Off to see the Wizard

I suppose that announcing I’m “Off to see the Wizard,” when headed out the door gives away my age. (Extra points if you know who said it first without going to the internet.) It also, usually, offers an ironic outlet to my inner skeptic, who suspects that all the wizards left town with the wise, making it unlikely I will actually see either one. This morning though, the quip dripped a little less irony than usual.

Much of my current “seat time” at the shop is spent acting as the Right Seat Pilot (RSP), sometimes called the Pilot Monitoring (PM), who used to be the Pilot Not Flying (PNF), though that was after being the First Officer (FO), who, before that, was know as the Co-pilot (Co). Push a lot of buttons, read a lot of checklists, do a lot of communicating with ATC, and don't do anything that makes the person in the other seat work any harder than they already are. The RSP is also the one that can reach the magic handle that drops the landing gear when multiple hydraulic systems go kaput at the same time, something the airplane can’t do for itself. A second magic handle will deploy the Ram Air Turbine when all of the DC generators pick the same moment to stop generating direct current electricity. The airplane is supposed to know when to do that for itself since making power is, literally, a matter of life and death; thus making a manual back-up prudent. And yes, we call it the RAT.

The person sitting at the Sim control panel, the Instructor of Record, is in total control over the kind of flying day we will have. Since this is training deliberately aimed at prepping line pilots for the worst possible kind of days, we get to do several years worth of “worst possible day” crammed into a few, very intense, hours. This is particularly true when the training is “recurrent” as opposed to “initial”. With the best of pilots it becomes a game, adding to the flashing lights and aural warnings until keeping the defecation from hitting the ventilation requires a near herculean effort. It is very easy to forget that the Sim really can’t kill us. It is also damned near impossible to do a "perfect ride" until you have done it a few hundred times, and made a few hundred mistakes. I'm not there yet.

This kind of training isn’t actually all that useful, at least insofar as day-in and day-out flying is concerned. Imagine if you had to retake your driver's test every 6 months. Get in the car, drive it around. Killer boring, right? But now imagine that six month "ride" involves race tracks and skid pads. Would that make for better drivers? Sure. Would it make for safer roads? Maybe, then again, maybe not. It depends on what the drivers do with their skills, and if they ever run across any race tracks or skid pads on the way to work. (Okay, maybe for some people that wouldn't be a bad idea. Around here many drivers have, apparently, forgotten what the word "STOP" means while acting like every highway is their own, personal, race track.)

Recurrent flight training goes the race track / skid pad route. It  does give those already experienced in the airplane a chance to do something different for a few hours, polish their skills, and add a few magic spells to their box of tricks. Spells that, in all likelihood, will never, ever, be needed.

A few weeks ago I was PM for an Instructor of Record while he endured his own recurrent training and check ride. (Yes, it is like requiring the college professor to sit through his own class.) We finished off all the required maneuvers in pretty short order, leaving some time that simply had to be filled in order to keep the regulators happy. For people who teach this stuff every one of their working days, even fire, smoke, multiple system failures, and jumping wayward pick-up trucks becomes routine.

So, when asked what else he wanted to do, and to keep the boredom from becoming terminal, the pilot I was with asked that the Sim be moved to Aspen’s mountain runway. Once cleared for takeoff we started doing touch and goes. He was making the circuit too quickly for me to keep up with updating the take off and landing speeds with the Flight Management Computers. It didn’t matter; he didn’t need them. That got boring pretty quickly so he shut down an engine and kept going: single engine touch-n-goes at Aspen. That got boring after a couple of times around so he asked that the WX be reset to 1/4 mile vis, indefinite ceiling, snow, and at night. The moving map display coupled with the Synthetic Vision system was enough for him to find the runway surrounded by tall piles of granite. And when that got boring he started doing some things with and to the airplane that discretion suggests be left inside the sim.

It is rare, as in near impossible, to impress me much when it comes to pilot things. My own collection of “And there I was…” pilot tales checks most of the boxes. About the only one I don’t have is joining the Caterpillar Club, riding a parachute to the ground rather than going in with a crippled airplane. (Had I been wearing a ‘chute one particular day I would have gotten my membership card but, given no choice, barely managed to get back to Mother Earth on a flight whose memory still gives me the willies.)

Being a part of this crowd, however, is like becoming a part of some wizard's council. The "magic spells" of abnormal check lists are memorized and honed over and over again. I still get them out because; a) doing so is the first line of the spell and, b) I don't have all of them memorized yet. It will take a while to be on equal footing with some of these folks. But I suspect flying with them every chance I get will allow me access to the table one of these days.

Learning and teaching

There are now two Ukuleles living in our little apartment. The original Blue Soprano gifted me by Daughter Eldest and Family nearly two years ago, and a new wood Concert Uke with a finish as deep as on any good teak work. It is a pretty thing, with a slightly deeper tone and offering a little more room on the fret board on which my mechanic’s hands can fumble. I play them both, with Blue being my companion when I’m out on the road. That doesn’t happen very often, but it went with me to Dallas last month and will likely go along when I head to Orlando in a few days for another week of classroom work. In addition to plunking away at the strings, the urge to actually learn some music theory came over me…and I thought the theory of flight was confusing. But I think its good to keep learning new things.


Stumbling up to bare competence in Basic Ukulele with the goal of someday actually playing passible music keeps me on the student side of the student / guide equation, making a good balance to teaching in the jet. Though the people I work with are far from amateurs, their learning experience is a compressed, drinking-from-a-fire-hose marathon of classes, tests, Sim time and check rides. It is a high pressure learning environment.

