Waypoints

The envelope seemed innocuous enough. The enclosed invitation to my high school class reunion, though, stirred up decades of memories. Twenty years. My life these days seems so disconnected from those high school days and the friends that went with them. Throw in the college years with their unique friendships, and then the tumultuous years starting a career, and I feel as if I'm now living my fourth life. One thread common to each of those periods, however, is aviation.

I passed the checkride for my private pilot certificate just a few weeks before graduating from high school, so the invitation to the reunion naturally took me back to those early flying days.

Like many students today, I didn't sprint through the private pilot curriculum. High school activities and the need to raise cash to fund my aviation experience forced me to spread the training over two years. In fact, I passed the checkride just one day before my written exam expired.

Certainly one of the most dramatic changes in the training curriculum over the past 20 years is the way in which ground school is taught. Back in the Dark Ages, we didn't have videos and computer software to help coach us through the course. (We also didn't have microwave ovens to make popcorn to snack on while viewing the videos; you Gen-X types will undoubtedly find this hard to believe.)

A student's only choice for ground school during the Carter administration was to gather together with a bunch of equally uninformed fledglings to hear lectures doled out by instructors who were usually better at flight instructing than ground instructing. With all due respect to the instructors in those days, the ground school experience was plain awful. There were few decent visual aids; the FAA's Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge was about as good as it got. There was something called an Exam-O-Gram that still gives me nightmares. I used Bill Kershner's The Student Pilot's Flight Manual to supplement the ground school material. Bill's sense of humor was such a welcome relief from those other dry texts. Of course, back in those days, it never occurred to me that someday I would have the privilege of working with the man. His words are a welcome addition to this magazine, and his textbooks, with their comical drawings and clever phrases, still bring smiles to the faces of students everywhere.

I complicated the ground school experience by going about it backwards. I went through ground school before ever taking a flight lesson. At age 15, I decided to pursue this desire to pilot an aircraft. Since I was too young to solo, I decided to go ahead and get the ground school out of the way in the winter so that in the spring, when I turned 16, I could delve into the flying part with gusto. Big mistake. Because I had been in an aircraft only once or twice before, even the simplest terms — stalls, VOR, true airspeed, wind correction — were foreign to me. To anyone who asks, I now advise pairing the ground school with flight training so that one brings relevance to the other. And it's much easier to follow that advice today. Back then, you took the ground school when it was offered — a couple of times a year, maybe. If it happened to coincide with your training, great. If not, too bad. Now, using videos and software, students can breeze through the ground-school material at their leisure and when it is applicable to their flying curriculum.

A lot has changed on the flight training side as well. In the 1970s, the Cessna 150 was the trainer of choice at most smaller flight schools. The school where I trained had two. The older one had a push-button starter rather than a keyed ignition. Ironically, many new airplanes now come with push-button starters instead of keys.

The newer 150, which is still doing duty at the same flight school, had a little mirror built into the glareshield. Its purpose was a complete mystery — applying makeup, shaving, flossing? What? I found out later that you could supposedly set it so that you could see the runway behind you during departure to help assure that you were staying on the runway centerline. Yeah, right.

These days, flight instructors and students tote headsets out to the airplane for every lesson; they're as common as sectional charts. In the late 1970s, though, the intercom was just some black box in a few magazine advertisements. No one that I knew used one. Instead, the instructor shouted a lot, and I nodded a lot — feigning complete understanding of every concept that he demonstrated. I'd then take the controls and blunder through the maneuver, only to look over and see him shaking his head. So there we went, nodding and shaking through some 20-plus hours of flying in that diminutive 150, the cockeyed little mirror showing me nothing except his left shoulder.

I eventually racked up my 20 hours of solo time, and the day for the checkride arrived — rainy and cloudy and only two days before I would have to re-take the written exam. (Today it's called the knowledge exam — which implies that one understands what one writes, which isn't always true.) These days, the written exams are administered by computer, at seem-ingly every corner drugstore. Back then, the tests were given only a few times a year at certain FAA offices. Some steely eyed FAA bureaucrat would stare you down as you walked into the beige room (all FAA rooms were beige in those days; it was in the regs, I think). He'd demand to see your identification — in the days when photo IDs were unheard of — and then he'd examine your Number 2 pencils to make sure that you hadn't somehow smuggled in a Number 3. Electronic flight computers hadn't been invented yet, but a few students brought calculators — themselves still a novelty and the size of paperback novels. Those who brought calculators were assumed to be cheaters and were given extra scrutiny. If the calculator had a memory in it, you had to clear it under the watchful eye of the government official.

Recently, I was discussing the plotting of wind triangles on an E6B with a new pilot. She looked puzzled, as if I had started speaking in Swahili. As it turns out, she had never "worked a wind triangle." Instead, during her training she had fed numbers into an electronic flight computer and it had given her back a number. She put that number on a flight log and flew that heading. Magically, it kept her on course despite the effect of the wind. I felt like a dinosaur — Pilotsaurusgeriatricus.

So, on a misty Saturday in 1979 I was under the gun to get the checkride completed or face the bureaucrat in the beige room again. My instructor was not there that day, so I had the place to myself — to pace unseen. The designated examiner showed up an hour late, flying in from another airport in an old (even then) Cessna 310. He was instructing a multiengine student in the twin. He turned the student loose to shoot some landings and quizzed me for the private certificate.

The oral exam went well and the flying — despite the low clouds — started out fine. We went to a nearby tower-controlled airport so that I could prove my adeptness at "working the system." I listened to the ATIS, called approach control, and was then handed off to the tower. I was a regular Edward R. Murrow on the radio. We did one touch and go. Immediately after I touched down, I expertly added throttle, pitched up, flaps to approach, and started the climbout, which to anyone except the student flying seems interminable in a Cessna 150. From inside the beige tower, the controller barked, "Cessna Zero-Eight-Niner, make right-hand traffic. Learjet Three-Two-Victor, position and hold, Runway 32."

My mind raced. The call was for me, but I hadn't heard all of it. I looked at the examiner; he was shaking his head. Why wasn't I following the controller's instruction, he must have wondered. Finally, I "confessed," as my instructor had taught me. I picked up the mic and asked the controller to "say again." "Make right-hand traffic," he ordered — a little annoyed by now that the 150 was bottlenecking his entire operation. I hadn't a clue what "make right-hand traffic" meant. I looked at the examiner again. He was still shaking his head. Finally, using his right hand to make a large sweeping motion toward the right side of the airplane, he shouted, "Well, let's go." It must have something to do with turning right, I thought — always the observant one. I wracked the airplane to the right. He stopped shaking his head. This is good, I thought, nodding. The Learjet was cleared for takeoff.

Eventually, we ended up back at my home airport, the 310 pilot still droning around the pattern. The examiner signed my temporary certificate, with an admonishment that I might want to spend a little more time at controlled airports before venturing very far on my own. I nodded enthusiastically.

Next week, when I fly into that same airport for my high school class reunion, I think I'll seek out that 150 — take it around the pattern for old time's sake. Maybe on climbout I'll even get the runway to appear in that little mirror.

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