Learning to Fly Better

Today I’m wearing the airplane t-shirt the girls got me for Father’s Day, with great pride and confidence and a permanent half-smirk on my face, because yesterday I finished my instrument rating. Four years almost to the day since my first lesson. That’s a long time.

I dove straight into instrument training right after I got my private pilot license, just like I told you I would. Wasted no time. Still, just like before, I once again wound up putting it all on hold for almost a year — this time for completely different reasons than before — right in the middle. So, again, what should probably have taken six months ended up taking two years. But I promise this isn’t just a sequel that recycles the old original plot-line. I did a few things during my instrument training that made all the difference in my skills and confidence, and none of them was intentional.

Here are the things I did that made me a better pilot.

I switched instructors.

All the great stuff I told you about Larry is absolutely true. He was an inspiring teacher and a fantastic pilot. He test-flew 727s! But he had other stuff in his life that was taking more of his time, and as I was getting motivated to spend a lot of time getting the instrument thing knocked out, scheduling became trickier so I figured it was best to look around for Plan Bs.

The guy I wound up finding had a good old all-American pilot name: Riley. And he was an instructor at Spartan, an aeronautics school in Tulsa. A by-the-books guy: meticulous, measured, clear, paced. Young. Down-to-earth. I hope I’m not making him sound boring… he’s exactly what a guy like me needed for something as technical as instrument training.

We dove right in. This time, I did my book studying on my own as we were doing the flying stuff together, and we did an occasional ground-school review. I signed up for the written test, studied like a freak, and did exceptionally well. Boom. Instead of drinking whiskey to celebrate on that chilly February night, Riley and I took off on a night-flight to Kansas and back to knock out the last instruction hours in the plane before my flight test.

I crashed my plane.

It was the day after the Modern Family episode where Jake Pritchett decides to take secret flying lessons, and the evening of the very day that I somehow got through my written test with a strong pass. We picked Johnson County Executive as our destination in Kansas because that’s the regional sales center for Pilatus, and the PC-12 is my aspirational next airplane. Thought maybe we’d get to see a few on the ramp, but it was too cold and they were all hangared when we got there.

So we got a coffee and warmed up for a few minutes and filed our flight plan to head back to Tulsa, wrap up the day, possibly drink that whiskey.

With a strong tailwind it’s a short one-hour flight from Olathe to Tulsa, and on a cold cloudless night at 10,000 feet there’s absolutely nothing to see but the cool glow of the cockpit instruments, the lights on the wingtips, only blackness on the ground near the Kansas-Oklahoma border… at least, nothing discernible in the pitch dark. We were listening to XM radio, enjoying the 20 or so minutes of idle time before we’d have to start getting set up for approach and landing when the ALTERNATOR WARNING light started flashing.

The alternator keeps the battery charged, which powers all the electrical systems in an airplane. So while this wasn’t a minor thing, it also wasn’t a very common thing and since we had the advantage of two of us in the cockpit, I flew the plane while Riley looked over the procedures in the Operating Handbook. We could see the battery discharging, so we turned off the nonessential electrics (XM, strobe lights), dimmed the rest that we could, and we called Tulsa Approach to let them know we had a potential alternator problem and could possibly lose our radios, worst-case.

Approach thanked us for the call and offered to sequence us for runway 36R at KTUL, the big runway on the east side, to expedite getting us on the ground since we were on that side. Told us we’d follow a regional jet that was on a 10-minute final, and that we could go ahead and descend and contact the tower when ready.

Although we were still 15–20 minutes from landing, we had a good 7,000' of altitude we could lose immediately, and in the interest of not pressing our luck with the remaining electricity we set up to immediately drop the landing gear: this would both help us lose altitude more quickly and also get that very critical task out of the way while everything was still functioning.

It’s always a comforting sensation (for me, at least) when I lower the gear toggle and hear the whirrrr of the gear motors and feel the sudden slowing of the plane as the wheels fight against the air on their way down. Then it stops after a few seconds, and things are smooth again, and the little triangle of three green lights confirms that the wheels are locked. After that it’s speed, flaps, radio to tower, sequence for landing… Except tonight. Tonight, just before the 3 greens, the drain from the gear motor killed all the electrics entirely. We had no lights, no radios, and no confirmation that the landing gear was even all the way down and locked.

