Horsing Around in the Citabria with Ben Phillips

I went out with Ben Phillips this afternoon and horsed around the Acro Camp Citabria (N7636S). I still have lots of bad habits by Ben’s estimation, but I fly with Ben mostly to have benefit of his estimation, so it’s all good.

Five takeoffs and landings. Three of them to a full stop. So I’m again current to fly passengers in ASEL, be it tailwheel or otherwise. I think my work in the TG-7A has broken me to some extent of stirring the coffee on landing. Still some stirring, but nowhere near what I used to do.

And, perhaps coolest of all, Ben gave me the go-ahead to take the Citabria out solo. It might strike you as counterintuitive, but I’ve never been cut loose in a tail-dragging airplane. Lots and lots of time in them, but never solo. I have lots of solo time in a tail-dragging motorglider, but nothing about the TG-7A’s taildraggerness counts in the airplane world. I got my tailwheel endorsement from Dan Gryder in the DC-3 in 2008 and I’ve flown movie stuff and competition acro since then. But never frequently enough at any one place to get turned loose in the airplane.

My landings were pretty decent today. Not perfect by any means. The first one was a little ugly, even. And the wind was nearly calm. I know the difference between what I’m authorized to do and what it would be smart to do. So I’ll be back to fly some more with Ben when we can get a good crosswind with which to play.

In the meantime, my clothes smell like Citabria. It’s a good smell.

 

Tailwheel Training and Camera Placement Work with Acro Camp IP Don Weaver

This is a regular blog post. You can find show notes to episodes – and links to episode audio and video – in the other entries.


I finally got a chance to escape from the office and get up for the first time with Acro Camp IP Don Weaver. Although we have spent a fair amount of time talking about the project, we haven’t been in the same aircraft yet.

So we got up for 13 or 14 trips around the pattern at KPTK on Wednesday to test out some camera placements and get to know each other in the air.

I have a good deal of tailwheel time (at least compared to the average pilot), but wanted to get my groove back and spend some time understanding Don’s teaching style.

We had a about a seven-kont crosswind, so it was a good day to work on wheel landings under those circumstances. I nailed three three-point landings first and then we set about the business of working on the wheel landings.

The crosswind was just enough to support rolling down the runway with the wail up, banked over a little to the right, and with only the right main on the ground. Over the course of the next nine or ten landings, I got a much better feel for what it’s like to dance the Citabria around a little.

I think that a lot of tricycle-gear pilots get bunched up about the oscillations that a tailwheel airplane an have. Frankly, jacking back and forth like we were would probably have damaged a C-172 or at least scared the pilot silly. But this airplane is built to handle the side loads and squirrel around a little more. Additionally, I know that I still have the tricycle-gear pilot’s tendency to not want to push the stick as much in the wheel landing because my lizard brain is screaming “Nose gear! Nose gear! Prop strike!”

In fact, you’d have to push a lot harder than I did to get the prop anywhere near the ground. It’s just a sight picture and a kinesthetic sensation that you have to get used to.


By about the 10th trip around, I was reasonably competently putting it on the right main and keeping it there for an appreciable part of the trip down the runway.

Don’s a good guy with whom to fly. He seems to share with Barry and a few others the rare gift of figuring out when the student is figuring something out for him self and knowing to shut the heck up for a few moments. That sounds crass to say, but I think we’ve all had motor-mouth instructors who actually keep you from learning by constantly calling out every little thing. It’s like asking you on the first tee whether you inhale or exhale on your backswing. I don’t know. Just let me hit the ball!

I think that Don quickly identified my tricycle tendencies and worked on those elements. He also identified a consistent problem that I have, namely centering the ailerons on landing (when I should have full deflection into the crosswind). Having me get it up on one wheel for the takeoffs and encouraging me to put it down on one wheel for the landings really helped me to see that part of the envelope.

We also flew a couple of cameras. These stills are from the Panasonic that I’ve been flying since last year. The other camera is a Sanyo Xacti HD2000 in back, to the right of Don’s head, facing forward. I didn’t have the wide-angle lens for the HD2000 that day, but I think that that placement is going to work out just fine once I get the lens. I just wanted to figure out whether that location worked from a vibration perspective.

