 Welcome to Sun Infant 2008, what a pleasure it is to be here, and we're really fortunate this morning because we have an extraordinary person to start this program. Walter has been involved in aviation for more than four to fifty-two years, and mostly in terms of working with flight instructors. He's a dedicated man who's flown in Alaska and in Florida, worked with the Civil Air Patrol, and has persistently been a volunteer for safety in the aviation program. Walter is going to talk to you today about a flight review, some of the most important ways aviators stay safe each year. Among other things, he has been honored as CFI of the year, and as aviation safety counselor of the year, and currently, Walter is the training manager for the airline transport professionals based here in Jacksonville, Florida. He has over fourteen thousand hours of flying, everything from hot air balloons to jets. Please welcome an extraordinary airman and somebody with an amazing background in aviation safety, Walter. Thank you Kathleen. Well, ready or not, those flight reviews keep coming around every, well, twenty-four calendar months. So are you really ready for the next one? Let's talk about what we need to do to prepare for it to make it easy, because it seems like everybody gets a little excited about that flight review, but it's pretty easy. It's just kind of a quiet laid back, let's talk about, are you still as proficient as you think you are? Or have those little things crept into our flying that maybe we need to watch, and of course when we fly with somebody else, we always pay a little more attention to our flying than when we fly alone. We know that it's required within the preceding twenty-four months to act as pilot in command. But during a test with Emory Riddle, they took some students and they took the entire class, private pilot class, and at the certification point, one hundred percent passed, but only ninety-two percent passed this particular test. This evaluation was at half FAA standards. Gee, ninety-two percent passed half FAA standards. That's pretty good. But as time goes by, we know that we kind of lose the ability to recall the knowledge and skills that we had. And Emory Riddle took the class six months, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months and said, you know, how motivate pilots, right? Free flying. And we're going to run you through the same test that you did for your private pilot certificate. Well, some stayed in the training program, some kind of drifted off to one side because of expenses or academics. When we started out at ninety-two percent at the end of two years, only thirty-eight percent of the class was able to pass half standards. And one hundred percent of them made an error in the traffic pattern, and they knew better. Where do we go through that magic seventy percent line? Twelve months. Your military organizations, a lot of insurance companies require twelve-month training rather than twenty-four. So maybe as pilots, even though the FAA says every twenty-four months, maybe as an individual you might want to fly a little more often than that and get that maybe annual review. No reason to get nervous about it though. We've maintained our knowledge and skills. And I don't know about you, but I have to take about four flight checks a year from the FAA, and I still get sweaty palms, but I blame it on the Florida weather. Trouble was I was in Alaska at the time. What about all that studying that we have to do? We're just going back through the POH, back through the regulations one more time. Those regulations that we're supposed to use all the time, but we kind of forget about, like we're going to stay in the traffic pattern at a non-towered airport. When do you turn crosswind? I work with a lot of students and they tell me five hundred feet. It's automatic. Five hundred feet. And I said, well, I guess your instructor didn't teach you very well, because that's not a road answer. The answer out of the aim is we turn three hundred feet below traffic pattern altitude and beyond the end of the runway. I use a twelve thousand five hundred foot runway. Flight instructors can hit that one. Well, we're already at pattern altitude before we get to the end of the runway. So it's not a road answer. It's a thoughtful process. But if we fly out of our home airport all the time, it becomes a road answer. And everybody tells me five hundred feet because their instructor was taught five hundred feet and the instructor before that. And I was taught five hundred feet back in the fifties. Well, sure, the traffic pattern was eight hundred feet. But the instructor never told me it was because we turned three hundred feet below traffic pattern altitude. The flight review we talked about is one hour minimum. It could be longer than that of oral review. And the regulation says we have to do some review of part ninety one. If you talk to the F.A. General Counsel's office, they said, well, it's not specified. So one question would meet the requirement of a review of part ninety one. But in reality, the instructor is probably going to spend a little more time going over some of those pieces of part ninety one that we use all the time. How about VFR minimums? How about operations in the airspace? How about my favorite ninety one one nineteen minimum safe altitude rule that we sometimes forget about? Light signals. Do you remember all those light signals? Where do you find light signals in the airplane? They're not posted. A lot of people using knee boards now and a lot of the new boards have it. Some people carry a set of F.A.R.s in the back seat. I guess they get it out and read it. But what happens? I can't recall the light signals because I don't use them all the time. So we go back again. The flight review is one of those principles of recency and exercise. The flying portion says one hour again. And a lot of people have a misconception on this one because it says that between the instructor and the student or the applicant, or the pilot, we're going to have an agreement of what we're going to do. What are the maneuvers that you want to work on? I think we'll