Because Glider – Audio Episode Show Notes

2-33 on Runway 02

This is a two-part presentation, but I wanted to keep everything in one place.  Accordingly, I’ll put links to both audio parts here as they’re released.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Because Glider: Being an Account of One Man’s Path to the CFI Certificate by Way of Uncle Ernie’s Holiday Camp, a Couch at a Radio Station, &c.

If you follow me anywhere on social media, you’ll know that I recently completed the Herculean effort of becoming a certified flight instructor (or “CFI”) in the glider category.

I first started flying gliders in 2012 when my friend, and later instructor, John Harte, invited me to go fly a motorglider after a haircut that I had scheduled in Detroit one Saturday. By the second time we flew, I was training for the rating. Four months later, I was a commercial glider pilot and, six months later, I flew my first airshows as a performer in the same aircraft. Since then I’ve logged more than 200 hours in motorgliders, more than half of that in formation.

 

Winter in the ASK 21

Through the kind efforts of Mark Grant, Chris Felton, and others in the Civil Air Patrol, I even added an aerotow endorsement so that I could fly gliders that had no onboard powerplants. I earned that one after about 20 tows, most of them conducted in Owosso, Michigan in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures where you had to close the canopy and hold your breath until you had airflow through the window on takeoff so you wouldn’t completely frost the inside of the canopy. If you earn an aerotow endorsement in Michigan in the winter, you have well and truly worked for that endorsement.

And then, like the urge of Ishmael to get to sea, I began to feel the urge to do the next big thing. Certainly, there are plenty of challenges that could have been that next big thing. I really ought to add both single- and multi-engine airplanes to my commercial certificate.

But a number of things pushed me to go for the CFI. I’m very broad in aviation, but not very deep. Until I started flying gliders, I could fly a lot of stuff, but only with private privileges. I did my glider checkride at the commercial level simply because the practical test standards are about the same for private vs. commercial and the only other requirements are the knowledge test and a more comprehensive oral during the checkride. (Written test and comprehensive oral? Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch!) So the idea of taking a single category of flying all the way to CFI appealed to me.

I have a son who was getting close to turning 14 at the time. His name is Nicholas, but most of you know him by his callsign, “FOD.” He has about 30 hours bumming around in the TG-7A with me, most of it sitting there in the instructor seat while I fly. 14 is an important age for someone who flies gliders because that’s the age at which you can solo. And it doesn’t matter that the aircraft has an engine and a propeller. If it’s certified in the glider category, you can solo it at 14. I decided that it was not enough to just fly around with him or teach him without having the CFI in my pocket. I wanted to take him to a real CFI for the solo and the checkride.

Lastly, I had always thought that instructing would be fun and that I’d become a much better pilot if I did it. During the DC-3 rating, I had the chance to sit in the back and watch somebody else fly under circumstance where I could just watch and think about flying. That was one of the most productive experiences I’ve ever had in flight training. I couldn’t help but think that being able to really observe and critique would make me a much better pilot.

So, last spring, I decided to go for the instructor certificate. This is the story of that journey.
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Aviation Puts the Awesome in Sixth Grade Science

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Sixth grade was rough for me.  I was 5’4” and clumsy, I read a lot of Heinlein, and I was much more comfortable around adults than my age peers.  I remember spending a lot of time wishing that there was some way that I could really impress the other kids with the deep thoughts that I was thinking.  But, alas, I never managed to do that.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago.  My son is now in sixth grade.  Thankfully, he’s much better adjusted than I was and at least as smart.  But he also longs for ways to demonstrate to his peers the awesomeness of the thoughts he thinks.  He arrived home one day and announced that he was to be “scientist of the week” in his science class.  He was supposed to do a science experiment and report on it in class.  He and I thought for awhile and hatched a plan.

On that Tuesday, the skies were clear and visibility was unlimited.  I met him at the doors of his school as classes let out in the afternoon.  I wore my flight suit.  (Because, of course, it’s always good for your classmates to hear that your dad met you at the door wearing a flight suit.)  We drove to the airport, preflighted a TG-7A motorglider, loaded our scientific instruments and implements of destruction into the aircraft, and launched for a piece of airspace out between Detroit City Airport (KDET) and Selfridge ANGB (KMTC).

FOD Experiment Posing

The idea was to take two balloons to 10,000 ft. MSL.  One out in the unpressurized cockpit and one sealed in a mason jar as a control.  We’d observe the experimental balloon every 1,000 feet or so and then measure it 10,000 feet.  We could also visually compare it to the control balloon in the jar.

I’m working on my CFI in gliders and,  if I have someone else in the aircraft (other than when I’m flying formation), I take the instructor seat on the left and the other person takes the primary pilot seat on the right.  (Air Force doctrine calls for the stick to be in the right hand and the power in the left and, because there’s only one throttle and it’s in the center, the PIC sits on the right side in the TG-7A.)  This means that I can let my son do most of the flying from right after takeoff until just before landing.  I get practice flying from the left seat while also honing my instructor skills while he flies.