Any learning curve is jagged, filled with slumps, valleys, and plateaus. Instructors need to remember that and, more importantly, remind students of this inescapable fact. Serious learning is never easy and never goes smoothly. Another fact is that mastering the rationale behind a physical skill is one thing, perfecting the skill quite another. Learning the physics behind and the complex relationships that form a musical scale helps in understanding just how the music should sound. But there is no escaping the fact that the fingers have to play that scale a thousand times before it sounds good enough to be included in a song. It was the same learning to sail. Classroom time spent learning the basics was time well spent. But no one becomes a sailor, or a pilot, in the classroom. No one becomes a good instructor sitting in a classroom either. Standing in front of one? Sure. Sitting in one? Not so much.

Which is the one tiny frustration I have right now, not doing a lot of teaching. Though I have worked with a couple of crews in the GFS, most of my time is still spent on internal training, with the class coming up being focused on meeting the requirements to teach European crews. I also get to spend some time as the right seat pilot for other FSI instructors doing their own internal training. It is all good stuff, adding to my own store of knowledge and offering up some good practice time. But I am really looking forward to more time spent working with those learning to fly a machine new to them.

And though it seems a little odd, being a student of the Uke helps make me a better instructor in the jet.

Ed Note: If you have always wanted to play the ukulele but feel like you're too old to start, read Tj's book, Learning From a Uke, available on Amazon.

Never ignore the good

London City Airport, England, identified as EGLC in the aviation world, is an interesting place.The single runway is 4948 feet long with the ramp area on the south side being less than half that length paralleling the west end.  There is no parallel taxiway for the length to the east. Aircraft landing east pull into a loop at the end of the runway to turn around and back taxi to the ramp, nose to nose with the inbound traffic. Because it lies among the city’s buildings the approach is steep, 5.5 degrees as compared to the standard 3.0 degrees. Departure corridors are equally steep in order to accommodate both safety and noise concerns. They fly airliners into the place. It takes special training and authorization to operate there, specific to the type of equipment being used.

Photo credit: Ercan Karakaş

Innsbruck, Austria is another interesting place. The airport’s field elevation is 1907', nestled in a picturesque valley and noted for the world class skiing on the surrounding mountains; mountains that are just shy of 10,000 feet tall. Approaches into that airport start letting down into the valley as much as 27 miles away, then wind their way to the airport with mountains framing the inbound path. Landing to the east, the point of the final turn that lines one up with the landing runway (known on the chart as WI005) is just 2.6 miles from the approach end. The runway itself slips into view a few moments before reaching that point. It is also a place that requires specialized training in any airplane one wants to fly into the place while the weather is down on its face.

America has mountains, skiing, and its own interesting airports, with Aspen, CO being among the most notorious. The Aspen airport elevation is 7837 feet with the surrounding mountains touching 14,000 feet. The RNAV (GPS) - F approach boasts a descent angle of 6.49 degrees, which is easily topped by that of the VOR DME - C approach with its ear popping angle of 9.61. Being in the US of A, home of the rugged individualist and cowboy loner, there is no special training or authorization required to saddle up and head to Aspen. The prudent, however, heading that way in a $20 mil jet loaded with VIPs, like to take a peek before jumping into the deep end. (An attitude much approved by insurance companies.)

A flight instructor working in a full motion simulator bolted to the ground in St. Louis gets to fly into all three. (It is a bit of a jolt to climb out of the Sim after a few hours of "flying" around London, then climb into a car to take I70 east to St. Louis.) I’ve been to Aspen for real. The London “flight” happened a day or so ago and I’ll be “heading” to Innsbruck, again, in a week or so. This plane has a special system's mode for steep approaches, one that raises the approach speed while allowing full spoilers to be deployed along with full flaps; a configuration not available during more normal approaches and landings. The procedure isn’t overly complicated, but it's always more comfortable to not try something new while “on the fly” at 200 knots.

Seeing new places, even if through view-screen “windows” looking out at a synthetic world, helps with making the transition to living a land-bound life. Outside of the Sim life is traffic, bustle, the constant barrage of propaganda, advertisements, and the relentless noise of civilization. It is a frenzy now ramping up to insane levels with the incoming national political campaigns beginning to unfold. (Those living on the water and off these shores should rejoice at being well insulated from the madness.)

Photo Credit: Andrew Jacob Byrnes (@jakeofsaltlake)

We have found a nearby bar that has not a single TV anywhere to be seen, a rare find nowadays. (It would be no surprise if some future civilization categorizes our fascination with TV as an addiction; and a fatal one at that.) Walks in the nearby parks, having a bit more resilience to life-threatening weather, and the endless joy of having grand kids around are more than just balms for the stationary soul. They are treasures in their own right, things to be cherished and celebrated. I miss the open water life, but life is rarely all bad or all good. No matter where life leads, one should never ignore the good while emphasizing the bad. Something I am still learning to do.

Ride the training train

Training goes on, and on, and on… I do get to work with clients once in while now though, so far, it has all been in the GFS. I’m looking forward to an eventual chance to take a crew into the Sim, but I have no clue when that might happen. Getting the approval to work the class room appears to be many weeks away yet.

Some of the training did bring on a fun bit of coincidence. The Europeans came up with a new requirement for upset training to be included when anyone is learning a new jet. Since I am to (eventually) train EASA pilots, I had to take the training. An old acrobatic pilot being forced to toss a $20 mil simulated jet around a simulated sky? Sign me up!

