It’s a no-flying kind of day, so I’m out walking and listening to my aviation textbook audiobook.
With the grey clouds obscuring the horizon and the scrubby trees, it almost feels like home.
Almost…
The first year of flying
So 2024 is over. My first 6 months of flying are done. As of 6 months I’m ready for my commercial checkride, just waiting my turn to take the test.
I’m going to call that zero-to-commercial in 6 months, since the only factors slowing me down are out of my control. 😎
This is considered to be rather fast. The last several months I’ve flown more hours in a month than most of our instructors. Most students are going quite a bit slower.
Why did I do this? Well, I’m incredibly lucky. Between money saved up and available loans, I could afford to take the time off work and do nothing but flying. There’s no way I could have done this if I had to balance work in with it. I don’t fly Friday evenings or Saturdays, due to two board-game-night events we go to weekly, but every other day of the week I was trying to fly, and hanging around the airport trying to learn things when I wasn’t flying.
People do it faster than I did. They fly multiple times a day. You can do it in about 3 months, weather permitting. I wouldn’t do it that way though. I went into this wanting to get it done, but now that I have I’m glad I didn’t go faster. You need time to absorb things and spend more time talking to people and thinking through different scenarios and conditions. If I’d been done in 3 months I would’ve gotten done before the real clouds showed up and I would’ve graduated without ever flying in real weather.
So all in all I think it’s working out for the best.
The flying software I use tracks my year in review and has some interesting statistics:
That 0.9 though… Just needed to fly a bit more and I’d have around-the-world in 6 months!
As a software engineer I’m a little disappointed in foreflight, their averages don’t take into account the number of months I was flying, they just assume it was all year. Oh well, still cool to see!
A couple of notable trips on that map are my jaunt up to 1K1 in Kansas. Flew up there to get a hamburger. Actually it was because getting your Commercial certificate requires you making a 500 mile solo trip, but the story is better the other way. 😉
So what’s next?
I’ll take my commercial checkride soon, which allows me to get paid to fly. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of jobs you can get hired for until you’ve got quite a few more hours. Airlines for example are typically 1500+ hours required. So what most people do is exactly what I’m going to do: teach!
As soon as I get my commercial I’ll start working on taking my CFI, or Certified Flight Instructor, tests. Once I’m a CFI I’ll start looking for a job, and hopefully the school I’m at will be looking for someone! And then it’s just keep flying and building time, hopefully while getting paid, until I have enough hours to get hired for a big-boy job! (In this industry insurance rules, and companies can’t hire you until you’ve got the experience that their insurance policy requires.)
Onward and upward!
Cloud surfing unlocked!
So this post is incredibly out of date now, I realized I had never actually posted it. Whoops.
Please pretend, for the purpose of this message, that it’s November 29th 2024, just over a month ago now, but also last year somehow.
Its a beautiful Texas morning. For them past two months I’ve been flying at night, with blinders on, staring at instruments and not looking out the window. We learn how to do this so we can go touch the clouds, but not the scary clouds. Imagine a day where you can’t see above the 4th floor of tall building because the clouds are so low. We’re practicing to take off, fly, and land the plane in clouds like that…
It’s way more fun than it might sound. Take a look!
Am I 400 feet off the ground or 7000 feet up in the sky? Only by looking at your instruments can you know! I seem to be having fun though, so it can’t be too bad.
So you take off and disappear up into “the soup” as we call it. Can’t see a thing. Air traffic control is telling you which way to turn on its your job to do what they want, they’ll keep you safe from other planes, big manmode objects, and mountains. (Not that we have any of those…)
When flying like this you don’t really get to pick anything about whot you’re doing other than your destination. You tell ATC where you want to end up, they tell you how to get there.
Sometimes though it works out, and their instructions put you someplace really cool.
That’s what instrument flight is all about right there. Flying when you can’t see, and seeing really awesome views when you can!
One of the craziest things though is approaching an airport. We have a number of different tools to use that keep us right on track. Imagine that your car GPS that tells you “turn left in 500 feet” ALSO tells you “descend 200 feet, at a constant rate of 333 feet per minute”. It’s not quite that easy, but that’s the idea. You’re flying along, following your desired path, and then suddenly the clouds part and you’re about 300 feet above the runway and 20 seconds later you’re on the ground.
It’s a lot of fun.
Being allowed to fly in clouds requires passing a written test, an oral exam, and then a practical check-ride where the examiner goes out with you and watches you perform the necessary procedures.
Long story short: I passed!
Now I can go flying clouds, as long as they aren’t angry clouds!
Getting instrument is also an important step in getting to my Commercial license, which allows my to get paid to go fly.