throw a few more in there as necessary. But it says to the standards of the certificate held, not the privileges exercised. And I fly with a lot of pilots and they tell me, I've just got a third class medical. They tell me to, I just fly for recreational purposes. You wouldn't hold me to commercial or ATP standards, would you? Yes, because that's the requirement. I often wonder, is there the same thing as current and proficient? Or are they really two different things? The F.A.R. specifies currency. But I often wonder, even though I'm current, am I as proficient as I ought to be? And maybe I need to work on proficiency for instruments because I don't fly instruments very often. So I'm in the procedures trainer or the simulator working on instruments when nobody else is around. Trying to stay proficient, we had notices come out all the time about accidents or incidents. I think that all accidents or incidents are 100% human factor. You know, the old buzzword pilot error? Well, we've kind of switched over to human factor because it's not always, quote, the pilot. Somebody designed the airplane. Somebody built the airplane. Somebody certified the airplane. Somebody maintained the airplane. And then it gets down to us. Somebody flew the airplane. And if there was an accident or incident, why? We spent all that time and money investigating accidents and incidents to find out where in the human system was the problem. And you probably read about some of the mechanical problems that are going on right now with some of the airplanes. We go back and we fix it so that no one else has that problem. It is not there to determine blame. It's to determine what happened and how can we fix it. What else could we put in the ground portion? Well, we know we have to cover at least part 91, but I suppose we could talk about airspace operations in and out of B airspace. How many people fly into B airspace anymore? A lot of us try to avoid it. So why? If you know the procedures, you're comfortable with it. And that's the other thing. Are we comfortable with it? Every B airspace is different. It's site specific. We know that C airspace has certain standard requirements, don't we? From the ground to 4,000 feet on the inner ring and the outer ring is 1,200 to 4,000 feet. It goes out 5 miles and 10 miles. Did you know that that's not C airspace? C airspace is also site specific. Some of them go to 6,000 feet like San Jose, California. The regulation as actually written says that C airspace can go to 18,000 feet and be as wide as 50 mile radius from the airport. That's the way the regulation is written, but all of them are right now just in this form. We'll see as time goes by and as operations change what happens to C airspace. But D airspace is very specific. It's from the ground up to 2,500 feet above the surface and it's a 5 mile radius around that airport, kind of like a tall beer can. Great. I have people that fly IFR all the time. Talk to ATC all the time. And when I put them in the right seat as a flight instructor student, they can't talk to the tower. And I said that's interesting. We change seats and all of a sudden we can't talk to anybody. We're nervous. We're excited. So we might review some of those things again that we're not really that proficient in. How about changes of the PTS? We said that we're going to do this to the certificate held. I started flying back in the 50s. There's been a lot of changes since then. And we have to keep up with all the changes because that's the FAA requirement. And when they put another maneuver in the PTS, it's fair game, if you will, to talk about that maneuver or even demonstrate it on the flight review. For those of you that are commercial pilots, you may remember a few years ago and maybe you came in through that window when we dropped the requirement of testing 8s on pylons. We never dropped the training requirement. We dropped the testing requirement. And I was out at the airport one Saturday, getting ready to fly a 172 just for an hour of proficiency flying. And I was going to go out and do 8s on pylons and a friend of mine, airline pilot, said, can I ride with you? I don't have anything else to do. And I said, sure, get in the seat. We took off. I started doing 8s on pylons and he said, what's this? And I said, aha, you're one of the guys that came through when it wasn't required. Here's how to do it. And he said, let me try that. And he said, it's easy. And I said, of course, they're all easy. So are we keeping up with the changes in the PTS? The knowledge requirement in the PTS seems to be getting longer and longer and longer. How about performance and limitations of the airplane? Have you really gotten into the charts? Or do you always fly out of home airport 5,000 feet and you don't think about it? What is my short field takeoff length under these conditions? Have you gone back in and looked at those charts? What about crosswind situations? Weight and balance? Well, I always fly with just two people and a little cargo in the back. If you've got a 172, two people, a little cargo and probably full fuel, we're okay. Put somebody in the back seat and maybe ought to do a weight and balance. Two people in the back seat, I know I have to do one because I know that I'm probably overweight. I'm going to have to drop some cargo out or I'm going to have to take some fuel out. And if you're flying one of the newer 172s with 52 gallons of fuel versus the 40, you probably can't carry four people in the airplane with no baggage. And how about the aim? It's a wonderful book. It's usually used as a paperweight on the desk. But have you really gone back and looked at the aim and looked at all those black stripes down the border that says since the last printing, here's some of the changes to this book? Because that's all common sense flying. The FAA has their rules and the aim explains those rules in a little more common sense that says here is the standard, here's what we're after. And here's what we're going to base, quote, good pilot judgment on. We talked earlier about what does the pilot want to do? What maneuvers and procedures do you feel uncomfortable