By the way, the Sanyo HD200 accessory lenses appear to be out of stock everywhere! What gives, Sanyo? And the scumbags at www.elitedeals.com took my order for a Sanyo 0.45x semi-fisheye lens that they said was in stock, took my money, and then proceeded to wait on the manufacturer like everybody else for three weeks. Don’t do business with these folks. They’re bums. I got a nice 0.42x semi-fisheye lens with an adapter ring on eBay for less than half the price and the seller shipped it to me within two days.

The only problem now is that the HD2000, which has a pistol grip, looks like a flare gun or worse when I put the lens on it. I’m going to be pointing that rig at a performer on the flight line sometime this summer and some security guy is going to think I’m a nutball with a firearm and shoot me.

The HD2000 is probably going to be the primary camera in one of the airplanes for Acro Camp. I got it primarily because it has a microphone in jack. I can run the intercom directly into the camera and not have to deal with recording the audio separately. So the HD2000 in one airplane and the good old dependable Panasonic in the other one.

I still have to check out the Pitts for camera mount points. Might be a good excuse to go out to Ray Community Airport to see it and check out camera mount points.

Don and I also did some pretty aggressive slipping just to show the capabilities of the airplane. From 1,000 feet AGL and a quarter mile out, we slipped it down so that we came across the numbers at flare altitude and 85 mph. Don also demonstrated some effective ways to bleed a lot or airspeed quickly, also with slipping techniques. We had plenty of airspeed above the stall in all of the slips, so I wasn’t worried that we were so cross-controlled.

That demo gave me a lot of confidence for engine-outs and glide performance in the airplane. Often, it’s not hard to glide to the landing point in an engine-out. The challenge is arriving at the flare with enough empty space ahead of you without hitting anything on the way. With the Citabria, you can just get to where you want to be (a fairly broad window in space) and simply show the relative wind a lot of the draggy parts of the airplane. You have a pretty broad choice of altitudes at the key position from which you can get it down – from a long glide to an aggressive slip.

I’m looking forward to getting up again with Don. Both to confirm my thoughts about the camera mount points and angles and to expand my tailwheel and aerobatic stills (such as they are on both accounts).

And to think that I once worried about running out of things to learn!

Make sure that you fill out your Acro Camp cast member (“camper”) application! This is going to be a boatload of fun. Check out the announcement and casting call at http://www.acrocamp.com/ and, if you qualify, go to the Acro Camp group at http://www.mytransponder.com/ (registration required, but it’s free) and click on the link to the online application.


Taildragger Training – Part 1


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These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/airspeed/AirspeedTaildragger1.mp3.

[Audio 01]

We’re going to do a little time travel here. Last April, when I had scheduled the DC-3 type rating course, I figured that it would be a good idea to get some tailwheel training before going down to Griffin. It seemed to stand to reason that it would be a good idea not to have my first tailwheel experience be in an airliner.

I actually needn’t have worried. Other than taxiing (which was an exercise in humility), the ‘three behaved beautifully.

But my tailwheel training has since become a lot of fun and I’ve spent a lot of time in a Citabria since then.


My instructor is Barry Sutton of Sutton aviation at Oakland County International Airport in Waterford, Michigan, although it’s “Pontiac” on the radio. The ICAO designator is PTK, for those following along in their A/FDs.

Barry’s a DE and an amazing instructor. John and Martha King have nothing on Barry for cockpit chatter. Barry is polished and smooth and seems to have a telepathic sense for what you need to know and immediately begins telling you before you have to ask. But Barry also has a talent for being quiet when he senses that you’re working things out, which is a rare thing indeed. I think Barry is the best instructor with whom I’ve ever flown. And I guess that’s saying something these days, as many people who’ve occupied the right seat in airplanes I’ve flown.

Anyway, I got ahold of Barry and scheduled a time to go get an intro to taildraggers and to go do some pattern work.


The airplane today is an American Champion Citabria 7ECA Aurora, tail number N157AC. It’s practically brand new, with its airworthiness certificate issues in December of 2006. It’s powered by a Lycoming O-235-K2C that puts out 118 horsepower at 2,800 PRM and it’ll climb at 740 fpm at sea level. It’s 22 feet long, 34 feet wide, and has 165 sq. ft. of wing area, giving it a wing loading of 10 lb./sq. ft. at its max gross of 1,750 lbs. It’s also certified for basic aerobatics and is rated for +5/-2 gees. I

t seats two in tandem. I’m in front for these flights. It’s a little weird if you haven’t flown a lot in tandem airplanes. You don’t see the instructor directly, so his or her voice is just sort of there in your ears. Like a voice in your head that’s teaching you to fly. Note: If you still hear a voice in your head telling you how to fly when you’re solo, consider a precautionary landing and some rest.

