You guys are pumping me up!
Oh…I forgot…The first day I took my youngest (13 y.o. son) to our muni to see some planes on Veteran’s Day last week, and we just missed the landing of this beautiful piece of machinery, Lockheed-12-A-Electra. This was the actual plane because they told me they are based out of Chino Airport and the I remember the mirror like finish with red markings. While the pilot (might be the husband, or the hired pilot) inspected the plane, I talked to woman (or wife) about it and she was pretty proud about that airplane. She said that there was a problem with the magneto system(s) and they decided to land the plane at KAPV (our airport) rather than going all the way to Chino (the clouds where getting thick in the Inland Empire). They were coming back from Santa Rosa, and they were doing 206 knots with a tailwind. Anyways, she was telling me that there are only 11 of these planes still able to fly…I think she told me this model was from 1939. They rented a car for the remainder of the trip and were bringing their mechanic to work on it the next day…It was gone by the time I went last Saturday.
So Cool!
Oh… You said ‘Mojave Desert’, right? May I ask where?
I learned to fly at Barnes Aviation at WJF (Lancaster). My dad was a Flight Service Specialist at DAG (Daggett).
EDIT: Should have read before posting. I see you’re at APV.
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Yeah, I am just over the hills to the west of the airport. I have hiked to the top of those hills and watch the planes take off and land from the top of them over the last few years.
An Electra you say. Huh. So THAT’S what that row of planes were at Oshkosh.
I took my ground school at the college I was attending. The guy knew what he was talking about and the people in his class breezed through the test. IMO it makes a difference who teaches the class. I’ve known students who went to local flight schools that simply did a poor job teaching the book work. It’s your money so make it count. You want to go to a class that actively encourages questions. And when you take your test make sure you have an aviation calculator or phone app that is self prompting. That way you don’t accidentally enter the wrong unit of measure. the test answers are close enough that it matters whether you enter statute or nautical miles.
I liked the college class because it did encourage questions. People would ask questions that you had, and that you didn’t even know you had. And there was a person right there who could answer your questions, unlike a DVD.
Aviation flight computers:
[ul][li]Sporty’s electronic E6B[/li][li]Circular slide rule E6Bs at Amazon (also shows electronic, but there’s a good selection of manual ones)[/li][li]Sporty’s Android E6B phone app[/ul][/li]You’re going to need an E6B of some sort. I like the old circular slide rule kind because that’s what I learned on; but I’m learning to like the electronic one. I don’t know if a phone app is allowed for the ‘written’ test. (‘Written’, because nowadays they’re computer-based.)
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As has been said on this message board many times over the years, airplanes are not like cars. That’s why pilots have no problem climbing into a 50-year-old airplane and taking to the skies. One reason there are so many old airplanes flying today is that they are required to be thoroughly inspected every year to remain legally airworthy. The following article with video is a very brief description of an owner-assisted annual inspection.
Learning about your airplane through an owner-assisted annual
This somewhat wacky video shows an inspection of a 1958 Cessna 172. I chose it because, unlike the AOPA link above, it shows some of the inspection panels opened up on the inside.
This AOPA video shows a Canadian annual inspection. It’s the same as in the U.S., and this video shows inspection panels removed from the wings. It’s amazing how many inspection panels there are on a simple airplane. Lots of good information in his one.
Watch the videos, and then imagine if your car had to undergo such an inspection every year.
Thanks for those videos, Johnny L.A.! I love the idea of the owner-assisted annual inspection. How much do you spend annually on your inspection and repairs?
NOTHING! 
I mean, 
Alas, I have not yet joined the ranks of aircraft owners.
There was a line-of-duty firefighter funeral this weekend. They had web coverage of it, including a live feed from the hovering helicopter for the entire length of the service (which was basically an overhead of the funeral home & many firefighters milling about outside for maybe 30 mins).
Johnny L.A., how hard is it to hover a helo for an extended period of time? Can the pilot essentially ‘park’ it on auto pilot or is he hands on the stick that entire time?
