Pug’s Place

I’ve piloted a plane every morning since and including last Sunday. I had very high expectations, and the experience is almost up to them.
What’s happened…

On Saturday Chris and I drove to speak with three local flight schools, two at Chandler Municipal Airport (KCHD) and one at Stellar Airpark (KP19). We started at Stellar Airpark, a private airstrip which happens to be the closest to my brother’s apartment. Stellar Airpark is home to Angel Air Flight Training, the group that appeared to be the most ritzy and most expensive. Before we even arrived I had pretty much discounted them as being too expensive for my pocket, but I wanted to talk to them anyway if only to have something to which I could compare the other groups at Chandler. So we stopped there and spoke to a flight instructor named Jason. He pointed out the advantages of Angel Air over the competition as being scheduling flexibility and the modernness of its aircraft. We walked out to look into the cockpit of a Garmin G1000-equipped Cessna 172 just as an example of how new their fleet of aircraft really was. Their planes were pretty, clean and recently built, and their prices were painful-looking as I had already surmised. ($120 / hr for a Cessna 172 [includes fuel] and $50 / hr for an instructor [includes jokes]).

We left Stellar Airpark and drove a few miles down the road to Chandler Municipal Airport, a much more active, larger, tower-controlled airport in the southeastern corner of Phoenix. Chandler is home to two appropriate flight training groups: Tailwind Flight Centre and Chandler Air Service. We stopped at Tailwind first. Tailwind’s office was abuzz with activity and we had to wait a while before an instructor had a few minutes to talk with me. He was headed out to the flight line to do a lesson with a student so we had to talk on the go (and also got to see their aircraft up-close). Like Angel Air at Stellar they do all of their training in Cessna aircraft and are a Cessna-certified Pilot School which means they use Cessna’s training materials and curriculum to teach. Their prices for Cessna 172 aircraft are the same as those at Angel Air, shockingly, but they also have several older, smaller Cessna 152 aircraft which are considerably less expensive ($70 / hr, including fuel) and a slightly cheaper instructor rate. Unfortunately, they are short instructors and only two of their current instructors can fit into the cheaper Cessna 152. I was left with somewhat negative impressions about their turnover rate in instructors, how tight the current instructors’ schedule is and the difficulty I might have in scheduling training around my new job. So Chris and I drove onward to the third and last flight school in the area: Chandler Air Service.

I had already pretty much made my mind up about going with Chandler Air Service before I even got there. They train in different sorts of aircraft than the others (Piper Warriors rather than Cessna’s), have more reasonable prices and show up consistently as one of the best places to learn aerobatics in the country. They’ve been in business for a long, long time and have a good reputation. We met with an instructor who Chris describes as being an ‘old, unkillable pilot guy,’ by which he means the instructor’s been flying so long he’s already made all of his mistakes and has apparently learned from them. We talked through their training program for a short while as it was considerably different than the Cessna program and then got around to the practical aspects of the training: when and how much? The ‘how much’ was no big deal, they were on par with Tailwind and cheaper than Angel Air, just as I expected. The ‘when’, though, was a problem: you submitted your schedule when you applied to become a student and the following Tuesday they’d assign you an instructor, and then you could start scheduling lessons 2 weeks down the road. Whoops - that’s not how I wanted things to go! I have a week here in Phoenix before I start work and I wanted to do some flying, well… now!
After hopping into the cockpit of a Piper Warrior to see what the plane looks like on the inside, Chris and I drove back to his apartment and talked through the choices.

Chandler Air Service was effectively out of consideration because of the difficulty/rigidity in scheduling lessons. Tailwind didn’t look so good from the student/faculty ratio side of things and wasn’t any cheaper than Angel Air unless you flew a C152 constantly… and Angel Air had the scheduling flexibility. I shifted my lean toward Angel Air, not because of its more modern aircraft but because of the scheduling. I decided I could resign myself to paying more for the convenience of easy scheduling - especially when the bottom line figures aren’t that much different. What’s $800 extra when you’re already planning on spending $7,000 on training? *gulp*

When we were back at the apartment I did a few more calculations and then called Angel Air, spoke to the same instructor with whom we met earlier and scheduled a ‘discovery flight’ in a Garmin G1000-equipped 2004 Cessna 172 for the next day (how’s that for flexibility?). So Sunday I drove back to Angel Air, had a brief briefing, paid close attention to everything I could, sat in the pilot’s seat of the Cessna and went flying.

