Posts by Berck

You might be a flight instructor if you get kinda happy when you wake up and the weather is crap. As a student, it was always infuriating. As an instructor, it means a relatively stress-free day.

Unfortunately, since we’ve got a base salary, they can make us stand around and do nothing. Which is what I did until about 2pm, and then got to come home. It was a nice break. I’ll try to remember that when I’m there at 6am on Saturday.

I wonder if I’ll be any good at this job in a few months. I try hard, but sometimes it seems like I’m just not getting though. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be faced with the responsibility of signing a couple students off to solo. Right now, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to do it in the allotted flights. And I’m not sure if it’s my teaching ability or their learning ability. Probably a combination of both. Still, the idea of signing them off to solo scares me. To state, legally, that I think that some kid, in a matter of 10 flights, is capable of taking off, flying around the pattern and landing, all on his own. That’s a lot of responsibility and risk. Fortunately, it’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that they’ll have to pass a check ride with someone else first.

So, Joanna’s job is now full-time and official. For some reason, this meant I got to cook lamb after work on Monday. But, this is good. She’s not working in a warehouse and maybe we’ll manage to get out of debt sometime in the next 40 years.

Other than the yuppies and the traffic, I like living here. With any luck I’ll never live anywhere souther or easter. From the air you can still see patches of snow on ground, but it’s mostly gone now. The outside air temperature guage in the plane was reading 84F yesterday, which just doesn’t work. Low to mid 40s all day today, which makes up for it. We still haven’t turned on the heater– we seem to do just fine by sucking our neighbor’s warmth.

Jonah’s been making mead. Or claiming she is. I told her that if she were going to go through the trouble of fermenting 5 gallons of something, she ought to at least make a drink that I like. I suppose it’s possible that I might like the mead, but considering I really don’t like the taste of honey, I doubt it.

Her reason for making mead? She’d picked a couple gallons of rose hips and that’s all she could think to do with them. So we had to buy lots of honey to make an icky drink with a useless fruit. Woohoo.

She’s been checking it every couple of minutes. Immediately after sealing it she pointed out with glee that that water lock showed signs of increased pressure inside the container. I didn’t point out that this was probably because it was warm.

I’ve been amusing myself reading her mead books and telling her everything she’s doing wrong, though nothing I say tends to faze her. “Did you aerate it?” “Uhh. I tried. I rolled it around.” “Oh, that won’t work. It’ll never work now. It’ll be a dud.” “I’ll just add more yeast if it doesn’t work.” Actually, I think it’d be really hard to actually screw it up. Mead is apparently the easiest fermented drink in the world to make. And seriously, people have been doing it for longer than Joanna thinks the Earth is old, without even knowing that such a thing as yeast existed. That said, it’s still an awful lot of bother for something that’s going to taste like honey.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making beer, but everytime I look at what it takes, I’ve decided it’s way too much work and equipment considering that I’m probably not going to be able to make it as good as I can buy it, and the money savings isn’t as good as one might think. But still, the idea appeals to me. So maybe after Joanna makes some nasty mead, I can coerce her into making beer while I supervise.

In any case, watching her bottle of really nasty looking crud is making her happy, and that’s good.

On Friday, several boss-people asked me if I wanted to work. “No, but I will if you want me to,” I told them. It turns out that as of so far, Saturdays are optional since we won’t make much more money for it. They told me not to come in then. So I didn’t and did my best to rest this weekend.

But here it is, Monday, and I’m already feeling worn out. Part of it is the 10 hour days. Part of it is the exhausting reality of the constant possibility of screwing up and letting a student kill me. Or the possibility of getting in trouble for something silly.

I flew three times today and signed off two lieutenants for their final checkrides. I tend to think that I’m giving them good instruction, but I don’t really know if that’s the case. One of the students had everything down except simulated emergency landings. After the first one, we had quite a bit of time left over. So I explained what he did wrong, pulled his engine again and watched him make new mistakes. Finally, on the fourth try, he got it. During the debrief he thanked me for taking the time to make sure he understood it. Course, he came within about 10ish knots of stalling the airplane on his base to final turn. I didn’t yell, but spoke loudly, clearly, and displeasedly. Not so much because I was angry (though I was) but more to make a point. “Don’t you dare stall on approach! 65 knots! Full power! 51 knots is NOT 65 knots! Can’t you hear the stall warning horn?” It’s often best to just let the student make a mistake and let him learn from it. But there’s really know way to let him learn what happens when you screw up and bury a plane in the dirt, so I chastising is the next best thing. I thought about taking the airplane from him but figured he’d learn more if I made him fix it. It did wake him up. He’s got 25ish hours now. He shouldn’t be making that sort of mistake.

I talked to one of the other instructors about it, after he mentioned that his student did the same thing. How to instill a respect for airspeed? Is there a better way than simply yelling at them?

The Chief Flight Instructor at Airman (with thousands of hours of instruction experience) claimed that some of his most effective tools in flight instruction are fear and intimidation. Maybe he’s right.

My last student just wasn’t trying. His last flight before his checkride, and after he lost THREE HUNDRED feet during slow flight I asked him, “What the hell are you DOING?” “Uhh.. losing altitude?” “YOU’RE not doing anything! FLY! What good does it do if you just sit there and watch the altimeter unwind? Recover and do it again.” He did much better the next time after actually trying.

