Stick or yoke, throttle left or right handed. Takes about 5 minutes to be cool with it. Engine controls in non-standard positions are much more scary. If you are not used to Beech Barons, in tense situations you can move the wrong control real easy. Ask Cessna about the first 175’s… They had the mixture & the carb heat reversed from standard position in relation to the throttle. Got changed back PDQ… :rolleyes:
I am long legged so heel brakes are a PITA for me.
I prefer manual flaps ala Cessna, & 40 degree barn doors…
Electric trim on the yoke / stick is great especially in a twin or any plane that needs a lot of trim change between cruise & touch down. Want the manual wheel there also as sometimes thinks quit working at the most inopportune times… :eek:
I do better aerobatics with a stick. That is from terrible to just bad. Never got to practice nuff and I get motion sick from repeated heavy G’s.
I got chased by an Airbus last night :p. We were landing at Richmond Int’l and when I entered the Charlie and called tower, he told me to do a straight-in landing on Rwy 16. Now, 16 is for the big boys, not little baby planes like my C-172. It’s 9000 feet long and lit up in every way possible. I felt honored.
Tower also said there was a jet landing on the opposite runway. No, not the parallel…the opposite. Rwy 34. I didn’t even know they could do that. Of course, it landed well before us and was long gone before we got there. It was still cool to watch.
So then we request a stop 'n go. That’s when the tower tells us “traffic 10 nm behind you, landing on rwy 16, type Airbus.” So we go “Uh…OK. Full stop, then.” and we get cleared. We then hear him call the Airbus and say “traffic ahead of you, type Cessna, doing 100 kts.”
So my instructor tells me to just throttle up, keep the flaps up, and land at 90 kts. “We’ve got 9000 feet,” he says, “we won’t have a problem stopping.” So I did just that. I landed at almost full throttle and no flaps. And let me tell you, it was a glorious landing. So smooth, so controlled. We slammed on the breaks and hook off the runway onto Txwy C. My heart’s pounding, but I’m exhilarated. I’m thinking “I’m now, officially, a bad ass.”
Reminds me of something that happened to me back when I was working on my private certificate. I was at Hanscom airport in Bedford, MA, a dual military/private field, getting ready to do some touch and goes.
When I was ready to take off there was a big ass high wing military transport plane that was holding on the runway waiting for his clearance. The guy in the tower told me that if I thought I could taxi under his wing and get in front of him I could take off. His wing was so far above my little 182 I was able to taxi under it with no problem.
Just as I emerged from under his wing I was cleared for takeoff and I responded, “Cessna AB123, cleared for takeoff. Big ole plane I just taxied under, caution wake turbulence.” The pilot of the big plane keyed his mic and laughed.
Commercial (it just means that I can be compensated for taking passengers) sailplane pilot and glider owner here. Try it - you’ll like it! Really. Sometimes soaring/gliding gets looked at as “not a real pilot” endeavor. Granted, you don’t have an engine to manage but everything else applies. Its FAA regulated and pilots certificate is required. It has been argued that those getting their glider rating first make better power pilots. In a glider you need to more aware of everything - potential landing spots, weather (esp. weather), energy management, formation flying (on tow), potential traffic conflicts (most gliders do not have transponders) and more. It seems the USAF Academy agrees since cadets start out in gliders. I’ve not yet seen a glider go around on a landing. You have to get it right the first time every time. Glider flights of hundreds of miles are common place. The altitude record in a glider is over 50,000’. Flights of 1000K are not uncommon. I’ve been told, by people who know first hand, that flying a glider is the closest you can get to flying a jet fighter. Great visibility, snug cockpit, responsive controls, flying steep bank angles - its all there. Well, almost. Its pretty hard to fly a glider straight up for very long. Ask any questions you might have about silent flight - its freakin’ awesome!
Had to switch gears, as it were. I’m now taking Flight #2 in a 1979 C-172N out of KWHP next Wednesday morning. $100/hr for the plane and $30/hr for the instructor. We’ll see how it goes.
Very first time my instructor had me do a simulated rope break – Insufficient lead-up training (I thought), not enough prior practice at altitude doing steep turns, not sure how steep to turn a really tight 180, let alone that close to the ground.
Need I say we landed in yonder cow pasture?
