Land and Hold Short

In spring 1976, I failed grade 7 French.

It was my delinquent year — I was almost two years younger than the other kids, starting the school year in 1975 still aged 10, and as hormones pulled my slightly-older friends in new directions, I found a different outlet, testing how many rules I could break without getting caught. Despite my failure, I joined the grade 8 French class the next year, paid attention, didn’t cheat, and ended up second in the class with 89% (my hormones had kicked in, and girls became more interesting than acting up).

In spring 2009, I failed my biennial IFR flight test.

In Canada, unlike the U.S., we have to redo the complete IFR flight test every two years to maintain our ratings. I passed in 2003, 2005, and 2007, but failed yesterday due to altitude deviations. I now need to be signed off by an instructor, then take the full flight test again. That may put an end to any hope of family trips or Hope Air flights this summer: without an instrument rating, it’s not really practical to fly on long trips around northeastern North America, unless you’re willing to wait 2 or 3 days for weather to clear at each stop.

Because of work, I haven’t flown much in the last year and a half. The hood/foggles don’t bother me, and I’m still good with the radio work, IFR procedures, heading control, and needle tracking, but I need to get back up and regain my altitude control. The Transport Canada test standard is +100 feet/-0 feet for IFR, and I dipped 50 feet below four times in my two approaches. Next time, I’ll remember to target 50 feet above minimum altitude as well, to give myself some wiggle room.

Aftermath

Obviously, as a 700-hour pilot with nearly 100 hours actual IMC, I was shocked and disappointed at the result, but I also recognize that it is my responsibility to fix the problem rather than looking for excuses. It’s important not to fall into bad habits, no matter how long you’ve flown, and it’s probably time for some recurrent training anyway. When I arrived back at my home airport, I went straight in and booked a two-hour lesson for next Tuesday with an IFR instructor. I’ll have him evaluate my flying, then we’ll put together a plan to get my altitude control back to test standards (as well as anything else that might have slipped).

The examiner (a very nice man, and a talented, 20,000+ hour pilot) felt terrible about failing me — he said I obviously know what I’m doing, had 4/4 on much of the test, probably just needed to go up once to get a sign off from an instructor so that I could redo the exam. I’m prepared, though, to work at this all summer if I need to.

Failing once in a while is good for the soul — if you never fail at anything, then you’re not really trying in life — but I don’t want to fail this particular test again, and with my confidence badly shaken, I’m afraid of messing things up next time that I took for granted this time (like holds and NDB approaches) even if I do fix my altitude control. I need not only to brush up my skills, but to get my confidence back.

A good day, all the same

Despite all this, it was a good day yesterday. First, I realized that I really do still care about flying — my first reaction wasn’t to give up, but to book some lessons and get back on the horse. Second, the Red Sox came back from a 1-3 deficit at the bottom of the 8th to beat the Yankees again, for 8 straight this season. And most importantly, I celebrated 21 years married to my best friend, and that easily trumps any flight test results.

When I was up practicing holds today, I realized something important: it’s not concentration, but lack of concentration that makes a good pilot.

Sure, on the ground concentration can be a good thing: you check weather and NOTAMs, plan your flight, preflight the plane, etc. giving your full concentration to each task, one after the other. But once you’re in the air, concentration is the last thing you want.

Hollywood wants us to think of pilots as alpha-wolf masters of concentration, flying the plane by sheer will power, but that doesn’t have much to do with being in a real cockpit during a real flight. Remember that wierd kid in your elementary school choir who could never focus on the song or conductor, but was always glancing up at the ceiling, down at the floor, at the kids beside him/her, at the door, out the window, etc.? That’s a future pilot.

The thing is, when you’re flying, there are lots of things happening at once, and every one seems to need your attention all the time. You simply can’t focus on a single task and finish it. Concentrating on tuning the radio? Guess what, your altitude just changed by 200 ft. Trying to get the gyro compass set correctly? Looks like you just blew through your next checkpoint. Trying to figure out where you are on the map? Maybe you should recover from this incipient spiral, first. It’s like driving a car, but with more speed, (sometimes) nothing visible out the window, and an extra dimension and two extra axes of rotation thrown in.

When a plane has two pilots, I imagine that they can divide up the work to some extent so that one can concentrate on something while the other flies, and certainly, an autopilot can help a lot, but I imagine that even on the flight deck of the most sophisticated airliner pilots have to keep their focus moving, all the time.

When you go to the other end of the spectrum — say, a private pilot (like me) flying single-pilot IFR in turbulence with no autopilot — it’s all about lack of concentration. Need to retune the radio? I can’t just look at the dial and keep turning until the right frequency, or the turbulence will have knocked me 20 degrees off course. Instead, I turn it two or three numbers, then back to the AI, ASI, AI, HI, TC, ALT, AI, turn it two or three numbers then back to the AI, ASI, AI, HI, TC, ALT, AI, check the oil pressure and temperature then back to the AI, ASI, AI, HI, TC, ALT, AI, turn the radio dial two or three numbers then back to the AI, ASI, AI, HI, TC, ALT, AI — that’s not necessarily the exact order of my scan, but you get the picture. If I have to look up an approach plate or a frequency in the CFS, it’s the same thing: two or three page turns at once, then back to the scan, then two or three more page turns, etc.

I once did 9 hours of that in a single day in IMC for a Hope Air flight, and I wanted to sleep for a week afterwards. I don’t know how commercial pilots like Aviatrix can do it day after day (I know she often flies without an autopilot, too).

Update: pix at the Rain Aviation Blog (via Dave Rooney’s comment).

My home airport, Ottawa Rockcliffe, was hit by severe winds yesterday: I’ve heard from 18-24 airplanes damaged, at least 10 of which are write-offs.

