Aviatrix Logbook

I’ve been steadily busy yet unmotivated to write. Here are some updates due to popular request.

Student I
He’s making slow progress. His procedures are great, but his worst problem is still failing to react when something is wrong. I don’t care if a student constantly screws up or does something wrong, as long as they proactively try to fix it, even if that means giving up and asking for help. But I’m concerned about someone who notices something isn’t working out yet decides to ignore it and continues to fly along. This is especially bad in an instrument pilot. He’s steadily chipping away at the 50 hours of PIC xc requirement, mostly because I’ve been cancelling lessons on nice days to force him to go. Since he’s been doing this, I’ve noticed some things have improved, such as his orientation to the airport and sense of direction. He’s still not studying for the written exam. So until he does that, we’re just going to have to keep practicing. We did have a notable flight the other day:

I go out to join Student in the airplane after his preflight. I open the airplane’s door, and I’m almost knocked over by the unmistakable acidly sweet stench of expelled stomach contents. Holy shit.

Me: “Do you smell puke? God.”
Student: “No, I don’t smell anything.”

It’s not that I’m crazy — Student is congested with a cold. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t get within ten feet of this airplane now. But no other airplane is available, and Student has to fly. So I’ll have to suffer it alone. I hold my breath and climb up into the seat. It feels like settling down into a nest of dried vomit and disease. We taxi with the window open and fly with all the heat, cabin air, and cabin vent on full blast. I can still smell it. I would write about Student’s flight, but I remember very little of it. After returning to the airport, I launch out of the airplane and breathe the fresh air until I cough. The line guy, B, is out to fuel the airplane. I know he’s going to ask me how the flight went.

B: “How was the flight?”
Me: “Did someone vomit in that airplane?”
B: “Yeah, about a week ago.”

Let’s have a moment of silence.

Me: “People have been flying in that airplane for a week with it smelling like that?”
B: “I guess so.”

B wanders off to go do something else. I vow to not be put in this position again. I won’t be forced into flying in the puke airplane anymore.

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J, who is working on her MEI, is almost done with the 15 hours of ME PIC required. She’ll probably be done next week, which is great for her but too bad for me. Our flights have all been great, and the Duchess has been behaving nicely.Anyway, the other day, the plan is to go up to practice checkride maneuvers. The Duchess’s heater will burn out if it’s used on the ground due to lack of airflow. When riding along in the left seat, I’m right in front of the heater switch — my big important job is to turn it on as soon as the wheels leave the ground. This one time, the heat didn’t come on. We end up flying the lesson in 20 degree temperatures. I’m irritated — I assume that someone neglected to turn off the heater after landing, and it’s burned itself out.

Me: “Who flew this airplane last?”
J: “You did.”

Oh. It seems so unlikely that I didn’t turn the heater off on the ground, but I shamefully squawk that it’s inop. I expect to get a lot of crap for this.The next time J and I fly, the squawk is signed off by the mechanic — the heater works fine, but some cable needs to be adjusted at the next 100 hour inspection. So it turns out that I didn’t burn out the heater, but WTF? They’re not going to address the problem until the next inspection? We go fly, and the heater is inop through the first half of the flight despite my best efforts at jiggling the cabin heat pull. It comes on later for no apparent reason. I hope the 100 hour inspection comes up soon — it’s still too cold at altitude to fly regularly with no heat.

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Student B
He’s still trying to get his long solo xc done. He can go on Saturdays, and every single Saturday is either too windy or MVFR. It’s beyond ridiculous how long this is taking. I’m now looking at taking vacation time to try and squeeze in the xc during the week if a nice day comes up. We’ve started practicing checkride maneuvers in the meantime, and I can’t believe how much his general flying has improved. It’s like a switch has flipped. He’s totally in control of the airplane, not over or under correcting, hitting altitudes and headings perfectly, and he’s not really even trying. You wouldn’t know that he hasn’t flown these maneuvers in a long while. So the solo xc, the night xc, and a few ground sessions, and he will be ready to finally go on the checkride.

