Learning to Fly
I took my first flying lesson in July of 2013, and didn’t get my private pilot license until June of 2015. That’s twenty-three months. I was just about ready to start soloing in November of 2013, so about four months from nothing to solo, with a terrific private instructor named Larry and no day job to get in the way. Larry and I probably flew twice a week except when the weather didn’t cooperate. It was an awesome experience: aggressive and exciting and absolutely not the right way to do it.
And then, instead of plowing ahead and starting to solo, I put the whole thing on ice until December of 2014. A fourteen month break; a little hiatus brought on by a few big personal obligations all wanting lots of my time, and none having anything at all to do with flying. I was worried if I did that I might never pick it up again, and I didn’t for over a year. But it ended up being an opportunity for me to rethink my approach to the whole thing, and a test to see whether I was serious about finishing or not.
So in the end it took me almost two full years to get my pilots license. But in terms of real time spent working at it, really only just under a year.
Here’s a few things I learned.
Find the Best Instructor
Cliche. And probably so obvious-sounding that you’re inclined to stop reading right now, but it’s critical and must be said. And the problem is, a new student probably doesn’t even know what questions to ask. Start with this: there are instructors who teach because they love teaching, and there are instructors who teach for some other reason. No different than college professors and high school teachers, I reckon. One very popular motivation for many flight instructors is that teaching can build hours for them towards some other ambition, like being a commercial pilot. There’s an obvious conflict of interests there with both your priorities and your wallet. Ask lots of questions of a prospective instructor. You want them to be teaching for the right reasons, and you want them to have plenty of the right kind of experience.
Larry was a lucky find. Flew all his life, commercially and privately, loved teaching, and occasionally piloted a Citation for a private client’s weekend trips. Otherwise he was around and available and all we really had to work around was his Crossfit schedule.
There Is a Correct Order to Do Things
No matter how structured (or not) your curriculum, there’s no avoiding the simple fact that there are three boxes you’ll have to tick before anyone gives you a license:
- the medical
- the written test
- the “check ride”
The most binary of all these is the medical. It’s exactly what you probably fear it could be: a test to see if you’re medically fit to fly a plane in the sky. The doc (and everyone on the ground, too) wants to be sure that you can see, and that you’re not likely to have a panic attack, or epileptic seizure, or heart attack at ten thousand feet. If you fail your medical, you can not get a license. Period. If you fail your medical and are somehow (this is rare) allowed to re-take it, it’ll be much more rigorous the second time. And, again: if you fail it you can not get a license.
You might as well take your medical first. Right off the bat, before you even take your first lesson. I doubt anyone does this but it’s seriously what everyone should do. The medical requires no studying, and if you aren’t going to pass it then all the instruction time and money is wasted. I did my whole first stretch of instruction without taking my medical, partly because I was afraid of it. Occasionally Larry would ask, “Hey, did you do your medical yet?” and I would say, “Nope not yet but I will. Don’t worry.” I was worried almost to death, because I knew the absolute best case for me was I’d end up with glasses. Worst case, who knew? Right? Doctors are scary.
I got a prescription and a pair of glasses that I put away and refused to wear for almost six months. But now I wear them like they’re going out of style. Actually they are out of style.
The “written test” is a bunch of random questions chosen and presented by a 1980s-era computer in a private room, and it can be taken pretty much any time. You can read a book all by yourself to study for the written test, or you can sign up for a more formal ground school that will prepare you for it. At the end of the day, the fifty or so questions you’ll enjoy are chosen completely randomly from a database of thousands, so there’s a real possibility that most of your test will be about clouds like mine was. I spent my study time focusing on other non-cloud things, and ended up passing with a 72%. But, as Larry famously said, “72% is as good as 100%!”
Unlike the medical, if you don’t pass the written test you simply sign up to pay the fee and take it again — as many times as you need to.
I ended up enrolling in a ground school that my instructor and his partner had started offering. Although we’d been doing briefings and sometimes even full class sessions on the ground during that first four months, we spent most of our time on flying the plane. Larry expected me to be keeping up with my own reading and study for the book stuff, and I wasn’t doing it. If you can get the book and make yourself study it on your own instead of sitting through ground school classes at night for six or eight weeks, you can save yourself five hundred bucks. If you’re a guy like me who says, “Oh I’ll just study that stuff on my own” but really won’t, go ahead and sign up for a class.
The “check ride” is comically mislabeled. Misleadingly under-labeled. While it does technically include a check ride, what it really is is four or five hours one-on-one with a guy, the first couple hours of which are an oral grilling on rules and maps and airspaces and mechanics of flight. Only if that goes OK are the remaining hours of which spent in an airplane demonstrating basic flying skills and answering more questions. It’s the last event. After the check ride, you either have a license or you schedule another check ride.
Big Airports Are Cool
My first little five-month stretch took place at a small regional airport, and we flew a rented Cessna 180. Everybody always wants to learn at a small regional airport, because everyone assumes small airports are less crowded, less complex in terms of traffic control, and just all-around easier. That’s not always true.
When I reached out to my instructor a year later to get started again, he’d moved from the little airport on Riverside, found a partner, and acquired a couple Piper Cherokee 180s that he was using for teaching at Tulsa International. The idea of a big airport frightened me, but here’s the thing: you’re going to get your license and you’re going to start flying alone and you’re going to be uncomfortable with what you don’t know. Big airports have more traffic — commercial traffic, sometimes even military traffic — and more runways and bizarre things like Clearance Delivery and more structured radio protocols. And this is all awesome. Scary for only the first hour. And then you’re prepared for more of the real world out there.
