Archive for category Flight Training

wikiRFM Proof of Concept

May 4

Posted by Chris in Flight Training | No Comments

Last week this thread was on the VerticalReference.com Flight Training forum; in writing a response to it, I decided to just go ahead and develop the lesson plan for helicopter pick-ups/set-downs. I think it illustrates the limited tools available to new instructors and overwhelming task they’re faced with. From the student’s perspective, you can also see that there’s a lack of accessible, quality training resources to start with, and to fall back on when the instructor isn’t able to help. Here’s the OP’s question:

I’m…close to soloing, but not real happy with my lift-offs. Most of the time I don’t seem to have the cyclic centered properly while lifting off, so there is usually some horizontal movement that needs to be dealt with….

I also take way too long pulling the collective…. The last time I tried to speed things up I shot up off the ground and everyone got a little excited.

My instructor wants me to use a little left cyclic to make sure the left skid comes up first, pause briefly when light on the skids, correct and then lift off, but not being able to tell where neutral position is, things get a little hairy at times.

This is a student who’s getting frustrated. He’s not happy with his progress, and his instructor isn’t communicating what he needs. To me, this type of circumstance is exactly the type of situation where the wikiPPLH syllabus and maneuver guide can help a student (and instructor) out.

Think of the maneuver guide as a starting place for your training’s standard operating procedures. My experience was that most schools don’t have a published training manual/”SOPs”, and they don’t use the RHC R-22 Maneuver Guide. This is a critical problem: if your school doesn’t have a written reference for teaching flight maneuvers, how can you study for a lesson in advance? How can you be assured that you’ll get the same training from one instructor to the next? A secondary problem is that the guides that are out there (like the Helicopter Flight Instructor’s Handbook and R-22 Maneuver Guide) are pretty bare-bones manuals that focus on the technical aspects of the maneuver. Unfortunately, they lack context and practical training tips. Add into the mix an inexperienced CFI or two, and you can have a very confused student and an inefficient training program.

For students then, if your school doesn’t have a training manual, here you go. The day before you start practicing a new maneuver, wikiRFM is a place where you can start learning about the purpose of the maneuver, specifics about the configuration and completion standards, and different ways to go about learning the maneuver.

Back to the case that started this all. The student is concerned about his lift-offs, and needs help “centering” the cyclic/preventing lateral drift. Now, the student’s instructor is telling him what he needs to know, but for learning to occur, that info has be be presented and received. The instructor is essentially telling this student what he needs to know, but he’s not delivering it in a way that makes sense to the student: you can see this in the last paragraph, where the instructor is advising the student to prepare for the pick-up and use a 2-step process. You also get a hint about where the student’s confusion is coming from: does he need to neutralize the controls, or does he need to neutralize the movement?

From my own experience, I can think of a few things that could be going on:

  • No correlation: some aerodynamic (eg, translating tendency) and mechanical (torque/anti-torque) concepts aren’t getting translated to the real-world. If the student just reads the assigned books front to back, this is what happens (and was my point in this post). The instructor’s job is to correlate book knowledge with practical skills, and the easiest way to do this through a well-thought-out syllabus. It’s a hell of a task, and more trouble than it’s worth for any individual instructor: that’s where a Part 141 syllabus should help, but failing that, it’s what this site is about.
  • Inadequate pre-flight briefing: it’s so easy to just go out and fly. At a busy flight school that uses 2-hr blocks, you’re hard-pressed to get an hour of flight time, and an instructor that goes all out is lucky to slip in short post-flight briefings (most of which is filling out the log books) and get a drink of water between lessons. In this situation, there’s a good chance that the pre-flight briefing is going to happen on the ramp or in the cockpit–informal environments that lack access to learning aids, are fraught with distractions, and not conducive to quizzing and review to ensure that the student understands. Not the best set-up for an efficient lesson. In this case, the instructor might help drive correlation by setting the student up this way: “Eyes outside. Little left cyclic for translating tendency, little left pedal to correct for torque. Raise collective until we’re light on the skids….” For this to work, the student needs to start the maneuver knowing not only about the steps in making a pickup, but having also learned all those ground lessons that apply to it: that’s what the pre-flight briefing is for.
  • Inflexibility: sometimes cancelling a lesson or changing plans is the best course of action. If during a pre-flight briefing, the instructor finds that the student doesn’t have the required knowledge, a ground lesson is in order and a flight lesson is inefficient. This is where the intersection of a student’s enthusiasm for flying, an instructor’s motivations, and pressure from owners to maximize flight hours come together in a way that can screw a student.
  • Not sticking to a lesson’s goals and objectives: Have a plan for a lesson and stick to it. Sometimes this means going back to the ramp 20 minutes into a lesson. If you brief a lesson on quick stops and go out and do 3 or 4 perfectly, the lesson’s over. The temptation, of course, is to go practice or learn something else, in which case you aren’t getting the good pre-flight briefing you need to make the lesson valuable.
  • Limited tools/experience: This instructor is teaching his student in a way that made sense to him during his training. From what the OP said, it looks like the instructor hasn’t formulated the insight that the student is confusing “neutralized controls” and “neutralizing movement.” He also hasn’t impressed on the student that, for learning pick-ups, it’s okay to be slow and deliberate in the beginning. And the 2-step pick-up process’ purpose (minimizing the risk of dynamic rollover) also hasn’t gotten through to the student. Preparation, knowledge, and experience can all help an instructor recognize when and why a student isn’t receiving the message. Helping instructors prepare, developing and organizing their knowledge, and drawing on the experience of others is where I think wikiRFM can really help. In addition, several respondents to the OP’s question added other techniques that hopefully will add to the student’s knowledge and approach to learning pick-ups. This is a double-edged sword: some techniques were useful and things I had never heard of before, other things were probably inappropriate for this student’s level of experience.

