Aero-Tips!

A good pilot is always learning -- how many times have you heard this old standard throughout your flying career? There is no truer statement in all of flying (well, with the possible exception of "there are no old, bold pilots.")

Aero-News has called upon the expertise of Thomas P. Turner, master CFI and all-around-good-guy, to bring our readers -- and us -- daily tips to improve our skills as aviators. Some of them, you may have heard before... but for each of us, there will also be something we might never have considered before, or something that didn't "stick" the way it should have the first time we memorized it for the practical test.

Look for our daily Aero-Tips segments, coming each day to you through the Aero-News Network.

Aero-Tips 07.13.06

I took a combination Flight Review and rental checkout at a small yet thriving local airport recently. It was a blast to get into a well-maintained and equipped (if somewhat old) Cessna 172 again and revive memories of my presolo training and early CFI days.

Conducting the review was a young instructor, about 500 hours total time and working his way through community college. Flying with Daniel reaffirmed my optimism that there will always be young people with a passion for flight. He started his day flying a dual cross-country at dawn; with several breaks during the day he landed for my 7:30 pm flight after watching a beaming student's first solo.

We started with a preflight inspection and a detailed series of questions about airspace, regulations and the Skyhawk. The before-flight segment also included a review of local procedures (it had been a couple of years since I'd flown there) and rental program minutia. And then we flew.

I settled back into the light Cessna (most of my time is in much heavier Beechcrafts). Our briefed Flight Review mainly mimicked a Private Pilot checkride: takeoff and climb, power-off and power on stalls, steep turns and a simulated engine failure emergency. Recovering at 800 feet above ground level we flew S-turns across a road and turns around a point.

I flew everything to Commercial Pilot standards, but Daniel was quick to provide reminders of mastering the Skyhawk --

• "Add 200 rpm as soon as you roll into the steep turn to hold airspeed and altitude; wait too long and you won't catch up"
• "You don't have to lower the nose as far as you might think to recover from a stall, even with so little power to recover; just get the angle of attack back into the flying range"

-- and the like. All the way he was very professional and encouraging, a great communicator... and when I scanned to the right, he looked like he was having fun. 

We flew an ILS into Wichita, a Class C primary airport in a strong, gusty crosswind (Runway 19L, winds 130 at 20 gusting to 28 knots), and took a break while the winds died down at dusk. Then it was a short-field takeoff and landing followed by a soft-field takeoff, and finally a night recovery back at Stearman Field (1K1). Afterward we completed the ground portion of the review with a lightning round of regulatory questions (researching daily Aero-Tips turns out to be pretty good study for a Flight Review, so reading them might work for you). At 10:30 pm we were done; despite his full eight hours' flight instruction per day and a lot of ground instruction besides, did he want to slump on home?

No... he wanted to talk about tailwheels and flying to grass airstrips.

Despite (or perhaps because) of his youth and "newness" to aviation, flying with Daniel made me feel real good about being a pilot and a flight instructor.

Aero-tip of the day: Go fly with a new CFI now and then. They need the experience (and the money), and maybe some of their "newbie" zeal for aviation will reignite the spark in you.

FMI: Aero-Tips