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April 29, 2002 - Stage Check I
I ended up with the Training Operations Manager for my Stage I check -
Pete. Pete is a good guy and besides teaching yahoos like me to fly he
flies Metroliners under a Lifeguard (air-medical) call sign professionally.
Pete knows his stuff - the flying, the training - he especially knows the
equipment. With all the young pups floating around at Ahart he's also the
first person who's asked me about "Stick and Rudder" the book that
really got me over the hump for landings. This really ended up being a
multi-day affair. Those winds that are little corner of the world is
famous for (the Altamont just East of Livermore is the home of the worlds 2nd
largest wind power generation complex) intervened to keep us on the ground the
1st attempt. We could have flown but they like to do the Stage Checks with
weather below student minimums. Every (almost hopefully) flight
training school has their minimums for different classes of pilots. If the
weather is worse than the minimums they aren't supposed to let you up in the
plane. Ahart's minimums are quite reasonable and a good working guideline
for students. For local solo they are 15kts wind (no gusts), 5000 MSL
ceiling and 7kts crosswind component. So for the stage checks with
a CFI along you can go out in much worse conditions but if you go out and it's
worse than student minimums and you can't make your landings satisfactorily then
they don't know if you are good for solo and you end up having to go out again. The
afternoon wasn't a complete waste. Pete and I did the oral portion and
decided we liked each other quite a bit and I did a reasonably good job of
impressing Pete with my vast knowledge of flying. For me the book part has
always been easy - it's the psycho-motor skill I've been struggling with. Anyway
- a few days later and the winds are still around but a little more friendly so
it's time to fly. I learned a lot about the little Piper I've been flying
(turn's out Pete has a soft spot for these low wings...) so my preflight has a
few new bits in it. After that it was off to fly. We settled on
Hayward (HWD) as the airport to
fly into. So it was a simple "straight out" departure to the
West from Livermore to get over to the Bay. Only catch was Bay Approach
was _busy_. We circled for about five minutes at I-580 and I-680 to try to
get their attention. Technically we can sneak in under the San Francisco
Class B and south of the Oakland Class C to Hayward but it really isn't
polite. Well - we finally got our squawk code and into Hayward we
went. Of course for all that work Bay Approach dumped us off in about 3
minutes and told us to squawk VFR and contact Hayward on our own. So that we
did - but for all Bay was busy little Hayward was pretty quiet and the lady
controller was quite nice. We setup for a nice 45 and down for my one
touch and go it was. It was a little shaky (always pressure performing for
the boss) but good enough to get me a pass and off we went to do other things. From
there we headed back out East to more sane surroundings. We didn't bother
with Bay this time - just a little careful attention to I-580 to stay clear of
Oakland's Class C and back out over the San Ramon Valley. Now it was
"hood time". The standard FAA requirements are now that all
students have to have at least 3 total hours of simulated instrument
flying. This isn't to make us instrument pilots but it is to give us
enough grounding in instrument flight that we don't turn upside down and make
the headlines the first time we accidentally fly into a cloud. Well - this is
one area that all those hours on the flight simulator paid off. PC based
flight sims make us lousy visual pilots (it takes a lot of work to break that
stare and look _out_ the window) but they do set us up well for this part. We
did some basic flying - that was easy. After that we did some
"unusual attitude" recovery. This means you close your eyes and
the instructor tries to fake out your inner ear and then put the plane into a
bad spot and then you open your eyes and recover by the instruments. After
a couple of tries it was clear I had this down so Pete decided to try some
partial panel stuff. Partial panel means we "loose" the
instruments that are normally vacuum powered (the gyroscopic compass and the
attitude indicator - aka artificial horizon). For training this means the
instructor covers them with little static cling circles. This means we're back
to flying by the altimeter and the magnetic compass (and the vertical speed
indicator). This essentially puts us back to the 40's as far as flight
instruments but it is a common failure case. So we did lots of
"unusual attitude" recovery with partial panels. Normally this
isn't even done for a Stage I Check - but hey - after all the struggling with
landings it was nice to be ahead on something. All in all it was about 45
minutes under the hood. The longest single stretch I'd been under.
But it was good. You get to a point about 15-20 minutes into it where your
inner ear is a little bit confused and you're ready to see things. For me
that doesn't last long - once you're settled into a groove your brain (mine at
least) is happily refocused on the instruments as their reference and everything
is happy again. All in all I like to think that maybe at least I'll be
faster than usual on my Instrument Rating when the time comes, we'll see. From
there it was on to taking the hood off and doing some emergencies.
Descents, approaches, selection of landing spots. Same thing - Pete gave
me a lot of good pointers - things like how to _really_ get a plane down fast
and help on judging descents and when I could afford to circle to make a
landing. Finally some steep turns and then back to Livermore. It
certainly was a little stressful - it's always a little intimidating being under
the microscope for the first time. But nothing like my Paramedic exams
(like the National Registry) and I did well enough to earn my right to
solo. So I was plenty happy.
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