with? They're a little rusty that you want to do. Or maybe even some new maneuvers that's not even required on there. A private pilot wants to do eights on pylons. I said, easy, here, let's show you how to do it. When's the last time you did steep turns? For a private pilot, the bank's 45 degrees. But for a commercial pilot, it's at least 50. Pick a bank and do it. We try to maintain proficiency so we're not one of these FAA accident statistics. But the number one accident-incident cause has been and always will be loss of directional control on takeoff or landing. And that is a major problem right here in Florida. We're seeing a lot of students getting soloed and they're losing control of the airplane on takeoff or landing. And there was one incident that involved a student and I use this a lot because we do funny things. That wasn't funny at the time. It's only funny afterwards. The airplane landed and swerved a little bit to the right. So the student corrected with left rudder, just like they're supposed to. And remembered what the instructor said, to help it just a little bit, we'll add a little left brake. So he locks up the left wheel. The airplane turns 45 degrees to the runway centerline and departs the runway. Runs across the grass and bam, right into the fence. That's why they put up all those expensive chain link fences. They're airplane catchers. Well, here comes the FAA. Let's help you with the accident report, fill all that stuff out. And since we're here, let's take a look at the scene. And there's the marks on the runway. And there's the marks through the grass. And there's the airplane up against the fence. And the inspector was standing there looking at the airplane way over there and said to the student pilot, I said, why didn't you correct your heading? Take off, it was clear, take off again? Or stop? You could have stopped in a straight line here. Why'd you hit the fence? And the student looked at him and said, I didn't see the fence. That's funny, I can see it from here real good. So we asked the next question, which he probably didn't want to ask. He said, why didn't you see the fence? And the student said, well, when it swerved like that and ran off the grass, I got scared. I released my seatbelt, I got down on the floor of the airplane. And it had partial power on it and it hit the fence. Ah, understand, why would anybody do that? But students do strange things. So maintaining directional control. He doesn't say this in any PTS. But examiners are taught that if the center line gets outside the main gear of the airplane, it's an unsat on take off or landing because you've lost directional control, even though you keep it on the pavement. Well, if that's a standard for certification, I guess we ought to keep practicing that to keep on there. From accidents, incidents, and from training, what are some of the things that we see that are problem areas? Well, the first one that we lose after we get our private certificate is 8th correction, soft field take off and landings because we don't practice them. We practice short field all the time, but we don't practice soft field. In the airplane flying handbook, the FAA says that you may land soft field with or without power. Sure. But what is the objective of a soft field landing? It's to land as slow as you can. And if you have a conventional tail airplane with power in ground effect, we can get it a lot slower than we can without power. And I'll have to say after flying in Alaska for four years, we did some things up there that were a little strange, like landing on 300-foot gravel bars in the river where the water was soft. When the water was hard, we just had the whole river to land in. Of course, we had tundra tires on the airplane, but we operated in and out of 300-foot gravel bars all the time. No problem. Maybe you've seen some of those ones where the airplane lands in the water and skips across the water on wheels. Well, that's what we did with the tundra tires. The hydroplane speed was down around 10 miles an hour. We just land in the water and come up to the gravel bar, chop the power, pull the tail down, and slide to a stop. Soft field operations. T-tail airplanes don't do soft field operations. You can't get them slowed down any more than, quote, normal because the tail is outside the prop blast. We talked earlier about steep turns of private and commercial. Can you do a steep turn and maintain your altitude? Now, the standard is plus or minus 100 feet. But wait a minute. That was for a 40-hour private pilot. How many hours do you have? You ought to be able to do it better than plus or minus 100 feet. Set a standard for yourself. Plus or minus 50. Plus or minus 25. Oh, don't set zero. Even the instructor riding with you can't get any place close to zero. How about unusual attitudes? Now, we're not talking about the problem with the captain and the first officer, but we're talking about recovery from unusual flight attitudes. I don't know what it is about pilots. They always get the nose low correct, and we really don't practice that very much. If you're nose low in a turn, how do you correct for an unusual attitude? It's power off because we're diving the airplane. Why pick up more speed? It's stop the turn, get the wings level, stop the turn, and pull out of the dive. And everybody gets it right. But if you think about it, all stall recoveries that we have on the test are always nose high unusual attitude recoveries. And that's the one people keep falling up. In the nose high unusual attitude, what do we do when we decide to recover? It's full power, pitch the level of flight, and roll the wings level. Now, what's difficult about that? So I set it up, and here we are, and the person in the other seat slams the throttle's dial. And I said, this could be real interesting here in a minute. I've had them go to idle. I've had them go to partial power. I've had them roll the bank over. Now, that's one of the recoveries from a nose high unusual attitude. But not when they roll it over to 90 degrees and drop the nose, but now they're in a dive so they know how to recover from that one. I said, why do we