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Me
I’ve gone on a couple of fun flights. The most fun was skimming frozen Lake Mille Lacs with the Duchess. I find that it’s easier this time of year, because ice fishing season is almost over, and there are fewer people and man made structures on the lake.

I managed to pick up a virus. I went flying anyway, and although it was a bit painful in the sinuses, it wasn’t too bad. I had a flight scheduled immediately after that, and my ear blocked. A day later, it was still completely blocked. Two days later, it was better but still not completely cleared. Irritating. Don’t fly with a cold.

Despite my best effort, I ended up forced into the vomit airplane again. It had been three weeks, so I didn’t fight too much. But it still smelled like puke. Whatever that person was eating, I think they need to see a doctor. I am seriously banning myself from that airplane until further notice. If it’s this disgusting now, wait until the weather warms up.

I’m mostly fine with my light instructing load, and I’m starting to like it again. I’m actually considering increasing it this spring and summer. As an aside, I’ve found that working with other CFIs seems to go two ways, with little in between — they’re either a clueless know it all, or completely open and engaged in the process of learning new things and sharing what they know. Just a comment.

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I haven’t written much about W’s ME training, mostly because it hasn’t been very interesting. This isn’t a bad thing; he just flies very nicely and studies more than anyone. The most eventful event while flying with W:

Me: “OK, let’s do an emergency descent now.”
W: “OK, let me fly this way so we’re not over the nuke plant anymore.”

I look out my window, and sure enough, the nuke plant is down there.

Me: “OK, good idea.”

Anyway, W arrived back from his successful checkride the other day as I was sitting in the lobby waiting for a student to preflight. It sort of blows that the fun students disappear so quickly.

Lately, it seems like at least every other lesson with Student I is canceled for weather.  It’s been awful here — low ceilings and frigid temperatures.  The skool won’t let anyone rent an airplane if the temperature is below zero, so, even if one wanted to fly in such weather, it’s not going to happen.  Which isn’t so bad, since I don’t.  Today, it’s somewhat above zero and clear.  We fly the ILS into KANE a couple of times, once with the DME arc.  I’m glad for this, because he’s out of practice with the arc.  It goes fine, but I have to help way too much, and again, he accepts errors that are actually unacceptable.  But the smooth air helps Student a lot on the ILS — he can concentrate on small corrections and procedures.  I have him follow the ILS down past DA, almost to the pavement.  He flies quite nicely.  Not only is there less than half scale deflection, but he pretty much keeps it to within a couple of dots.  I get to see everything configured at the proper times.

It’s nice to be able to move on.  We’re going to go try some interesting VOR approaches next time.  We talk again about how he’s on track to be held up by the written exam.  He also needs some xc time.  Until then, we’ll keep practicing.

After a week of cancellations due to weather, Student I and I can go fly approaches. He’s been stuck in a rut of slow progress, so we talk about the two things I need to see before we can move on from practice ILS approaches: 1. staying within checkride standards from the FAF to DA, and 2. not needing a reminder to configure before the FAF. Those aren’t trivial things, but he has constant problems with them. So again, we’ll flog the local ILSs.

The KANE ATIS says their ILS is out of service, so we abandon that airport for KSTP. Everything is nicely done up to the final approach fix. He gets a bit configured, but not everything gets done, and it doesn’t get done quite in time. We’ve talked about the power settings to use, but he doesn’t use them. I think next time, I’ll just write on his approach plate what to do and when. Student also has a disturbing tendency to misinterpret the glideslope needle — we’re well below glideslope, and he thinks we’re above it. We get to full scale deflection on both localizer and glideslope. This isn’t new. When we’re flying, I can sit there and watch the localizer and glideslope drift further and further away from the center with no action on Student’s part whatsoever. I try to avoid too much coaching, but if I don’t say something, we’ll get to full deflection on both needles every time. When he does correct, it’s a big overcorrection — like twenty degrees of course change when five would be plenty. I can point out an overcorrection while he’s doing it, but he’ll just keep turning and turning the airplane. And on this ILS, he also is looking for the MAP using timing instead of arrival at DA. I have to idea where that one came from.