I should also point out that being an armchair instructor is easy, and I’m not criticizing this guy’s instructor. Teaching takes practice, and I doubt I could reliably do a better job. This became obvious to me last week while I was reviewing the aerodynamics of vortex ring state with another pilot who’s sitting for his commercial check ride. Even though I know this topic pretty well, have practiced teaching it a few times, and had my lesson plan right there in front of me, this student threw me off pretty easily simply by saying “thrust” and meaning “induced flow” in a question he asked. Queue me up as the babbling idiot. From my experience teaching CPR, it took me teaching that class probably 20+ times to get to where I could feel confident walking into a room knowing that I could handle 95% of the curve balls students could throw at me.

Thoughts on Pinnacle Landings

Mar 22

Posted by Chris in Flight Training, Off airport | 2 Comments

I had the chance to fly some last weekend, and took the opportunity to do a few pinnacle landings. The pilot who I was with has just a little more helicopter experience than I do, and quite a bit of fixed wing time. He’s done more of what I’d characterize as “real-world” flying (ie, out of the flight training pattern), and his experience shows. We picked a reconned a pinnacle just south of the airport: a nice ridge with a steep drop-off on the west face, and a smooth slope moving off to the east. The wind was blowing briskly up the face at probably 12-18 knots.

Wind is one of the factors that dictates how you approach a pinnacle. When the wind is light, the airflow is laminar (flows smoothly over the earth, following its contours). As the wind picks up, two zones that are separated by a “demarcation line” form. Above the demarcation line airflow remains laminar and smooth–good for flying in. Below the demarcation line, turbulence and eddies are going to toss the helicopter around. The method you’ll read about in the FAA Rotorcraft Flying Manual uses a steep approach that terminates right at the windward edge of the landing zone (LZ). Flying a steep approach keeps the helicopter above the demarcation line and in the smooth air. The downside of the steep approach is that it gives you fewer options in the case of trouble and, especially if you don’t plan it well, can require larger power changes. Also, as the wind picks up, your approach has to become increasingly steeper to stay above the demarcation line.

The alternative to flying a steep approach is to use a shallow approach. I’ll add a disclaimer right here that you shouldn’t try anything I’m suggesting–find an instructor who knows what he’s doing and have him show you. A shallow approach offers a few benefits that I might elaborate on at some point, but one key advantage is that you fly the approach so you don’t have to fool with trying to stay above turbulent air behind the LZ. In this instance, we could fly the helicopter along the face of the ridgeline, taking advantage of updrafts there while keeping a convenient escape route down the face. So here’s how I [tried to] fly it. Both my high and low recons were elongated ovals, with the high recon passing just over and to the east of the knob that we were going to land on. On the low recon, I descended to just above the LZ, flying the helicopter parallel to the face of the ridgeline. The final approach phase was right along the cusp of the of the pinnacle face. The entire approach is lower, and it’s set up to be a shallow descent that terminates right at the LZ. One key feature of flying this approach is that you start with the wind perpendicular to your flight path. As you slow, you still need to align with the wind to stay in trim, so you are moving along the ridgeline laterally as you approach the LZ. Since you never move behind the LZ, the helicopter never enters the turbulent airflow there.

For the record, I haven’t flown much in the last 6 months, and the Schweizer 269A is still a strange helicopter to me (different sight picture, higher skid height, no governor). The results weren’t as nice as I’d planned it in my mind: mostly, I flew it too low and started the approach too soon, so that I ended up moving over the ground sideways and lower for a lot longer than I’d have liked. In theory though, flying the approach like this has it’s benefits–for example, we were above ETL throughout the approach, right up until the point where we came to a hover.

The other pilot took the helicopter and demonstrated how he would have flown it. Not only did he execute his plan much better than I did mine, but his approach had some advantages that I hadn’t considered. Basically it was a hybrid between the steep and shallow approach techniques. He flew the approach pattern the same as I did, but a bit higher. As he lined up on final, he started a shallow descent as if he was shooting past the LZ. Once he intercepted a steep approach sight picture though, he flew that profile to the LZ. The steep portion was about what you’d do at the termination of a quick stop…or maybe about how you’d fly into a confined. His result was exactly the same, but kept us up at a much more comfortable altitude until the very end of the approach. That extra altitude makes it easier to exercise the option of breaking off the approach and flying down and away from the pinnacle face. One of his (well-justified) complaints with my approach was the risk of catching a skid while moving laterally along the face of the pinnacle–even if I’d flown it at the altitude I wanted to, I was still lower for a longer portion of the approach…my approach looked a lot like what a shallow approach to a runway would look like. Some unlucky combination of a change in wind, the lateral flight path, and an unseen obstruction would have ended my approach very badly.