lose proficiency in that maneuver? Because every time we practice a stall, that's the recovery procedure. Full power, pitch the level of flight, and wings level. Cross-country flight planning. Isn't GPS wonderful? You know what GPS stands for? Yeah, goof-proof system. And then some goof comes along and proves it wrong, right? Yeah. Some of the people I fly with, they're oriented 100% to GPS. And when you take the GPS away, they don't know how to use the VOR system anymore. When's the last time you did an NDB approach? They're almost all gone. Most of the rental airplanes today don't even have ADF receivers in them. That's old technology. Still works good. Still a lot of places in the world that uses that because it's inexpensive to put up and to use. But we don't use it much here. And the administrator, FAA administrator, put out a letter that said in 2010, we're going to shut down all land-based navigation systems. Now, that's not going to happen on time, but it is a goal of the FAA. And there's a reason for it, and it's a good reason. What's your tax money? The FAA doesn't have to rent land. They don't have to maintain the system. They don't have to buy the electricity. They don't have to have somebody on 24-hour call to go out and repair it. You spend $10 million or whatever it is. You put it in a little ball. You shoot it up in the space, and there it sits and it runs for how many years? It's a one-time cost until the thing falls out of the air quits and then we'll throw another one up there. So it's going to be a lot cheaper when we go to GPS navigation solely. So what's the backup system? There's got to be a backup system. What if it doesn't work? Well, the backup system is in the glass cockpit. We have inertial nav systems in there. But if you've got the old round gauges, old round gauges, still a lot of them out there. There is no backup system for the GPS if that is our primary navigation system. Don't get excited though. It's probably at least 20, 30 years down the road before they get shut down. Just like the Loran system. Coast Guard said, don't need it anymore. We maintain the Loran system. We're shutting it down. And the FAA said, no, no. We've got airplanes that use that. And they said, fine, you got it. So the FAA now maintains the Loran system. And that's another one they want to gradually shut down. Flight planning though, do you still fill out a flight log whatever that is? Do you go into duets and punch the button and get a flight log printed out? Or do you just kind of take the string out the FBO and say it's about that far and about that direction and I can make it? And off you go. Was that all the flight planning that was done? And I see pilots do that. And they, yep, I can make it and it's far enough and the winds aren't too bad. I know there was a lot more done than that. But the student sitting over there says, gee, there's an ATP, corporate pilot, whatever. And that's all he does. No. Experience. Repetition. The student has to fill that flight log out so that they have a basis for understanding. And I find it funny because when I do a private check ride, they do it. That same person six weeks later comes in, flight log's half done. I don't need all that. I got GPS. You know what happens on every practical test. GPS fails. Now give me an ETA to your destination. And they have to sit over there and add up all those legs to find out how many miles it is to the destination. And it would have taken you another 90 seconds or 120 seconds of your life to put all those figures in to make it easy. Situational awareness. We kind of talk about CRM and we also talk about positional awareness for years and now we're saying it's not just where you are but the entire ball of wax. Because we're not in an XY environment. We're in a three-dimensional airspace and what's going on around us? Have you flown in eastern Canada? The international language is English. And the reason is safety. But you go into eastern Canada and if you call up in French, they respond in French. You call up in English and they respond in English. Okay. I don't speak one word in French. The guy that just called in, where is he? What's he doing? Is he ahead of me? Behind me? Is he headed in my direction? Is he even near my airspace? He could be clear on the other side of the sector. Don't know. And that's the reason why we have one international language. Yet when you go to a lot of foreign countries, they talk in their native language and then they'll revert back to English if you call them in English. Here? Well, what's the requirement? Right there on the application. So do you read, write, speak and understand the English language except as spoken in LA. You know, LA, that's lower Alabama. So I think that a flight review should include or might include based upon you and your instructor. Some of the following things, stall recoveries. Do we teach stalls? No. All those stalls you've done, we don't teach stalls. We teach recognition and recovery. And the FAA philosophy is if you never stall it, you can never spin it. Steep turns. One of those things we don't practice very much and we certainly don't practice that with passengers. And again, unusual attitude recoveries. Going back over those again. Recency and exercise. Oh, slow flight. You know what slow flight is. That's when you're in a hurry and you ask ATC for vectors. Or maybe it's that certification slow flight that says we're flying right on the edge of the stall. We're just above the buffet and we can maneuver the airplane. And I get people tell me that I said, what's the maximum bank you can do in slow flight? Oh, five degrees. Five degrees. Not any more than that. Why not? It used to be a private pilot maneuver. Maybe you came through that system back in the early 80s. Well, let's see, 84 was when the first private PTS came out and I think it was good for about four or five years and it said in there, slow flight with a 30-degree bank if it was within the capability of the airplane to maintain altitude. 