From The Editor

For most of my adult life I've been mad about helicopters. They are magical machines, and I envy helicopter pilots' ability to make them dance like a dragonfly - but I don't hold them in unreachable regard. They are ordinary people just like me, and when I see them perform rotary-wing magic, I quietly tell myself, "I can do that!"

As an early "Christmas present," I got a chance to try, and the experience taught me several important lessons.

David Borrows, Flight Training's helicopter editor, opened a flight school - ProCopter International - just before Thanksgiving. It's at Palwaukee Airport, not far from my parents' Chicagoland home, and I snuck away for a visit while everyone was taking a turkey-induced snooze.

The weather was putrid. The ceiling wasn't much higher than Palwaukee's control tower, and the visibility was just about as bad. Expecting nothing more than a tour of his new facility (which, in its corporate attire, looks quite nice, by the way), Dave greeted me with an invitation to fly. Alarmed, I calmed down when we turned away from the door to the ramp and headed toward a back room.

Dark and quiet, the room housed a brand new Frasca 342, a flight training device (FTD) configured as a Bell 206 JetRanger, a turbine-powered helicopter. Just installed, Dave was proud of the device and said it was the only one like it in the United States. Frasca had a bit more work to do, such as installing the second and third video channels, but I didn't care. I was going fly a helicopter! A dream was coming true and my rotor madness ratcheted up a notch.

Because I've absorbed every word of the 28 articles Dave has written, I considered myself an erudite helicopter pilot, and I spouted my "book learning" before climbing into the Frasca. Dave, and my copilot, Scott Moran, an Army aviator and instructor pilot working on his civilian CFI, listened and smiled.

Settled in the right seat - the pilot-in-command's seat - I ignored the full IFR instrument panel that included everything from a horizontal situation indicator (HSI) to a GPS. I focused all my attention on that single video channel and processed my book learning into hand-foot-eye coordination as quickly as I could. Sitting at the Frasca's instructor's control panel, Dave gave me a break. My flight started at several thousand feet and several miles from the airport.

I did okay - for a pilot with a lot of book learnin' and .8 hours logged in a real JetRanger about seven years ago. I made it safely to the helipad. My skids didn't parallel the pad's H, but I missed the hangar. Excited and proud of my success, my words must have bordered on braggadocio because Dave suggested an ILS. Hey, I've got an instrument rating, I've flown a bunch of ILS instrument approaches - "I can do that. Let's go!"

Starting above the clouds, my field of vision narrowed to one degree as I sank into the murk, and my instrument scan boiled down to one instrument - the HSI. In severe mental overload, determined to "show them" how good I was, all I wanted to do was keep the HSI's localizer and glideslope needles in the proper places.

Once I broke out of the clouds at 800 feet, life got easier and I made it safely to the runway. Dave and Scott just smiled. Then Dave played back my flight. In my overload I forgot that you make a helicopter descend by lowering the collective. Instead I pushed the cyclic forward - which gave me the desired descent rate, but it also increased my airspeed. During my approach I blew right past several redlines. If any warning horns sounded, I didn't hear them.

I enjoyed my informal flight immensely, and I want to learn how to fly a helicopter now more than ever. If my flight had been a lesson I know it would have been quite different, but I did learn something from it. My flight taught me that - like any pilot - I'm susceptible to the "dark side of the force" - the idea that I can do something for which I have no training, skill, or experience. Thankfully, I learned this in an FTD.

I also learned that book learning is a good thing, but it's not the only thing. To make it worthwhile, book learning must be accompanied by good instruction and practice. This applies to aircraft a pilot knows how to fly (an airplane, in my case) as well as those he doesn't. There's nothing wrong in thinking "I can do that." The key is ensuring your safety when you see whether your belief is true. In a real aircraft the best way to do this is to learn "that" from a competent instructor - not to go out and try it on your own.