Every bit as concerning as all that: we hadn’t yet called the tower at Tulsa. You are not cleared to land until you’ve made contact with Tower and they’ve given clearance. While we could potentially have continued flying around for quite a while (the engine wasn’t the least bit concerned with the electrics situation) we had no lights and nobody could see us; we had only our non-electric instruments (illuminted by an iPhone flashlight), and we were in a hurry to get on the ground.

So we determined to continue our approach course, attempt to hand-crank the gear in case it hadn’t completely locked, and hope that Approach had given Tower a heads-up about our situation. We saw the regional jet we were to be following as we turned from downwind to base. As we turned from base to final, we saw guys in the tower shooting light gun signals at us. Clearing us to land! It was a mostly windless night, so even though we had no flaps we had plenty of runway to make a fast, shallow landing.

Fast, shallow, and right on the centerline. We touched, coasted, and almost immediately began to hear and smell grinding metal. The gear folded up under the plane, the plane slid forward on the gear struts, the propeller struck the ground, and we came to a pretty abrupt stop. Ignition off, everything off, out of the plane quick in case of fire. Fire trucks came, but there wasn’t a fire. I spent 90 of the coldest minutes of my life standing on that runway trying to figure out how to move my plane while ATC gave special clearance to Fedex and UPS jets to use the smaller parallel runway since I was perfectly blocking the intersection of 36R and 08.

It took a full year. The FAA guy interviewed me. The insurance company solicited appraisals. In the end, the engine stayed in Tulsa and the rest of the plane went to Greely, Colorado.

The biggest educational moment of this whole experience for me came a few months later, after I had gone up to Greely to check in on progress and they’d suggested I see the engine guys in Tulsa to do the same. By this time, I’d gone over and over in my own mind and with just about every instructor, FAA guy, and mechanic I knew what had happened and what we might have done differently. After getting a rundown on the engine situation and discussing options for repair/rebuild, I liked the guy and wanted to hear his opinion too.

“Hey so I’m not sure you even know why this engine is here. We had a gear-up landing due to a failed alternator and total loss of electrics. What causes an alternator to fail? Is that common?”

He told me, “Well, first of all, let me just tell you that this is one of my all-time favorite planes. If I could have my own plane, this is the one I’d want.”

And then he asked me, “But let me ask you: Do you do a lot of cross-country flying? Because everyone I know who has this plane and flies long-distances has a backup alternator.”

I did not know that was even an option. Nobody had mentioned it to me, ever, in the months of discussions I’d had about the incident. Backup alternator. So simple. Not only an option for my plane, but standard equipment on all newer models. $2500. “Let’s get that ordered.”

I failed my first attempt at the check ride.

Riley was still around when the plane finally got all put back together a full year later. He and I went up to Greely and flew the plane back home on a special ferry permit since it was now overdue its annual inspection. It was a good flight, everything went smoothly for the three hour trip to Tulsa. Straight into the hangar at TulsAir Beechcraft, for the several more weeks of almost total disassembly and reassembly that is an annual aircraft inspection.

It wasn’t all bad. I upgraded some of the avionics, and the inspection turned up about a hundred little things that needed to be fixed. So I felt, at the end of it all, that the plane was probably in better shape than before the accident.

We started training again. I’d had a good long opportunity to forget everyting I’d memorized to pass the written test, and it was all going to come up again at checkride time. More immediate, though, was learning the radios and approach plates and navigating departures and arrivals procedures. We flew holding patterns and radial arcs and non-precision GPS approaches and precision ILS approaches over and over again, all the time with me wearing “vision-limiting” goggles that prevented me from seeing anything other than my instruments.

I got reasonably confident flying with a coach who was there to help me when I fumbled loading an approach into the GPS or remembering to dial in and verify a localizer. It didn’t happen often, and I knew my weakness was the book-studying stuff: the operators manual for the GPS; the FAA regulations; all the charts and airspace and textbook stuff I’d mostly known a year ago and mostly forgotten since. So when we got close to the required number of training hours in the plane, I switched gears and started cramming for the oral part of the test. And I scheduled the check ride.

