Aileron

Now that the sun sets earlier, evening lessons after work are less attractive since I would be in the dark the entire time. It's beautiful and peaceful in the dark, and other traffic is actually easier to see (assuming they remembered to turn on their strobes), but it's more difficult to judge the runway centerline and the instrument lighting in these old 152s is almost nonexistent. I tried a 0900 lesson yesterday, getting back home to work remotely before 1100, and that worked out alright.

Weekday mornings are great because no one else is really flying and I had the airport to myself. The cooler air also makes for happier engines and wings.

In the feeling stuck aftermath of my previous lesson, I made a point to review the techniques I needed to focus on and mentally run through the takeoff and landing sequences. When I first started flying, I had a tendency to over-control the airplane and I had to consciously tell myself to back off and let the plane fly itself, which it does quite well if you let it; but pattern work isn't the same as flying at altitude. The name of the game when you're low and slow is precision flying, by which I mean airspeed, engine speed, and airplane position all have exact places they should be during all phases of takeoff and landing, and any deviation needs to be corrected immediately. Over-control in the pattern isn't the best phrase, but a vigilant nursing of everything the plane is doing is required.

This attitude paid off. I felt more like I could keep at least a step ahead of what I was doing. Remembering to use the trim wheel really does help relieve workload. I remembered to make radio position reports at all the reporting points, I remembered to set the flaps on each leg, and I did better at a stable final approach.

On the first landing we did, my instructor called for a go-around (for practice, my approach was actually spot on). A go-around is an aborted landing, where the engine is brought to full power, flaps are progressively brought back up, and the plane climbs away from the runway, presumably to try the landing again. These are good to practice in case your approach ends up being really bad by the time you get down, or another airplane doesn't see you and taxis onto the runway, or there's wildlife on the runway, etc. The go-around went well except I forgot to turn off carb heat during climb-out.

We also did a no-flap landing, where because flaps aren't used, we come in faster and flatter on final. It also means we flare longer and land longer down the runway because we need to bleed off the excess speed. It's interesting how a little extra speed (70 kts vs. 65 kts) has such a noticeable effect. No-flap landings are useful if your electrical system fails and you can't extend flaps.

I feel like I've gone over a hump in the training, but more likely it's just proof I need to put more effort into reviewing technique in between lessons.

• Flight Hours: 11.4
• METAR N51 271400Z 04005KT 10SM CLR 07/02 A3058

What planes look like when they're sleeping.

Labels: Flight Lessons

While I was starting my research into flight training mid-2014, it was a rare and valuable find to come across a frank discussion of costs, so I'd like to post a clear and simple account of my expenses so far, near the 10 flight-hour mark, taxes and all.

The books cost includes only those that I think are necessary for training. I've bought a whole bunch of aviation related books that are more for entertainment than learning, and those are not included here.

I can't say how this would factor in, but N51 is in suburban New Jersey, within 15 minutes of two other airports with their own flight schools. Air traffic is fairly light, even on beautiful Saturdays, so there is not much time burned sitting on the taxiway waiting to use the runway.

The lesson fees include instructor time for ground school (the 10–20 minutes before and after each lesson when we brief/debrief the flight), but I haven't been logging how much time ground school takes exactly. I don't think it's a bad assumption that the proportion of ground school to flight time will stay the same up to the final exam, so we can assume my flight training operating costs will remain $140.14/hr moving forward, which includes aircraft rental, flight training, ground school, and fuel burned driving to and from the airport.

Assuming I am average and take 65 flight hours to get to a passing final exam, the remaining 54.2 hours will cost me $7595.59, resulting in a total PPL cost of $9341.88. The numbers are much larger and scarier here compared to when I just go in and pay $150 a pop, but that's the purpose of this exercise, and $9300 is what I'm looking at realistically. Most flight schools will advertise $6000 to get a PPL but that assumes your last name is Skywalker and you only take 40 hours to learn it. Most pilots will tell you a wide range, $6000–$12,000, which is more accurate but not very helpful in financial planning.

Whether it's a worthy objective to minimize the cost of a PPL, and consequently learn as quickly as possible, is questionable, and that certainly isn't my goal. It would be nice to finish earlier, and thereby have spent less money, but with the PPL in hand I would continue flying anyway which means burning cash at a comparable rate, so the savings are phantom. I really like the idea of learning the material completely.

It took me almost exactly four months to get 10.8 flight hours behind me (2.7 hrs/mon), which is much slower than the 8 hrs/mon that I'd originally anticipated. Hopefully I can increase this rate, but I don't think it's a huge deal if I can't. Extrapolating the current lesson rate, I will get to my final exam in 20 months (this number sounds dismal).

So there is the ten-hour financial report. I think it'd be good to check back in at 20 hours, 40 hours, and when I have my PPL in hand.

I had another flight lesson Saturday to work in the pattern practicing landings. I feel like I've plateaued in my training, where my landings and pattern work hasn't improved over the past couple of lessons. I'm getting the plane down sure enough, and almost all the landings are decently gentle, but I don't always feel in complete control and have to be reminded of some things. Pattern work is certainly not boring (as I feared it'd be), and being stuck is not frustrating yet, but I'm not happy with the state of things either.