A ‘discovery flight’ is usually a steeply-discounted hour-long flight where you, the customer, get to sit in the pilot’s seat of a plane with an instructor and go flying. While the instructor does pretty much everything (he is the pilot-in-command, after all), you get to have your hands on the controls and try some maneuvers yourself to see how you like turning a yoke and making the plane do stuff! While on my discovery flight last Sunday I had my first taste of preflighting a plane, taxiing, taking off from an untowered airport, constant-rate turns, climbs and descents, stalls and got to try a touch-and-go landing before returning to Stellar Airpark. My discovery flight had more ’stuff’ in it than most, but I’ve been logging a lot of time in MS Flight Simulator in the last few months so I already was familiar with much of what we did. At my request we also did some high-G maneuvers to see how my stomach would respond: I’m proud of my tummy, I’ve had no airsickness problems, even while doing strange things like holding a 1,300 foot-per-minute descending stall to see how low G’s would affect me. Woo! (Yes, that’s a lot like just falling out of the sky like a rock without a parachute - however, I should say it takes work to stay in a stall in one of these planes, they’re designed to right themselves and continue level flight)

At the conclusion of the flight I purchased the Cessna Pilot Training package, got an account for their online scheduling application and set up a date to come back the next morning for my first lesson. Jason, the instructor who took me on this discovery flight and who is now my flight instructor, also took the time to remark about the oddness which is me. He enjoyed watching the looks on the faces of folks there while describing that I came in for a discovery flight with my Class 3 Medical, an FAA weather briefing and knowledge of obscure things like P-factor (which is asymmetric thrust generated by a propeller at a high angle of attack causing a left-turning tendency in single-engine aircraft). Heheh.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings I went to Angel Air and took command of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk SP pretty much identical to the one Barry took Katie and I into the skies in last summer. Monday started with a lot of time getting a full lesson in how to ‘preflight’ one of these aircraft - what to check in what order, what to do when things look fishy, how to use the checklists to back-up the inspection, etc. We also did more basic maneuvers until it was obvious that I was on top of everything that counted as ‘basic’. Then Jason (my instructor) decided to put me into trying something which is causing me a bit of trouble: slow flight. Slow flight (descriptions: everything2 | wikipedia) is flying the airplane at or just slightly above stall speed - stall speed is the speed at which the airplane’s wings only barely generate enough lift to keep it in the air. When a plane fully stalls, it starts dropping out of the sky. It’s very important for pilots to know how to tread the line between stalling and not stalling safely because a final approach to land is done in ’slow flight’ so as to facilitate a timely cessation of flying. It’s also common to be in a slow flight situation during the first moments after taking off. Slow flight is challenging, at least initially, because it’s in “the area of reverse command” which basically means that you control airspeed with the pitch of the nose rather than the throttle and the altitude with the throttle instead of the pitch of the nose. In other words, backward compared to other flight attitudes. The first few times I tried this it worked out relatively poorly for me - I could keep the aircraft at one altitude but not an airspeed or heading, or one airspeed but not one altitude or heading. I’ve already gotten better at it, but it was hairy the first few times I tried it. I’m still not a fan…

Tuesday Jason had me demonstrate constant rate ascending and descending turns, so in other words adding climbs and descents into the standard turning practices. That didn’t take too long for me to acquire a sense for, so we headed to Phoenix Regional Airport (an airport in the middle of nowhere between Maricopa and Chandler, AZ) and I got to practice a few touch-and-go landings in a steady cross-wind (wind coming from anywhere other than straight down the runway). On our way back to Stellar Airpark, Jason demonstrated a few full stalls for me showing me just how stable a Cessna 172 is in a stall. He made the aircraft stall and managed to keep the plane flying with minimal altitude loss, straight on our desired heading with the stall warning horn blaring for a couple of minutes. He said, “You can control a stall all the way to the ground with one of these aircraft. Look, I can turn to pick a new heading, I can change descent rates — all while flying it below the minimum airspeed. Now, how do I break out of this stall?” Add full throttle, point the nose just below the horizon and then back up to level. It was educational, but still somewhat scary to watch the altimeter scream down “6,000 feet, 5,500 feet, 5,000 feet….” in less than a minute.