This is all stuff we’ve discussed, both on the ground and while flying, so I have to think of some other way to get it across. If we can clear up both his inability to correct an error and his overcorrections, that will get us 90% of the way there. In some ways, I’m at a loss. He wants to get this rating over and done with, but he isn’t studying for the written exam at all. He’s also not working on getting the required 50 hours of cross country flying time. Money is a big issue, which is not unusual, but as much as I try to make things efficient, it’s not working. I feel like I’m failing my student. I really don’t think I’m making much of an impact on his training. It’s like he either thinks I don’t know what I’m talking about, or he has massive ability to tune out what I say. Possibly, he may do better with another instructor. I’m pretty sure we can get him proficient, but I also have to think about how long it’s taking and how much money he’s spending. We’ll see.

I’m sick of assigning letters to students, so you’ll know my new student as W. He’s a CFI at a local flying club and also here at the David Lynch Skool of Flight. You can read more about him if you look back at my CFI ground training entries. Anyway, he’s getting his ME rating in the Duchess now. He shows up for the first lesson after doing ME sim training and getting pretty much set on Duchess systems. How nice for me.

We do the preflight and c*ckpit familiarization routine. W gets the engines started, taxis out, and takes us out to the practice area. It kind of feels like I haven’t taken a long vacation from flying at all. Except that I have a little motion sickness. Weird. W likes the airplane, which is not surprising. It’s fun. We go through the standard maneuvers and so on. Around 4,000 feet, we have to turn the heater off. It’s an unusually warm day, but it’s even warmer up here. The inversion is keeping a lid on the smog over the cities. The ugly brown layer sweeps off to the east, carried by the winds aloft. Below a couple thousand feet, we can’t see it anymore, because we’re in it. Gross.

Weather and schedules work out for me and Student I, so we’re flying today. I think it’s been over three weeks since I’ve been in an airplane. I’m not really looking forward to doing another set of ILS approaches. Not because I’m bored or anything, but because I’m concerned that Student is getting sick of doing it. But for as many times as we’ve tried, Student I still hasn’t flown an ILS to standards. And he still doesn’t ever get the airplane properly configured before the FAF. We discuss this before and after every lesson. I’ve recommended practicing by going through approach plates when we’re not flying, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t do it.

Taking off, I look out the window at the ground and feel some of that little thrill again. It’s definitely been a long time since I’ve flown. MSP approach helps Student out by suggesting a delaying vector. He gets everything set up nicely and then forgets to configure before the FAF. As usual. The glideslope is flaky, but even so, it’s not an excuse — if that’s happening, Student should be making a decision about whether to switch to the localizer-only or not. He’s at about half scale deflection all the way down, and he would be even further off without constant reminders to watch the localizer. He confuses a “below glideslope” indication for an “above glideslope” indication on the VOR. Gah.

After going missed, approach advises us that KANE’s ILS is out. So we’ll go do the VOR-A into KMIC instead. The DME has been pulled out of this airplane, but Student doesn’t realize until well inside the FAF that he has no way of identifying the MAP because he forgot to start timing. And that was only after being reminded. His flying is good, and his radio work is good, but the situational awareness just isn’t there. I know he wants to get through this rating, but his procedures are going to have to improve a lot. We have a discussion about this after the flight, but from experience, I expect a repeat performance next time.

Student B has been owned by bad weather for at least a couple of weeks now. He’s trying to complete his long xc, but he can only attempt it once per week due to work and school. I considered making him do one more dual xc before I sent him on the long one, but the short one went so smoothly that I figured it would be ok to assign him an easy trip on an almost-cardinal heading. I think he’ll do fine.

Only Student I is flying regularly. Or attempting to do so. I’ve been sick with a horrifying virus that won’t be happy until every molecule of moisture in my body has drained out my nose. Although I didn’t like doing it, I had to cancel a couple of lessons. It seems to me that Student’s flight training is taking longer than it should, but I’m not seeing a lot of improvement. He’s also behind on the ground study.

