As I write this, it has been only a few hours since I left my local airport. The windsock there was as erect as the barrel of a howitzer and swung jerkily, as if being aimed by an inebriated artillery officer. It was a bad day for flying. Or was it?
The blustery crosswind reminded me of one of my early instructors, Dick Kersey. He had called me on a similar day when I was a student. He wanted to know if I had time to fly. Perhaps, I thought, the noise created by the wind rattling the windows in my house had caused me to misunderstand him.
"Are you serious, Dick?"
"Of course I'm serious," he replied. "It's a great day to practice crosswind landings." And without giving me a chance to respond, he added that he would meet me at the airplane in an hour. Click. Dial tone.
Southern California's Santa Monica Airport was the busiest single-runway airport in the world, yet we had it to ourselves on that windy day. Other pilots had the sense to leave their chocks in place and pass time safely ensconced at the local watering hole.
Kersey and I bounced around the pattern and off the runway for 1.4 hours. Rivulets of perspiration collected at the small of my back, even though it was cold outside the airplane and in. I don't recall ever working so hard in an airplane. But it was one of the most instructive periods of dual I had ever had. I made crosswind landings like never before, and the lessons learned on that day have served me well.
So, why, I wondered, weren't some eager and capable instructors out there today to take advantage of the crosswind and teach others under controlled conditions to cope with adversity? This was not a day to cancel flights; it was an opportunity to learn new skills or polish old ones.
That flight with Kersey taught me more than how to teach crosswind landings. It demonstrated that other challenging conditions can be used to advantage.
Several years ago, for example, I had a student who had obtained his instrument rating without ever having flown in a cloud. Conditions can be like that during a summer in the Southwest. On one opportune day, the ceiling at our local airport was 500 feet agl, barely above the minimum needed to complete an instrument (VOR) approach successfully.
With Dick Kersey in mind, I called my ex-student and asked if he would like to shoot some approaches to Santa Monica.
"There is a chance," I added, "that we might have to make several approaches to get back in, and there is a possibility that we might have to divert to nearby Van Nuys Airport until the weather improves. At the very worst, we might have to leave your airplane at VNY and take a taxi home." He accepted the challenge.
Before takeoff we requested a clearance for an approach to our own airport, and we slid into the overcast only minutes later.
My student was visibly nervous as we flew through a rain shower on final. Yes, you guessed it; we missed on the first try, and the second, and the third. On the fourth attempt, we broke out of the scud prior to reaching the missed-approach point. But we were too high for a straight-in approach. We instead circled at the minimum altitude and landed in heavy rain.
It was a perfectly safe flight conducted under minimum weather conditions, and my student gleaned as much about weather flying in that short period as I had about crosswinds 43 years ago. My student confessed that he probably had learned more about what he should not do than what he should, a valuable lesson indeed. It developed within him a healthy respect for single-pilot IFR (sans autopilot) during demanding conditions.
There are many other conditions that an innovative and competent instructor can use to provide training above and beyond the norm. Icing, for example, could be another. Unfortunately, the FAA takes a dim view of anyone who intentionally flies in ice-laden clouds. But there are conditions that can provide a pilot with exposure to ice and still be perfectly safe. I would have no hesitation, for example, to take an instrument student into a high overcast over flat terrain so that a descent could be made into above-freezing temperatures. (Some might suggest that such teaching methods are too innovative.)
Some years ago I tried to develop an innovative way to train an instrument student to cope with vacuum pump failure and the subsequent loss of gyroscopic attitude and heading indicators. Simply covering these instruments is ineffective because a pilot does not learn to detect the gradual loss of vacuum. After all, when the instruments are suddenly hidden from view, the student immediately knows to ignore them and shift his attention elsewhere.
It would have been most effective to cut the vacuum line and install a valve to be hidden in the cockpit and away from the student's view. In this way, an instructor could — at any point during the flight — slowly and realistically throttle the vacuum source. Unfortunately, the FAA would not approve the installation. The inspector feared that someone might take off into IFR conditions with the valve in the closed position, an understandable concern.
With desire and imagination, however, there are many other situations that an instructor can use to prepare a pilot for an unexpected encounter with adversity.
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