Our Dumb Blog

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:)

My mom and dad are in Singapore for three months. Dad is heading up the Integrity Media regional branch while they find someone to take over there.

Some interesting facts about Singapore…well, I thought so anyway:

Oral sex, public spitting, and failing to flush public toilets are all illegal, although bar-top dancing and bungee jumping are no longer. Importation of chewing gum used to be against the law, but the US insisted that Singapore end its ban on selling the substance in order to join in a free trade agreement. (Apparently, Wriggly has some really powerful lobbyists.) Sugar-free gum is now available…but only sold by dentists or pharmacists, who also have to record the buyers’ names. In all this time, there has never developed a black market for gum.

Singapore gets about half the water it needs from rainwater. The rest it imports from Malaysia.

Singapore used to be part of Malaysia, which kicked the island out in 1965, forcing it to become a sovereign nation.

Singapore is the second highest most densely populated country in the world, right behind Monaco.

Singapore has one of the highest per capita gross domestic products in the world and unemployment is at only around 3%. Yet 84% of the population live in public housing.

Serious offenses like murder and drug trafficking are punishable by hanging. Amnesty International claims that Singapore has hanged 400 people since 1991, “possibly the highest execution rate in the world.” But the government claims this figure is exaggerated. Still, Singapore enjoys one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

Singapore is also the world’s biggest bunkering hub with 23.6 million tonnes of bunkers sold in 2004.

Can anyone tell me what the heck a bunker is?

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…

I awoke this morning to the doorbell. Then some knocking. I wasn’t dressed, so I didn’t answer, but then the phone rang. It was our landlord informing me that our downstairs neighbor was complaining about our water heater leaking. He was out of town, so I had to wait around for the plumber to call.

Indeed, the water heater was running (it’s a very loud monster), which it doesn’t do unless someone’s just taken a shower, and Berck had been gone for hours. I figured out how to turn the water to it off, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn the gas off, so it just kept heating what water was left in there, putting it under greater pressure and causing it to leak some more. I put a bunch of bowls underneath to try to catch the drips. Then every so often I opened the release valve at the bottom of the tank and emptied some of the contents into a pitcher. For a 40 gallon tank, I wasn’t about to make 40 trips to the toilet, but I kept it from leaking more until the plumber came.

The plumber turned off the gas, so the thing finally stopped leaking. But he had to go buy a hose to empty the old water heater and get a new one to replace it. He’s back now installing the new one.

In the meantime, I’ve been applying for some jobs. I’ll go to work as soon as the plumber is gone. He’s currently soldering some copper pipe with a blowtorch.