Students share in flight-training responsibilities
Flight instructors, like policemen, judges, and psychotherapists, hear many tales of woe. You learn never to say, "Now I've heard everything," but sometimes you are pretty sure nothing can top the latest little skit from aviation's ongoing melodrama.
Today was one of those times. I had been speaking at length to a rejected private-pilot applicant who had telephoned in hopes of receiving a stranger's opinion on what had gone wrong with his training program. As I hung up the telephone, it was awfully tempting to snap off the lamp and mumble, "Now I've heard everything."
The man's hard luck story went like this. After a fitful few months of flight instruction at his local airport, the fellow's instructor pronounced him airworthy and sent him off for a checkride. The student doubted his readiness but deferred to the wisdom of the CFI. Off he went. The oral part of the checkride went badly — no, it was a disaster. Seems the examiner wanted to know things about the airplane that the student had never considered before. The applicant stumbled again and again in response to the questioning, until the examiner had no choice but to terminate the proceedings and suggest he try again after receiving more instruction...a lot more instruction.
I asked for examples of the questions the examiner had posed. They were routine queries about V speeds, emergency procedures, and aircraft systems. Why did the student not know the answers to such questions when the information is right there in the Cessna 152 pilot's operating handbook? "My instructor and I never used it," he said. VX, VY, VNE, etc., all drew a blank. Even when teaching engine-out procedures, the CFI had never insisted on use of best glide speed, with its lifesaving possibilities, but had casually talked the student through some sketchy steps and called it good. This, in turn, had caused the student to believe that other areas of study could be approached with equal disinterest. Thus the rude shock when the checkride turned out to be, for lack of a better definition, the real thing.
Sympathy has its limits, so I agreed with the fellow that he had received less than first-class flight instruction, but I expressed the view that he, too, bore responsibility for the disaster. This observation was not eagerly received; but after the storm passed, I pointed out that flight instructors cannot prevent a student from reading his aircraft's POH. Nor am I aware of any cases where a student pilot was ordered by a CFI not to read the Federal Aviation Regulations, Practical Test Standards, or other relevant materials on his own. Agreed, the flight instructor is the guide, and should not lead you astray with incompetence or neglect. But just as your lawyer or physician gives you "advice" regarding your final decisions in matters of law and health — perhaps supplemented by your own research — the instructor you retain to teach you to fly is your employee, and as such, may need supervision. (If he or she has a heavy student load that might cause certain details to slip through the cracks, assume he will need to be supervised.) Maybe it shouldn't have to be this way, but it often is, and the stories I hear from far and near make it clear that not all student pilots are protecting their interests and investment as well as possible.
A friend of mine is a flight school chief pilot and designated examiner. I climbed the stairs, poked my head into his office, and found him sitting there, shaking his head in dismay. "What is wrong with some flight instructors?" he moaned. I sat down to sip coffee and hear the tale. A student pilot had come to town for a checkride. On examining his logbook, Sandy discovered that the fellow was ineligible for the flight test because he had never completed the required 300-mile solo cross-country that was set down for all CFIs and their students to see in the FARs.
Student pilots are not the only victims. A private pilot applied to a flight instructor for instruction aimed at meeting the requirements set forth under FAR Part 61.31(g) for pilot-in- command privileges in a tailwheel airplane. The instructor, a working pilot who apparently was still working from a dated copy of the regs, or perhaps from memory, was not aware of the new rule requiring that the trainee's logbook be endorsed for competency in specific operations such as wheel landings, crosswind landings, and go-arounds. After the training, the pilot's logbook merely bore a routine dual-instruction endorsement. Had the pilot subsequently soloed a taildragger and had an accident, I suppose a case could be made that he was in violation of FAR 61.31(g). The trainee returned and showed the CFI how to make a proper endorsement. (Weeks later he was amused to see that the CFI was now advertising identical flight instruction aimed at satisfying "recent changes" to the regulations.)
Last summer I was asked to give a rental checkout for a fixed- base operator. The renter this day was an attorney — an attorney, mind you — who was vacationing in the area. He had just become a private pilot and wanted to take in the scenery from aloft. It was a good morning for a checkout because a sprightly crosswind was blowing. On such a day I can see more of a pilot's technique in the first five minutes than I can guess at in an hour when the wind is calm. But after an hour in the pattern, he had not made a single landing unassisted. We flew for a second session, but the technique was clearly beyond his recognition. Why? "We never did any crosswind work when I was a student," the man said with a good- natured but glum smile. "We either canceled or waited until things calmed down." Doesn't the PTS have something to say about crosswind proficiency? "My instructor and I are going to have a little chat about that as soon as I get home," the lawyer said.
Another night, another telephone call, this time from a veteran flight instructor. "What's this I hear about us having to give students a pre-solo written test — do you do that?" he asked. I said that I did. "How long has that been a requirement?" he questioned. A few years, I said. A short pause, then, "Hmm. Guess I'd better start doing that." The good news is that the fellow had learned of the rule from one of his students who had troubled to read the book.