It’s hard for me to figure out just what tact I should take with these students. Unlike any other flight training situation, they’re being PAID to learn– not the other way around. It’s not my job to be nice to them, it’s my job to teach them. It’s not important that they like me. Still, I know from experience that being mean isn’t necessarily the most productive method. I suppose that with any luck, I’ve got a few hundred hours to figure out what works best.

Overall, I like the job. Admittedly, I haven’t even been doing it a month, but I’m happy with it. It’s rewarding, challenging, and I get to fly planes. Or at least ride around in them and look at the pretty mountains.

I think I’ve gotten used to being called sir. It’s about time that someone in my life treated me like the all-knowing deity that I am:)

There’s nothing like some crappy weather and a salaried flying job to make your day.

I was about to walk out of the house when my cell phone rang. It was one of the guys in white flight letting me know that the first go was canceled and not go into work. There’s a list of phone numbers activated by the flight commander. He calls the first guy, who calls the next guy, and so on. I’ve managed to lose my list already, but I was pretty sure I was on the bottom of it. I asked the guy who called me, and he said that I was, in fact, on the bottom, but that there was a part time guy below me, and I wasn’t sure if he needed to be called or not. I also asked if they were going to call us to tell us to go back to work or what and he didn’t know. If he wasn’t planning on working anyway, I’m sure he’d love to get called at 5:40am. So I called my flight commander. Only I got the number wrong, which I’m sure made someone really happy. When I actually got in touch with him, he said that he’d already called the part time guy, so I was fine. I asked him how we knew when to go back to work. “Nine o’clock! Whoever called you didn’t tell you?” “No?” He sighed, “I guess we need to practice this.” I figure when that when you play telephone, expect a garbled message at the end…

So I got undressed and went back to bed. Even after having gone to bed at 7:30 the night before, I was still tired. Now I’ve had to get out of bed and get dressed twice. But this time it’s light out. Or, well, grey out. It’s still not flyable weather. I wonder if they’ll call us and tell us to stay away, or make us go in anyway.

Unfortunately, considering that flights were canceled Monday morning due to low clouds and yesterday due to high winds, it’s pretty much a certainty that we’ll be working on Saturday…

But not for lack of trying.

Mostly I’ve been given the easiest students so far, but they’re getting progressively harder. I think I’m going to wind up with full-blown new cadets next week.

I’ve already screwed up. I got completely confused in the traffic pattern by the tower, and ended up turning about 1,000 feet in front of a plane I didn’t see and then thought was going somewhere else, but which my student had told the tower he had in sight, even though he was looking at someone else entirely. My flight commander was in a plane just behind us and saw the whole thing, and we talked about it. He didn’t seem too upset, and helped me understand where I went wrong.

It’s a strange profession. As I strap the airplane to my back (with the canopy open, it feels more like wearing a bulky suit than sitting inside an airplane), I tend to think about the possible outcomes. A smoking hole in the ground. Violating an Air Force regulation, or worse, an FAA regulation and having my privileges suspended and/or revoked. Bending a nose gear, scraping a wing tip or blowing a tire on a landing where I should have taken the controls sooner. Flying unwittingly into a dry microburst on 200ft final that my student can’t react quickly enough to and freezes on the controls, not letting me react. Flying into another Academy aircraft because neither of us noticed our students had varied just slightly from the altitudes and ground tracks we were supposed to be flying.

I think about it all while my student closes the canopy and starts the engine, running through his checklist. I watch to make sure he doesn’t break anything, to make sure he does everything with precision. As he pulls out from the parking space and fights the castering nose wheel by abusing the differential brake I wonder if I can possibly explain a better taxi technique. But all I really manage at first is, “Taxi on the yellow line!” as he seems content to be two feet to the right of it. “Over here you’re likely to strike a wingtip on the nose of another plane, and I’ll have to explain why,” I tell him. “That seems like a crazy job, being responsible for anything I might do wrong,” he says. “You have no idea,” I respond.

Later, when he drifts off taxiway centerline again I tell him, “Do you want to be an Air Force pilot? Air Force pilots taxi on the centerline.” “Yes sir!” he responds.

Later, as we do stalls, I put my feet on the rudder pedals. As the left wing drops, my student feeds in more and more right stick. Eventually he’s holding full right stick and the left wing continues to drop. I figure we’re about 3 seconds away from an incipient spin. I don’t know what these planes are like in a spin, but I hear that they wrap up quickly and take awhile to recover. Today is not a day to find out first hand. Fortunately, the student recovers in time as I start issuing instructions. Trying to sound calm and collected.

“You did something very, very wrong in that stall. Do you have any idea what?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. And that’s good. Because I can tell him what he did wrong, and maybe he won’t do it next time.

I was originally going to have to work today, but our Moron in Chief decided to watch the hurricane from NORAD so it would look like he cared. (?!?) Since he’s afraid of damn near everything, no one can fly in Colorado Springs while he’s here. Which, today, is fine by me. I’m glad to have the day off.

Jonah and I went driving today. We drove up to one of the north areas and I discovered that the astonishing array of satellite dishes that form the north border of one of our practice areas is the Direct TV headquarters. Drove many of the dirt roads that border the area. I like getting a perspective of things from the ground. I drove down North Gate road and found point FOX, then headed south and drove by TANK (a large, brown tank). I have a hard time finding it from the air, and I wondered how hard it would be to climb on top and spray paint it yellow or something.