It's mid-April as I write this and I'm in the final phase of the flight training I began last summer. Recently my instructor Larry and I completed the night cross country flight, so now it's down to the wire, fine-tuning my skills until he thinks I'm ready for the checkride. I passed the written about two months ago.

One of the trusty steeds.

A lot has been covered since my previous two articles. The first covered the very beginning of training, and the second my up and down road towards the solo. This article will go up to the cross country phase of the training. That'll be covered next very soon. In the first article I had some thoughts about the differences between flightsimming and real flying. This time around I plan to describe what to my mind are some of the similarities.

After soloing, Larry just wanted to get me used to flying alone. I'd wondered if I'd get a laundry list of maneuvers to do, but for my first solo hour he had no particular instructions. I was a little edgy. I spent most of the time just exploring the practice area. Larry also said that solo hours would be more productive. The idea was that I'd do three solo hours, and then an hour of dual. I would either have mastered what we were covering and get bored by then or if not he'd need to step in and help. In my second solo hour, I was more comfortable, which was good because I had to deal with some local traffic:

"On a crisp, clear, calm Saturday morning even a little airport gets a little busy. There's a skydiving outfit there that hadn't been active on my weekday evening excursions, but they had two aircraft going this morning. Another student had Larry's other Cessna 150 out when I arrived, and sometime during my practice area time another airplane came in for a full stop.

This is yet another experience that you don't really get in flightsim, local pilots keeping tabs on each other. In flightsim the AI pilots are always going to or coming from somewhere. Anyway, there was a little mental debate about if and when I needed to relay my position. I figured while I was out in the practice area I was all right. The other 150 was staying in the pattern. The two skydiver planes were mostly operating to the north on the other side of the airport, and higher. I almost radioed that I was out in the practice area, but I really didn't know how far out I was. I practiced turns and slow flight and did my first three solo stalls then decided to head in. I knew I needed to radio when I got closer to the airport, and when one of the skydiving pilots radioed that he was also approaching the pattern (though from farther out), I radioed that I was four miles out coming in for the pattern for runway 18. The other pilot acknowledged that he "had" me and would be following. From then on we four pilots maintained fairly steady communication.

I'm not sure how exactly, but the last landing got away from me a little. I was a little too fast and I flared a little too early. I remember saying out loud, 'This landing's gonna suck.' But I held on and let gravity do its thing and ruddered it back straight. So with a little perseverance a bad landing became at least a mediocre one.

Flying was simply real fun today. There was something new. I felt a little more confident being alone and that was reflected in my flying."

Ironically, I never actually saw any skydivers or even the skydiver planes that day. It was all radio. And my landing skills were improving to the point that I could correct a little mistake.

One of the clearest days ever.

This morning's flight was one of the most satisfying of all, even if it was the least comfortable. Yesterday the winds had been 16 knots gusting to 26. The forecast for this morning was for lighter winds, in the 10-15 range, but the forecast was wrong. It wasn't as gusty today but the wind speed was probably at least 15-20.

I was surprised yesterday when Larry told me I could go if I wanted to. He said that I wouldn't get much out of it though, other than maybe something to brag about at the local tavern. I replied that since I no longer drank that that wasn't reason enough to go.

What was even more surprising was the way the aircraft behaved just after being towed out of the hangar where it was exposed to all this wind. It wanted to move; control surfaces where rattling all over. My weight in the plane didn't seem to settle it down any-it still rocked in the wind. I tried to hold the yoke steady with my knee while I buckled up. I was having serious second thoughts. It was hard just staying focused on the checklist.

There was no smooth air upstairs. This is the kind of wind that will yaw the nose and lift you up out of your seat. Straight and level flight becomes something of a challenge. Passing through 2000 feet it was slightly calmer. It was just flat lousy at 2500, so instead of climbing up to 3000 I decided to go back down to 2000. I meant to do S-turns anyway. I seriously considered just going back and landing it was so rough. I'm beginning to get the hang of S-turns. I perhaps wasn't patient enough coming back upwind with the shallow bank angle, and had trouble getting back to even when I was reaching the road from the windward side. I feel had the wind been slightly calmer, I would have really nailed these. I also practiced slipping a la a crosswind landing. Before long I realized I had been up for half an hour and decided to head back. I hadn't decided whether one landing was going to be it or not. I really had to crab back into the wind to approach the field at a 45 degree angle and pointed the nose nearly due west.

When I came in to land Larry was with another student at the end of the taxiway prepping for take-off. As I rolled out, a voice came over the radio. 'And the scores are coming in ... 4.5, 6.2, 7.8 ...' I laughed out loud. I couldn't come up with a tart reply and just radioed, 'Roger that.' He asked me if I'd had enough. I explained that I was debating that, and then told him I'd go for one more. One more turned out to be two more. On the second approach I was too high and too hot, and went around. The third and last landing was a lot like the first, perhaps a little more under control because I knew what to expect.

I don't know if Larry really didn't think I'd get much out of flying in today's conditions, or if he was just giving me an out. If so, he couldn't have been more wrong. Flying today was about control and patience, about taking what you're given but still being on top of it all.

