDO stating as much.

I didn't want to teach in it, and certainly didn't want to log any time in it, until we were certain it had the FSDO's blessing. The sim owner was great about getting in touch with the FAA and getting a current letter of authorization to ensure we were legal.

There is, I'm certain, a logic behind the FAA's decision. But I know for certain that a copy of Flight Simulator 2004 or X-Plane 8, a decent PC and a cheap yoke or joystick would be as effective a training tool if not more so. How on earth an ancient bit of technology can be logged and a modern flight simulator program can't just leaves me shaking my head.

So far we've used it for basic VOR navigation, practicing holds and ADF/NDB navigation and it's worked out pretty well.

It only has a single VOR, plus an ADF, for navigation radios but it does have a DME. No fancy digital readouts for the DME, it's just a needle on a meter that looks like it came off of a piece of 1960s stereo equipment.

That means it's going to be tricky to practice approaches but I think we can make it work. NDB approaches will work out just fine but VOR approaches will take some care since there's not an easy way to identify crossing radials and even if you could, the VORs would be in the wrong place.

There are, in fact, a set of yellowed approach plates for each area but I don't want to use them. The charting format is ancient and to activate an ILS you need to plug in some magic combination of transponder code and communications frequency. That's just a bit too much to think about.

I'll be monitoring this experiment carefully because I want to make sure we get a benefit out of the ATC and don't suffer any negative transfer.

Already I can see that it's not a fingertip simulator to fly. It's pretty unresponsive in roll although my student can fly it pretty well using just the rudder pedals. I want to make sure it doesn't affect his ability to fly the actual airplane on instruments.

This sure is an interesting job.