The Killing Zone, killer #1

I've finally made it through the first real chapter in the book. The first few pages cover statistics and give background/justification as to why 50-350 hours of flight time is the range dubbed "the killing zone."

I have to agree with whoever said it a few months back (IFR Pilot? Diary of a Private Pilot?) -- the lack of editing on this book is distracting! Seriously, people, a high school kid with a pen could have done wonders to improve the grammar and flow!

That aside, however, there's good information in there. The first "real" chapter, as I've called it, covers the first major reason why/how pilots die: VFR flight into IMC.

I have to be entirely truthful here. My meager three hours of under-the-hood training showed me that, while I can certainly fly by visual reference to horizon, I trust my instruments more than my own perception and am very comfortable with them. Given that, the idea of flying in clouds has not been intimidating. Before you go yelling and screaming that I'm exactly the kind of pilot who becomes an IMC statistic, my training dictates that clouds ahead warrant a 180 and that's what I'd do. (Hopefully; some of the cited NTSB reports and "survivor" stories describe get-there-itis and other judgment flaws that lead to problems and I assume they were all good and diligent pilots beforehand, too.) In the book, Paul Craig points his finger at me and says my attitude is the reason young (read: inexperienced) pilots die. I'm a young pilot. I don't want to die.

I gleaned several useful points from the chapter that tempered my fearlessness (again, fearless does not equate to disregard of common sense) with regards to flying solely by instrument reference. First, and worst, is the idea of instrument failures and how subtle they can be. The fact that gyros wind down slowly and feed you increasingly incorrect information but at a such an insidiously slow pace that you're willing to continue "correcting" your trajectory to level off or fly straight is terrifying to me. On our plane, the suction gauge is at the very far right of the instrument panel, and while it's part of the standard scan, I could see missing the cue that something was amiss based on its read-out in a time of extra stress. Our plane also has this hideously bright red protrusion from the middle of the instrument panel that lights up when suction is lost; I've seen that at engine startup when the attitude indicator was sad and dead, but with some added RPMs the vacuum system kicks right up. Would it come on promptly at the start of trouble?

I don't know airplane systems well enough to know how to recognize or troubleshoot every problem (or most problems, even). Carb ice, check. Loss of suction, kinda check. Blocked pitot tube or static port? Maybe, but it would take longer for me to catch on to that. This chapter spent several pages discussing how to recognize such failures and what to do about them.

The second item is the physical disorientation. My naivete' says it wouldn't be that bad since it's easy to read and rely on the instruments (barring failures). Husband described his IFR training and how very, very different it is to have foggles on and fake like there are no visual cues to overcome versus actually being in a white-out cloud situation where the body very loudly insists on assessments that just aren't right. To demonstrate, he encouraged me to try to keep reading the book while he stood a foot away yelling at me. The book goes into a little detail about how the ear participates in a sense of equilibrium and how motion affects your perceived sense of stability in three axes.

I'd love to do one of those test simulators, the ones where the statistics for VFR pilots are really bad, like the longest surviving pilot lasted 8 minutes but the average was 20 seconds. I'll take their word for it that it is that deadly; I'm not one to tempt fate. But that is just difficult to believe without firsthand experience. When we finally move up to a plane Husband feels comfortable with for IFR trips, he'll have to take me into the soup to demonstrate...

Technical difficulties over?

Husband suggested it was probably a database issue at Bloglines (the reader I use) that was making it show up funny, and in fact today it's back to normal, so, good, I guess... :)

Technical difficulties

Something is amiss in the blogger.com world....

If you're subscribed to this blog using the blogspot atom feed, you're probably now seeing posts from a blog called "Great blogs for you to use." Of course if you're seeing those posts, you won't see this one. I haven't determined what the problem is yet but am looking into it. Perhaps it will resolve itself in time.

I recommend updating your blog reader to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/pilot-in-training instead.

Checkride part 2 part 1

The first installment of my checkride flight finally went up. I hope to finish the rest of it with only another hour or two of work...

In case your feed reader missed it on account of the post being back-dated, it's here.

I'm so sorry for the delay! I'm ashamed that it's been 3 weeks! But yay -- I've been a full-fledged pilot for 3 weeks! :)

Neat :)

If you get Flight Training magazine, check out page 45 of the April issue. If you have an AOPA membership, you can also check it out here.

Should sound familiar if you've been reading along here since September...

Getting side-tracked...

I'm now behind by two flight posts -- the checkride (still!) and yesterday's flight with Husband.

But I'm gonna post on a semi-unrelated topic anyway...

Aviation. Aeronautics. NASA. The universe.

Maybe it's not so unrelated after all...

Husband sent me a link to this 6.5-minute video a while back, and it got buried in my inbox, but I finally dug it up tonight and watched. It's pretty neat, especially when you're fascinated by the topic but, as they note, in your day-to-day life you just don't think about it that much. (There's some series available in full online that's pretty good, if you want more -- Husband, what is it? Is it a Nova program?)

I did have to laugh out loud, though... Not on account of the dancing dork (it's only a few seconds, bear with it), but when they said "8 planets in our solar system." It really caught me off-guard! I guess the change to that fundamental piece of knowledge hasn't sunk in yet, because when they said that, I flashed forward 10 years to when our baby is in elementary-school science class learning about the solar system, and how weird it will be to say "Back when I was in school, there were 9 planets." I wonder if they'll learn about Pluto's demotion, or if the textbooks will even mention that it was ever a planet.