As a note for future episodes, I’ve done a lot of aerobatic training in it and recorded a lot of audio and video that will appear in future episodes.

Flying a taildragger is different in many ways. Probably the most important is that the center of gravity is behind the main gear. If you think about it, that’s an important thing because, if it wasn’t, the airplane would simply rest on its nose with the tailwheel in the air.

The most important consequence is that taking off and landing in a taildragger is a little like pushing rope. If there’s any off-center drag or friction, the center of gravity is going to want to come around from behind you and get in front of you. In a taildragger, that’s called a ground loop and it’s embarrassing at best and can bend you and/or the airplane at worst.

Think of it like this. The nest time you’re in a grocery store parking lot, go grab a shopping cart. Turn it around backwards and put your forearms on the sides of the cart, rest your elbows on the front corners, and grab the sides with your hands. Now run really fast. The cart isn’t very graceful and it gets worse the faster you go. That’s a pretty good proxy for what it’s like the first few times you fly a taildragger.

One other thing as we get started. Barry talks a little about an imaginary nosewheel. He is, of course, addressing the fear by tricycle-gear drivers like me that pushing the nose over will result in a prop strike. The fact of the matter is that there’s a fair amount of downforce on the tail of the airplane and you’d actually be hard-pressed to have a prop strike. Even if you got pretty well beyond level, the prop would tuck under a bit before actually striking the runway.

For all normal operations, you can simply imagine that there’s a nosewheel in front and you don’t even have to imagine very hard. After a certain amount of forward force, the airplane will resist you pretty well and the nose feels pretty stable.

Also, this is my first time flying an aircraft with a stick. You hold the stick in your right hand. Push and the houses get bigger, pull and they get smaller. Left and right are as you’d imagine. The throttle is a knob on the left wall and the carb heat is a smaller knob just below it and you operate those with your left hand. Trim is also on your left, but it’s only marginally helpful for gross adjustments. It’s almost impossible to trim the airplane for hands-off level flight.

The transition from yoke to stick took ten seconds. I’m not kidding. It seemed completely natural immediately. And I love, love, love flying with a stick instead of a yoke. I’d have to get a different kneeboard if I was going to fly the Citabria IFR (and, by the way, it’s IRF certified), but I’d consider doing that. As it is, I fly it without a kneeboard and take notes on my right knee with a fine felt-tip marker. Right on the knee. A prouder tattoo one cannot imagine. In fact, I’ve often considered writing an ATIS on my knee before going out just because I think it looks cool.

The first order of business was to familiarize me with the feel of the rudder at high speed before rotating. To that end, Barry and I did two high-speed taxis down Runway 27L. Barry had the stick and the throttle and got us moving just fast enough to get the tail off the ground. I’m sitting up front with my hands in my lap and feet on the rudders.

Here’s the first high-speed taxi.

[Audio 02]

Not bad. We taxi back and do another one.

Barry and I talk about the first run and get ready for the second one.

[Audio 03]

Then it’s time to do the second high-speed taxi.

[Audio 04]

We taxi back to the approach end of 27L. this time, we’re going to take off. The wind is pretty heavy out of the south and I’m not ready to crosswind operations in this airplane yet. We’re going to ask for a right turn on takeoff and make right traffic around to Runway 17.

You can land a taildragger in two ways. The easier and more common is the three-point landing. As the name implies, you try to touch the mains and the tail all at the same time. A three-point landing is a little easier in the Citabria because the tailwheel is steerable and you have more directional control when the tailwheel is down.

The other kind is a wheel landing. In a wheel landing, you land on the mains and then let the tail fly until it can’t fly anymore. It’s much the same as takeoff except that you’re slowing down. It’s also a lot harder because (a) as a tricycle-gear pilot, you’re overly scared of nosing over and having a prop strike and (b) you don’t have that steerable tailwheel on the ground and you’re instead depending on the rudder for directional control, even though rudder effectiveness is decreasing all the way until the tailwheel makes contact.