The coincidence came in the form of my training partner for the Sim session. He was one of the clients I had worked with in the GFS, had just passed his type ride, and this was the last bit of training he had to do before heading off for home. It doesn’t get much better than flying with someone you helped train (even if just a minor bit of help). We did a total of three hours together, doing all kinds of things that will near get you dead in an airplane; massive wind shear hits low to Mother Earth on both take off and landing, wake turbulence rolling the plane to knife edge just a few hundred feet off the ground, and traffic conflicts with intruders both above and below. Even with all that we had a little time remaining in the Sim.

Sim time is rare and expensive so we generally don’t let any of it go to waste. Without warning or a pre-brief, the instructor failed both engines with the airplane 5000 feet in the sky and just barely within gliding distance of a usable runway. Since that is an altitude prone to being filled with migrating feathered friends, this is one of the more likely scenarios one might see out in the real world. No time for checklists or setting up an approach, fly-by-wire system gone and flight controls degraded with only one hydraulic system left, and no hydraulics for gear extension or brakes. Take your best guess at the runway you can reach, eyeball the rate of descent, call for flaps and gear when you think you have the runway made, and make it work. I think the Europeans are on to something with this training requirement, though the bird hit / all engines inoperative exercise wasn’t part of the deal.

This week is something new as well, teaming up with one of the program’s more experienced instructors to make up a crew for the GFS. The reason? We will be practice dummies for the program’s newest instructor. Since I went through the same thing not too long ago it should be interesting to be on the other side of that exercise. I also had a chance to sit in with a bunch of other instructors while representatives of the manufacturer of the airplane updated us on the latest support news. It was a very technical discussion which dug pretty deep into the minutia of system functions, approved procedures, and documentation. It might not be rocket science, but it isn’t tying your shoes either. It is rare to find myself in a room full of people who are more than equal to my inner airplane geek. I also got my hands on the maintenance training manuals for the airplane, pleasing my inner mechanic geek as well.

Which is good because my inner sailing geek isn’t nearly as pleased. Kintala sits forlorn in a FL boatyard, waiting for someone to take her back to sea. I try not to think about her much. With it being the hurricane time of the year we should be pushing north. It has been several years since we were last in the Chesapeake Bay and, even as I write this, I can picture Fishing Bay and our friends at Oak Harbor. But, being on the boat as long as we were taught us many things. One of the most important was that there are many parts of a voyage over which we have no control. Navigating that bit of the passage is the only real responsibility we have, doing it well - or not - is what matters. The “where” and the “why” and the “how did we get here?” Those don’t really matter much at all.

Eyeball it, and make it work.

A Texas surprise

Another week of training but a different kind of training, this time in Dallas. For the first time in nearly 4 decades I got instruction on instructing. Though it started out with me thinking that this was going to be four days of my life I was never going to get back, it turned out to be time well spent. It wasn’t so much new info as it was formalizing things learned long ago and practiced for years. What was new was learning to be not just a fight instructor, but a representative for an international organization. Different rules apply when the student is also the customer and the customer is always right.

There were 8 in the class from 4 different Training centers. Five of the eight were straight up flight instructors, including one who teaches on one of the world’s most sophisticated helicopters. She had spent a good part of her career flying off oil platforms all over the world, did a stint with the Maryland State police, and is now joining FSI. She had some pretty good stories and was an absolute joy to work with. 

Another in the class teaches maintenance techs, one dispatchers, and the eighth ocean crossing procedures. On day one the class instructor had us count; there was roughly 235 years of flight experience in the room: airline, military, corporate, crop dusting, acrobatics, chopper, glider, up high, down low, going fast, going slow…everything but balloons and astronauts. I am still blown away by the depth of field employed by the company.  But it wasn’t all good.

Word has it ours was the third to the last group who will benefit from this class. The training we received is being replaced by something more cost effective but will certainly be of less quality. I say that for two reasons. The first is that our instructor was a uniquely qualified person with decades of experience instructing flight instructors. The second is that he is going to be replaced, to a large degree, by e-learning. For some reason the human family has decided that actually interacting with other human beings is of no intrinsic value. It is claimed that listening to a recording of a voice, or the disembodied voice of a person standing in a room hundreds of miles away, is nearly as good as being in a classroom. And, in today’s world, nearly as good is good enough, particularly if it allows those who already have a pocket full of coins to pocket a few more.

And yes, I realize that observation is being made by someone who prefers that interactions with his fellow human be taken in small doses. A classroom with 8 or 10 or a Sim / GFS with 2 is perfect, and likely one of the reasons I am enjoying this job as much as I am.

I was awarded another surprise on this visit, the making of a new friend. Mark is a hard core Texican, born and bred. He lives on 25 acres of hallowed Texas soil, owns enough weapons to arm his own little militia, and usually has more than one either on his body or within close reach. In fact I pretty sure there were at least 3 in the car with us, but he is so comfortable with the whole idea that he didn’t make an issue of, or boast about, his guns. Which made me somewhat comfortable with the whole idea as well. He listens to right-wing radio and loves him some Donald Trump and a pickup truck, though we did ride around in his Japanese 4 door. 

He sat next to me in class and, nearly instantly, we recognized a kindred spirit. We enjoyed two dinners together and spent most of the break time exchanging rogue smiles and skeptical glances over some of the things being said in the class. In spite of that connection I think, at first, he was also puzzled by and curious about someone who, though aware of what is going on in the world around, doesn’t really pay much attention. The fact that I can both; a) know something is vitally important but, b) dismiss it anyway because I know I can’t do anything about it, seemed kind of new to him. But I think he likes the idea. Anyway, I don’t make new friends that often, and have to admit to being a bit surprised that this trip to Texas offered me a chance to do just that. 