Off-airport landings are something I think a lot about since confined and pinnacle landings are the mission profile for many helicopter operations. No two are the same, and getting your head wrapped around off-airport landings is tough to do in 200 hrs. Even though I’ve read up on different methods, taken a mountain flying ground course, and spent a good bit of time during my training to try different techniques, I recognize that I still have tons to learn. I’m in no position to be saying what the optimal approach is, but I liked the shallow-to-steep method.

The 60:1 Rule

Mar 8

Posted by Chris in Flight Training, Ground Lessons, Navigation | No Comments

No I’m not talking about the number of students who go through helicopter flight school for every instructor that gets hired. Actually, there are several problems on the Commercial Helicopter Pilot Knowledge Test that require you to understand this rule. In short, the 60:1 rule refers to the relationship between distance from a VOR or ADF station and the ground distance of 1 radial. At 60 NM from a station, if you cross 1 radial you will have covered 1 NM of ground. There are some things you need to do, like maintaining a constant heading, knowing your true airspeed, and timing how long it takes for you to cross the radials, but that’s the premise of this problem.

When I went through my commercial ticket, this was a stumbling block for me, and it took me a while to figure it out. I’m not mathematically inclined–1 of the 3 C’s I got in college was in calculus II, and the only thing I remember from that class was that the instructor wore the exact same sweater to class every single day. Yep, true story. Anyway, a friend recently asked me to endorse him for his CPL(H) knowledge test. Before I offered him an endorsement, I asked him to do several knowledge tests and he also hit a wall with these questions. Smart guy too–went to grad school, has his A&P, Inspector Authorization, and rebuilds helicopters for fun. Fact is, the 60:1 rule questions aren’t hard–they are very easy. Why is it that they cause trouble?

Like anything else, you and I can only teach what we’ve been taught, and the 60:1 rule isn’t taught well in any of the helicopter textbooks or the Jeppesen Commercial/Instrument Handbook (which I think is a waste of 0.3 flight hours’ cash). Since you only need it to pass the Commercial and CFI written exams, why not just memorize the answers and move on?

Yeah, you could do that. But I’m guessing that the instructors and students who read this blog are setting a higher standard for themselves. I was disappointed when my instructors glossed over questions or didn’t know things that I knew. Like you, my mission is to raise the bar a little so the next generation of students is a little better trained than I was. So here’s my lesson plan for teaching the 60:1 rule, along with a short animated graphic to help out those of you who like to see concepts illustrated. The animation takes about 30 seconds to run, and I’ll admit that it’s not going to dazzle anybody, but it does more to explain the application of the 60:1 rule than the spiffy graphics in the Jeppesen book does. Now you can impress your students, other instructors, and your friends with your command of this archaic piece of trivia!

Putting TFA’s Lessons to Practice

Mar 3

Posted by Chris in Career Development, Flight Training | No Comments

I thought this would just be a 1-off topic, but as I’ve thought about it, there’s a lot you should be considering when looking for an instructor. In the first part, I said that your instructor is going to be the most important variable in the quality of your helicopter training. In the second part, I pointed out how challenging it is to separate the good instructors from the bad, since most have big aspirations and little teaching experience. That post talks about the qualities and attributes that predict who will make a good CFI. The purpose of this post is to give you some pointers on how to apply the lessons from the first 2 posts to the real world.

First, find out if the school has a selective process for hiring their flight instructors. Ask the school’s owner what their selection criteria are. Take this example of 2 schools up in the Northwest: the first posts job ads, requests resumes, and has a review and interview process. I haven’t been through it–and it might all be bullshit–but at least it’s a formal process for validating what the chief pilot might already know about a prospective CFI (and maybe learning some things he didn’t know). At the other school, instructors are just hired. The owner doesn’t ask for resumes and there are no interviews. Who gets through is based more on the school’s immediate needs, when they graduated, and who the current CFIs recommend (and what are their criteria…?). There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with that system, but does the owner really know what they’re getting? Sooo….

Ask the owner what their flight instructors’ individual qualifications are. If you get a generic answer and nothing deeper (“Well, we look for professionalism, good skills in the helicopter, good attitude, and they have to be good teachers…”), but the owner can’t say, “Well, Bob did XYZ before flying helicopters, and during her CFI training, Sally stood out from the other candidates by…”, then you’re dealing with a flight school that isn’t hiring instructors based on the ability to be good instructors. Does the owner (or chief pilot) relate examples to you that illustrate the attributes that predict who will be a good flight instructor?

Get to know your instructor too, before you sign up. Ask her if she has any prior teaching experience, what she did before flying, what her greatest non-aviation accomplishments are. By the time you complete your training, you’ll probably get to know all these things through the course of friendly conversation, but it doesn’t help you then.

When you do your demo ride, see if the instructor is using the “I do, we do, you do” method, or if he just hands over the helicopter after briefly demonstrating a control’s effect. If that’s what he does (and most will, because a demo ride is really about getting you excited about flying a helicopter), ask him if he uses the “Telling-and-Doing” technique of flight instruction. Every CFI has to know about this method, and the good ones will have learned to put that info into practice (as opposed to just memorizing it for the check ride). You might be impressed if the instructor says he actually prefers the Demonstration and Performance method, but the Telling-and-Doing technique is an extension of the D&P method. They aren’t the same, and the most important distinction is that the “student tells, instructor does” transition. There’s a whole freaking chapter on this in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook, aka The Fundamentals of Instruction or FAA-H-8083-9, so it’s gotta be pretty important! If you don’t believe me, drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy of the FOI with the key paragraph highlighted.