Since I asked a question, it’s only fair to share something.
The camera got spun in to try & catch the others ahead; turned out to be pretty good view of the the pilot’s hands in action landing. There are some comments that I added below the video to explain it & I’ll answer additional questions you might have.
Do what I did Johnny. My first airplane was a 1966 Piper Cherokee PA-28-140. Small, 150 HP, 4 place, old Hershey bar wing. I bought it with 3 other guys, it had 840 hours TTA&E, one previous owner. My share was $2400, that included the new transponder we had to add. As it turns out, the 3 other guys were Navy pilots, who never landed the airplane like a sane pilot would. They would come in hot and sort of bang it on the deck, probably as they did in a carrier landing. I cringed every time I saw that and thought of that poor airplane suffering such a landings.
I remember viewing the airplane during its annual. They had the inspection panels off the wings and I could see where the wings bolted to the fuselage. On each side there were 12 bolts, in 2 rows of 6 holding each wing spar to the plane. The wing spar was much larger than I imagined it would be. Once I saw that, my confidence in general aviation aircraft increased 100 fold. There was no way that wing was ever coming off.
Consider finding 2 or 3 reliable partners. I wondered about scheduling when I bought in. It ended up being no problem at all. No one really took it anywhere very often, other than an occasional Catalina or Las Vegas weekend.
ETA, that was in the late 70’s though. Prices probably have gone way, way up.
Way way back my older sister was the chief instructor at PAC in San Diego. They got a lot of new Military pilots who hardly ever flown a piston engine much less something small like a C-150. They would not listen. They were great pilots, just did not respect a 150 as a real airplane. Plus, take instruction from a girl…not going to happen…
She found a solution. First thing she did was to make them line up with the beach, stay over the water/beach line, wings level and the nose headed the same as the beach line. They could do that just fine. They did not snap to the fact that they were in a very cross controlled state.
She then told them to hold that and do a full power stall. All hell would break loose. Over the top they would go and be spinning real good by the time the nose was down.
150’s do not power out of stalls & spins like jet fighters do, they don’t do anything like jet fighters do.
Once she had them straight and level, she would say, “Now that I & the airplane have your attention…”
She said she hard the doing great in 15 minutes. They are/were very good & smart pilots. Just had a little too high an opinion of them selves. Once they realized even this little toy airplane could surprise & kill them, they were the easiest to teach.
Just had to get their attention… 
Hovering is the hardest thing to learn, and it’s also the first thing you have to learn. As I said somewhere upthread, your body learns pretty quickly how to make the proper control inputs so you don’t have to think about them. Once you have it down, it’s second-nature. I’m not aware of any autopilot that lets you ‘park’ in hover, but then I’ve only flown R22s and 300s.
The thing you have to watch out for in an OGE hover is getting into a vortex ring state, AKA ‘settling with power’. To settle with power you need three things: Power, a descent rate of greater than about 300 feet per minute, and an airspeed of less than about 15 knots. In this situation you’re descending through your own rotor wash. The more power you add, the harder you’re being pushed down. Change one of the things contributing to the condition, and you get out of it.
The people fling the news helicopters you see hovering for extended periods probably all have at least 1,500 hours. It’s unlikely that they’d allow themselves to get into a vortex ring state outside of training. As far as hovering for a long time, it’s not like sitting in a parked car. The pilot is still making those small control inputs; plus s/he’s watching the other aircraft, monitoring and making communications, watching and reacting to the happenings on the ground, following instructions from his employer, on-air personality, controlling agencies, etc. in addition to flying the aircraft and monitoring its condition.
How hard is it? OGE hovering isn’t hard at all. For half an hour? I couldn’t tell you, since I was paying $200/hour to fly a helicopter. Not to mention that the R22 (in particular) doesn’t have a lot of power and L.A.'s hot weather means high density altitude, and you have to make sure you don’t overheat. For me, hovering a thousand feet above the ground was neat, but it’s more fun to shoot pinnacle landings and to do quick stops and autorotations.