Training

I have been "QAed," Flight Safety speak for having been assessed as being competent to instruct in the Simulator. It will be a while yet before I get in front of a classroom. The nature of the business is that one Class instructor can carry 10 or more clients through the week, but the next two weeks that same group will require at least five instructors working the simulators. Those five instructors will each be doing a daily four-hour session. We have one sim for this airplane, which is why it runs 20 hours a day. As a general rule, we show up an hour or so before the clients to do our own prep. There is an hour pre-brief before getting into the sim. A half-hour of post flight review follows when the sim work is done, and then there is the inevitable paperwork. (I wonder how long we will keep calling it paperwork, since it is all done on a computer?)  If things go smoothly it will be close to a 7-hour, non-stop day. Things, of course, don’t always go smoothly. But even when they don’t, there is free coffee, the air-conditioning and heat work, and everyone involved is focused on the same task.

A lot easier than fixing boats during a Florida summer.

The QA session was interesting. There were the two Clients, with approximately 21,000 hours and a half-dozen type ratings between them. Then there was the Instructor of Record watching me teach, in addition to the QA instructor who was also watching me. We three likely have about 25,000 hours and 10 type ratings between us. Forty-six thousand hours of flight time and 16 type ratings, that is a lot of experience and talent squeezed into one little, moving box. Kind of a strange thing given that pilot training has become a focal point in the unfolding Boeing 737 Max drama. It has been reported that pilots transitioned from the older, less complex 737s to the Max with a one-hour session on an iPad. It would be interesting to know just who was responsible for getting that approved.

It isn’t clear when I will actually settle into the sim with a new crew. At the moment, the schedule includes training specific to Air Traffic Control procedures, additional training in operating the Simulator itself, and differences training in order to work with clients who fly under the European authorities. Being responsible for ATC procedures is new. All my past flight instruction was done in an airplane where actual ATC professionals provided ATC service. For a reference, ATC training involves 2 to 5 months at the FAA Academy; then 2 to four years of on-the-job training. The good news is, if I actually run the sim into an imaginary bit of mountain, all that happens is that the motion stops and the visual turns red. It doesn’t appear possible run it into another airplane no matter what. (Given the terrain sensing, moving map, and synthetic vision capabilities of the jet, driving it into a mountain could only happen if the crew was completely incapacitated for some reason.)

And so it goes. On a rare day off yesterday, Deb and I walked over to the Library. On the periodical rack was the latest offering from Sail Magazine, one where they reviewed a bunch of new boats from the winter’s boat shows. It was a pleasant hour. I miss the quiet of the boat, being independent and mostly self reliant. I miss the cruising community, and a life where schedules come and go with tides and seasons rather than the days being chopped up into half-hour bits. But being on the boat taught us to accept life as it unfolds, working with it rather than chafing at the unexpected. It was good training for being back on land.

Back in the Box

Done with the sim observation week, and it went a bit better than pretty well. I started this with a tendency to look at Sim instruction as just one of those things one had to put up with for the chance to get back into a classroom setting. All of the hours spent in the front seats of Sims over the years had dulled any enthusiasm for working in the box. These last few days have eased that feeling somewhat. The Sim is a unique training environment; a multi-million dollar, full-motion chalkboard used to study and master some pretty complex challenges. At the start of the week the crew I was with was tentatively poking at switches just to get the flight deck powered up and the engines running. Today nothing—not badly degraded flight controls, one engine gone, or 3 of their 4 instrument screens dead in the panel—kept them from flying near perfect night instrument approaches to absolute minimums, usually ending with a gentle touchdown and the airplane coming to a stop with the nose gear on the center line. This is training the way training ought to be, and is pretty close to as much fun as a person can have while, at the same time, just working for a living. (No, we didn’t do any single-engine dump truck jumping. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks such things are a waste of training time.) Meeting with them after their successful check rides was cool, and they were even kind enough to say that what little input I offered over our week together in the sim was helpful.

Photo courtesy of aopa.com

My next task is to “teach” the Initial Pilot sim sessions to two Flight Safety Instructors pretending to be clients, while a third Instructor teaches me the simulator ropes. And that has led to one of the cooler things that has happened to me lately. (Though the idea of four Flight Instructors in the same Sim provokes images of four doctors in a Bonanza. Its an insider joke, don't worry if you don't get it.)

Years ago, I had a chance to teach a class on high altitude/turbine flight operations at St. Louis University, something that lasted nearly eight years. After that job faded away, there was some time spent as an Airline Captain. Fun job, but the pay was hard to live on. (Regional pilot pay back in those days was another inside joke.) I left that job to fly a corporate jet around the country for about a decade and, when the ax fell on that gig, Deb and I headed out on Kintala.

Now, something near 20 years later, one of the pilots I will be practicing on will be someone who sat in one of those classes at St. Louis University. He is a fully qualified Sim and ground school instructor for the Legacy, and it is likely he will have much of value to share about teaching others to fly this thing.

I have stumbled across several students from those SLU days: a young lady flying Apache Helicopters for the Army, several who are now wearing 4 stripes and flogging airlines around the world, one who flies B2 stealth bombers…I don’t claim to have had anything at all to do with their success, though it was kind of fun that such meetings always included smiles, laughter, and good stories. But to be working with one of them, having him show me the way around this high-tech wonder jet? That’s enough to make an old flight instructor feel pretty good about the paths life has taken; enough to have me truly looking forward to being “back in the box.”

The way it is.