All of the landings today will be wheel landings. That’s because the DC-3 almost always does wheel landings. Unlike the Citabria, the ‘three is very stable in a wheel landing. In fact, although the ‘three can and does do three-point landings, it’s discouraged because the tail could begin oscillating up and down and, when a tail that big with that much momentum starts to oscillate, you can have control departures, prop strikes, and other nastiness.

But the Citabria is a good platform for understanding what goes into landings of either kind and we’re going to do some wheel landings today.

Here’s the takeoff from runway 27L and part of the pattern over to Runway 17. You can tell that I’m really enjoying the way this airplane flies.

[Audio 05]

And here’s the approach and the first landing. There’s a lot of convection and other turbulence, so you’ll head Barry coaching me on the throttle until I get the approaches dialed in.

[Audio 06]

Not awful, but I can tell that Barry’s doing a lot of the flying on the landing. We taxi back to the approach end of Runway 17 and I get my second takeoff. I feel pretty good about the takeoff and do most of it myself.

[Audio 07]

We get through the thermals and it’s time to touch down again. I don’t keep the stick forward to keep the tailwheel off and Barry helps me out with that. I’m exhibiting ever reaction that you’d expect from a tricycle-gear pilot flying a taildragger for the first time.

[Audio 08]

We head around the patch again and I put in my worst landing of the day. I keep wanting to pull back when I need to be disciplined enough to keep it forward to keep it on the mains and keep the tail off the ground. This time, we have to play with the power and oscillate a few times before getting the aircraft down and stopped.

I should mention that Pontiac is a pretty big airport with parallel main runways in addition to the crossing runway that we’re on. It’s a rare time when we have the airspace pretty much to ourselves. Barry’s friendly with the guy in the tower and I take the opportunity at the end to try to cloak my landing in a PIREP.

[Audio 09]

We got something like seven takeoffs and landings that day. Here’s the last one. It was a little better than most, but I still didn’t push adequately and we had to play with the power in order to get the right attitude for touchdown.

[Audio 10]

Needless to say, about a month later I had a tailwheel endorsement from Dan Gryder in the DC-3. The ‘three was much easier to fly than the Citabria in many ways. Lots more on the checklist and much more technical to get her over the fence but, once over the fence, docile as could be.

My understanding with Barry is that I’m going to fly the Citabria with him until he tells me that he’d sign me off for a tailwheel endorsement in that aircraft. Then I’ll really feel that I’m a tailwheel driver. Most of the flights since then have been aerobatic for the first hour and then pattern work after that. As I record this in mid-January, I haven’t been up in the Citabria since November, but I’ll be back in the saddle as soon as I can get there.

I think the Citabria is my favorite training aircraft thus far. It’s yellow, it’s new, it’s clean, it has great visibility (including a transparent roof), you sit on the centerline, you have your feet up on the rudders, you have a four-point harness, and it’s a genuine stick-and-rudder pilotmaker. Captain Chris of Plane madness did an informal poll on Twitter a few months ago, asking, if money was no object, what two aircraft would you own. I responded with the F-86 Sabre and either a Citabria or the Citabria’s big brother, the Super Decathlon. It’s that much fun.

Stay tuned because there’s lots more tailwheel and aerobatic audio stored up from the last year. And I’ve shot a lot of cockpit video of the aerobatic stuff, so I’m planning to release some more video episodes, too.

Contact Barry Sutton at Sutton Aviation:

Sutton Aviation, Inc.
Oakland County International Airport
6230 North Service Drive, Waterford, MI, 48327
248-666-9160

UPDATE as of February 2012:

N157AC is now on the line at FLight 101 at KPTK.  Contact information:

2121 Airport Road
Waterford, Michigan 48327
Ph: 248-666-2211
Fax: 248-666-1094
flight101school@yahoo.com

1.4 Aerobatics and Tailwheel and Taxiing the Kids


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These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedCitabria1.mp3.

(Lead photo by Nicholas (“Cole”) Tupper.)

Got up in the Citabria yesterday for a training flight. 1.4 hours of mostly aerobatics and landings. The plan was to go out, review the maneuvers that I’ve been working on up until now, and then do some spins, sort of as a killproofing exercise.