30-degree bank. And now we've got pilots out there that are scared to bank the airplane in slow flight. I said, why? I rolled the airplane over to 60 degrees and said, see, it'll do it. It won't maintain altitude. It doesn't have enough power. But it'll do it in a 60-degree bank and then I said, how much aileron control do we have? Oh, hardly any. And I'll roll it the other way and I said, gee, look at all the aileron control just like we said because the wing stalls from the wing root to the wing tip post-47 wing but prior to that they stalled from the wing tip to the wing root. So if you fly an old airplane like I do, I fly a lot of airplanes that were built in the 30s. The wing design is different. They handle different. They stall differently. The new airplanes, hey, great. And look at, they get safer and safer and safer every year. Do you want a 172? The safest four-place airplane in the system today and has been for years. Ah! Don't you wish you had a dollar for every takeoff and every landing that you practiced and you get out there on the weekends and you practice takeoff and landings? Have your landings gotten a little bit worse? I can land better than this and my landings became inconsistent and this happened to me just recently. Why are my landings just a little bit off? And I seem to be dropping it in from a foot and I shouldn't be doing this. So, yep, I went to the optometrist and he said, oh, your vision's changed. You need a new set of glasses. Great. So I went, got a new set of glasses, went out to fly the airplane. Everything is back where it should be. So just having one eye change vision a little bit. That's why the AME checks your vision every time. And yet, I passed my flight physical. But I didn't pass the optometrist check. He said, you need new glasses. So if your landings and takeoffs are getting a little worse than what you think they ought to be, maybe it's time to have your glasses checked. When we talk about stall recoveries, the FAA is a little bit inconsistent from having it across the board. This is the way you recover. And back in 1984, when they started the first PTS, which was the private, they determined that they wanted the private pilot to recover from a full stall. This is where we've lost pitch control. The wheels all the way back against the locks, I can't control the pitch anymore, recover. Well, that's fairly easy. We practice a lot of full stall recoveries. But the commercial now, the person that wrote that says, I want you to recover as the stall occurs. That's what the book says. So let's find out from the writer, what do you mean? He says, at the first sign of the Buffett, that's where the stall begins. Sure would have been nice to get that in the book, but okay, so we'll teach it that way. Commercial pilots recover at the first stall Buffett. And then we go to ATP. Oh, that's totally different too. The ATP recovers at the first stall warning. Horn, light, stick shaker, whatever it may be, we'll recover at that point. So we have three certificate levels of different points of recovering from a stall. If you're a commercial pilot and you're practicing, maybe we need to do both partial, recover at the first Buffett, the onset, or we need to go to the full stall. For this next portion, we're going to talk about one airplane, because if we talk about generics, it comes across kind of abstract. And I don't know about you, but I'm an abstract person. I'm in the physical world. You tell me an airplane, you tell me speed, you tell me procedures in this airplane that make sense to me. So we're going to use the 172. If we're going to do power on stalls right by the airplane flying handbook, then we're going to be in takeoff configuration, and that's real easy. That's flaps gear down because you can't bring the gear up, and it's flaps up. And we're going to slow lift off speed. When we get to 60 knots, and if you rotate properly, it comes off the ground at about 60. So we're going to slow the airplane down to 60 knots and call that lift off speed. When we get to 60 knots, we're going to pitch up to an attitude where the airplane will just stall at full power. And then we're going to push the throttle into full power, hold the nose steady, and let it fly into the stall by itself. Nice and easy. And when we get the full stall up, we're going to recover. And the book says that we can do it out of straight ahead or out of a bank not to exceed 20 degrees. Well, 10 degrees, 15 degrees, 20 degrees, whatever you want to pick. And you can do this right, left, and straight ahead. When I'm out with a student, I always do one to the right because it's the hardest one, isn't it? Because you've got torque and p-factor fighting you while you're trying to do the stall. And the book also says to recover with the minimum loss of altitude. It doesn't say no loss. What's the characteristics of the airplane? Well, a 172 with two people on board. I shouldn't lose any altitude beyond the entry altitude. I should be able to recover and fly out of it without striking the ground. On the other hand, some other airplanes would strike the ground. When do you want to do this? Well, what does the FAA say a takeoff is, right? We're going to climb out at VY. We're going to be at a steady pitch attitude. We're going to go to pattern altitude before we depart the pattern. And then we're going to stay at VY all the way to minimum safe altitude before we go into a cruise climb. At least that's what the lawyers think we do. But I see a lot of people that gear up and ride into cruise climbing. Gee, we're only 10 feet off the ground and we still got 8,000 feet of runway in front of us and the gear's up. We get into those habits. Somebody needs to fly with us to say, wait a minute, this is not the safest way to fly the airplane. Power off stalls. We practice these a little bit more. We're in the landing configuration. In this case, we're going to go to full flaps. It could be done in any flap situation, the 172. But I'm going to go to full flaps and I'm going to simulate as though we were doing a short field landing. The airplane is stabilized on the approach. There's that FAA buzzword, stabilized descent. What do we mean by stabilized? Minimum control input considering the weather so that we can get this airplane