Slowly, and somewhat against my will, the integration back into the world of land dwellers continues. I am starting to drive a little faster. The highway part of the route to and from the shop works best when big parts of it get done in the left lane. Two of the off ramps used are left exits, with one of those dumping me off into the left lane of another highway. From there it is about 1/2 mile to get across four lanes of traffic to a right exit. When in the left lane, it seems best to try and keep up, but ten over is about as fast as I care to go. It’s usually enough, particularly when the schedule has me making the trip around rush hour. Non-rush hour traffic is light enough that leaving the lane switch to the last minute isn’t a problem. On those days,speeds in the fast lane run 20/25 over…and more. Best to leave that bit of concrete to those in a real hurry to get to their next accident.

The drive through town to the highway has its own displays of land dweller foolishness. I don’t understand those who just blow through red lights without even slowing, something witnessed on an average of once a day. I can’t get my head around the idea of someone thinking that they are so important that traffic laws simply don’t apply to them. I sometime wonder if they think the laws of reaction times, momentum, braking traction, and impact “g” forces, don’t apply to them either. Then again, thinking isn’t likely one of their strong suits. Such drivers are, admittedly, a minority. Maybe Darwin keeps them from multiplying too rapidly.

Unsurprisingly, the job is helping ease the transition. In the aviation world, the people not big on thinking don’t get very far or last very long. (Darwin rules again.) Being among the tribe of hard-core, professional aviators helps take some of the sting out of not being among the tribe of cruisers. The job, now, is to sit through the exact same class/cockpit trainer/sim sessions as completed barely a week ago. Observing is the task at hand, concentrating more on how the material is taught rather than what is being taught. There is still a lot of learning going on. Knowing enough to pass the check rides and exams is not near to knowing enough to teach.

Mike, the instructor this past week, is the fourth I have worked with since hiring on. The first three got me – six years away from a flight deck – past an FAA type ride in the Legacy fly-by-wire-gee-whiz wonder bird, in three weeks. A pretty good demonstration of just how good they are at what they do. Watching Mike, with an eye toward working the classroom gee-whiz wonders and watching how he interacts with the group did (as I fully expected) highlight just how challenging – and fun – this is going to be. And there are still two areas of instruction, the cockpit trainer and the actual simulator, to be mastered.

Another help in taking the sting away from being off the boat comes from spending time with the pilots being trained. The current class includes pilots from Mexico, France, Germany (who was born in Brazil), and the US. One of the American pilots was a contract guy who has flown pretty much everywhere there is to fly, including Russia and China. This group of seven pilots is, collectively, fluent in at least 6 languages. They are very much the kind of people we routinely met while traveling on Kintala: adventuresome, capable, friendly, smart, and at ease with other cultures and ideas. It is just flat-out fun to be around them, listen to their stories, and work with them as they get a handle on this new bird.

It all helps.

The crew of Blown’ In the Wind is spending a few days on the dock where Kintala is sitting with the broker. They say it is strange to see her there without Deb and I nearby. It is even stranger having them “out there” while heading off to work each day. I try not to think of it too often; the job, Daughters (Two), and the grandkid gang of 7 are all good reasons to have taken this path. But sometimes the nights pass slow, with the lights of the city and the noise of the adjoining apartments rubbing raw against the nights of silence and darkness riding to the anchor off some uninhabited cay. At other times a thought or memory will sneak up and freeze my world for just a moment, right in the middle of the day. Those usually pass quickly, though the ghost of a hurt may linger for a while. Some of the people I love, and a world I miss, are very far away. And that’s just the way it is going to be for a while.

Just another ride?

One thing that seemed a pretty sure bet when we left land and moved onto a boat, was that there would be no more check rides in the future, let alone two check rides in five days. It would have been a bad bet to take.

Photo courtesy of AOPA.com

The first was Monday’s “easy” ride, the one to check the box required by the European authorities. That one was done with my new friend from Germany and was actually two, two-hour rides. Michael took the left (Captain’s) seat for the first ride with me on the right. Then we switched for the second ride. Like most jets, and in spite of all the high tech gee-wizardry that is supposed to make this one “easy” to fly, it is a two pilot airplane. When things start to go wonky, with warning lights flashing and aural alerts filling the flight deck, they can be two very busy people, with each person’s hands being filled with different tasks. The nice thing about European (EASA) rides is that they are not “jeopardy” events. One can’t really fail the ride. If a maneuver isn’t performed up to standard the crew simply does it again, learns from whatever mistake it was that they made, and moves on. There is always the possibility that someone will come along who simply can’t figure out how to do it right, but that is a pretty rare event at this level of aviation. These are not teenaged kids working toward their first solo flight in a single engine piston banger.

Another good thing about EASA rides is they focus on crew coordination and decision making, using the aircraft's capabilities to minimize risk. When things start to go wrong, the crew is expected to reduce the risks involved as much as possible. Checking destination weather, finding alternate airports, requesting priority handling to simplify the approach procedure as much as possible, are all expected to be part of the crew’s actions. Of course things still go wrong on an EASA check ride. Though there is a good chance that a pilot starting out today will never see a honest to goodness flashing red light in an actual cockpit, you have to practice something.

The second ride, the FAA sanctioned ride, was Friday. The FAA is the last aviation entity on the planet to still insist on “jeopardy” rides. Lose too much airspeed during one kind of maneuver, gain or lose too much altitude during another maneuver, and the examiner is required to terminate the ride, no second chances. The applicant is sent home with a “pink slip” and a notice goes in the federal records of a failed attempt to get a new rating. They can’t take away your birthday or anything, and a second ride can be scheduled after a certain amount of retraining is logged. The bitch with this approach is that anyone can have a bad day, and a ride can be “busted” even if the outcome of the flight was never in doubt. (You can read that as meaning it didn’t get near to crashing and no one was going to get hurt.)

