Things to Work On

After Tuesday's lesson, I jotted down some specific things to work on in addition to landings, so I might as well publish them here.

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I don't know the compass rose as well as I thought. Sure, I know that 90° is east and 180° is south, but for me to picture, for example, where 115° heads, I have to go through several steps in my head: (1) well, I know it's between east and south, (2) directly SE is 90° + 45° (3) so 135°, (4) ah, so 115° is 20° north of SE. Or, to turn from 280° to 95°, is it faster to turn left or right (again, arithmetic gears whirring in my head)? Sure, I can arrive at the correct answer eventually, but not quickly enough.

And things happen quickly in the traffic pattern. A common question is something like, "What heading should we fly to be perpendicular to runway 30 on our left?".

And so I step through, "Hm, well runway 30 means its heading is 300°, which is kind of northwest. To have it on my left I need to add 90° (subtract if I want it on my right); 300 + 90 is… 390, but crap, that's bigger than 360, so need to subtract 360… Fly 030°!" And by this time we are rather far from the runway or we've already passed 030 in the turn.

I think the answer is to eschew arithmetic altogether and burn into my head a really solid picture of the compass rose. It is a bit sad, though, because there are simple arithmetic problems, and then there are arithmetic word problems, and then there is doing arithmetic in order to fly an airplane (fly an airplane), and while I thought I finally have a very good reason for passing the third grade, I'm just too slow at it (apologies, younger self). But arithmetic will always be there to check my answers, so there's that.

I'm guessing that other pilots are not too fast at it either, because almost every aircraft has a heading indicator (HI) or, if you like older terms, a directional gyroscope (DG). This is an awesome little instrument because it tells magnetic heading without using a magnet, and so is immune to the lead/lag/dip/acceleration errors that a magnetic compass is prone to in an aircraft. Instead, you sync the DG with the compass when you're confident of the compass, and the DG then uses a gyroscope to fix its orientation in space as the aircraft turns around it, telling accurate heading without outside information. The top of the DG will read the current heading of the aircraft, but it can simplify other problems too. With the above example of runway 30, it doesn't matter what 300 + 90 is, just turn the plane until 300 is under the left tick mark on the DG. I need to become more proficient at using the DG.

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I can't adjust the flaps by feel. I think the flap lever is supposed to have little notches so you can feel when it's exactly at 10° and 20°, but they may be too worn in these old planes. Without looking at the lever, I can reliably select zero flaps, full flaps, and somewhere-in-between flaps, but that's as precise as I go.

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Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range (VOR). VOR is a nifty radio navigation system that lets planes home into navigation stations. I kind of glossed over this topic in my readings because I figured it would be a while before I would be flying far enough away from my home airport to need homing signals, but hey look at that, it was hazy and dark and I was suddenly interested in getting home from an airport I've never been to. This is easy enough to correct; just read the material.