Or was it?
A landing airplane groundloops as you are holding short of the runway before departure on a cross-country. This mishap closes the only runway, delaying your departure long enough that it's not certain you can make the flight and get back before nightfall. Until that happened, it was a perfect day for the trip -- now who knows when your next chance will be?
It's been hard to get in your required night landings, but on another evening, you're available, your instructor and aircraft are available, and the weather is inviting. Immediately after takeoff, the one and only radio aboard your aircraft fails, just as the pilot-controlled runway lights (PCL) on the ground behind you are about to switch back off. Your instructor makes a quick return for landing, and the lesson ends early. Class dismissed. Oh -- and remember the day your flight instructor had to cancel on short notice? The flight school told you that the other staff CFI was available and willing to conduct your lesson. However, you soon discovered that this person has an entirely different cockpit manner and training methods from the instructor to whose presence you have become accustomed. The experience provoked feelings of uncertainty reminiscent of your first days of training as you struggled to interpret new and confusing signals. Is this good or bad?
At first glance the answer is clear: very, very bad. But looking back on the flight, you're not so sure. Perhaps something he or she said helped an idea click that had stubbornly refused to make itself understandable before. Long term, there's an even more important lesson embedded in the memory -- namely, that pilots or instructors who fly the same aircraft after undergoing the same standardized training and testing can still be very different kinds of flight companions. To you this means that if you have serious plans to fly after your initial training, you are going to have to learn to deal with an endless and colorful assortment of personalities -- most, but certainly not all of them, pleasant.
This is demonstrated by another example that has occurred -- in this writer's experience -- more than once. Not a specific flight, but rather the thorny environment in which someone is trying to earn a pilot certificate. A student pilot telephones to relate a discouraging tale. She has been learning to fly at her local airport, but her male instructor is overbearing, grudging in his willingness to share his knowledge with her, and prone to bouts of temper in the cockpit. More than once he has suggested that she might not be suited to her goal of becoming a private pilot. Hours are mounting in her logbook, but learning is not keeping pace with outgoing cash flow. Self-doubt has become almost overwhelming, but a defiant inner drive has kept her from quitting.
She has considered finding another instructor, but she views that as defeatism. What should she do? Does the experience have ramifications for the future? Indeed -- it could become as formative an experience for her in aviation as an unexpectedly vicious stall response from a previously tame airplane or the need to wrestle an unforecast crosswind on a solo landing.
It takes all kinds to make a world, someone once said. Omitted from that observation is that many of them fly. If you plan to become a flight instructor, cling to this realization for all you are worth.
If you have read many articles on flight training, you've noticed that they frequently pose situations and how to use what you have learned to solve problems or find the most efficient way through. The most basic challenge in most cases is whether the variables confronting you are telling you to disregard the flying option altogether -- the go/no-go decision in one of its guises.
Once you vote aye on flying, you move on and strategize how best to pilot the mission. An important aid in this decision-making process is experience, which you accrue as much from your wrong decisions as your right ones. Yes -- you will make some wrong decisions. But if you have done a complete analysis of a proposed flight, they won't be nail-biters, because you also constructed a plan for what to do in that event. In politics that's known as an exit strategy.
But even some of the most quickly foiled, seemingly wasted attempts to fly have a silver lining: Call it unscheduled learning. In the long run this facilitates your goals instead of impeding them.
None of the examples given above appeared in a syllabus. They seem little more than monuments to frustration and wasted money. But experiencing the circumstances or events described added a dimension of understanding to the pilots involved that they might have never otherwise acquired. Intangibly, the experience seasoned them. Later, when they presented themselves to flight-test examiners or simply went about their business as pilots, their minds were wide open to the idea that there's never a reliable script for a flight. We hope it goes one way, but it could just as easily go another, and no crying foul if it does.
Don't think that this applies only to student pilots headed out for flights planned on a predictable agenda of training exercises. Even a seasoned pilot on an extraordinarily mundane flight may share this lesson with the fledglings.
It had been a while since the pilot had flown, long enough that it was a good opportunity to combine the task at hand -- taking an aerial photo little more than a mile from the airport -- with performing three takeoffs and landings to remain "current" under the regulations for another 90 days. Traffic was light, and the control tower gladly approved the pilot's request. Yes, it was a routine chore, conveniently blended with the photo mission. But the pilot, who for many years had flown almost daily, set himself some precision-landing goals, then examined how well he did after several weeks away from airplanes. He could also see whether his skill lagged his confidence, or vice versa.
For many pilots, the longer they stay away from flying, the less motivation they have to return to it. Doing well tends to eradicate that problem. Or, he could have performed the dull ritual, shut down the airplane, and never given the flight another thought. It all depends on what you want to get out of your flying.
Thinking back on the examples of busted flights stated above, was the time wasted?
- The flight taking off at night with the radio that failed just after departure made it back on the ground moments before the pilot-controlled lights went off, but it required quick thinking and a hasty, somewhat nerve-wracking course reversal.
- The student whose male instructor was not professional enough to handle his assignment also reported a happy ending. She sought advice, then confronted the fellow and toughed it out to a successful checkride, although she remained bitter about the treatment she had endured.
- The student witnessing a minor accident involving a tailwheel-equipped Cessna 185 landing at a tower-controlled airport had a multitude of questions afterward. Some were somewhat advanced for his experience level, but that, too, was an opportunity to learn. Following the flight his instructor gave a brief description of the design differences between tailwheel-equipped and nosewheel-equipped aircraft. He explained that their landing techniques must also vary. It was also valid to point out that the cause of the accident -- pilot inattention and loss of directional control after touchdown -- was a concern for pilots of nosewheel-equipped airplanes too. The accident also required a quick review of the day's lesson plan.
- The dual cross-country flight on which this student and instructor were about to launch when they witnessed the accident caused a temporary shutdown of the runway, which had to be scanned for debris. This placed the cross-country's expected conclusion closer to nightfall. Fuel needed to be reviewed and weather updated. The flight proceeded, but had it been a solo cross-country it probably would have been postponed, or reduced to a local outing.
So don't react only with disappointment if your planned flight doesn't go off as planned. You may find that what happened was more educational than what was supposed to happen.
Let the experience provide you with a new measuring stick by which to evaluate your future flights, and perhaps chuckle to yourself the next time you hear someone describe an aviation outing as strictly "routine."
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