Good thing, however, that I got reasonably good at judging altitude in the pattern by the time of my fist solo – at which time I discovered at the last minute that the altimeter was sticky and was lying to me about how high I was on downwind. Good thing they trained me on too-low pattern approaches before that happened.
I was taught ‘tap.tap.tap’ on my first flight lesson & it was not even in a glider. I thought that was taught to glider students before they ever got in a glider???
'Fraid not. I learned tap.tap.tap on the day described above. But I did get a lot of emphasis on judging altitude by sight, especially low AGL altitudes, especially near or in the pattern, and it served me well on that day.
So your first rope break ended with an off airport landing? It sounds like you made the right decision. Did you have that pasture picked out as an option ahead of time? Its quite common to have the altimeter covered up during training. Landing is all about angles and landing safely w/o an altimeter is no big deal. Once I hit the IP at the correct altitude I never look at the altimeter again. Of course, that assumes landing at a field with a known elevation. Landing in a farmers field with an unknown elevation makes knowing how to read the angles more important. (Pretty much everyone flying cross country these days has a gps that will tell you your altitude AGL but sometimes the battery dies)Spoilers/airbrakes give you great glidepath control so you have to be way low or way high to be unable to put it where you want it.
“This is why, as much as I would love to, I will never be able to be a pilot. I just can’t afford it.”
Another reason to consider gliders. In my club dues are $50/month, the glider rents for
$12/hr, a tow to 3000’ is $36 and instruction is free. On a good day you can stay up for hours
on a single tow. While learning your flights will likely be shorter. Its a relatively cheap way to learn to fly. Relatively - it still ain’t cheap.
Good to see the military guys have a sense of humor, but they know how to put us in our place, too…
From Major Shul, SR-71 driver:
One day, high above Arizona, we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. ‘Ninety knots,’ ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. ‘One-twenty on the ground,’ was the reply.
To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was ‘Dusty 52, we show you at 525 on the ground,’ ATC responded.
The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of Walter’s mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice, Walter startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ‘Aspen 20, I show you at 1,742 knots on the ground.’
We did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.
My dad operated a small rental & flight instruction biz from the mid 60s to the mid 80s. We went from 1 to eventually 10 and then back to 1 airplane for rent. Along about 1967, before the big spurt in US consumer price inflation we rented out a then-new C150 for $9/hr.
I haven’t done any GA flying in over a decade. My bro & I owned a 1966 Twin Comanche from about 1992 to 1997. Sold it for what we paid for it. 2 years later the going price of TCs had doubled. Oh well. Fixed costs of ownership ran about $500/mo and that was before we actually flew it even a single minute.
The jet I fly now burns about 18,000 pounds per hour at takeoff thrust. Jet fuel runs very roughly $0.50 / lb nowadays. So we’re burning $9000 / hour or about $3 / second roaring down the runway. In cruise it’s just shy of $1 / second. Glad somebody else is paying for it.
All in all, flying’s not a low-cost activity whether you’re talking light planes, airliners, or anything in between.
> It sounds like you made the right decision. Did you have that pasture
> picked out as an option ahead of time?
Well, not exactly my decision. We were only maybe 100’ up, still taking off straight ahead, barely to the end of the runway. I didn’t know how steeply to turn to make a 180. Got turned 90 degrees, just past the end of the runway, and lost too much altitude doing that. Instructor saw we weren’t going to make it back, and took over. The runway was surrounded on 3 sides by cow pastures, so we just landed in the one right there. At the time, I still didn’t have much of a feel at all for controlling glide path with spoilers yet.
I changed instructors a few weeks after that. New instructor was much better. That’s when we started doing training with controls covered. (He used a dime-store shower soap holder thingy – little soft rubber disk with octopus-like suction cups on both sides.)
He gave me an impressive demo of ground effect one day. After turning base, he did a steep full 360 (OMG Thermalling in the pattern?), which left us on final approach, over the cow pasture on the other end of the runway, about maybe 3’ AGL. Now that’s having good control over your vehicle! We were right on target to run right through the barbed wire fence in front of us. But we had enough air speed and ground effect to hop right over it. Another day, he had me practice doing some spins. And of course, I got to practice some low approaches before it really happened on that solo.
BTW, for whatever reason, we always did right-hand patterns there.