The aerobatics worked out well. Wingovers, loops, rolls, and hammerheads. Last time, I was at the point where the loop was mine. I flew them more or less without coaching (at least after a little review and coaching on the first one or two). This time, I added the hammerhead to that category. I’m getting good vertical uplines and downlines and handling them with good energy management (e.g. I get a good amount of time in some of the more dramatic accelerative phases while still recovering in plenty of time to keep the airspeed well within the design tolerances of the aircraft). I’m really pretty proud of that.

Same with the rolls. A roll in the Citabria involves picking up energy with a dive to about 120 MPH IAS, leveling out briefly, and then burying the ailerons left. You roll 360 degrees, pulling power smoothly throughout, and then you end up wings-level on a 45-degree downline (which you maintain for awhile), and then you recover. You lose a lot of altitude (500 feet or so) pretty quickly, which was news to me when we started, but it’s actually a very elegant move. You get and then give energy in an elegant, disciplined, precise, and measured way.

Inversion tends to bother me, even when I’m on the controls, and, by the time we got to the spin part, I was pretty green.

Barry gave me a pretty good lecture and demonstration of what secondary stalls can look like in likely scenarios. Still technically under control, but oscillating toward departure from controlled flight. We did one sustained falling-leaf stall, broke it, and pulled way-nose-high into a secondary stall, which, in turn, broke more savagely and dropped a wing hard. I’m sure that the third iteration would have been even more violent and that was the point of the exercise.

Barry’s teaching is really well-structured in that he always starts out with the reason that he’s teaching what he’s teaching and, if possible, a demonstration of how the maneuver applies in actual situations.

Just when we were ready in the training sequence for the actual spins, my tummy informed me that it had had enough. Discretion is the better part of valor, even though I had a Sic-Sack in my pocket and ready to go. I’ll get the spins in later this fall.

We headed back to the airport and got in four or five three-point landings. I was really pleased with the landings this time. I think I’m finally getting over one of the bad habits that plagues tricycle-gear pilots transitioning to tailwheel. I’ve been relaxing the back pressure on the stick after touchdown in much the way a tricycle-gear pilot would do to lower the nosewheel. In a tailwheel, you want to get the tailwheel down and keep it down. It both keeps the tail from oscillating and gets the steerable tailwheel down on the ground where it’s effective. Although I ballooned the last flare pretty badly, the landing worked out well and all of the landings had much more of a feel of positive control than I had experienced before. Very nice! I think I’m getting it. I realize that wheel landings will be another matter entirely, but I’ll revel in such success as I’ve had so far.


I took Cole and Ella out to see the Citabria earlier in the day. I don’t think I’ve ever had then in a taildragger before and they really seemed to like the tandem seating. Cole is really beginning to understand how the flight controls work. I can tell because, when he moves the controls, he looks right at the relevant control surface without casting about. You can see in this picture that he’s pulling and looking back at the elevator.


Ella, starting out in the back seat, expressed a little consternation about the stick moving around, apparently unbidden, as Cole worked the controls in front. She happily rotated up front and really seemed to enjoy seeing the different cockpit configuration.


And here’s the coolest part of the day. The Citabria is owned by one of the instructors at Sutton Aviation and he leases it back to the school. He happened to be walking out on the ramp with a student and noticed me taking pictures of the kids in the Citabria. He knows that I’ve been training with Barry and I had ducked in when I arrived to make sure that it was okay to show the kids the aircraft. He also knows that I have a tailwheel endorsement from the DC-3 training, but that I’m conservative enough to come back for more training from Barry in the Citabria in order to really learn the ins and outs of conventional-gear aircraft.

“Hey, why don’t you start it up and taxi the kids around the ramp a bit? I’ll bet they’d love that.” They’d love that? I’d love that!

My wife is wonderful and has been very tolerant of my flight training. Especially considering at least one event involving an instructor during my primary training. Even when I started taking aerobatic training, she didn’t object and she listened objectively when I explained the additional margin of safety that upset recovery and related training adds to regular GA flying. Heck, I had had thought long and hard myself about it before talking about it with her.

She’s not nuts about the idea of me flying the kids just yet. She approved getting up for a helicopter flight at Oshkosh and also said that it’d be okay to take Cole along if a spot had opened up in the back of the Herpa DC-3 (although she asked a lot of questions about Dan Gryder, all of which were easy to answer). But she’s still getting comfortable with the idea of me flying Cole or Ella.

In the meantime, I honor her feelings. I take the kids to the airport regularly and we ramp-fly whatever’s on the line, but they’ve never been in a GA aircraft with the prop turning.