from A down to the runway B. I like to set it up with 500 foot per minute rate of descent. But the book doesn't say this. I'm going to set it up with 500 foot per minute rate of descent. To do that in the 172, I'm going to need approximately 1500 rpm. What's your weight? What's your density altitude that you're trying to do this at? And the book says for this airplane 62 knots. Well, which 172 are you flying? Are you flying the one with the 145 force engine, the 150, the 160, the 180? What's your weight? We'll continue coming down until it is. And we can do this straight ahead or out of a turn, not to exceed 20 degrees of bank, right or left. Once the stall occurs, now we're back into that nose high unusual attitude, aren't we? We recover with minimum loss of altitude. It doesn't say no loss. And a lot of instructors teach come down to an altitude and then start the maneuver and we'll simulate that as terrain level and see if we can't recover before we go back to that altitude. That's instructor technique. It's not in the book. It doesn't say to do that at all, but it's not a bad teaching item. We talked about steep turns. If you read the airplane flight manual, flying handbook, excuse me, steep turns. And it says if you're coming out of a steep turn, what do you do if you're losing altitude? You roll your bank out and you climb back up to altitude. Well, yes. If you go back and you read that section twice, you'll realize that what they're talking about is you're doing steep turns over something on the ground that you're interested in and you start losing control of the airplane. And your low altitude. Immediately roll wings level and climb, get out of that situation. But that's not a certification maneuver. The certification maneuver says we got to hold our altitude and we got to hold our bank and we hold our airspeed. So in this case, we're going to hold the bank steady and we're going to work pitch to hold our altitude. And if the airplane starts to lose altitude, we're going to have to pitch up a little bit to fix that. We can't change the bank. And every pilot that I fly with tells me, well, we just roll the little bank out to fix that. Wonderful. The standard here for a commercial is minus 5 degrees. Do you think that 5 degrees is going to make any difference on altitude to loss or gain? No. We've lost it. They're 200 feet below altitude and I see the bank go from 55 degrees to 35 and then back to 55, back to 35 because they can't hold the bank. And that's the key to doing steep turns. Hold the bank. Also, we have a speed requirement in the FAA book that says add or below VA. And everybody quotes me VA at max gross weight. What is VA in your airplane at the weight you're flying? You got two people? Full fuel? No baggage? VA is a lot less than what was specified for an airplane at maximum gross. Do you know how to go back to that equation and calculate what actual VA is based upon your weight? And of course, practicing right and left turns, not just always left. Basic instruments with basic instruments, we're talking about straight level flight, climbs, turns, descents, unusual attitude recoveries, which we've talked about. But we get this out of the airplane of the instrument flying handbook and we might take a look at what the flight manual says for the airplane for any other restrictions. What is the most dangerous thing about night flying? It's going into a cloud that you didn't see. Losing orientation. And I love to fly at night. I had more nighttime than I had daytime when I went for my private certificate. And I still like to fly at night. Nobody else wants the airplanes. The air is nice and calm. The lights twinkle on the ground. This is the time to fly. Lower density altitudes and in Florida it's a lot more comfortable sometimes. Do you have one of those airplanes with air conditioning on it? How much performance is lost with the air conditioner on for takeoff and landing? We already talked about unusual attitude recoveries. But here's one now. We talked about before doing it with visual reference. Now we're talking about doing it only by instrument reference. And I do it both ways on a flight review. Unusual first and then by instruments. Can they adapt to those instruments quickly and recover and get back to straight and level flight without their gyros tumbling. We talked about the procedure again. But after we recover a lot of people don't go back to cruise and use a checklist. Why were they in the unusual attitude to start with? They got distracted. They weren't paying attention. I used to fly a 310. The ADF was way over in the right hand corner. I'd had to practically lean over in the person's lap sitting next to me in order to tune that thing in. And I did that one night. And when I looked back at the attitude indicator I was in a 60 degree bank. None of my passengers knew that fortunately. But unusual attitude recovery nice and smooth. When do you go back to the checklist? When do you go back to cruise power? Well, we've got full power on the airplane and the recovery, don't we? So when we accelerate and we go back to cruise airspeed, go to cruise power. Now that seems to be pretty simple. But how about nose low? We got the power off. We're pulling out of the dive and I'll just go back to the 172 again. We pull out of the dive. We're doing 140. Pretty fast. Now when are you going to go back to cruise power? Oh, when I get down to cruise airspeed 100. And so here's 100. Now they start putting the power in and pretty soon we're down to 85 or 80. So once you get that airplane in a level of flight, go back to cruise power. It has to slow down to that speed. It can't maintain a high speed with cruise power on it. So don't play the game of slowing down and speeding up again because remember that all those air instruments lag. That airspeed indicator is telling you what you did yesterday, not what you're doing right now. So get the power back to cruise and it'll slow down to cruise airspeed. Going back to the basic instruments in the instrument flying handbook again. Slow flight. We can do this in various configurations according to the book. And we can do it