After supper today my spouse and I drove to the airport to check the damage. On the way there, driving along the Rockcliffe Parkway (past the fields where the RCMP Musical Ride horses graze), we could see a zig-zag line of mature trees snapped in half, while trees only metres away had not a twig disturbed.

Volunteers had spent the day clearing up at the airport, but the damage was still apparent: some planes with bent wings, others on their backs, and one smashed up against a fence and flattened so that you could barely tell it had been a plane. Most of the damaged planes were high-wings, which makes sense (if you’ve ever tried to taxi a high-wing plane in strong winds, you know what I’m talking about), but there was also a Cherokee Six on its back, having bent the vertical stab of the Cessna beside it on the way over.

Most planes, however, looked untouched. There were two badly damaged planes within 100 metres of my tie-down spot, but not only did my plane look OK through the fence (except rotated 5-10 degrees in its spot), but a big snow scoop that had been leaning against the box behind my plane hadn’t even tipped over. When I can get into the airport, I’ll check the control surfaces more closely for damage.

Given how specific the damage was — one plane might be totalled, while its neighbour was untouched — I suspect a tornado, though I haven’t seen official confirmation yet. Tornadoes aren’t incredibly common here in Ottawa, but they do happen. My brother, who lives a few kilometres from the airport, lost a window and a few screens to heavy winds. Someone my daughter knows in our neighbourhood had a roof ripped off a house. In my yard, one lawn chair blew over, and … er … that’s it. No branches down from the trees, no garbage cans blown around. Parts of the city lost power. My spouse and I were watching TV in the basement, and never even noticed the storm.

Here’s how some recent tweets describe flying:

LizaBelle30: Flying is like throwing yourself at the ground and missing

elysiancoffee: flying is like preparing oneself for a big performance in which I only become an instrument

johnnyo312: flying is so horrible now, the food is worst than McDonalds, service is very bad. Flying is like riding the greyhound bus.

Janellematthew: Flying is like driving at 40,000 feet

softserve: Flying is like being tattooed – it doesn’t get real excruciating until the three hour mark.

(Idea stolen from “Google is Like…“, which in turn was stolen from “CSS is like…“.)

Yesterday, I asked what WWII plane you would have chosen to fly. I thought my answer was not so obvious — I expected to see a lot of Spitfires, Mustangs, ME-109s, Zeros, B-29s, etc. — but two other people have already mentioned it in the comments to that posting. Oh, well.

The plane I’d have chosen first is the de Havilland Mosquito.

Doing more with less

I like the Mosquito because it exemplifies the best of engineering practices — stripping away features instead of adding them. The Mosquito design started as a medium bomber with two engines, three gun turrets and a six-man crew. Performance sucked. Their first impulse was to add two more engines. Any techie reading this will instantly recognize the first step in a f**ked project: two more engines make the plane even heavier, and it will have to carry more fuel, so it will fly slower, so it will probably need more guns to defend it, etc. etc.

But then something went right. Some suggested removing one of the gun turrets. Hey! The bomber’s a bit faster. Let’s try removing another turret. Hey, it’s so fast, why have guns at all? Take out the weight of the guns and ammo, and the four crew members to fire the guns, and the Mosquito was flying like nobody’s business. But that wasn’t the end. If it’s that fast, why carry lots of heavy metal armour? In fact, why not build the airframe out of wood?

Virtuous circle

As usually happens with successful projects, unexpected benefits began to appear. England was full of furniture factories that couldn’t contribute much to the war effort. However, their high-quality, low-fault-tolerance woodworking skills were exactly what was needed to build the Mosquito. (The English were good at that kind of improvisation: they also trained workers in bicycle factories to repair heavily damaged Spitfires, freeing the Supermarine factory to concentrate on building new ones.)

The light bomber version of the Mosquito could fly at almost 350 knots, comparable to the fastest (pre-jet) fighters in World War II, and comparable even to some modern light jets. It was so fast that it also saw uses as a fighter-bomber, a pathfinder plane, and even as a pure night fighter with radar equipment installed. The Wikipedia article quotes Hermann Göring’s opinion of the Mosquito in 1943, after a Mosquito squadron attacked a Berlin radio station, knocking him off the air:

In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy.

The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that?

What, indeed? Less is more, worse is better, the simplest thing that can possibly work, KISS — whatever you call it, stripping away features and striving for simplicity is the heart of great engineering.

Note: the Mosquito also has great geek cred, since it’s the plane that was used to evacuate quantum physicist Niels Bohr out of Stockholm (in the bomb bay, no less).

Runners-up

My #2 choice was the Douglas Dakota, known as the C-47 to the Americans, or the DC-3 in civilian life. It was the workhorse of the allied transportation effort, and the from all accounts, a great plane to fly.

My #3 choice is a little more unusual: the L4 Grasshopper. I’m not providing a link for that, but those of you familiar with that plane can provide more info in comments, if you’d like.

Here’s a question for the aviation bloggers reading this posting: if this were World War II, and you could have a two-year mission to fly any military aircraft you chose (from any country), what would it be? To make it easier, I’m going to wave my cyber-wand and make two things happen:

1. You can be any age, gender, or physical condition. Even if you’re a 55-year-old, overweight, bald female with an astigmatism, for the sake of this exercise you can be a 21-year-old male track star with a baby face, a mop of hair, and lightning-fast reflexes.

2. You won’t hurt anyone but yourself. If you choose a bomber, I guarantee that all your bombs will fall on unoccupied factories of no historical significance. If you choose a fighter, the crew of any plane you shoot down will bail out safely. etc. (too bad that didn’t work in real life).

So what’s your favorite WWII plane, and why? If you want, list your 2nd and 3rd choices as well. Mine is coming up in my next posting (hint: it’s not obvious).