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All. Day. Long.

May 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Tupper 891

I am not a spectacular pilot.  I have no natural skills.  Every move I have is a result of cookbook learning and repetition.  Which is why I think that yesterday will stick with me for awhile.

As is my habit each year, I was checking out on N94891, the 1981 C-152 II in which I first soloed back in 2001.  It lives at Solo Aviation at KARB.

Having flown all of the high airwork, the IP and I were back at KARB to round out the ride in the pattern.  Downwind abeam the number for Runway 6, she pulls my power, tells me to pitch for best glide, and land power-off.  I zoom-climb to 60 KIAS, then look back at the numbers to guestimate the turn.

891 has great slip capabilities.  You can turn her sideways and just come down like an elevator if you like.  And there was no reason to hang her out on downwind and risk coming up short. So I put the outside rudder to the floor, gave her aileron into the turn, and sweeping around, dropping out of the sky at a rapid but orderly rate and dropping flaps as required.  Watching the airspeed carefully, 891 came around the corner from 1,000 AGL and 180 degrees and arrived on slope and on speed right before the jumpers just as the flaps hit the stops.

A little before I let off the slip inputs and set up to land, the IP looked at the runway and the airspeed indicator and said: “All. Day. Long.”

I remain absolutely tickled by that.  Like I said, I’m not a brilliant pilot.  I have no inborn skills.  And that’s why I get such a charge out of responding to a challenge like that and nailing it, even in the opinion of an IP who spends a lot of time in that aircraft.

“All.  Day.  Long.”

Yeah.

 

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Team Tuskegee Gets Press from AOPA

March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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The Tuskegee Airmen Glider Club got a nice writeup by AOPA today.  Thanks to Rod Rakic for helping to make the connection and to Benet Wilson of AOPA for helping to showcase our operations!  Check out the piece at http://www.aopa.org/training/articles/2013/130312detroit-tuskegee-airmen-glider-club.html or click the image above.

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Early-Season Training Continues – Team Tuskegee and CAP Form 5

February 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Tupper Craig TG-7A

Time has been amazingly scarce these past few months.  But that doesn’t mean that I can let the rust build up on my wings.

Last weekend, I got up with Team Tuskegee for some three-ship formation deep in the Detroit Class B.  I needed some echelon takeoff and landing experience, so I flew 2 in a phantom 4 configuration, landing and taking off abreast of lead on 21L at Detroit Metro (KDTW).  John Harte ably flew Lead and Chris Felton flew a very competent 3 (or, as he likes to be called, “Element Lead”).  We also got in some tail chasing and other more general formation work with me flying 3 and Chris as 2.

I took along Alex Craig, one of CAP’s check airmen in the Michigan Wing, with whom I’ve flown several checkrides over the years.  Alex is an ATP with thousands of hours logged, but little time in gliders or in formation.  Alex sat left seat to observe the formation work.  And, as Tim Brutsche likes to say, flying an aircraft with an empty hole is a sin.  Aviation is always best when it’s shared.

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Then, this past weekend, Alex and I switched seats and aircraft and I flew a CAP annual Form 5 stan/eval ride.  I hadn’t flown the CAP glass C-182T in maybe six months.  Needless to say, I spent a fair amount of Saturday preparing for the Sunday-morning ride.

I approached this ride with more trepidation than usual, largely on account of the rust build-up.  But I suppose that I needn’t have worried.  I goofed up the throttle work a little (one of the few cross-contamination problems that I experience between the TG-7A and the C-182T) and I managed to forget which way the glideslope indicator was supposed to move and I got fairly high on the glideslope on the ILS 27 at KFNT.

But, generally speaking, the ride went far better than I expected.  I’ve always hated landing the C-182T.  I still do.  It’s so nose-heavy.  You run out of elevator pretty quickly in that aircraft if you’re CG-forward, as you almost always are when you’re flying with two guys and 60 gal. of fuel.  The usual way to deal with that, namely keeping a little power in on the flare and flying it all the way to the runway like an airliner, isn’t an option for practice engine-out work.  So it was all attitude and airspeed on many of the landings.

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I did use one technique that I recommend to anyone who has hot hands with a C-172 but has problems with the C-182.  Put 50 lbs of something in Cargo Area B.  It moves the CG back a little and makes the landing flare a lot more controllable.

We rocked out the high airwork, did most of the landings (engine-out, soft-field, etc.) at Lapeer (D95), shot the ILS 27 and the RNAV 36 (twice) at KFNT, then flew back to Pontiac (KPTK), where I think I did my best short-field landing ever in that aircraft, getting it down and stoppable before the 1,000-foot markers.

Work and other commitments are still keeping me out of the cockpit more than I’d like to be, but I think I’ve done as good a job of getting active and proficient early in the season this year as I ever have.