I’m still enjoying all the bonus idle time from my half ass flying hiatus. I haven’t spent this much time reading, playing games, going out, drinking, and just having fun for a very long time. I also think I’m happier when flying regularly. The other day, I was feeling too run down to do anything other than lay on the couch and flip through the TV channels, even wandering far down into Deep Cable. I stopped on a documentary about pilots flying C-130s to Antarctica. It’s always been a dream of mine to spend a year working in Antarctica. For a while, all the talk about the extreme environment and the people who work there swept away my self pitying fixation on dripping snot.

The documentary switched to a back seat view of an instrument approach down to the ice runway. I watched this approach and listened to the crew chatter and the radio exchanges. It was familiar. I thought to myself, “Hey, I can do that. That’s what I do.” For a minute, I was taken out of the dream world of Antarctica and dropped into the real world of flying airplanes. I followed along with the procedures and watched the approach lights pass underneath. The airplane touched down smoothly and gently on its skis. It was beautiful.I’ll probably never make it to the South Pole, but I could go out right now and fly an airplane like these people were doing, and that has to be worth something.

I was so looking forward to doing G’s II. He’s fun, and his little Cherokee 140 is fun. Several weeks back, one of the partners who jointly own the Cherokee took it on a weekend trip. That trip ended up lasting for several weeks. G made good efforts to find out what the hell was going on, but we never knew exactly where the airplane was or when it would get back. Was there some reason it wasn’t brought back? Could anyone possibly be rude enough to keep an airplane at his cabin indefinitely? Was it even hangared?

At the end of the several week wait, G and I scheduled a flight. I got the dreaded phone call a bit before — we couldn’t fly, because the airplane was broken. What the hell happened? Apparently, the guy who kidnapped the airplane didn’t raise the hangar door all the way when he pulled it out to fly to his cabin. Rather than delay his trip and fix the problem, he flew it like that. Then, the airplane sat outside in the rain. For several weeks. With water leaking into the newly restored interior.

So, G will not be able to do his II for a few more weeks while the airplane is properly fixed. By that time, he’ll probably have left for an airline job, making the II training unlikely. And the moral of the story is that hell is other people.

I’m having a nice break. Work has slowed down and left plenty of free time to enjoy. Student X, one of my more frequent fliers, easily passed his checkride a couple of weeks ago. Student I is still flying only two days per week, which is fine with me. Student B is still flying only one day per week. I have a lot of free time. It feels like vacation.

The story about Student X’s ride is good enough to share. Student wanted me to go along on the checkride, even though it meant delaying a week or so while I was out of town. Student’s worst enemy has always been his nerves. But he’s a safe pilot, his procedures were good, and despite his lack of confidence in his ground knowledge, he was more than ready for the exam. It made no sense to delay his checkride any longer. If he failed, it would be because of nerves, not any training deficiency. So, my first day back, we flew to KMGG for the ride. The receptionist was hanging out eating lunch, and a local retired guy was shooting the shit with her.

Me: “Is Bill Jr. here?”
Receptionist: “No, he’s in Arizona.”
Me: “We’re supposed to have a checkride with him in 5 minutes.”
Retired Shit Shooting Guy: “Uh, oh!”

WTF? If you’ve taken a checkride, you know there’s a major pain in the ass component when it comes to preparing. The student has to complete a nav log, a flight plan, takeoff and landing distances, weight and balance, and he has to cram last minute fun facts. Things went smoothly while preparing, but Student X and I had still put in a couple of hours of work so far. Apparently, the examiner had forgotten to call me and tell me he wouldn’t be here today. We had a couple of choices — reschedule, or see if DE Bill Sr. was available. I had to be back by a certain time, but we asked the receptionist to see if DE Bill Sr. could come out and at least do the oral.