As of passing my checkride I have 206.6 hours of total time as pilot in command. Time to start practicing the new maneuvers required for the Commercial checkride, which I can take when I get to 250 total hours.
(And a big thanks to my wonderful instructor Edwin for taking these videos. I was so busy flying I would never have thought of it, and I love being able to show them to you!)
Doing it in the dark…
I was reminded that I haven’t made any updates about the flying lately. Well there’s a reason: there hasn’t been anything to show off, or even really to see!
I’ve been training for my Instrument Rating, which involves doing a lot of flying with a view limiting device on. There are a number of different view limiters, everything from foggy glasses to big hoods, but they all do the same thing: prevent you from seeing outside the plane. The goal is to practice flying as though we were in the clouds and only have our instruments to guide us.
In order to practice this we need a second pilot in the plane to act as a safety pilot and keep looking out the window to make sure we don’t run into anyone. This doesn’t have to be an instructor, so in order to save some money (sorry instructors!) we go out with another student and one of us simulates being in the clouds while the other acts as safety pilot. And we’ve mostly been doing it at night in the dark because one of the other things that we need to build hours for is night flying time. And also it’s much cooler at night.( Yes, I’m aware that it’s October. Apparently the sun is not. Still, I’ve been getting to almost 100 degrees during the day here.)
So there’s not a lot for me to show off. All I’ve seen for the last 30 hours of flying or so is this:
Instrument flying is super fun for me though. It’s very by-the-numbers, very precise, very Josh.
Because of the way training works we students simply need to go practice, or “time build”. We need to get to a certain number of hours to be able to take the next test. Currently I’m working on getting the necessary time under the view limiting devices for by Instrument Rating, and then I’ll need another 100+ hours to get to the minimums for the commercial rating. And after that is the long climb to 1500 hours to have enough that insurance companies will let you get hired by the big companies!
So we just go out and fly around and practice. The other night we went to 7 different airports all around the DFW area, just to practice our approaches to landing. While we were out I had my safety pilot, Breck, take a quick picture so at least I’d have something to show you:
Last night I did my required long cross-country (250 nautical miles, landings at three different airports) with my instructor Nathan. We were out for 4.1 hours, and we were on an actual flight plan for the first time. Between air traffic control telling us exactly where to go, and using the autopilot to stick to the path given to us, there’s not a lot of hand-on-the-yoke flying that actually happened. Seems like cheating, but in practice learning how to utilize the autopilot and stick to the dictated route is a large part of learning to fly the big planes!
On one of our night flights I did sneak a peek outside for a minute and grabbed a (blurry) picture:
I’ll be done with the required simulated-instrument time after just one more flight, and we’ll go to taking turns, so I should get the chance to appreciate the view a bit more soon. (I took Bevin out for her first night flight on Sunday and it was great to be able to look out across the city while we flew over it.)
Back to work on preparing for the instrument rating test, coming up soon!
License to Learn acquired!
Exactly 3 months after my first flying lesson I started my final exam to become a certified Private Pilot. June 19th 2024 to September 19th 2024. We completed the oral portion of the exam on the 19th successfully after a couple of hours in a conference room with me answering questions about flight planning, rules and regulations, decision making, etc…
We were going to do the flight portion the same day, but due to weather and scheduling it took a few days to finish the actual flying portion of the exam, and that got done on September 22nd 2024.
I’m going to count it as a 3 month journey though!
It was a great morning to go fly, definitely worth getting up early for. The air at 7AM is lovely and smooth, no crazy thermals yet, and the winds haven’t picked up.
We did our landings first because there was nobody else flying yet really, and it was great to get that done in the super smooth morning air. It’s much easier to get super accurate soft landings when the hot texas sun hasn’t heated up the ground and started creating thermals yet. Then we took off on our simulated cross-country flight, and pretended to do a diversion to an unfamiliar airport. Navigated to that successfully, and we started doing some maneuvers. Everything went really well, but by the end when we were doing our S-Turns the winds and thermals were starting to pick up so it started getting a little tough. You can see the S-Turn over there on the upper left though, it doesn’t look too bad! Then we headed home! Long as you can land the plane safely it’s a pass, no pressure now!
After the landing, the examiner asked me if I was left handed. I’m not, so he asked if I was left-eye dominant. I am! He diagnosed this as the cause of why I’m always slightly to the left on my landings. Which, in retrospect, I should’ve absolutely realized. Cross-dominance has always been a problem for me with shooting as well! Next time I land I’ll close my left eye for a second to check my alignment, and I should be able to land dead center. The good news is that left-eye dominance means I won’t have any trouble staying right on centerline when I’m an instructor and sitting in the right seat.