During this check ride, one gets to demonstrate all kinds of skills that will never be called upon again. Steep turns in an airplane deliberately designed to correct any roll attitude greater than 33 degrees is one. The required 45 degree angle can be commanded, but one is literally fighting the airplane’s flight management system the entire time. Oh, and don’t gain or lose about a wing’s span worth of altitude while doing so, even if the ground is 10,000 feet away. Do so and the ride is a bust, come back another day to try again.

The same can be said for performing aerodynamic stalls, when the wing quits flying from too low an airspeed. Millions upon millions of dollars were spent when designing this aircraft to ensure that it could not be stalled. So, during an FAA check ride, some (not all) of the multiple layers of protection are switched off. Then the pilot can provoke a stall warning (not an actual stall) in order to demonstrate the “skill” of recovering from something that hasn’t actually happened yet. It is a bit like chopping off a foot to demonstrate the skill of hopping around on one leg.

After doing things in the airplane that the airplane was designed not to do, one gets to demonstrate the ability to handle multiple, cascading failures by making the poorest possible risk management decisions. No pilot I know would ever, with an engine shut down (OEI), press on to an airport where the weather was at minimums for making the approach. Nor would any airport I have ever flown to allow a piece of equipment to blunder onto a runway in front of an emergency aircraft, thus provoking a single engine low altitude (barely 50 feet in the air, less than the length of the aircraft) abort and missed approach. But an FAA check ride requires pretend stupid topped with a dash of silly. After the abort, the sky will miraculously clear and turn into day for the next landing, but the flaps will fail. A OEI / no flaps landing is like tip-toeing through a mine field. One faltering step will have the airplane careening through the grass on the side of the runway. (A sure way to bust any kind of check ride is to crash, even if it is a Sim.)

A saying that floats around the aviation world goes something like this, “It is best to exercise superior judgment and avoid demonstrating superior skills.” On the FAA ride we do just the opposite. The good news is that the Legacy 500 is such an overpowered little brute that it barely notices that an engine has packed it in for the day. So, what it taketh away in cooperating with steep turns, it giveth back when jumping over a wayward dump truck. The no flap, OEI landing? Just take it easy with the single thrust reverser, don’t pounce on the brakes with too much enthusiasm, and all should be well. (That is, by the way, just the highlights of the things that go wrong on this two hour check ride.)

For me the ride mostly demonstrated that it takes more than a few weeks to scrape off 6 years worth of salt water accumulated rust. Still, it went okay. The Check Airman was fair in his assessment of the things I could have done better and, to a large extent, all involved are well aware that check rides have little to do with actually using the airplane to move around the country day after day. I would have been quite comfortable to walk out of the sim, climb up into an actual Legacy, and head off somewhere; the Check Airman would have put his family on board behind me. When it comes right down to it, that is every Check Airman's actual pass/fail criteria. And it is the best one I can think of.

After the “official” ride was over, we had a good discussion of how I, as a flight instructor, can help him do his job as a Pilot Examiner. The people he checks will soon include people I have helped train. We are on the same side when it comes to getting them ready for both the check ride and the real world. Sometimes that is a delicate balancing act between two contradictory sets of standards.

With the rides over, and a new type rating in my pocket, the heat is off a bit. I am past the point where the job could still have gone very wrong, leaving us with few options for getting back to a boat someday. I have been “at the shop” pretty much every day since training started three weeks ago. When not working the GFS I was at home pouring over manuals, procedures, and test questions, often far into the night. Though not the FAA’s doing, to me this check ride carried more potential “jeopardy” than any other I have taken.

It will be good to get back to a more normal schedule. I am really looking forward to concentrating on getting to the front of a classroom, rather than to the front seat of the airplane. After all, they hired me to teach, not to fly. 

Hoops and boxes

Training goes on. Sometimes it is kind of fun. Sometimes it is enormously frustrating. Note to self, don’t take nearly six years off from doing something complex, then expect to go back to it without any kind of drama. The salt water rust on what were more than adequate aviation skills is embarrassing. The good news is that one need not be an expert pilot to teach other expert pilots how to make friends with a new piece of equipment. The regulations require that one carry a type rating to teach but the goal isn't to fly the thing out on the line, it is to help those who do to keep sharp.

It is a bit like being a riding coach for a MotoGP racer. All the coaches are ex-racers themselves, though not all of them are past champions. Past champions tend to have enough resources to do whatever they want after hanging up their leathers. Not many of them want to gypsy around the world, living in hotels, and spending work days at race tracks. But past champions or no, the coaches don’t race anymore. Yet they are an important part of the package that gets the racer to the top step of the podium.

There is no desire, on my part, to join the working pilots back out on the line. Hotel rooms and working days spent at airports stuffed full of human kind don’t hold much attraction. And, truth to tell, I don’t think getting a type rating in the airplane myself is all that important, though it is kind of fun to add another one to my license, just for boasting’s sake. In the aviation world type ratings are a bit like the gold star one got from a favorite teacher back in Kindergarten.

It would be more useful to run though the various scenarios, V1cuts, engine fires, ect., over and over to get the procedures down pat, sniffing out the smallest details of how to get it perfect. Then we could pass that along to the crews, like a riding coach helping get that last 0.1 of a second out of a difficult corner on the race track. But endless hours spent grinding through simulated skies setting up instrument approaches, doing circles in holding patters, talking on the radio? These folks do that day after day, and have been doing so for years. When it comes to a new airplane a bunch of hours figuring out the particular switch work is what they need, and they don’t need a full motion sim for that. Sim time should be spent concentrating on those difficult corners. Spend an hour doing V1 cuts, one after the other, where it is less then five minutes work from engine failure to flying or dying. Do ten of them in a row and the muscle memory will be there when needed. The same goes for engines blowing up, flight control failures, and electrical emergencies. Once the correct actions are taken, most problems are just an annoyance until the wheels touch down again. Then it becomes the maintenance department’s headache.