We waited. We waited for about 45 minutes to hear from DE Bill Sr., who was attending a funeral, and we waited for another 45 minutes for him to get to the airport. Retired Shit Shooting Guy gave Student X a lovely pep talk. It’s interesting how a third party giving such a talk tends to make more impact. Anyway, the oral went fine. It was too late for the flight portion of the test, so Student X made plans to come back tomorrow and finish the checkride. I found out later that he was feeling pretty tired from all the screwing around and wasn’t really up to flying anyway.

I couldn’t take the day off for Student’s flight test, so I signed him off for solo at KMGG. I missed out on snafus with two different airplanes. The third airplane fortunately worked. The entire episode was fortunate, as Student informed me — all the activity gave him something other than checkride stress to focus on. He passed the flight test easily with no real comments from DE Bill Sr. Good.

Otherwise, my flying has been minimal. I had a super fun flight with N in the Sundowner. I’m letting my club membership lapse, because I don’t use it enough. I’m sad about that. I still have a bunch of money on account at KANE, and the plan is to use it only for fun flying. I’m not sure how much more I’m comfortable cutting back on instructing. I want to keep myself flying, stay visible at the flight school, and not let myself drift away. My biggest complaints really are that I don’t like driving up to KMIC and dealing with students who can’t or won’t study. Part of my job is providing motivation, obviously, and I feel that I’m doing that by keeping people informed about where they are and where we’re going next. But I don’t hand-hold.

We’ll see what happens next. I miss flying with fun and motivated students. I miss the big milestones, like unassisted landings and first solos. I also miss flying at KANE, where there was an actual community of flying people who weren’t complete nerds. It’s very unlikely I’ll ever get a student from them again. And it’s unlikely I’ll bring any students there myself — I can’t both keep my personal integrity and recommend that anyone fly there, unless they had a really good reason to pay more and deal with a flight school that acts like nothing more than a money generating machine (laff). I suppose in the great scheme of things, these are good problems to have.

After the recent low point, I had several good flights. Student I has been able to fly regularly lately, and it’s helping him a great deal. He’s still making no effort with the ground study, but his flying is coming along just fine. We practiced an NDB approach, and he executed it well within standards. The last four hundred feet of his ILS is coming right along. We’ll start flying about half of our flights partial panel now.

Student X is in the very last hours of checkride prep. I’ve given him the gouge, and we’ve practiced at KMGG. I’m going to try and get his checkride done this week. He’s a perfectionist, as always, and he says he doesn’t feel quite ready. But many students say that, and you can detect a little contradiction there if you look closely — he doesn’t feel he’s prepared, but he feels like he’s worked hard and that he can be a safe pilot. The uknown is the one thing holding him back from feeling completely ready. We’ve had the “the checkride isn’t supposed to be perfect” pep talk a few times. Soon, we’ll have the “I’ve signed you off as good to go, and all we need is the second opinion from an examiner” pep talk. And then, I will push him out of the nest for good, because it’s all up to him after that.

I’m still struggling with Student B. We’ve been to KGTG twice now — the first time was rather unsatisfactory. It wasn’t terrible, but I’m extra cautious with him. So we went again, and he handled that flight much better. I’m going to sign him off for that airport solo. Although it’s more fun and interesting for the student, I’m not going to sign him off yet for an airport we haven’t flown to together. I’m not sure what to do after this — I don’t want to make him pay for another dual xc, but that might have to happen before I’m prepared to let him go solo on the long xc.

Student K has to work afternoons and nights now, so we can’t fly together anymore. To be honest, this is a relief. He does an ok job with the airplane flying part, and I like the Duchess, but I find that going over private pilot concepts with a commercial pilot is just aggravating. Yes, I realize it’s my job to address these issues. Move on with life.

So for now, things are looking up. I have a lighter load of students than the last time I wrote, and it’s still decreasing. I will have no private pilot students after Student X is done. My plan was to do no private pilot training for a while, but I think one at a time may be ok — I really like teaching landings. But I’m going to be selective about my student. Anyway, I’m going to keep a much reduced instructing schedule and not worry if business stops completely for a bit. It’s already helped a lot.