Wednesday I got to try my hand at “power on” and “power off” stalls, putting the aircraft into the stall, holding the maneuver without losing control of the aircraft and then breaking the stall off with minimal altitude loss. These are important skills because the most dangerous time of flying an airplane is when you’re taking off and landing simply because of those two stalls and inadvertently causing one of them to happen without sufficient room for recovery. So in training you drill over and over how to get out of the stalls as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of work to be done to set up for a “power on” stall, so much that I still haven’t memorized all of the setup steps… I’ll have to remedy that soon. Jason keeps encouraging me saying that these maneuvers are all about mastery of the aircraft and their perfection will only come when I achieve said mastery. It appears that ‘mastery of the aircraft’ is a term meaning roughly, “being able to maintain control of the aircraft with minimal change in course, altitude and airspeed while also watching for other aircraft, talking on the radio, consulting checklists, peering at charts and cooking breakfast for your passengers while humming the theme to Bonanza.” There’s a lot to do! After the stall practice we moved to less stressful maneuvers - steep turns, airport traffic patterns and I got to try my first radio calls! Ah, radio fright… there’s something magical that happens when a student pilot clicks the “radio transmit” button and his brain immediately turns off.
Thursday we started ground reference maneuvers: learning how to fly precision paths over the ground despite wind conditions. We only worked on the most basic ground reference maneuver yesterday, the S-turn, but it was simple enough… after a few of those we climbed to 4,000 feet of altitude and my instructor yanked the engine’s throttle all the way to idle and said, “your engine has quit, what do you do?” We did a long simulated engine out to demonstrate to me just how far such a plane can glide with no power whatsoever, talked about the best terrain to land on if an airport isn’t close enough and drilled over and over again what procedures one should follow. They get summarized as: A: Pitch the aircraft for best-glide Airspeed. B: Locate Best landing spot. C: Engine-out Checklist. D: Declare emergency on emergency frequency, squawk 7700 on the transponder. E: Evacuate by opening the doors before landing, pulling the emergency fuel shutoff, checking seatbelts and actually landing the aircraft. I expressed concern about how to land at a nearby airport without any engine power - how one should optimize their time aloft to ensure you land where you want to, not short of the airstrip nor rolling off the end of the runway. Jason responded by having me set a course to Phoenix Regional Airport again, asking me to get us there at 4,000 feet of altitude. I complied, even getting to make appropriate radio calls which sounded like:

“Phoenix Regional Traffic, Cessna one-niner-niner-papa-sierra is 5 miles west of the airfield, 4,000, inbound for simulated engine out. Traffic in the pattern please advise. Phoenix Regional.”

Over the airfield Jason again cut the engine down to idle and demonstrated all the way to the ground how to judge each turn of the landing pattern and what observations to be sure to make when you don’t have the option to increase power to the engine. It really was quite comforting.

We intended to stay around Phoenix Regional for a while to let me practice touch-and-go landings but there was 38 knot crosswind which was simply brutal for anyone - Jason said it would frustrate more than teach at this point, so we did some low flight over the desert back to Phoenix and Stellar for the end of that lesson.

At the end of my first week here I have accrued 6.6 hours of flight time toward my private pilot’s license - not bad, really. Had I gone with one of the other flight schools I’d have had nothing to do this week except work on stuff relating to the new house. Ooh, I’ll have to talk about that next.

But not right now - I want to get this entry posted and then find some Internet access for the new place. Then I’ll talk about it.