in level of flight. We can climb to send the turn as appropriate to the power available in the airplane. But we're just above the stall buffet and we can do this with instrument reference as well as visual. But now when we get into slow flight in level of flight they told me that airspeed was power right out of the instrument flying handbook and that altitude was pitch and then we get into slow flight and everybody reverses it. Why? Well we're in the region of reverse command. Great, you don't know what that means. Those instruments don't swap holes, they don't change function. Airspeed is power, pitch is altitude even in slow flight. Well why does it work if the instructor teaches it backwards? It works because every time we change pitch we have to change airspeed. Every time we change airspeed we have to change pitch. That's why it works but it's incorrect procedure. If your instructor taught you wrong as a student pilot you had a little learning curve to learn it as an instrument pilot properly. So when we do this we're going to go back and teach it the right way and we're going to review it the right way. In level of flight airspeed is power. What did you do? You were in cruise, you pulled the power back, you slowed down to the speed you want you pushed the power back up to hold that didn't you? Didn't change. Short field takeoffs and climbs is another maneuver we practice a lot correction short field, soft field, wait a minute that's what you do, that's what your student does and that's what I do I have selective hearing I know you asked for a soft field takeoff and I heard short field or that's what I performed and when a student does that to me I said alright now that we've done that one correctly now let's go back and do the other one. So we're in soft field configuration which is usually with flaps in the 172 we got the controls all the way back so we want to get that nose off the ground as quickly as we can get that nose wheel out of the mud and take off lift off just above the stall speed just above the buffet. Stall warning horns having a fit over there and we're going to stay in ground effect and we're going to accelerate. How high is ground effect? Don't care don't be any higher off the ground you want to be if the engine fails because in this situation if the engine fails you lose the prop blast on the tail and the airplane immediately stalls how far do you want to fall? So if my student gets more than a foot above ground you're too high get back down there and yet I fly with people that set up a soft field takeoff and they climb out right on the edge of the stall and I've gone through pattern altitude like that and I sit there and I just kind of watch them what are you doing over there? Well I wanted to make sure I was clear of the obstacles gee we have trees that are 800 feet tall accelerating out of ground effect can be extremely dangerous in this situation again with a tea tail tea tails are not soft field takeoff and landing airplanes we already talked about the objective is to land as slow as possible and you can take a 172 and if you do it right you'll swear you could get out of the airplane and catch it before it landed it'll be that slow on touchdown how about the soft field landing we're going to make the same approach as we would in a short field landing except instead of having our approach point inside the runway a lot of times it's shorter the runway because we want the entire runway as a landing surface we don't leave a thousand feet behind us and in the round out or flare we're going to add some power it's a fixed pitch propeller as we slow down the rpm slows down less power so you're going to have to add some more and if you work it up to about 1700 rpm right on the edge of a stall it almost stops and we want to land right on the buffet stall warning horn is going off like mad and then if you really are in soft situation you may have to add power to the touchdown because of the drag on the gear tries to push the nose down the nose wheel is going to try to bury itself in the grass or in the mud when we talk about that what is a soft field nobody really knows do we because it's not defined any place but if you go back to the Cessna 150 manual in the 50's Cessna said you should use soft field technique if the grass is up to the main gear axle well if you go into a grass strip where do they cut it right there about that height because that's where the brush hog cuts it so anytime you go into a soft field a grass strip when I go into a gravel strip I always use a soft field technique save me one time I flew over and looked just like we're supposed to I didn't know there was 3-4 inches of water on that runway and the runway had a little bit of a dip in it and the grass had been cut and it rained and it looked dry but all the grass was floating on the water I made a soft field I landed on the higher portion rolled off into that lower portion and I never saw so much water and mud and weeds going past that airplane holy cow it's a good thing I didn't make a normal landing I'd have been on my back in a second how about a short field takeoff oh we like to practice those we want to set the controls neutral I see a lot of people don't do that particularly the twins they let the wheel forward they accelerate then they grab a hold and they start pulling back they don't have the controls neutral we want to maximize acceleration right up to vx and remember the airspeed indicator legs what's your acceleration rate so in the 172 if you start your rotation about 3 knots before the speed because that's about how much the thing lags when it rotates you're going to be right at liftoff speed and then we're going to climb at vx to that 50 foot obstacle and once you get to 50 feet go to vy no reason to climb up at vx and continue climbing to higher altitudes I tell look outside I see people trying to do short field takeoffs by instruments wow look outside when you get to the top of the tree why? landing over an obstacle uh I wasn't taught to do this my instructor said you set it up for a stabilized approach even back in the fifties stabilized approach we used that word