That’s why this was such a cool opportunity. You normally wouldn’t go through the trouble of starting up an airplane and taxiing it around if you weren’t going to fly it. It had not even occurred to me to do it. But now we had a quiet ramp in a sleepy little corner of the airport. Plenty of room to taxi around and a gorgeous little taildragger in which to do it.

He didn’t have to offer twice. “Okay, guys, get in here and let’s taxi the airplane around a little.”

Cole started jumping up and down, saying “this is so cool!”

I got them in the back seat, buckled everybody in, ran through the startup checklist, and hit the starter button. The prop turned through about 20 blades and then the engine fired to life.

I looked over my shoulder and they were both smiling from ear to ear. Any worry that either of them would be scared by the noise or uncomfortable in the airplane melted away. All of that time pressed up against the fence in the front row at airshows over the last three or four years had paid off.

I ran all of the pre-taxi checks and then eased the throttle forward. Inertia gave way and we taxied happily around the ramp. I took it slow, but delighted both them and me by adding a little throttle and inside brake to swing the tailwheel around at each turn. Then we taxied back to the starting point and whirled the tail around in a tight 180 before shutting down.

“That was the coolest two minutes of my life!” shouted Cole. And it was a pretty cool two minutes of mine, too.


I’ll get the kids up sometime. There’s no hurry, really. It’ll happen when it happens. And it’ll happen after continued demonstration of my competence, skill, and judgment as a pilot when Mary’s comfortable with the idea. But, in the meantime, it’s a really good feeling to know that the kids are excited about it and it’ll be a big thing for them when it happens.

This is how it happens, folks. This is the magic of general aviation. The smell of 100LL, the sound of an engine, and the spark of imaginations on fire. Take your kids to the airport! I’ll see you there.

Aerobatic Training Scheduled for Tomorrow – And "Real "Tailwheel

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio, please check out the other posts.

Thanks for your patience, guys. No new episodes ready to go at the moment because I’m still writing the DC-3 type rating summary episode. It’ll be worth it, I promise! I’m taking from four hours or so of audio and more than two GB of photos to get it right.

In the meantime, I’m scheduled to go fly the Citabria with Barry tomorrow. Weather doesn’t look great, but we’ll see. I have a tailwheel endorsement from the DC-3 type rating course, but I’m smart enough to know that that doesn’t really qualify me to go fly a Citabria (not that anyone in his right mind would rent one to me at the moment).

The DC-3 takes off and lands beautifully. You need to pay attention, but it’s a wonderfully smooth aircraft. With 22,000 lbs of mass loaded into the momentum calculation, it should! But taxiing the DC-3 is like trying to drive your house around the neighborhood from an upstairs window. You can’t see much and you have to be pretty intuitive about where your mains and tail are.

The Citabria, on the other hand, is pretty easy to taxi (at least without any real crosswind), but squirrely on takeoff and landing. A much different creature. I really want to get so that Barry says that he’d sign me off in the Citabria just like an initial tailwheel endorsement. And that’s a few hours away.

But there’s no rush for that. Weather and time permitting, I’d like to head out and do some basic aerobatics. I only booked two hours, so it’s possible that getting chutes and other prerequisites to real aerobatics might eat too far into the allotted time. If that’s the case, I think it’d be good to just go do some spins and other VFR upset recovery. If we can get the aerobatics in, it’ll be cool to have Barry demonstrate the basic syllabus of maneuvers and let me try a few.

Not saying that I’m going all aerobatic on you and am planning to forsake the other elements of training. But I’ve been training for the time-intensive certificate and rating (e.g. private ASEL and IA) for most of the time in my logbook and it’s been really fun reaching out to experience, or obtain ratings or endorsements in, other areas of flight. And the cool thing is that a lot of these ratings and endorsements are fairly quick in coming, so you get the satisfaction of adding things to your certificate and/or logbook. If I can get the seaplane rating done soon enough, I might be able to go a good few months without my then-current pilot certificate being other than a temporary.

If I play things right, by OSH this year, I’ll have added instrument, multi, complex, tailwheel, high-performance, seaplane, and a DC-3 type rating. And all but the instrument rating in less than a total of about 22-25 hours.

Boy, do I love this stuff.

Get out there and challenge yourself! The summer is young!