Most students won’t do any of this–they’re too excited about the dream of being a helicopter pilot, and aren’t going to start thinking about their career until some time down the road. Big mistake. Be rational about your demo ride. Almost everybody is too excited or too nervous to make a demo ride meaningful. Consider doing a no-pressure demo ride just for the hell of it, then doing a one-off, honest-to-god lesson that includes a complete ground and flight portion (and the 2 ought to relate to each other…but that’s another topic).

Finding a Good Flight Instructor

Mar 1

Posted by Chris in Career Development, Flight Training | No Comments

Second installment in a two-part stream of consciousness. Here’s the first part if you didn’t read it already, but if you want the short-attention span version, basically I was talking about some of the attributes good instructors have. This part is more relevant to the wannabe helicopter pilot: How can I tell if I’m getting a good instructor?

“I’m confused…isn’t this the same thing you were talking about in the first part?” Nope. Here’s why.

Helicopter flight instructors usually don’t teach for too long–CFI is usually considered a stepping stone to a “real job”. If you get a seasoned instructor in the helicopter industry, you’re probably only his 4th or 5th student. That’s not a lot of time to figure out how to be an effective instructor, even for the most motivated CFI. So when you’re on that demo ride with a bright and smiling 200-hr CFI, how can you sort out if he’s going to bumble through his next 1000 hrs of dual, leaving a wake of confused students, or whether he’s going to figure out how to teach you what you need to know to be a proficient pilot? This part, also based on research done by Teach for America, might be some help. And, maybe, flight schools can take TFA’s findings to heart when they are making hiring decisions.

Attitude is everything in the helicopter industry. Even if you haven’t even learned how to hover, you’ve probably already heard this pearl of wisdom. This part is true: a good attitude will open doors for you and get you through the tough times. But good instructors have more than a good attitude: they have a track-record for perseverance. Effective instructors have demonstrated that they can pursue and follow-through on long-term goals. Simply saying “all I ever wanted to be was a helicopter pilot” and keeping a positive attitude about attaining that goal through the hard times isn’t good enough. An instructor that has successfully completed college or built a business has demonstrated perseverance. An instructor that spent years getting his ratings might be a better choice than the good stick who was in the right place at the right time.

Reevaluation and continuous improvement is another predictor of a good instructor. Again, given the short tenure for helicopter flight instructors, it might be hard to evaluate whether your instructor can constantly reassess his effectiveness and improve his teaching method since even the most experienced ones won’t have been at it too long. One way you can judge this attribute is by asking about their past academic performance or work experience. In this case, the better instructor is the one who might have started off as average but improved over time–not the brainiac who always got straight As or the slacker who never moved from the sales floor to a management position. The instructors that had to work and improve in other endeavors are more likely to apply the same process of reevaluation and improvement as helicopter flight instructors.

Not all helicopter flight instructors have a college degree to point at, but don’t think that means you don’t have other ways of looking at their ability to reevaluate and improve. Try looking at leadership performance. This is more for flight schools than students, but have your instructors taken charge of a project, seen it through to the end, and had some tangible results to show for it all in the end? For example, when I’m reviewing resumes from low-time pilots, I always ask the older guys if they’ve had a business or management experience—that’s leadership performance. Employers want to know this because it tells them about the applicant’s capacity for self-improvement, and this is something every student and flight school should be looking for from their instructors.

Good instructors also apply the “I do, we do, you do” model. This is covered in the FOI, but you really need to put it in practice as an instructor because it works. Every instructor I’ve flown with has skipped the “we do” part (and students are complicit in this–they want to get on the controls rather than sitting and watching). This takes some creativity, and there’s no resource that provides any guidance for a motivated instructor trying to figure out the “we do” part for individual maneuvers. But here are a couple of examples I thought of:

  • Hovering: “Tell me when you see the helicopter starting to drift, and tell me what to do…left cyclic, right cyclic, forward, backward…”
  • Approaches: “Am I high or low, fast or slow? What’s the corrective action?”
  • “Quick” stops: “You tell me how to do the maneuver.” (“Level, lower, pedal, aft…flare, flare, flare…level, power”, for example.)
  • Autorotations: “Tell me how to correct any deviations from our glide configuration”, “Tell me when to initiate the flare and add power.”

This method keeps students from learning bad habits because they don’t understand the underlying concepts or steps. Primacy also plays into this–the first time a student does something makes an impression, and if that first time included incorrect inputs, they now have to unlearn them before they can learn the correct ones.

Good instructors also recognize that students aren’t very good at evaluating their understanding. This tears at the method of assessing students’ understanding by ending every lesson by asking “Do you have any questions?” According to TFA, students may think they understand, but if actually challenged to demonstrate their understanding, they can’t do it. An instructor who merely relies on student self-assessment to judge teaching efficacy isn’t collecting the info he needs to really evaluate whether his teaching methods are effective. (And recall questions like “What maintenance can a private pilot perform on his helicopter?” don’t test understanding–they only test memorization.) Even if students are saying they understand the lesson, or they’re getting recall questions correct, they probably aren’t making the deeper connections that will allow them to apply that information in the helicopter.