 

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Team Tuskegee Ramps Up Training

February 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Team Tuskegee has begun to ramp up its training. Element takeoffs and landings yesterday deep in the Bravo. Echelon. Tail chase. Overhead break back at Detroit City (KDET). It’s still less than a year since I first flew a TG-7A. Last march, it was all about giggles and having fun. It’s still a lot of fun.

But the standard is different this time. This is the first pre-season when I’m actively working with an airshow standard in mind. There’s nothing whatsoever wring with with working to PTS or working up to competent $100 hamburger flying. Train for your mission and for safe outcomes and I’m with you.

As for me, though, every time I take off, land or maneuver, I see a crowd line and 10,000-plus people out of the corner of my eye and I hear Ralph Royce in my headset. It’s not long now before I won’t just be imagining that crowd (or Ralph). It’ll be real. And, providing that we nail down out FAST cards and get some additional training done in time, the Tuskegee demo will be even more complex.

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Think landing at OSH is intimidating? It is. Or so I’ve heard. But what if everyone near the flightline at OSH was actually watching you instead of buying stuff and talking and not paying attention to arrivals? And what if they had all had cameras? And what if there was a guy on the PA system telling them who you are and where you live? Suddenly, even the simple act of landing an aircraft ought to become pucker-palooza.  That’s what it is to fly an air show.

But with enough of the right kind of training, it’s no more than you should reasonably expect of yourself. The airshow guys are fond of saying: “Perfection is expected. Excellence will be accepted.” They mean it. So you go out on cold February mornings, brief the flight exhaustively, fly it with everything you have, then pick it apart back at the hangar. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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We’re working hard, bundled up with extra socks and thermal undies under our flight suits. Because each of us imagines that crowd line in the snowy fields near the flight line. And we imagine you in that crowd.

Soon, the fields will be green, the barrels and stakes will go up, and you’ll actually be in that field. We’re training hard now because we know what it is to be in that crowd and we’re very conscious of that part of your dreams that you vest in us by coming to see us fly.

And every single one of us can barely believe that we get to do this.

 

 

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Plimpton No More (or at Least Not Much)

January 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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It has been said of me that what I do is similar to what George Plimpton did in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Plimpton pitched against the National League in 1958 and captured the experience in his book, Out of My League.  He also went three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson in while on assignment for Sports Illustrated.  In 1963, he went to the Detroit Lions’ training camp as a rookie quarterback and captured the experience for Sports Illustrated and in his book, Paper Lion.  Paper Lion was made into a film in 1968 starring Alan Alda and Alex Karras.  And, not least, Jonathan Coulton wrote an ode to Plimpton called A Talk with George.

I finally sat down and watched Paper Lion last week.  It’s very much a film of its time, as evidenced by the soundtrack and the pacing.  It lives in the same space as The Paper Chase and similar films.

But what really struck me was a a short scene about halfway through.  Plimpton (Alda) is reacting to a prank played on him in the dorms by his teammates, who have discovered who Plimpton is and what he’d doing at camp.  He’s talking to Alex Karras (playing himself) when John Gordy, an offensive guard, (playing himself) steps into the doorway.  Gordy tells Plimpton that he respects what Plimpton is doing, but that Gordy is unwilling to play for him.  Gordy explains that this is all well and good for Plimpton as a poser who’s going to write about the experience.  But this is Gordy’s profession and he doesn’t want to get hurt if George screws up the offense.  “Ligaments don’t heal. George.”

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Up until the airshow season last year, I was Plimpton-y at best.  The guy in the back seat with pretty strict instructions not to touch the controls.  Or the guy flying upside down in competition, but at altitude and under fairly closely-controlled circumstances.

That all evaporated quickly when I started flying airshows as part of a team.  Nobody stopped in my doorway and gave me a John Gordy talk.  But nobody needed to.  I fly very close to other aircraft.  I fly in waivered airspace as close as 500 feet from tens of thousands of people.  The guys flying the other aircraft, the air boss, and the crowd all depend on me to be where I’m supposed to be and have amble supplies of altitude, airspeed, and ideas at all times.  There really are no half-measure here.  You’re either an airshow pilot or you’re not.

I had never seen the John Gordy speech before this past week.  But it immediately hit home.  I heard Gordy’s words loud and clear.  There’s no room for Plimpton in the box.  If you want to really dig in and have these experiences, it’s fine to have them and tell the story.  But you’d better be capable of actually playing the game and playing it well.

I still take the “George Plimpton of aviation” characterization as a compliment.  In many ways, I admire Plimpton’s life and aspire to a part of what he did.  But it’s both inspiring and sobering to realize that there are some things that require that one move past even Plimpton.

 

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