I can identify a couple reasons for the stagnation, the largest of which are lesson spacing and homework. Because of non-airplane related things going on, the past couple of lessons have been spaced several weeks apart, and I end up using at least one takeoff/landing circuit to reacquaint myself with how to fly the airplane and all the little subpar points in my technique that I forgot about. This uses up time but also puts a dent in my confidence, although I've been pretty good at shrugging that off when the plane lines up on the runway again. It hasn't been the best strategy to space lessons farther apart just as I got into the trickiest part of flight training, but here we are. Anyway: redoubled effort to increase lesson frequency.

Perhaps because the lessons have gotten farther apart, I haven't been doing my homework between lessons. I don't have homework in the traditional sense of assignments that get graded, but I'm always reading through some training material (there's no end yet to stuff to read, thankfully) and I've found that just taking a couple minutes to mentally visualize all the steps to, say, descend and land, helps ingrain things. These activities seem less pressing when lessons are farther apart so they get dropped, which is not good. So back on the homework, kid.

Cessna 152 Instrument Panel; maybe it'll help to stare at this photo more.

Added to that, my instructor helped pinpoint several elements that I should focus on:

Maintain center line on takeoff and landing rolls. This has slowly been improving but I'm far enough in my training that this should really be perfect. The nose wheel should ride the line like a track.

Use trim to help maintain pitch. Pilots can adjust elevator deflection (and therefore pitch attitude) by pushing and pulling the yoke, but they can also recenter the neutral position of the yoke with the trim wheel. This wheel adjusts little trim tabs on the trailing edge of the elevator, kind of like an elevator of the elevator (if you like historical tidbits, search for "buckminster fuller trim tabs"). I've been mostly ignoring the trim wheel and controlling pitch with yoke alone since I thought it'd be easier with one less thing to worry about, but my instructor says it's not. Setting pitch with the yoke and then holding it there using trim leads to steadier flying and less workload on the pilot since he doesn't have to constantly micro-adjust the yoke.

Knowing when to turn in the pattern, especially base to final, has been tricky. I think I just need to get more experience visualizing things.

Intercepting and maintaining center line on final approach. This is similar to maintaining center line on ground roll. I need to be more aggressive about this.

• Flight Hours: 10.8
• METAR KSMQ 241553Z AUTO 10SM CLR 13/04 A3036 RMK AO2 SLP281 T01280044

North American T6 Texan. There was a flight of three Texans at the field while I was flying, doing formation maneuvers and doing photos on the ground. They are large and loud and very pretty.

Labels: Flight Lessons

No, not my crash. We went hiking in the Catskills this weekend and found the wreckage of one of the plane crashes there on Kaaterskill Peak. We also found a piece of wing from another crash further up the mountain but didn't bother looking for the rest.

Apparently there are a lot of small crash sites scattered throughout the Catskills, mostly as a result of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), where the pilot had complete control of the aircraft up until impact, but just didn't expect the ground to be where it was, either because he was lost or had no visibility or was disorientated (or all three). There's even a B-25 bomber on the east side of Balsam Cap from a training mission that got lost at night.

This particular plane was a Piper Cherokee Six, tail № N7146C, and on its last flight on 25 June 1987, it took off from Quakertown, PA bound for Tannersville, NY. At the time of the crash (2115), there was thick overcast just above the mountain tops, civil twilight had just ended, and the moon had not yet risen, so it would have been pretty dark. The pilot wouldn't have seen the mountains, especially if he was descending out of the clouds. It would have just been black on black. Tannersville is only three miles from the crash site, so the pilot was likely beginning his descent into the airport pattern (both landing gear were down), misjudged his position, and found a mountain where he didn't expect one. The pilot and his one passenger were both killed. They probably didn't have time to process what happened.

The Catskills are not high at all, the peaks are around 3500 ft, and the fact that this is high enough to catch planes is scary. Losing visual references on a VFR flight is one of the scariest things I can think of.

The starboard wing is on the right here, seen with the landing gear extended out of the wheel well. There's a fuselage section on the left, and the engine is further out of view to the left.

Waiting for the bus this morning.

Labels: Cloudscapes

It's been about a month since my last flight lesson, but I got back to it tonight and it was good to be back flying. As usual, I forgot less in the hiatus than I feared and was pleasantly surprised how much of this stuff sticks. I also had a different instructor tonight. My previous one is away on training of some sort. It's unfortunate that it takes some time to build up a relationship with a new person, but it's not that bad and I think it's helpful to get perspectives from different instructors.

Tonight, like most lessons between now and solo will be, focused on landings. We did four circuits in the pattern at N51, but one of which was demoed completely by the instructor. There was a bit of wind, almost directly abeam the runway, which meant that I had to be careful to keep my pattern the shape I wanted and that I had to do a slip on final for crosswind correction. The first landing was surprisingly gentle, the second one I misjudged our height and we hit the ground hard and bounced, and the last one was not that bad.

I continue to be haunted by my failures in X-Plane, thinking in my flares that it's not going to end well, but flying in real life is much easier; I wish I had never played the game.

• Flight Hours: 9.2
• METAR N51 082130Z 14005KT 10SM FEW060 20/13 A3009

Labels: Flight Lessons