In the first part, I also said some of TFA’s findings also apply beyond the flight school environment and into your career as a helicopter pilot. Many of the qualities that make a good instructor are also the same things employers like to see on a resume. When I talked about how a college degree can give you an edge, it’s not about the knowledge you’ve gained, but it’s demonstrating your good attitude backed by a track record for perseverance. Recurrent training: additional education beyond the minimums might demonstrate that you are willing to make the effort to improve your skills above the minimum requirements. And the reason you list accomplishments under your job title on your resume is to show that you can take charge, follow a project through, and walk away at the end with some sort of tangible result.

One last thing TFA might be able to teach you. There are some things that we think make somebody a good helicopter flight instructor, but ultimately they don’t matter. Charisma. Ambition, whether they know where they want to be and have the drive to get there, or whether they have grand plans for where they want their students to be. Extroversion. In the end, a smile and a good attitude is useless without knowledge, perseverance, practice, and improvement. This is important, because when we go shopping–whether it’s for dinner, a new car, or a flight instructor–most of us are going to go with the person who sells himself rather than the person who can actually deliver on their promises.

Knowledge Test Fee Increase

Feb 26

Posted by Chris in Flight Training | No Comments

The CATS/LaserGrade cartel is going to be upping their fees for the required knowledge tests come March (or April, nobody seems to know). The most remarkable thing is the magnitude of the increase…$50 per test. Over the course of your helicopter training, the knowledge tests are going to cost you the same as about 4 hours of dual instruction. Ouch!

What Makes a “Good Instructor”

Feb 19

Posted by Chris in Flight Training | 2 Comments

Whenever a prospective student starts looking for schools, one thing that consistently comes up is that they want “good instructors.” But what actually makes a good instructor? Can there really be good instructors in an industry where most CFIs view their jobs as transient? Where schools show instructors the door when they hit 1000 hrs, if they haven’t already gotten a “real job” lined up? Are there only better and worse instructors? Could you spot a good instructor if you met one?

I was reading about Teach for America this week–this is a non-profit agency that recruits college grads to volunteer to teach elementary or high school students for 2 years. They’ve taken to studying their recruits, assessing their performance, and then trying to figure out what traits can be used to predict an effective teacher. Some of what Teach for America has figured out might help you when you’re looking at schools, and overall, there are some lessons that apply to your career. First and foremost, TFA has found that, while the school is important, it’s really the instructor that makes the difference in the student’s experience. The quality of instructors in a single school varies dramatically though. If you click with an instructor on a demo flight, make sure they’re going to be there for the duration of your training, and that they actually have room available in their schedule. High-time instructors are often getting ready to leave, especially if the spring hiring season is coming and they already have the hours they need for a turbine job. There are also a few schools that lay-off their high-time instructors to make room for low-time pilots so they can build time.

But TFA also found that knowledge is not everything! Simply having more hours doesn’t necessarily mean that an instructor will be successful. When TFA looked at what qualities their most successful instructors had, they found that they:

  • Set big goals for their students;
  • Acted purposefully so that every one of their actions related back to their overall goal;
  • Were always reevaluating their performance and improving their methods;
  • Planned and prepared, and changed those plans based on the results they were getting.

For flight instructors, how might these apply? Well, the first is pretty easily measured: instead of aiming for the 80% passing rate they need to renew their certificate, maybe >95% on the written exams and 100% pass rate on check rides would be a better threshold. Of course, simply setting that goal isn’t sufficient…they have to follow through with that second element. This one’s tough for the flight maneuvers since an instructor can’t just follow a lesson plan; some students will progress slower or faster than others. In addition, repeatedly hammering the same maneuver over and over again isn’t necessarily the best method for perfecting it. For both ground and practical maneuvers, there should be a logical progression built into the lesson plans. For example, instead of:

Lesson 4: Regulations (60 minutes)

  1. Part 41
  2. Part 61
  3. Part 91
  4. NTSB 830

A syllabus that builds knowledge would integrate each of the regulations into other lessons, so students could correlate the regulation with the actual procedures that they execute during their flights. So maybe Part 41 would be taught in this lesson:

Lesson X: Pre-flight Airworthiness and Maintenance Checks (60 minutes)

  1. Maintenance and engine logs
  2. Squawk sheets
  3. Pre-flight inspection
  4. etc…

I’m just throwing this out there. To really cover the regs, there wouldn’t be a Part 91 lesson, but instead one where instructors, say, discuss the airspace requirements for the airport they’re about to fly into (rather than drawing the diagram that lumps them all together and reciting the 3-5-1-2 mantra–even though I have that very diagram in my lesson plans).

Reevaluating and improving only makes sense–as pilots, we’re already doing this constantly in the cockpit. But it’s a hard one to judge when you’re testing out flight instructors. And if your flight instructor only has 5 or 6 students during his 1000-hr tenure, he doesn’t have much of a chance to make improvements. That makes the planning and preparation phase more important. During your CFI training, you should develop lesson plans and practice presenting them. This is good. As a student, you should be able to tell that your instructor has practiced teaching each lesson recently. It’s not so good if your instructor sits down in front of you, then lays out the syllabus and the Rotorcraft Flying Manual and starts asking questions.