I had more pride in this session than any since the day I soloed. I probably would have bragged about it at the local tavern. Flailing around up there, getting yawed around some and getting whomped on the seat of my pants, little was accomplished technically. It was a horrid day for checkride maneuvers. In some ways though, there was more to learn about flying than any amalgam of maneuvers could teach. I had less moment to moment control of the plane, and I had to trust it. There developed a sense of partnership, but I also realized that ultimately I had to be the senior partner.

This session also made me think more about risk management because it was more difficult to stay in control. I know "risk management" is such a broad term and touches every facet of aviation, but in this context I was again thinking of something more moment-to-moment, something I dubbed as I thought about it on the drive home, "managing the potential for chaos." That day it felt more like I could lose control at any given moment than any other time I'd flown.

How does all this relate to flightsim? I think flightsim can give one the flavor of partnership with an airplane, and I also think in flightsim we must "manage the potential for chaos", even if the consequences of mismanagement are not so grave. This can happen when you're on the edge, when flightsim is at its most intense; when your situation is drawing you in to the point where you nearly forget that you're really sitting in front of a computer. Probably anyone who's flightsimmed for long and taken it seriously has had this experience, probably many times.

These two ideas, this partnership and this managing the potential for chaos are to me the best link between flightsim and real flying. There's perhaps a certain irony this idea germinated after a bumpy, windy flight, because it's oft said that the lack of feeling such forces is the shortcoming of flightsim.

Before long Larry was broaching the cross-country flights. He had to teach me STOL (short-field landing and take-offs, as many of you know) and soft field landings and take-offs.

OK, I cheated and used one of my cross country pics.

On the short field take-off, we got the airplane as close as we could to the edge of the runway and lined up. With the brakes locked, full power was applied and the brakes released. Larry said the idea was that we had to clear a 50 foot wire running across the midpoint of the runway. Instead of rotating at 50 KIAS, we rotated at 45 and took off at 52. The plane was able to be pitched up at a pretty good angle and still the airspeed rose to 60. We held the airspeed there until the airplane was about 100 feet off the runway, and then the nose was lowered until we reached the normal best rate of climb speed.

The short field landing is essentially a full flaps landing, but the airplane is guided in a little lower before the threshold to reduce carry past the threshold. When he demonstrated it, I thought he might touchdown short, or scrape the little lights right at the edge of the threshold, but we carried over. The idea here is to get the airplane configured with full flaps, a 55 KIAS approach speed, and touchdown on or before the numbers. Because this must be more precise, there is more power adjustment going on during the approach. Larry said to make gross adjustments with the throttle, fine adjustments with pitch.

Soft field take-offs and landings are to be used for wet grass and dirt fields, where the nose wheel may have a tendency to get stuck. For the takeoff, one notch of flaps is deployed before rolling onto the runway. A key is not to stop the airplane here, as is done on a short field take-off, so the nose wheel is rolling through the muck and doesn't have much chance to sink into it. Similarly, once full power is applied, the nose is lifted completely of the runway. So configured, the 150 will lift-off at only about 40 KIAS, but since the idea is only to get out of the muck and no obstacle is involved, once positive climb is obtained (40 feet), the nose is lowered, the flaps retracted, and airspeed gathered.

Counterclockwise from top: pitot tube, strut, and potential forced landing sites as viewed from 3000 feet.

Soft field landings are sort of what I'd been doing quite a bit with my flaps landings. In other words, the plane is flared a little high, about 6 feet. Back pressure is applied and the airplane is allowed to slowly sink and maybe even drop the last foot or so. The difference is that the yoke is kept back and the nose is kept off for as long as possible. Larry said that with a real soft field, the mains will catch some and the nose will be forced down abruptly anyway, so keeping it up is partly to counteract that tendency.

Cross-country is just around the corner, Larry pointed out a little later when we were chatting in the office. He said after my next series of three solo flights he would go up with me and check me out for cross country. I have mixed feelings about this. I'm excited to be progressing to the point of consideration for cross-country. Sometimes, though, it all seems to be going too fast and I know that someday it will all be over all too soon. Time is funny that way.

I believe it was after this lesson Larry said I'd seen everything there was to see that may be on the checkride. It seemed I might be closer to the end of the training than the beginning. That day I thought I'd handled the precision take-offs and landings fairly well. I'd been practicing landing with full flaps before that and it had paid off. In some ways it didn't seem like that long ago I was struggling "just" to solo and now Larry was talking about cross-country and checkrides.

Though I was later cleared for cross country, it was after this lesson that I also began to think about and discuss what I might do with a license once I got it. I started discussing maybe buying a plane and started checking into rental options. When I embarked on this trail, it was doing just for the sake of doing and what might happen afterward never really mattered so long as I got to do it. When Larry read about all this dream-chasing stuff in my first article before its submission, he'd raised an eyebrow and said something like, "Having a license opens doors. It gives you opportunities. Some people fly for business. Some go on to instructing and others on to aerobatics. And some people just go up once in a while and fly around the yard and smash bugs with the windshield. You have the opportunity to do any of those things." I didn't see myself using an airplane for business and I wasn't sure about aerobatics. Instructing someday would maybe be fine if I had the right stuff, but didn't seem plausible. Though by no means resigning myself to it, I began to think about how being one of the bug-smashers might not be too bad. After all, it was the flying that always mattered.

Joe Zuzul
jzzl@earthlink.net