Posts by Berck

I’ve flown 4.1 hours today. I think my brain is fried. Completely fried. But, I’ve now completed lessons 1-8, which leaves one to be flown tomorrow morning at 8am, and then I’m signed off for my stage check, which if any luck will be Saturday. If so, Zach will have completed his goal of first stage in one week. There’s absolutely no way to describe the sort of brain frying that learning to fly instruments can cause, particularly if you overdose. After I pass the stage check, it’s on the simulators.

I flew two localizer approaches today. I did. Me. That rocked.

It was a beautiful night to fly. Unfortunately, I couldn’t look outside.

Earlier today the ceilings were at about 2,000 feet, and I was sure I was going to get some actual time. But no, someone else took the airplane I was scheduled in. By the time I got to fly, the clouds were all gone.

My instrument instructor, Zack, is convinced that I’m going to get my instrument rating in three weeks, starting a couple of days ago. I think he’s probably off his rocker, but I’m willing to do my part in making that happen.

I think 4 weeks, best case scenario, but that it will be longer. But maybe not. We’ll see.

Which means I need to study. I left ground school a few minutes early today so I could fly around 10:30. I did pretty good today. Instrument flying is all about small corrections and scanning. Flying solely by reference to six instruments is tricky, because it’s impossible to watch all of them at once. It’s easy if everything is doing what it’s supposed to. But as soon as you notice that you’re 100 feet low, you try to correct, of course. But what you can’t do is keep looking at the altimeter to see how your correct is working. You have to glance at everything else, otherwise you’ll end up slowing down and turning without realizing it.

Mostly it’s a matter of getting the hang of it. I performed almost entirely within tolerances today which is pretty good for my third lesson.

After getting home, I spent the next six hours studying. I can now understand the approach plates I bought. Mostly. I’m supposed to know how to read an approach plate for all kinds of navigational systems I’ve never even heard of. And I thought I knew a lot about navigation. Take, for instance, the “Microwave Landing System,” which appears to be a bit more complex than TV dinners.

And I still can’t figure out what a compass locator co-located with a marker beacon is either.

After I finish learning all these things I don’t know, I’m going to prepare for the instrument written, and hopefully get that out of the way next week. And after that, I’ll probably spend my free time flying endless approaches in microsoft flight sim.

I showed up for Instrument groundschool today. Someone should have told me that it was starting on Monday, I would have showed up then. It might have made things simpler. Oh well.

Instrument flying is a pretty weird thing when you think about. Staring at a bunch of needles that are supposed to tell you where you are and where you’re going.

Stage 1 of instrument training is basic attitudes. This is where I learn basic flying all over again. Flying straight and level, turns, climbs and descents. Only this time I can stare at the instruments all I want, but I can’t look outside the plane. There are perfect Instrument Meteorological Conditions out there today, but oddly enough I have to learn to Basic Attitudes in VFR conditions. The basic idea being when I get all screwed up, it’s a lot easier for me or the instructor to recover when looking outside is an option. Otherwise you can crash and burn pretty quickly flying around in nothing but clouds. Or so they tell me– I have yet to see what’s so hard about it after the 3 hours of simulated instrument time I had to get for my private.

I requested Rob as an instrument instructor. Although he’s only been instructing for a month, I’ve heard only good things about him. Unfortunately, he’s currently teaching instrument ground school and already has 8 students. He doesn’t think he can take another. Basically, I’m trying avoid a specific instructor whose known for laziness and poor instructing. (None of his students have passed their checkrides first time around). Since it’s not nice to say, “I don’t want person X for an instructor,” I thought I would go about it by saying, “I want person Y.” But it turns out that Zack, who was teaching private, is now teaching instrument and doesn’t have too many students. So, hopefully, I’ll get him instead. He’s nice and seems rather methodical.

So, I can go back to studying, which at least gives me something to do while I’m waiting around to fly.

Finally! It seems to have taken slightly longer than forever. I’ve got nearly 60 hours; it should have taken more like 40. The national average is more like 80, but those are people who fly once a week or once a month.

The scary thing is just how little I actually know and how little experience I have. Sure, I can fly, but I can only imagine how much trouble I could get in were I rich enough to have my own plane and decide to go fly across the country. Before I started I thought I would know more when I finished than I do. The only thing scarier than that is that I’m more knowledgeable than many people I’ll be sharing the skies with, who are also rated pilots. It’s amazing there aren’t more accidents than there are.

After a couple of flights, it seemed that while my landings aren’t that bad, they aren’t all that consistant. I talked to Dad today, and without ever having flown with me, but by knowing me, he managed to tell me the exact same thing that everyone who has flown with me has said: I overcontrol the airplane. Apparently, everyone does at first, but I tend to have more problems than some people. Part of it is that all of my prior experience in a moving vehicle is driving a car. Driving a car is quite predictable in that when you make a control input you get an immediate response. An airplane isn’t quite like that, particularly at slow airspeeds. But I’m even worse, since an instructor at the racetrack provided the exact same comments: I tend to overcontrol the car.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. Instrument training is next– where I learn to fly without looking outside the airplane, so that I can fly in clouds. A whole new set of challenges and problems completely unrelated to those I’ve been facing. And I’m not even convinced that I’ve overcome all the previous challenges.

There’s nothing like failing a checkride to make you feel crappy.

I showed up at 9am with everything I was supposed to have for my oral exam. After two and half hours of endless questioning, the check airman told me to go ahead and preflight the airplane. I actually did really well on the oral exam– I missed maybe three questions in two and a half hours. He gave me a list of things I needed to review. For most people it’s a fairly lengthy list. Mine had two items on it, “Convective Sigmets and Airmets.” And it’s not like I didn’t know what they were or how to read them. I just didn’t happen to know that hail must be over 3/4″ to be included in a convective sigmet or that surface winds in excess of 30 knots were included on an Airmet Tango. He even mentioned that it seemed like “I studied well.” I was almost disappointed it wasn’t harder. I went through all the trouble to learn things like the the minimum and maximum propeller diameter and the four different kinds of hypoxia, and he never asked.

Even the the flight portion of the test went well– up until I had to land.

I made a fairly hard soft-field landing. After bouncing, I made a nicer one. He asked me to try again. I made a worse landing. So he failed me.

I need more landing practice.

I told him that I wanted to go up with someone other than Mike, since this is the second checkride I’ve failed on landings, a different instructor taking a look at my landings couldn’t hurt.

So B. told Mike that I’d fired him and that S. would go over landings with me. I talked to Mike, and he understands.

Fortunately, since I’ve passed everything else, all I have to do is go do a few touch and go’s after I fix my landings. I’ll be a pilot in a few days. Really.