I watched about fourteen hours of iPad video courses an hour at a time. Made flashcards for myself. I worked at it, but I gave myself only a couple weeks and the reality was that the amount of trivia one was expected to know for a test like this is just too much. I was confident in my flying but was terrified of the oral part of the test.

Ironically, the test almost never started. For a full hour, the examiner looked over my airframe, engine, and prop logs, trying to track down written records of every single required inspection. It is nontrivial. In addition to regular maintenance schedules for airframe and engine and prop and avionics, every manufacturer releases periodic Airworthiness Directives (ADs), some of which must be addressed only once but others of which have recurring inspection schedules attached to them. Between 1980 and 2017 there had been a good handful of these, and for a couple it wasn’t clear in the logs whether they were current. So he looked, and I frantically texted the hangar that maintains the plane, and eventually we got it all sorted.

The oral exam part ended up being easy. An hour, a handful of questions from every section that needed covering, and then a revisit of all the stuff I’d missed on my written test a year and half ago. That done, we talked through what needed to get accomplished in the plane: three instrument approaches, at least one precision, a holding pattern and a circling approach. Plus the standard unusual attitude recovery and navigation stuff. We agreed the approaches I’d fly and I was feeling pretty great as we walked out to get in the plane.

It was windy: 30kts. The first approach was the hardest, too. We decided to get that out of the way: holding pattern, approach with a tailwind and at an odd angle, circle to land, miss. From there, back up to altitude and all the unusual attitude recovery stuff. At one point the examiner told me to turn a little further east, and I actually corrected him and said that was west, which it was not. I was confused, behind the airplane, but still holding it together. Everything was right there in front of me; all I had to do was pay attention.

The second approach was a dogleg-type thing into a smaller busy airport on the river, and that one I busted. There wasn’t any good reason for it. It was a straightforward GPS approach which I normally would have let the autopilot fly, but the autopilot had been misbehaving so I was hand-flying and too focused on navigating with the heading bug; I let the OBS get pointed in the wrong direction and it was reverse-sensing and so when I veered a tiny bit off-course it corrected me not back to course but further away instead.

He said, “Ok, you bust this one. I’m sorry. Do you see what you did? I have to ask you now if you want to continue the test.”

“What would be the point in continuing?”

“Well, if we continue and you fly the third approach correctly then you will only have to re-fly this one approach.”

Well then, let’s do it. It was crazy. A mistake I’d never made, but one which I eventually probably would have by myself if not during that check ride. A week later traffic at KRVS was flowing to the north and so that GPS 19R approach wasn’t available; we flew the GPS 36L at KTUL instead and it went just fine and I had my instrument rating.

Learnings

The instructor-switch wouldn’t have happened except for other unlrelated circumstances. But what I started to figure out during my private training with Larry got really hammered home during the instrument stuff with Riley: flying airplanes isn’t something you can just figure out as you go, like triathlons or Python. It’s more like I imagine studying medicine or law would be — demands some pretty rigorous attention. It helped me a lot having an instructor who was familiar with formal training programs.

The crash did a couple things for me: it showed me I was cool-headed enough to handle a pressure situation well; and it impressed upon me just how important it is to understand the airplane — how it works, and how it’s maintained — and how little of that you can expect to just be told. I am now on top of all maintenance schedules for the plane, and I get involved in troubleshooting discussions with maintenance guys. Keeps them honest, and also keeps me getting smarter about how it all works.

Finally, it was important for my ego that I busted an approach that first check ride. I broke the one cardinal rule that instrument training is supposed to teach a pilot: always stay ahead of the plane; never let yourself get rushed. I thought I could keep all the plates spinning and I missed one very simple thing that confused it all.

The End?

So I think that’s it for my formal training. After four short years and a few misadventures I’ve got a license and an instrument rating and a plane that’ll get me to Austin or New Orleans in one hop. Now I have to fly, fly, fly to stay current and sharp. We are hoping to take the team down to Florida in a couple weeks, stop over in Memphis to show Sam & Charlie the ducks at the Peabody. That will be my longest trip, but we’ll do it in short hops and as long as the air is reasonably smooth it’ll be soooo much better than going commercial!