and over the tree you jerk the power off pitch the nose down and try to land as close to the base of the tree as you can holy cow we were bent on airplanes right and left FA said no more of that we want a stabilized approach over the tree to the runway in the flare then pull the power off and land the airplane so we don't do the chop and drop anymore oh no so when we stopped that I said shoot my instructor showed me this one yeah you got it all set up power set we're at 60 uh in the in the 172 this is the old one and as I came over the tree manual flaps flaps zero plane dropped straight down base of the tree and then just before you impact and your passengers scream full flaps right onto the runway and we don't do that anymore either right stabilized approach stabilized descent no configuration changes on short final and of course if you're going to do short field without an obstacle the object here is always to hit the end of the runway and stop as quickly as we can don't do that because your student will land short of the runway I did and when the airplane suddenly dropped out from under me it was a good 50 feet of grass to the runway so now I always teach land at the thousand foot markers that way if you land short we're still on the pavement I guess you could call that a short field landing sure didn't go too far crosswind takeoff and landings oh almost every takeoff and landings crosswind a little bit my wife's not very happy with me I landed a 172 and a 55 knot crosswind one time and when we came to a stop she said do you know how close your wingtip was to the ground that far when I said we didn't hit it did we you know that's probably one of the dumbest things I ever did I could have gone over to another airport 16 miles away landed into the wind stopped had some free coffee from the FBO and waited for the winds to drop and go back to home airport that only had one runway and it was perpendicular to the wind oh get there right as I suppose right but do we maintain crosswind proficiency and all crosswinds end up in a forward slip so can you hold that center line in that gusty wind do you keep that bank in there to hold our position right and left does that longitudinal axis of the airplane vary off of the center line heading because we should be able to move the airplane back and forth on the runway and the heading never changes that's one of those proficiency maneuvers we do with students and I find that people aren't teaching it anymore what happened to the old experienced instructors mentoring the new winds it seems like the new instructor that just came out and got 25 hours under their belt as an instructor and they got 250 hours is now teaching a brand new instructor how to fly and instruct gee where's the mentoring and where's the experience oh I hear that all the time I say it sometimes and it's not any different today than it was when I was a student instructors got into the business to build time for the airlines it hasn't changed they're always building time for something Kathleen said I had 14,000 hours yeah in airplanes how did I get that time just like you one hour at a time it'll get there students they think never gonna solo never get the 40 hours they'll never get the instrument rating they'll never get that 250 hours and it just comes along the landing they say is the reverse of the takeoff well yeah instead of accelerating and climbing we're now descending and leveling off to decelerate do we fly a good traffic pattern the only traffic pattern in the aim is a 45 degree to downwind and I listened to a King Air come into the pattern from Atlanta direction and I told my student now let's see if he makes a straight in like all the other ones does or does he make a traffic pattern and he came in and he entered the traffic pattern and landed we had a couple more landings to do and I went in to take a break and I walked into the FBO's office there is the pilot of the King Air here and I talk a little bit loud once in a while because I'm mostly deaf anyway and I get this little timid voice from the guy on the couch he says I'm the King Air pilot is there a problem and I said no I just want to shake the hand of a man who knows how to fly a traffic pattern and he said I did straight in for years until about two years ago when I almost hit an airplane and he said now I always make traffic patterns pilots can be ground shy and one of the reasons why we're nervous to the ground is because our instructor taught us to be nervous altitude airspeed is safety now we're going to take away altitude and airspeed and call it a landing so we want to be able to be comfortable near the runway and emergencies well here's one person me on an approach that says engine failure set up a glide best lift over drag go through the emergency procedure determine your landing site maneuver to it go through all those memory items and then time permitting communicate as necessary with somebody one twenty one five make a position report and then fly the airplane to the landing and walk away from it but it says in the book go back to a normal approach speed so aviation safety that's all we're after each one of us we want to be the safest most proficient pilot there is and it's well worth it to get a professional another flight instructor to look at it and say are we as proficient as we think we are and the big secret now that we've talked about flight reviews is the wings program you can get into the wings program meet the requirement and reset that flight review clock to zero each time and I encourage everybody here to get into the wings program and do it annually requirement is a safety meeting three flights of at least an hour book entry and now you got to go to the computer and make those entries too so we'll see you on that next flight review or on completion of your next wings to be a safe and profession proficient pilot Kathleen safety happens because people like Walter who are thoughtful willing and unselfish in sharing what they know we have many more programs for you this year at sun and fun 2008 so let's go out there and learn more and have fun and we're going to go now to studio B