What this means
The Private pilot certificate is the first level of license you get. This allows me to fly on my own, pretty much anywhere I want to, as long as the weather conditions allow it. I can’t fly in weather that prevents me from seeing the ground or requires use of instruments. I can only fly up to 18,000′ above sea level. I can’t get paid to fly at all, but I can carry passengers now!
And starting tomorrow we start learning to fly with instruments only! (IFR)
Once I get that certificate too I’ll be able to fly even when there are clouds and I can’t see the ground. After that comes the Commercial certificate, which will allow me to get paid to fly airplanes. Both of these next certificates require largely “time building”, or just practice. For example the biggest chunk of the requirements to get your IFR certificate is having 50 hours of practice doing cross-country flight. (Anywhere over 50 miles away from your starting airport.) So it’s time to get out there and do some flying!
After we were all done with the exam instructor Nathan and the school owner Torrey gave me a pin. I earned my wings! 🙂
The Private Pilot certificate is commonly called your “License to Learn”, because now you’re at a stage where you’ve still got a lot to learn. There’s a lot of things I’ve barely experienced, or haven’t experienced at all. So the main idea now is to try and get that practice, and try and get exposure to as many things as possible! Try flying into unfamiliar airports, try navigating in areas you don’t recognize landmarks for, learn to fly some different planes, learn to fly around mountains and over water, all sorts of fun things.
Stats
In my 3 months of training I have logged 48 flying lessons, 3 ground lessons (I did most of the ground school stuff as self-study before I even started flying), and my total logged time flying the plane is 79.9 hours as of the end of the 1.3 hour checkride.
56.8 hours (34 flights) were in Piper Warrior PA-28-161s.
10.5 hours (7 flights) were in Piper Cherokee 180s.
12.6 (7 flights) were in a Cessna 172.
23 flights (36.2 hours) were with my primary instructor Nathan, 13 flights (22.6 hours) were with my secondary instructor Edwin, and 3 flights (5.2 hours) were with Maddie, who, being one of our mechanics as well as an instructor, schooled me on how to best keep the planes happy and healthy! All in all that makes 64 hours of instruction received.
I flew 9 flights, for a total of 14.6 hours, solo.
I have landed the plane a total of 269 times, 195 of which were touch-and-gos where we land and just take back off again.
Nautical Miles
In a comment on my last post Marcia asked about Nautical miles. It’s a good question, so here’s the quick answer:
A statue mile is 5,280 feet. A nautical mile is slightly longer at 6,076 feet.
Both ships and airplanes use Nautical miles rather than the regular (“Statute”) miles for navigation because we talk about navigating over very large distances where the curvature of the earth starts to matter. A nautical mile is based on the size of the earth at the equator. If you were to look down at the earth from above the north pole and imagine the circle of the equator. Divide that circle into 360 degrees. These are the lines of longitude you might be familiar with. Take the space between any two of those degree lines and divide it into 60 smaller lines. These are called “minutes of arc”, and that’s a nautical mile. 60 nautical miles * 360 degrees of longitude means it’s 21,600 nautical miles to go all the way around the equator.
And a “knot” is miles-per-hour in nautical miles. So 60 knots is 60 nautical miles per hour, or 1 degree of longitude per hour, which means it would take you 360 hours, or 15 days to go all the way around the equator at that speed.
So basically navigation over long distances uses “Nautical” miles because they divide more easily into the latitude and longitude lines on the map, and makes it easier to go back and forth between GPS coordinates and distances.
Just one of those weird things that you do to make life easier when you have to deal with living on a sphere rather than a nice flat map.
A report from the wild black yonder…
Flight turned out to be exactly 3 hours, 275 nautical miles, and 13 landings!
What the map doesn’t show is that we flew right through 2 really busy airspaces. Right in the middle there, just below the lower green line, is DFW. We went right over it! And just to the right of that you can see Love Field too. First time I’ve had commercial airliners flying under me!
Can’t really get good pictures from a cell phone, but I couldn’t not take one or two at least.
You can only really tell its downtown by looking for the blue and green building lights right about center.
Each one of those little islands of light in the dark are 2 DFW terminals, with a freeway running left-right between them.
Probably the biggest lesson of my first cross-country night flight is that airports are hard to see from the side! Thank goodness for GPS.
We flew down to Terrell and did a stop-and-go, and then flew right across DFW to Alliance and did more landings there. Their runway is huge, and also very well lit, which made it pretty easy. When a flock of 767s showed up we went out to Decatur and did a few more there on a not-large and not-well-lit runway for quite a different experience. Then came home and did a few more at Denton to get ourselves to 3 hours. 9:11PM to 12:11AM!