Repeated runs of low visibility departures and landings, the airplane at max take-off or landing weight, with the cross wind at maximum and / or the runways covered with snow would be time well spent. More of those difficult corners that lie at each end of a long, boring straight. Each of those only lasts a few minutes as well. A couple of hours in the sim and the crew could hammer out more of those twitchy departures and landings than they are likely to see in a year out on the line.

Still, as in all things in this modern world, the proper hoops must be jumped through, the boxes on various forms must be checked, and some sort of official blessing must be bestowed by both government and corporate powers-that-be. Though the sailing world has its own hoops, boxes, and brushes with officialdom, one rarely has to deal with such when out on big water in a small boat. Out there might be the last bastion of being completely responsible for ones’ own choices, answering only to Sister Ocean, Father Sky, and Mother Earth. That is not the same for the modern pilot. Cockpit voice recorders, data boxes, recorded communications, and radar flight track data will all be waiting to judge every action the crew took, and every word they spoke, after things went wonky. Even if they get the plane safely back to Mother Earth without putting a scratch on a passenger or bystander, some Monday morning quarterback somewhere will find fault with what they did. Human nature I guess, another advantage to being out on big water. Not a lot of humans milling around out there, looking for something to sound off about even if they don't have the slightest clue as to what really happened. Or what it took to survive.

Fortunately for me, when it comes to the effort of knocking off the rust, my Sim partner is one of those past champions who likes hanging around a race track. He is a retired check airman / instructor on Airbus airliners, flying mostly in Europe. His knowledge of instrument procedures / approaches / holds / misses / FMS operations is nothing short of encyclopedic. He even stumps our Instructor once in a while. It will be a bit embarrassing if, at some point down the road, he comes back for recurrent training and I end up as his Instructor. Sometimes the hoops and boxes are just short of silly, but at least I’ll know how to start up the Sim so we can work on getting the last bit of performance out of those difficult corners.

TwinkleStar

Two written tests are done and dusted. Two check rides remain. One, the FAA ride, includes a two hour oral exam. Those still lie a couple of weeks in the future. The GFS, a training aid that is a bare bones but accurate representation of the actual flight deck, is the focus of this week. Since hiring on, I have spent a bunch of days sitting in the thing, trying to get back up to speed. Hours were spent learning switch positions, running through checklists, rehearsing flows, and practicing procedures. Other hours went to learning to load the computers with flights plans, performance numbers, weight and balance data, instruments approaches, and holds. Then, of course, one has to figure out how to get the machine to actually do the stuff that has been loaded. All of it I kind of blundered through on my own, books in one hand while poking at switches, buttons, and curser controls with the other.

Now I am working the thing under the tutelage of an experienced Instructor, who will undoubtedly point out places where I taught myself the hard way to get something done. A nice thing is the EASA requirements insists that an additional GFS session actually be done in the Sim instead. Given training for two rides, there should be plenty of time to make friends with this new machine before the next round of tests. Though things are working out really well with the job, there are still rough moments to this. Some come from trying to scrub the rust off of pilot skills long neglected. Other bumpy moments happen while trying to fit into land living again. But the hardest are ones that I call “TwinkleStar” moments.

When we were on the boat with Daughter Eldest and Family nearby, Granddaughter Fourth would often climb up into my lap to help me play her a tune on my Uke. "TwinkleStar” was her name for whatever we played. (I'm sure you have already figured out where the name came from.) A few minutes here, a few minutes there, but those moments are the definition of what it means to share love. There were others, “Wizard Walks” with the grandsons, sitting in the park whittling shapes out of small branches, bird spotting, and cheering on the dolphins when they played nearby.

Once in a while, without warning and heedless of where I might be or what I might be doing at the time, one of those memories will flood through my mind, bringing a storm of both joy and hurt all jumbled together. The blow to the heart is enough to put a catch in one's breath, but there is an equally deep understanding that such moments are why we are here in the first place, that they are rare and wonderful. The memories should be cherished and celebrated as evidence of a life being well lived. The storm usually passes quickly and I go about my life knowing this is right where I should be at the moment, doing exactly what I should be doing. Daughters Middle and Youngest live near by, along with the grandkid Gang of Seven. New memories are already being added and, the truth is, if they weren't here we wouldn't be here either; great job or no.

It can be very confusing, being where I should be, where I want to be, doing something that is both challenging and worth my best efforts, yet being nowhere near where I long to be - playing “TwinkleStar” and watching the dolphins play.

Somehow we are fitting it together.

Strings of days…

Living on Kintala was usually a low key kind of life, but there were times when we had to push pretty hard. Long days would get strung together while trying to make it far enough south to get ahead of the cold weather. Other times the push would come from trying to get out of the hurricane zone in the early summer, or get back from the Islands in time to make that push north. Then there were strings of long days that came with trying to get the boat buttoned down and secured for an incoming storm, then getting out of Dodge ourselves before the storm arrived.

There were what seemed like an endless string of days working on the boat to get it ready to launch, or to launch the next time, or the time after that. There were days strung in a seemingly endless line, each feeling like the earth had stopped in its orbit around the sun right in the middle of summer in Florida, days that made me wonder if I would feel dry or cool or comfortable ever again. Of course all such days eventually faded into memory, replaced by easy days riding to an anchor or mooring ball, watching the moon rise over an uninhabited Cay or Bay, the water so still it tricked the mind into thinking it had never really moved, or would ever move again.

