Right Seat

We’re at 500 feet and the stall warning horn is blaring. It’s windy inside the airplane and our altitude is annoyingly difficult to maintain.

In most cases my alarm bells would have been going off, but this was a photo shoot, and air-to-air photo shoots of unusual and mismatched aircraft are in our job description at Flight Training and AOPA Pilot magazines. A vintage Pietenpol Air Camper flying off the wing of a Cessna 182 is about as mismatched as you can get and still have things work.

Maintaining relevance to real-world flying is one of the flight training’s ongoing challenges. It’s impossible to train for every situation, so including skills and knowledge in the curriculum that can apply broadly is critical. It’s part of the reason we now have the airman certification standards. These complex and exhaustive standards include more guidance about risk management than the practical test standards they replaced. And that’s a good thing—but given the broad scope of flying available to even the greenest pilot, creating relevant testing scenarios was at best an educated guess. As it turns out, our day of photo shoots created real-world scenarios for at least half the test.

In almost 20 years of flying I don’t think I’ve ever had to put so much training to use on one day.We needed to photograph the Piet—top speed 70 knots—and a Beechcraft Bonanza—top speed around 180—on the same day. The Piet would be from a 3,000-foot grass strip in the mountains, the Bonanza from a 6,000-foot paved strip in the valley. Throw in a photographer, his gear, no fuel at the grass strip, and the need to meet Editor at Large Dave Hirschman so he could fly the Piet, and we knew it was going to be a challenging day.

Thankfully the weather wasn’t a factor. The day promised to be the best of the spring, although heating in the mountains would add challenge to the close formation, not to mention raise density altitudes for taking off from grass in that same higher elevation. I went back to basics, calculating first a weight and balance and then the expected performance of the 182. Lucky for us the 182 is a beast and even with a 50-percent fudge factor would easily get Senior Photographer Chris Rose and me in and out again without difficulty.

Then it was on to planning the formation flight. Could the 182 fly slowly enough for the Pietenpol to keep up? Hirschman is a formation ace, so I knew he would give us our best chance for a good shot in the Piet, which meant it was up to me to try and keep the 182 below 70 knots while doing 20- or 30-degree banked turns near the mountains.

Confident the airplane was capable of it (whether I was being a different story), we set off. And when we arrived back home that evening after a successful mission I tallied up the number of private pilot skill tasks used in one day.

We left from a towered airport, flew cross-country under Class B, used pilotage and GPS to find a grass strip, and flew a steep approach over an obstacle to a soft, and somewhat short, field. Then it was a short- and soft-field takeoff with an aft center of gravity for the slow-flight shoot, followed by a diversion to the paved airport to meet the Bonanza, where there happened to be a 15-knot direct crosswind. After an hour of flying level steep turns and constant-rate climbs and descents it was back home after sunset.

In almost 20 years of flying I don’t think I’ve ever had to put so much training to use on one day. Most days aren’t like this, but if you ever wonder why you must learn something, remember that one day your friend will ask to circle her house, you’ll attend a fly-in, or you’ll want to visit a cool spot with a grass airport in the middle of the mountains. We never know where flying will take us, but we do know that it will be a great adventure along the way.