With that, I’m officially making this a 2-part entry. Since I’m at HAI for the Flight Instructor Refresher Clinic, it might be a week or 2.

Radio Navigation

Feb 15

Posted by Chris in Flight Training, IRH, Navigation, Take-it or Leave-it Advice | No Comments

The basic model for flight schools is to get students to take their CFII right after their CFI. This makes sense for the school for a few reasons, but in the long run, it ends up costing students. The school’s reasoning is that a CFII is a more marketable job candidate than a CFI, and that CFIIs are more likely to get hired. When schools do hire from the outside, they also subscribe to this rationale. Personally, I’d rather spend my CFII training where I’d be teaching, and it wouldn’t hurt to have that actual flight time to familiarize a new instructor with the school’s SOPs and the environment, but that’s the way the industry works. As a prospective instructor, you’ll have to buy into this logic and finish your CFII before you start looking for work.

Here’s the downside that I see: R22 instrument trainers are in short supply and have a more restrictive CG envelope (from what I hear anyway--I’ve only seen 1, and it was a glass cockpit trainer). Because of this, many schools rely on the R44 for instrument and CFII training. No problem there. But, insurance companies aren’t thrilled about low-time CFIIs instructing in R44s, and at least some of them will stick a 500 hr TT restriction on their policies. There are, of course, exceptions and ways schools can get around this, but if your school uses an R44, find out.

Why does this matter? A CFII operating in this system will fly for several months before he’s at 500 hrs TT and cleared to teach in the R44. All that time, he won’t have given a moment’s thought to instrument flight or procedures, and the teaching methods he learned to pass his CFII check ride will be fuzzy memories. Depending on your school, he may not be IFR current, and his R44 time in the last 60 days may only be 1-2 hrs. Even if you land a CFII that’s close to his 1000 hrs and has been teaching IFR for a while, at best, he’s probably only taken 3-5 students through their instrument rating--not much practice, considering the amount of knowledge that has to be learned during the instrument rating. So, if your school was anything like the school I went to, any instructor you get will be struggling to remember how to fly IFR and to develop effective teaching methods. As his student, you’ll be paying for your instructor to get up to speed.

The best thing for students would be for schools to offer CFII training only once their instructors have the aeronautical experience they need to perform the duties of a CFII. This won’t happen, since there’s an economic incentive for schools to take every student as far along in their training as they can before the student runs out of money or leaves to teach somewhere else. As a student, you can reduce the cost and time you need for your instrument rating by learning as much as you can at home. Obviously you can do more ground training at home. I’d recommend ditching the Jeppesen Instrument/Commercial textbook altogether, and using the FAA Instrument Procedures Handbook as a back-up source. For books, I personally liked Instrument Flying by Richard Taylor. I picked up the 4th edition for less than it cost the seller to ship it to me. A book like this is pretty worthless for learning regs, and I think he still had a  section on the recently decommissioned LORAN network. But he provides a common sense, practical approach to learning instrument procedures based on the experience that your instructor just doesn’t have. I’m not saying you should run out and by that book, but look into some of the video programs and books that are out there. Go over to your local fixed wing flight school, talk to one of their 2000-hr part-time instructors, and ask him what his recommendations are (when I finally did this, the FW instructor slapped his forehead when I told him all I was using was the FAA books).

You can also sit on your couch and learn the skills you’d be paying almost $500/hr for in the cockpit. That was the spirit behind this lesson on how to use Tim’s VOR Simulator, but I know that others before me have done a better job explaining radio navigation, so I didn’t want to duplicate effort there. And here’s one of those others, doing a lecture on VOR Basics. This is a very clear and organized lesson from a well-spoken and well-prepared instructor--I didn’t hear an Ummm… or Uhhhh… in the whole lesson, which gives you an idea of how much forethought went into his presentation.

Tim’s VOR Simulator

Jan 25

Posted by Chris in Flight Training, Ground Lessons, IRH, Navigation, PPLH | 1 Comment

It’s pretty much the Pong of flight simulators, but this little tool can seriously save you on ground school and flight training. I’ve seen friends struggle with VOR navigation, especially when studying for the PPL and CPL written exams, since most of the helicopters we fly aren’t equipped with an VOR or HSI. Worse, an ADF in a helicopter is as common as an AM radio in a new car, and I’ve never seen an RMI outside of a textbook. Yet these are worth more than a few points on every written you’ll take.

Even in instrument trainers, these traditional navigation systems–even if they’re in there–often get passed over for the ubiquitous GPS. It’s just as well. Everything you need to know about navigating by VOR/HSI/ADF/RMI can be done efficiently and cheaply at your computer. You can forgo thousands of dollars trying to do the mental work that interpreting these instruments requires while continuing to fly an aircraft in the real-world (with turbulence, imperfect/absent lesson plans, ATC and radio chatter, etc.). You just have to have the right tools.