Some instructors invent their own rules when the ones handed down by the powers that be don't seem to fit the situation — and here again, the unwary student is asking for trouble. The CFI's student was ready to solo, sort of. The instructor did not mind the fellow's flying traffic patterns alone, but he did not want him venturing away from the airport. How should his concerns have been handled? Most CFIs would correctly say that the instructor should have signed the solo authorization form on the back of the student pilot certificate, then endorsed his logbook with a traffic-pattern-only limitation. What the CFI had done instead was to send the fellow aloft with no endorsements at all, beyond a note of explanation in the man's training folder. The student was not one to delve into the regs independently; but, fortunately, the situation was discovered while the CFI was on vacation — and corrected before any mishaps occurred.
None of this is to say that student pilots are expected to know more of the dos and do-nots of flying than their flight instructors. But all this shows that reading the rules and training texts can head off problems. It also demonstrates that blind trust is not a useful trait for a student pilot — or any other kind of pilot.
How It Works: Breathing Easy
By Marc E. Cook
For an internal-combustion engine to create useful power, it really needs just three things: a fuel and air mixture in the correct proportion, an ignition source (spark plug), and sufficient compression to make the charge pack a punch.
But first, that combination of fuel and air must get into the cylinders — and when the deed is done, the exhaust must be routed back out. At the heart of the induction system is the carburetor or fuel-injection system. (Because few simple airplanes have fuel injection, we'll focus on the carb.)
Put simply, the carburetor lives to mix liquid fuel from the tanks with the appropriate amount of air, atomize this mixture, and provide a way of controlling engine speed through throttling of the intake air. Though the chemically correct ratio is 15:1 by weight, aircraft engines will run well on ratios from 16:1 at the lean end to 10:1 on the rich side. (The terms lean and rich refer to the amount of fuel delivered, so a lot of fuel is rich and not much is lean.) It's the carburetor's job to ensure that the right ratio, in the right form, is available to the engine at the appropriate times.
Fuel delivered from the tanks enters the carburetor and is held in the float bowl, so called because a set of air-tight floats work against a needle valve to maintain a set level of fuel in the bowl. This is important because the amount of fuel in the bowl in part determines how rich or lean the carburetor runs. (This is a subtle effect and is easily overridden by the mixture control, which we'll discuss shortly.)
In airplanes, you'll find the carburetor at the bottom of the engines a throwback to the days when the devices were prone to leaking — and dribbling of fuel on a hot engine could be hazardous to one's health. As such, these are known as updraft carburetors, as opposed to the more normal downdraft types found atop automobile engines until a decade ago, when fuel injection pretty much took over. (A relative handful of aircraft have side-draft carburetors, which are functionally similar to the updraft versions.)
Carburetors work by using the flow of intake air through a venturi restriction — increasing the velocity of the air and creating a low pressure zone just downstream — which then draws fuel through a nozzle into the air stream. A fixed orifice, or jet, determines the maximum fuel flow through the carburetor. The nozzle, which resides in the middle of the carburetor throat, also helps atomize the fuel, creating a more uniform mixture.
This simple aviation carburetor also has a mechanism that you won't find on automotive carbs: a user-adjustable mixture control. Why? Because an airplane must operate at a variety of atmospheric conditions — from the oxygen-rich lower elevations to thin-air altitudes. And the basic self-compensating nature of the carburetor- -the more air flow through the venturi, the more fuel drawn from the bowl — is insufficient to work adequately across the range of power settings and altitudes. In addition, air-cooled engines require more fuel during takeoff and climb — primarily for cooling and detonation suppression — than they do in cruise or descent. The mixture control operates a needle that moves down in the main jet to decrease fuel flow and lean the mixture.
Once the fuel-and-air mixture leaves the carburetor, it travels through a series of tubes to the individual cylinders' intake ports. Along the way these tubes twist and turn to accommodate engine- packaging requirements first and the needs of the intake system second. In other words, the typical setup is not optimized for ideal mixture distribution among cylinders. In Lycomings, the intake tubes pass through the oil sump, heating them, as well as the fuel-air mixture and the carburetor itself, which is bolted beneath. This helps ward off carburetor icing — a phenomenon caused by the cooling of the intake air as it passes through the venturi, which causes the dew point to fall and some of the water in the air to condense and freeze on the back side of the throttle valve. Continentals typically do not locate the carburetor next to a heat source, and so some airplanes — like the Cessna 150 and fixed-gear 182 — are quite prone to carburetor icing.
Exhaust system design is amazingly straightforward in aircraft. Instead of attempting to carefully tune the system for noise reduction and cylinder scavenging, most designers settle for getting the hot gases out of the cylinders with a minimum of fuss. So the typical steel exhaust system will have tubes of the same diameter for each cylinder, but not always of the same length. They will feed into what may appear to be a muffler but is in reality a can with little more than a simple baffle inside.