I gave him the controls just after rotation and we flew north of the field and began to climb.  He circled up and I held up the balloon(s) for the camera, along with note cards with the altitudes on them.  At 10,000 MSL, I did the measurement, and then we pulled the throttle and circled back down and landed.

FOD Experiment Measurements

The experimental balloon didn’t grow as much as we thought it would.  We actually worried about that.  There was no apparent difference between the experimental and control balloons if you just eyeballed them.  But, when we measured, we found that the circumference did expand from 25.5 cm to 29 cm.  Assuming that the balloon is spherical (close enough), that’s a 41% growth in volume.  After (not before!) doing the calculations, we compared our results to the actual difference in atmospheric pressure for a standard atmosphere and found that the balloon’s expansion was within 2% of the 43% drop in atmospheric pressure in a standard atmosphere.

FOD-Deck-in-Progress

We did a PowerPoint presentation summarizing the experiment and he delivered it for the class on Friday.  It went over extremely well.  The teacher even called in the other science teacher to watch once the first slide with an aircraft on it popped up and made it apparent that the presentation was going to be special.

Lessons learned (among many others):

(a) It’s okay to have preconceptions about what will happen, but be objective about your data-taking and accept the data.  The best scientists know that it would be even cooler if the experiment had yielded results different from what you expected.  Isaac Asimov put it well:  “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny . . .’”

(b)  Aviation captures imaginations.  The presentation made a huge impression in the class.  It held the class’s attention and even drew in the other teacher.  Every kid in the room understood the results.

(c)  You can become a legend at your school if you present photographic evidence that, at the age of 11, you flew a TG-7A nearly two miles high and back.

FOD and I will surely come up with additional excuses to incorporate aviation into his homework.  And, in the meantime, we’re spending lots of time flying for flying’s sake.  It’s nice having 100 lbs of willing student in the right seat so that I can sit left seat and practice my instructor thing for my CFI certificate.

 

Team Tuskegee Ramps Up Training

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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.

Picture 43

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.

 

 

Return from Rogers City (as an Airshow Pilot!)

It’s been a big, big weekend in Airspeed’s world.  It’s going to take a while to write and record the episode that covers it, but that’s because I need to take some time to make the episode as epic as the weekend was.

Long story short, I took things to a new level this weekend.  On Friday, I climbed into a TG-7A motorglider, flew to Rogers City, Michigan (KPZQ) in a two-ship formation, flew in my very first airshow as a performer, and came back in a three-ship formation.

I first started covering airshows from the fence along the crowd line seven years ago.  Over time, I’ve worked my way onto the performer area, then inside the box on the hot ramp, then out to show center with the pyro guys.  The only place that I had not been was up in the actual box in front of the crowd.

I had no idea in March of this year that I’d be flying motorgliders.  Or that I’d become reasonably good at it.  Or that I’d upgrade my certificate to commercial pilot in the process.  Or that I’d find myself spending time in formation with up to two other aircraft.  Or that, on Saturday, I’d be in that last frontier of the airshow fan: Actually in the box in an aircraft flying a demo for the crowd down below.

It’s been an epic weekend by any standard.  This is way, way beyond any expectation that I might have harbored just a few months ago.

I still have a lot of work to do.  I need to get a lot tighter and a lot more precise in my formation flying.  I need to develop even better situational awareness for those shows where the box isn’t over water with a definite shoreline to use as a reference.  But I’m part of a great team with really cool aircraft and – even if only in a very minor way – I’m now a part of that rarified community that flies aircraft in the box in front of airshow crowds.

My weekend.  Your weekend.  And a lot of my other weekends.  You know the drill.

 

Glider Rating – Part 1 – Audio Episode Show Notes

These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen to the show audio by clicking here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/airspeed/AirspeedTG7A01.mp3.  Better yet, subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your other favorite podcatcher. It’s all free!

If there’s a 350-hour private pilot out there who has a more diverse logbook than I do, my hat’s off to him or her.  I have everything from Cessna 152s to a DC-3 to the mighty F-16D in my logbook and my certificate reads ASEL, AMEL, and ASES, among other things.  I’ve flown for everything from lunch to competition aerobatics.

The key for me is experiencing the broadest possible swath of what aviation offers.

Coming up on three years ago, I got a ride with Mark Grant in a Schweizer SGM 2-37 motor glider.  The aircraft is one of three operated by the Tuskegee Airmen Glider Club, headquartered at Detroit City Airport.  It’s a beautiful yellow longwing bird and the ride was a lot of fun.

I also met John Harte that weekend, who was flying one of the other club motor gliders and I got good footage of him in a gaggle climb.  John and I have since begun to share an aerobatic instructor and we both fly the Acro Camp Pitts at Berz Aviation at Ray Community Airport.

Fast forward to this spring, when John offered me a chance to go up in one of the aircraft for some giggles.  I climbed in and was surprised to find myself doing most of the flying.  It turns out that the whole thing was part of an evil plot on John’s part to addict me to flying longwing aircraft. [Read more...]