Two Eagles breaks one record (distance), going for a second (time aloft)! 5+ days & 5000+ miles…& still going!
Read the Jan 25[sup]th[/sup] entry to learn about how to control a gas balloon.
…& they got the duration record, also. Landed safe today.
Yes, Rocky Aoki is the guy who founded Benihana
Just saw this post. I’m hoping you’ve started your training or are about to? Some general advice that I don’t think is out dated yet:
Stick with one instructor as much as you can, one that you click with. Switching between instructors is sometimes necessary but doing it too much can have a negative impact on your training. If you find that on many flights you are not learning new stuff but spend the flight doing “revision” so that your latest instructor can see where you are up to, then you have found yourself on the instructor merry-go-round.
How you do the ground school component doesn’t really matter as long as you get it done. For my PPL and CPL I attended the (free) lessons presented by the two owner/instructors at the flying school and passed. For my IFR and ATPL I self studied in my own time. I wasn’t concerned about the order of the subjects, just wanted to get it done in time for the flight tests.
Some pre-reading on the subjects would be helpful but don’t get concerned with studying much about how to physically fly an aeroplane. The danger is you will mentally teach yourself some erroneous things and it is much easier, IMO, to learn such things from a clean slate rather than trying to unlearn stuff from before. Provided you have a good flying school you should be able to follow their guidance and learn what you need when they’re ready to teach you. Ultimately it is a process of muscle memory training and there’s no way to do it other than to fly a real aeroplane.
I recently read a post on an aviation message board from someone who was starting flying and had spent a lot of time with a PC based B737 simulator and felt that he knew how to fly the aeroplane and all about the operating procedures. I suggested he might be getting a bit ahead of himself ;).
If you have the time, don’t just rock up to your lessons then jump in the car and go home. Try and immerse yourself in the world of aviation. Hang out at the flying school as much as you can, talk to the other students and instructors, visit the control tower if there is one and security allows it (I used to spend hours in the tower watching aviation happening but that was pre 9/11.) Hang out with the engineers. Offer to wash the aeroplanes. If training is done in four seaters such as a C172 see if you can go along in the back and observe. There may be IFR and CPL training flights you can observe as well. Once you have some experience you may be allowed to taxi aircraft to get them fueled up or move them from a hangar to the flight line. You can’t log it but it’s more exposure to the cockpit and the startup and shutdown checks.
This is all stuff I did at my flying school. I understand that it might not be possible or practical to do all of this, but the more you live aviation, the easier you will find it.
Last one. Fly at least once a week. Any less and you’ll struggle to retain enough between lessons and will start spending precious money on revision.
True. I’ve flown with military pilots who have never had anything to do with a piston engine. They started on single engine turbo-prop trainers and advanced to big turbo-props or jets. Then they retire to the civilian world and again are flying turbo-props or jets. They’ve never touched a mixture control or carb heat in their life.
Probably not in the instruction manual 
but effective none-the-less and a sign of an instructor who knows how to adapt to her students.
I still have a Jeppesen CR3 circular slide-rule in my bag. I’ve never used it that much to be honest, preferring a calculator for most common calculations, but I’m loath to get rid of it. One big problem with an iPhone anything, including apps and calculators, is that you don’t have tactile feedback. When I’m entering numbers into a calculator I can feel if I’ve made a mistake because I feel my fingers have possibly touched an adjacent button and that will prompt me to double check my entries. An iPhone or similar doesn’t give you that. A slide-rule has the benefit of displaying the “question” and the “answer” all at the same time which makes it easier to check your work. When I do use the iPhone I prefer a calculator app with a history function so I can check back on my working and spot any mistakes.
Besides all that, a circular slide rule is a cool piece of equipment. I wouldn’t worry about one on the bezel of a watch though, too small to be of practical use.
I’m no longer an AOPA member or I’d check for you, but they used to have an excellent offering of books available for those interested in flying. Plus, their magazine is top notch and offers great articles. Flying magazine used to be really great as was Plane and Pilot.
My advice, along with lessons, read, read, and read everything with the word airplane in it.