When you start your instrument training, you’ll be tempted by Microsoft Flight Simulator. For the cost of 15 minutes in the school’s R44 instrument trainer or a half hour in their Frasca, you can get MSFS X and a joystick. Then it won’t run smoothly on your computer, and you won’t be able to fly the Jet Ranger (but you’ll spend a few hours trying). Then you start thinking about a better machine and rudder pedals, get bored and frustrated, then take a few turns in the Extra 300. 3 hours later you’ve accomplished nothing. Save yourself. MSFS has it’s place for practicing instrument skills, but not in the Jet Ranger, and not from pick-up to set-down, but that’ll be the topic of another post.

Tim’s VOR Simulator, in contrast, is free, runs pretty well, is easy to find online, and you just have to know a few keyboard commands to fly it. It has all the functionality you need to practice simple problems (where am I relative to the VOR?), and can help you isolate the skills you’ll need to fly complex holds and approaches. Best of all, it’s free to anybody with a computer and internet connection, saving expensive cockpit time for consolidating the motor skills that can’t be replicated well even in the best simulators. Tim’s VOR Simulator allows you to set your speed and heading/turn rate with simple keyboard commands. Master that and the program’s quirks, and you can sit at your desk, at school, or in a coffee shop and focus on the mental part of instrument flying (and instrument flying is all mental). Make a mistake, and you can stop the simulation immediately and start over. Altitude isn’t a variable (which further improves the value of this tool for isolating specific skills), but wind can be introduced to teach wind angle corrections.

When you can fly this procedure with Tim's VOR Simulator, young Grasshopper, then you will be ready to fly by instruments.

Most people don’t know about this option though. My instructors didn’t (and they weren’t interested when I showed them). And every few months somebody will get on the forums asking about the best simulator for learning instrument procedures. So I’ve added a Tim’s VOR Simulator Lesson. It’s not a VOR navigation lesson, but just a lesson on how to use Tim’s VOR simulator to learn radio navigation. It’s also not an instrument lesson. This lesson is intended for student pilots working through their ground school and studying for their FAA written tests. The problems are remedial, but if you don’t understand radio navigation, you’ll struggle with them. I’ve also put some simple videos on YouTube that demonstrates these problems (sorry, no audio for them…I’ve had  a sore throat for the last couple of days).

Once you know how to work the simulator, you’ll see how you can easily use it to learn instrument skills (when you’re ready). But in the beginning, its simple interface can actually be a pain in the ass if you aren’t committed to trying it out. This lesson plan demonstrates some simple exercises you can do with the simulator that will open this tool up to you. Once you get past how to set up problems, the biggest barrier to continuing to use it is boredom. But that’s actually what you’re trying to accomplish. When navigating by VOR is as mundane as following a highway, or you can fly some wacky procedure while drinking a beer at 01:30 while seeing what the JustHelicopter trolls are up to in another window, then you won’t be making expensive mistakes in the air.

Really, ADF/RMI navigation, approaches, and holds are so much easier when you can see the instruments react in real-time and test your understanding. While drinking beer. I’ll do more of those video lessons or design some more structured problems, but it’d help if I got some feedback about what types of problems students are having trouble with.

The R22 Power Check: It Sure Sounds Like a Great Idea

Nov 5

Posted by Chris in ADM, Flight Training, Performance, Safety | 2 Comments

I have about 7 posts that are half-finished, new ideas for topics every day, dozens of lesson plans that I still need to add, and updates to my Amazon Listmania for Helicopter Pilots–that’s in addition to the day-to-day drudgery of work and all. On deck, I’ve got a couple of weather topics, especially with the change in season, one on the Hanford crap-to-copter, a post on the work I’ve been doing for Helicopter Academy’s Operations Manual, and I should do a post on why I hate the VR/JH forums (even though I spend 1/2 my free time on them). That leads me to this:

Every year since I’ve been watching the Vertical Reference forums, there has been an “R22 Power Check” thread that pops up. When I saw it come up last month, I thought it’d make a great lesson plan. The thread always gets lots of views, users will put a lot of work into writing their responses, and on the surface, it’s a pretty important topic, right? Now that I’ve spent a couple of hours going over 10+ pages of posts from Vertical Reference, I’m not so sure.

The idea, as I understand it, is that you want a way of checking whether you will have enough power to make an off-airport landing. I’m going to mull over the threads on this for a while longer, but lemme put out this scenario that I got on a check ride:

Bubba & Sons Company has a station on a 6200-ft mountaintop that needs to be serviced, and they’re on the phone wanting to know if you can take Bubba Jr up there in an R22 to do the work. At the airport (2450 MSL), it’s typical weather for the desert in the summer: calm winds, 30 C and rising, and CAVU. You’ve flown with Bubba Jr, and he’s at 210 lbs, plus 20 lbs of gear. The nearest fuel is a 50-minute flight from the station, and the weight and balance shows you need to be at MGW to have the fuel to legally complete the flight. Do you take the flight?

There aren’t any tricks to this question. I looked at the HOGE, fuel requirements, and weather, and declined the flight. The HOGE suggests that the flight can be done, but that’s making several assumptions about the flight–that the temperature won’t be any warmer than 30 C when I get there and that my fuel burn will be at least 10 gph–and quite possibly my abilities. At 200 hours of experience, I told the examiner I wouldn’t do it since it was too close to the limits of the aircraft’s performance, but that’d I’d be happy to send him on it or to take a Raven II. He nodded and said that the customer would accept the R44, then went on to grill me on aerodynamics.