Tulsa International is the ideal big airport. It’s got all the infrastructure and services of an O’Hare or JFK, without the congestion. You get to share the facilities with commercial planes and military jets and get the big airport experience without the chaos.
The Plane Wants to Fly
When I think back over all the endless takeoffs, landings, stall recoveries, navigate-around-a-point exercises, and engine-out simulations that we did during all those instructor hours in the plane, it’s clear as day now that what I was really, fundamentally being taught was something the instructor could never explain that he was teaching me: be completely comfortable in the plane, way up there in the sky.
There’s one day in every student’s experience, I’m guessing, where a lightbulb goes on.
This plane wants to fly. I don’t have to fight to keep it in the air. All I need to do is help it along in the right direction.
The best way to recover from a stall or some crazy unusual nose-up or sideways-nose-down situation is, almost always, to let go of the controls and let the plane straighten itself out. Especially those little Pipers and Cessnas. A hard concept to grasp, until that light bulb flicks on.
There’s another day in a lot of students’ experiences where their life kind of flashes before their eyes, and that’s the first time the instructor opens the door, steps out of the plane, and tells them to do a takeoff and landing alone. How smoothly that day goes for a student is all down to whether the light bulb up there has flicked on yet for him or not.
iPads are Magical
When I first started learning, my instructor handed me a list of helpful apps and websites I might want to look into: an online logbook, FAA regulations, an app for flight planning and navigation. I played with almost all of them. During those first few months there wasn’t much use for things like a flight planning app, since all we ever did was fly in little circles around the airport.
Once I started really flying, though, it became clear how crazy powerful some of these little apps are. For a couple hundred bucks a year you can have on your iPad the same technology that Garmin calls a glass cockpit and sells for about eighty thousand. Everything minus the auto-pilot: maps, flight planning and filing, weather and winds, radar, taxiway diagrams, forecasts, fuel prices, airport services directories. It’s fantastical.
I carry my iPad around with me a lot lately, so next time we’re sitting at the bar somewhere you can ask me how long it would take to fly to Duluth or Woodstock or wherever and I can work up a quick flight plan.
Use Flight Services
As a private pilot, you can pretty much fly around at will, when and where you want, without filing flight plans or maintaining contact with regional control centers or any of that complicated stuff. Even if you leave an airport in controlled airspace, you can fly to the edge, request that radar services be terminated, squawk 1200, and be on your merry way. Super simple.
When I bought my plane, right around the time I was getting my private license, the insurance company told me that I needed to fly a minimum of twenty hours in it with an instructor before I could fly it alone. There were a couple reasons: I was a new pilot; and my plane was considered to be complex (because of the propeller) and high-performance (because of the engine size), both of which require special instructor endorsements. This was cool with me because it was a new plane and I wanted to get comfortable before I flew it solo anyway.
Twenty hours is a lot of hours, so we did bigger, chunkier flights. Three hours round-trip Tulsa to Shreveport, then Memphis. To Fort Smith and back. To Dallas Love Field, to see what flying in busy airspace is like. Then all the way to New Orleans at night and back the next morning. Since I was learning the avionics as much as the airframe, my instructor filed IFR flight plans for all those trips, and I got to experience instrument flying.
IFR is how the pros fly. If you look at an IFR chart, there’s no terrain markings on it. IFR charts are all vectors from point-to-point all over the sky. You file a plan, agree the route with ATC, and you are escorted from your origin to your destination: one controller hands you to another, all along the route. ATC worries about spacing in congested airspace, lines you up to land, and talks to you about possible weather.
One of the biggest disappointments of my whole experience was when those twenty hours of instructor time were up and I suddenly realized I couldn’t file IFR flight plans myself until I finished my instrument rating. I know if I hadn’t had that hands-on IFR experience I wouldn’t have been be nearly as anxious to get my instrument done.
If you can’t file IFR flight plans because you’re not IFR rated, get your instrument rating. And in the mean time, request flight following for your VFR flights. It’s no more difficult and it ensures that someone is keeping an eye on — and out for — you all along your route.
If You Can Do It, Do It
Flying is a huge commitment. Money and time, and more time and more money, and it doesn’t end when the lessons end. If you don’t buy a plane, you’ll rent one, and if you buy a plane you’ll be forever maintaining it. Under about zero circumstances will flying yourself be more economical than taking a Southwest flight. In actual fact, if I had known before I started how much time and money I would be investing just to get my private license, I almost certainly wouldn’t have done it. But I’ve got no regrets at all. Flying is fun! And convenient. Even though a private pilot is always at the mercy of the weather, the mere idea that you can load up the team on your own schedule and take off for Beale Street or Bourbon Street or Sixth Street in Austin and be there in a couple of hours for lunch is just flat-out cool. And totally realistic.
N66801 is a Beechcraft A36 Bonanza that’s almost as old as I am. If you look up in the skies over middle America you just might see her up there with me, Sam, Charlie, my wife Jenn, and possibly even Jaz the dog looking down at you on our way somewhere.
What, can’t get enough? I wrote a followup called Learning to Fly Better. Go check it out!