It's important to understand that exhaust-system integrity is critical. Because the gases can be as hot as 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit at the exhaust port, this blowtorch-like heat must stay away from unprotected surfaces. Also, any leaks in the exhaust system around the heater muff — basically a shroud that uses the hot exhaust pipe to warm the cabin and for carburetor deicing — can lead to poisonous carbon monoxide reaching the cockpit.
Ultimately, what aviation intake and exhaust systems lack in technological "wow" they make up for in simplicity and durability, and with proper maintenance you'll probably never have to think much about these systems in flight.
Practice Area: Remember Your Landing Gear
By William K. Kershner
There's them that has, and them that's going to. Land gear up, that is. Or so the old aviation saying goes.
Thanks to an alert tower and wheel watch at North Whiting Field in Pensacola, Florida, I didn't get a chance to do it, that time.
I had finally gotten into the cadet program at Pensacola in 1951 after a couple of rejections because of being too skinny for my height; a siege of banana-eating (six pounds, to be exact) on the 2 a.m. train to Naval Air Station Memphis to report for another physical had fixed that. But I digress.
Preflight proved that Marine sergeants are not always polite and that the Dilbert Dunker and I were not compatible. The Dilbert Dunker is a fuselage that hits the swimming pool and then turns over — leaving the occupant to get out or drown (almost). It was suggested by a couple of swimming instructors that with my retarded survival skills I shouldn't fly over a child's wading pool.
At last, in January 1952, the actual flight training started with the North American SNJ as the primary/basic trainer. Because I had 800 hours as a civilian and had been a flight instructor, I got to solo in 10 flights instead of the usual 20 and also skipped flights in the next two stages. So this set the stage for a too-cocky attitude.
The flight in question was a solo in the southern Alabama practice area, and I remember admiring the star and bar on the left wing, thinking that I was at last a military pilot — and an outstanding one at that. In fact, I doubted that there had ever been a better military pilot.
The flight went well, and I started my return to the field. All airplanes returning to the field followed a path named, in this case, "Charlie Channel," and at times the convergence at the beginning of this lane could be pretty hectic.
The SNJ had a hydraulic system requiring the "power push" or power control lever to be depressed to "energize" the system before operating the gear and/or flap handles.
Cruising down Charlie Channel, I pushed the power control lever in preparation to drop the gear but realized that another SNJ was entering the channel and trying to occupy my exact airspace. After wrenching my airplane out of his way and thoughtfully describing the other pilot's ancestry and sex habits, I proceeded onto the downwind leg.
The tower called, "SNJ on downwind leg — you have no gear!"
(I wasn't surprised that some idiot had forgotten to put his gear down, what with all the French cadets and sociology majors taking flight training.)
As I turned on base, the tower repeated, "SNJ on base, you have no landing gear!"
(Good grief, that guy must be right on my tail, because I had just turned on base.) I looked back to see where he was.
As I turned final, the tower got quite excited and shouted, "SNJ number 91, you have no gear; take a wave-off. Take it around!" This was followed by a fusillade of red flares, reminding me of some World War II movies that I'd seen.
Uh-oh. That was my side number. Because of the distraction I had pushed the power control lever but not the gear control, and I had not done a proper check.
I decided that I would add power and surreptitiously leave the field to return to the practice area — if one could leave in such a fashion while flying a bright yellow airplane with two-foot-high black numbers on the cowl and being followed down the runway by red flares. I returned to the practice area.
After 15 minutes I decided to go back to the field. Having read and heard about the "military mind" and its rigidity, I was sure that the minor incident had been forgotten. Fifteen minutes seemed to be long enough, all right.
I returned and used proper procedures this time. When I taxied into the parking spot, there were no Shore Patrol folks and no Marines, so I knew that I had done it. I had beaten the system.
Unfortunately for me, in operations, the clipboard for my airplane had a note: "Report to the safety officer immediately."
The office was on the second floor of the hangar, and my legs had trouble supporting me up the stairs. Any hope for Navy wings was gone. I'd get shipped to the Fleet as an enlisted man — and, frankly, I looked like hell in a sailor suit.
I reported to the safety officer, a lieutenant commander who looked familiar. He looked sternly at me, and I "stewed" at attention.
"What do you always do before landing an airplane, mister?"
"Put...Put..." (now sounding like a boat motor...Put...Put...the landing gear down, sir."
"All right, get out of here and don't pull that again!"
(Bless you, sir, bless you.)
I learned valuable lessons that day: (1) Don't get cocky. (2) Don't get distracted. (3) There really isn't such a thing as the military mind, at least not with the naval aviators I met during four years of active duty. (4) A large number of those sociology majors and French cadets turned out to be pretty decent (fine) pilots, after all, and (5) A checklist is a very good thing to use.
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