Since making the decision to do this land thing for a while, we have been stringing long days together again. The push to get Kintala to Titusville, the push to get to St. Louis, Deb’s push to get Kintala ready for the broker while I pushed to get the job secured and started, and the push to get settled into the apartment. The current push is to get through the type rating training and get qualified as a Flight Instructor. Current days are spent in a class with four other pilots, all of us working to make friends with this new, and very complex, airplane. The level of experience / expertise sitting with me is kind of amazing. There is an ex-Air Force flight test pilot who then spent 17 years at Southwest airlines. Another of the class was an Airbus test pilot while another is a current Embraer test pilot. Only two of us are US pilots, and I am the only one based in this country. Germany, England, and Spain are home for some, and the other US pilot is based in and flies around Asia. This is the level of expertise that will soon be looking at me from behind the work stations.

Okay then.

American pilots fly under FAA regulations, European pilots under those of EASA. Only an EASA trained instructor can do sim work with EASA pilots, and I have been asked to do both. There are other regulatory agencies for China, Russia, and others I don’t know. There are additional qualifications that are company specific, many having their own particular operating parameters. I haven’t been tossed into those waters yet. As it stands, I have to pass two different sets of tests, one for the FAA and one for EASA. And I still have to learn how to actually operate the Sim, Graphical Flight-Deck Sim, and classroom from the instructor’s seat. All interesting challenges that look to be their own kind of fun. But all also long days of work that must be finished before reaching the goal of actually instructing again.

It feels a bit like being just a couple of days out of Marathon on the migration north to the Chesapeake Bay. A good approach then was to get up each morning, haul the anchor, enjoy that day for what it had to offer, and not think too much about the long string of days of that still lay ahead before one could settle in again, at least for a while.  After all, part of the reason for being on the boat in the first place was to travel. Wouldn't it be kind of childish to complain just because there was a little to much of it happening all at once?

I am hoping the same kind of approach will work here as well. We came this way for good reasons, and it is working out better than we had dared hope. A string of long days seems a pretty fair trade, and it isn't like such a stretch is something new.

But I could have done without the 12 inches of snow.

Balance

It has been several weeks since I put Kintala in the rear view mirror, heading back to St. Louis to work for Flight Safety International as a ground / sim instructor. The job is secure now, with the official start date less than two weeks away. There will be a ton of training / preparation work before I actually stand in front of a class room full of pilots or saddle up in a sim. First there is the required pile of paperwork to complete. There is an old saying in aviation that goes along the lines of - an airplane can’t fly until the weight of the design, test, and certification paperwork is at least equal to the maximum take-off weight of the aircraft. Digital files and computers have reduced that stack somewhat, but it looks like pre-employment paperwork for flight instructors has to equal about half the applicant’s body weight before they can be turned loose.

Once the paperwork is complete and indoc finished, the real training begins. There is computer-aided training on subjects yet to be disclosed. Then there is a new type rating for the aircraft they want me to teach, the Embraer Legacy 500. This will be my fourth type rating, the third I have earned at Flight Safety. A type rating is a month-long training exercise whose intensity is hard to describe. Modern day full-motion simulators are marvels of engineering. It is quite easy to forget that one is attached to Mother Earth, and so no matter how badly a maneuver might get botched, the ground will not rise up and smite thee. The risk might be simulated, but the tension on the flight deck can get very real indeed. There are emergency procedures; engine failures at the most critical moments of a departure roll, wind shear encounters, explosive decompression, flight control anomalies, fire…that must be utterly mastered. Perfect execution, in these cases, is just barely good enough. 

Along with the simulator training are forays deep into the aircraft systems: normal operations, failure modes, redundancies, limits, reversion modes…hydraulics, electrical, flight controls, pressurization, air conditioning, de-ice systems, auto-brakes…  Yes, there will be a test and no, it will not be graded on a curve. Every professional pilot in every airliner cockpit has been through similar training. That is a good part of the reason for it being safer riding along in an airliner that has lost an engine and half of its flight instruments on a dark and stormy Saturday night, than it is driving down the road on that same dark and stormy Saturday night after the bars have closed. On a sunny Sunday morning with all the systems up and running normally, it is safer to be sitting in an airliner than to be sitting in church.

For flight instructors there is another whole area of training required, that of learning how to use the training aids, those being the simulator, graphical flight simulator (GFS - otherwise known as a cockpit procedures trainer to us old pilots) and the myriad training aids used in the classroom. There will also be a week’s worth of instructing on being an instructor, something I am quite curious about and looking forward to doing. It all sounds rather daunting even if I have been through it several times before, and have spent hundreds of hours standing in front of a class room full of students. 

Will the upcoming years be interesting, challenging, and worth while? Yes. Will they be as good as those same years spent on Kintala, wandering hither and yon, being part of the cruising family? I honestly don’t know. My thoughts easily drift back to quiet anchorages, clear waters, and overnight passages; both easy and not so easy. Most of my dreams are of being on the boat, the first waking moments bring a touch of regret as the dreams give way to being back on land. My feeling is this is going to be both better than I had hoped, and harder than I had imagined. Its a bit like that first crossing to the Islands, half way there in the middle of the night, lightning on the horizon, lumpy waves occasionally splashing into the cockpit. One part of the brain says, "Relax, it will be fine. You know what you are doing." But some other part of the brain says, "Are you crazy? What are you doing here?"

For the curious, the link shows the exact place that will be my working "home," and the very sim I am about to learn. 

www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/november/pilot/turbine-school-is-in-session