Right here, right now, I don’t see anything to support the need for this type of power check if you have reviewed your performance limitations before the flight. Realistically, you know what elevations you’ll be working in, and from that you should know what your HOGE limits will be. The approach I’ve taken during training is to determine the limit for performance, and then apply a buffer to cover things you cannot anticipate (like humidity, winds calm, a confined area, or higher-than-expected temperatures at the landing site). Reasonable estimates for all of these can be made comfortably while at your desk, and you can reevaluate winds, fuel, and temperature onsite. As long as those are below your limits, you can make the landing. (Since I’ve flown mostly at elevations that top out around 5500 ft, I’ve always had at least a 1000-ft margin to work with. I’m not sure whether this is too conservative to be practical though.)

So, to apply this method to the case above without going on for too much longer, I can assume winds are going to be calm on the mountain and that it’ll still be warm when I get there–maybe 28 C. I can also estimate my fuel burn at 8 gph and determine what my weight will be when I arrive. I can’t do anything about my passenger’s weight, my fuel load (my limitation on reserve fuel is higher than the required 20 minutes), or the landing zone to tilt the odds in my favor. Knowing this, I can look at the charts and tell I’m not going to be comfortable with this scenario. But, I can do the flight first thing tomorrow a.m. when it’s 15 C cooler. By the charts, I get a HOGE that’s 750 feet higher than what I need. Or, if I get to the landing zone with anything less that 1340 lbs, I’ll have additional power to draw on. The odds are now stacked in my favor. If I get there and there’s a 10 knot wind or the temperature is 12 C…Bonus!

The other way of looking at it…and this is something that I’ve used on just about every flight…is to set a limit and stick to it. We’re going to go work on pinnacle landings today? Okay, temperature, weight after 30-minute fuel burn…we can sustain a HOGE below 6500 MSL. Don’t ask me to go into 7000-ft terrain to practice pinnacles. In fact, maybe I don’t want to be practicing pinnacles above 6250 MSL. I’m also going to control for lower-than-expected performance from the aircraft by checking my hover power before departure. Is it higher than what I would expect from this aircraft on this day? And as I’m approaching the landing zone, does the OAT gauge show a temperature near or below what I used to calculate my performance back at base? Where is my MAP throughout the approach? Am I nearing my MAP limit as I’m getting close to losing ETL? I should be clear that I’m not suggesting that a chart in a book is the be-all and end-all to figuring out if you have the performance to land. But that that chart, developed by a pilot more capable than most of us and under controlled circumstances, is one part of the ADM equation (dammit, there’s another post to do…).

Back to the threads. Forget for a second that I didn’t see a consensus method described for conducting the power check, and that there is no procedure for a power check given in the R22/R44 POH or Maneuver Guide, or any FAA publication. But in the threads, numbers get thrown around, such as, “If you have a power reserve of X inches in cruise/in the downwind/at minimum power speed/etc, you can make a vertical landing” or “If you have less than Y inches of power, you can only make a run-on landing.” These numbers come from a variety of sources, some possibly more credible than others, but again, they aren’t coming from RHC or the FAA. On top of that, when they start getting into differentiating between a normal landing, a run-on landing, and a no-hover landing, those would be indications that we’re operating very close to the edge of the envelope. At that point, the question isn’t “Can I do this?” but instead “Should I do this?” Or maybe it’s “I bet I can do this!” that necessitates the power check?

If I’m wrong, I hope somebody with more real-world and teaching experience will set me straight here. But isn’t this analogous to dealing with weather limitations? We know what we can legally fly in, but we should also know what we are trained to fly in, and we should set a further buffer so that if conditions get worse, we have an out. But the whole power check concept seems to be just like the “Let’s go take a look” mentality toward weather. Instead of knowing that the procedure is well within the limitations of our aircraft and our training, it’s like saying “Maybe we shouldn’t do this, but maybe we can.”

Two last things I’ll throw out here. First, there’s the “HOGE power check”, which is something along the lines of getting near your LZ, slowing into a HOGE, and figuring out if you can maintain it. I guess, if you really want to be sure and the LZ you are moving into doesn’t offer any good escape routes for a go-around, maybe this is fine. It does entail some risk, and you may not get a good answer from it if you do the power check under the safest conditions (eg, 1000′ AGL, where it will be cooler and windier). The second is a mountain flying technique that I’ll cover another time, where you make several very slow passes at the same elevation as your LZ. This is for dealing with poor escape routes, downdrafts, weather conditions you couldn’t anticipate prior to departure, and nasty landing zones; it’s also part of a 3-5 pass low reconnaissance. I’ve read about these techniques, but wasn’t taught them. They do seem applicable to real-world applications scenarios that entail a higher degree of risk than you would encounter as a low-time pilot. My thought is that they entail more risk than is appropriate for flight training, but I don’ t know.

Right now this is all just armchair musings–I would like to figure it out though. It’s either a training deficiency–all 3 of the VR threads were initiated by CFIs–or maybe it shouldn’t be part of what students are being taught. As mentioned in several of the posts on VR, most instructors and students can recite the procedure, but they can’t explain the rationale behind it or cite a source for it (other than their instructor). Think about that.

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