Was definitely a good first experience with night flying. Looking forward to when we do more night flying for the instrument-flying training!
And miles to fly before I sleep…
Specifically, over 100 nautical miles. And three hours of total flight time. And 10 landings and takeoffs.
All in the dark.
The sun is a big red ball just starting to kiss the horizon. It’s time to pre-flight the plane.
Solo from another angle
Got a couple of videos and pictures of my first solo from my instructor.
He’s done this a number of times before, but I imagine at least the first few times you send a student off on their own it must be a little nerve wracking to watch.
Here are the videos of me taking off and then coming back! We have two runways at Denton and the larger closer one is closed for re-paving this month, so I’m off on the smaller one in the distance. Don’t worry, I’m well clear of all those dirt piles and construction trucks. 🙂
There’s a tradition in aviation of cutting off a student’s shirt tails after their first solo.
Back in “the day” most training aircraft had seats front-and-back rather than side-by-side, and the student sat in front. The instructor would tug on the student’s shirt tails to get their attention so they could give them instructions via hand signal. Cutting off the student’s shirt tail became a tradition that meant that the student was ready to fly on their own without the instructor tugging on them all the time.
Considering how much more I’ve learned just in the few days since then, I’m not sure that tradition wasn’t a bit premature! 😀
And on top of all that it was instructor Nathan’s birthday! So we sent him off to have a birthday dinner and I helped one of other instructors push all the planes back in, all with my back hangin’ out since I left my other shirt in the car. 😀
And what did I do next? Went to see a movie with my buddy Bradley, who is learning to fly at a different school and had a big test the next morning. We needed a brain break, and Deadpool & Wolverine provided it!
The shirt I picked was one that I had brought home from my recent trip to Seattle to help clean out my grandfather’s apartment after he passed. The colors remind me of him, and I figured if I’m going to have parts of a shirt framed and hanging on my wall I might as well have two memories out of it! Grandpa spent almost his entire career working at Boeing and worked in different areas on various planes. I brought home most every memento that he had collected. The day before my solo, on my way out for that day’s flight I stopped and got the mail and got some items Mom had found and sent me. I had tossed them into my flight bag, and forgot to take them out. So these items went with me on my solo, as well as my next solo the next morning!
Grandpa had a collection of these sorts of things, presumably from events he went to. Other than the 777, I don’t actually know if he was involved in these specific programs or if he just went to the events, or maybe just bought them in the gift shop, I really don’t know! I picked a couple to show here because they’re from the year I was born, which seemed cool. 100th 767 on July 24th 1984, the 600th 747 on July 27th 1984, and the rollout of the first 737-300 January 17 1984, as well as a 777 pin, which was a program I know he worked on.
In other flying news, yesterday I flew to Ardmore Oklahoma and back, which is about 45 minutes one-way. We’re in the phase of training where we’re learning about how to plan and execute long cross-country trips. Pretty fun, and plenty more to learn!
Flying Solo
So last night was my first time flying a plane all by myself! That flight is one where you just take off, go around, land again, and do that twice more.
And lucky enough for me the plane was available again this morning early, so after a couple hours of sleep and pushing it back out of the hanger, I’m off again!
Seems weird not to have someone sitting in the right seat! Plane actually feels pretty roomy this way!
So for my first flight away from the airport by myself I’m just flying over the nearby lake Ray Roberts and the rural area on the north side. Just going to do some practice maneuvers, try and draw some shapes in the sky! Before I start though I needed to snap a picture. It’d be way to easy to just cruise and enjoy the view, but I gotta practice!
Winds were a little weird today, so my circles were not a great success. Had some other traffic as well which forced me to abort a few of them. Good practice though, and tons of fun.
Next up, on Friday, is a cross-country trip up north to Ardmore and back.
I haven’t posted about this yet because so far it’s absolutely boring going around in circles and no time to take pictures. Some statistics though:
- I now have 34.4 hours of time flying over 23 flights. Minus the 1.7 today and the 0.9 yesterday means I had my first solo at 31.8 hours, after 22 flights with instructors.
- I have now landed a plane 114 times. It took about a hundred before I was consistently okay.
- I have flown 5 different aircraft across 3 different types.
- I’ve flown with two different instructors, split about evenly between them.
- I don’t have mileage count, that’s not something that really gets tracked. For reference though today’s flight was about 150 miles. I’m probably at about 2500-3000 miles flown, never getting more than 50mi from the airport.
Now I’m stuck to the ground until Friday morning, which means it’s time to get back to studying the books! So much yet to memorize.
If you know, you know…
No, I’m not freaking out.
I think maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet…