One Thousand Hours

Our Redbird FMX simulator’s hobbs meter rolled across one thousand hours last month.  Adding the fourth digit to the time sheet made me think back on the twenty one month’s I’ve instructed in it since its delivery in May of 2010.

It was a scary, yet exciting experience when they assembled the unit in our space back then.  I had worked on all of the details of putting the business together for several months before the machine arrived, but the big question in my mind was whether it would rent, and whether we would make any money from it. 

All kidding aside I’ve had a tremendous time flying with people from all walks of life in the Sim. We’ve had everyone from airline and corporate jet captains to primary students come through the facility in the time we’ve been operating.  There are some limitations to the device, but for instrument training and maintaining proficiency these are far outweighed by the benefits. I cannot think of a more cost effective way to get your 14CFR 61.57 recent experience requirements met.

Aside from that, I find my instrument rating candidates progressing through our IFR syllabus more quickly than when I only offered “in the airplane” instruction. This I believe is largely due to the continuity of training.  Here in the Northeast our weather consists of  nine months of ice and three months of thunderstorms. Flying around here, the chances are good that when you embark on a training program, you will get weathered out of numerous lessons. If your schedule or budget only allow for one session a week and the weather is “un-flyable“ that day you could end up going two or more weeks between lessons.  Anyone who has been through this will tell you how frustrating it is spending additional money to relearn things the second and third time.  By having the FMX available we go regardless of what the weather is like outside. Sometimes this means several sessions consecutive sim sessions, but when the weather accomodates we accomplish so much more in our airplane time. 

The FMX has been unbeatable for avionics training as well. I do a great deal of G1000/GFC700 and GNS530/430 navigator instruction in the SIM. This and autopilot training really shines in the Redbird vs the airplane, instead of blowing through someone’s airspace, heads down, figuring out the knobology and consuming mass quantities of fuel. The ability to pause the simulation to review concepts, take a bio break,  or simply get out and stretch your legs, while discussing the session- is an invaluable feature of the equipment.

So…what do I feel is the biggest limitation of the equipment? I would say the lack of G forces on the Pilot initially tends to make them over control the aircraft. Additionally without G forces we really have no way to get the adrenaline flowing. Adrenaline and our fight or flight mechanism is the juice that bad decisions are made of. Bad decisions, and the thought process that begets them, is what we as pilots and instructors want exposed and corrected-before arriving at the same situation in a non-training environment.    

That considered, an aircraft is still necessary and required equipment when instructing. However, experienced pilots are getting type rated every day in level D simulators at training centers across the world without ever stepping foot in the actual airplane. The difference is that these are experienced commercial and ATP rated pilots using simulators that identically mimic the specific model of the airplane. Can I foresee the day when this type of training will be commonplace with GA pilots in sub 12,500 pound airplanes?

Frankly, I don't know, but if you asked me three years ago thether I thought I’d be writing about giving one thousand hours of dual in a full motion AATD I would have said that idea was crazy. Que sera, who knows what future will bring?  I can say that I’m excited and eager to see what happens in my next thousand hours, and I hope to fly with many of you either in the box, or in your airplane.

All 50 States by 55 Years Old

“Fifty by fifty five” is an Aviation goal that I have.

It used to be called “fifty by fifty” but seeing I turned fifty last year and hadn’t achieved it yet I changed the name.

The idea was for me to have done a take-off and landing in each of the fifty states by fifty years old. Our target date slipped a bit with the economy tanking in 2008 along with the opening our flight training business in 2010. All of that coincided with my wife getting real busy at work, so being pragmatists, we’ve extended the deadline.

All of the states east of the Mississippi river took a number of years, but the eastern seaboard went pretty quickly, as one of the primary reasons I got my pilot license was to fly to Florida. I go to Maine quite often and destinations in that direction are close, so we’ve explored that territory pretty extensively.

Hawaii and Alaska are the real difficult states. Hawaii for the obvious reason and Alaska for the time required to travel there.  With Alaska there is an entire continent to cross with a significant quantity of real estate left to cover once departing Washington heading Northwest.
I picked up Hawaii in a rented Cessna 172 on our fifteenth wedding anniversary back in October of 2001. I only flew on the big island from Kona International and not from the three other Islands we visited while there.  I had the flight school owner and chief pilot in the right seat and what started out as a checkout became a tour.  He was an interesting guy, flying helicopters in Alaska in the summer and running a single plane flight school in Kona the other half of the year. Having him and his local knowledge on board netted us dozens of spectacular pictures, each vivid enough to flood my mind with memories.

I’ve flown in California out of Van Nuys and Orange County to Santa Catalina in rented planes. The Golden State is one that I really want to explore by air,  so that trip would require a couple of weeks at a minimum just to do it justice. Naturally if you flew all the way from western Connecticut to California you’d probably want to pick up Oregon and Washington States at a minimum because you would have no way of knowing when life would allow you to pass that way again. 

This is what you do when you’re “whoring for states” as Judy calls it, you tend to start to think that way and plan your trips accordingly.

An Example - we attended a wedding in Memphis a few years back and on departure, with a long day of flying back to Danbury ahead of us, blasted off M01 and turned left, climbed to one thousand and entered the left downwind for West Memphis Arkansas (KAWM) airport where we did a touch and go. Departing there we hung a right and received a Bravo clearance at 1500 over the top of Memphis International (KMEM) and vectors to Olive Branch Mississippi (KOLV). Before switching us to the Unicom frequency the controller asked us if we were the same 58 Victor with an IFR on file to Louisville’s Bowman field (KLOU) due to depart in ten minutes.  When we told him it was us, he gave us our clearance and void time and told us switch to the advisory frequency and to report airborne just like that we picked up Mississippi.  It added .7 tach to the trip which took an additional 7.9 hours  that day to complete, as we had a blistering 95 knot ground speed for much of it -flying on the backside of a low that had recently passed. My logbook  entries only detail the times and the five states we picked up on that trip.

It’s a problem, I know.

I need Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Alaska for a total of thirteen remaining. Many of these places I really want to see more of than just the airport, and that adds on some time.

We picked up Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota visiting my brother and his family in Golden a while back using our annual Oshkosh vacation as a springboard for westward exploration.

Someone once told me “by the time you can afford the plane you really want you’ll be too old to fly it”. I believe this to be true and I’ve seen it a few times with friends of mine.  I can also interpolate that expression into – “if I wait until I can take the time to make these trips I’ll be too broke/unfit to fly them”.   

It’s an interesting dilemma, one without an easy solution. Some may say “oh get over it, you’re unfulfilled, poor you, welcome to the real world” and in a large part I’d likely agree with them. But this general aviation thing that we’re all so hopelessly addicted to, is of a fragile nature.  Fuel prices, user fees, maintenance, parts availability, are many of the things that threaten our ability to foresee whether what we love doing today will be possible tomorrow.

If 100LL Aviation Gasoline were to disappear from the market either through federal regulations (contain's lead) or  manufacturers simply find it unprofitable to produce, what alternative fuel is ready to replace it?  A more likely,scenario has 100LL Avgas  priced out of affordability. How many of us could justify taking airplane vacations or maintain currency when fuel hits eight, nine, or god forbid -twelve dollars a gallon? At six dollars I already hear pilot friends saying  “ We took Jet Blue, It was $250 a person round trip, How could I fly?” .

I know in one way they’re correct but here are a couple simple truths to think about.

·         Flying won’t get any less expensive tomorrow

·         You’re not getting any younger

·         You won’t become a better pilot sitting in economy cabin of an Airbus A318

When you take the airlines.

·         The vacation fun doesn’t start until you arrive at your destination

·         The vacation fun ends when you check out of your hotel

Whereas when you fly yourself

·         It’s an adventure

·         Flying is an aging antidote for the mind and body.

·         You exercise the privileges of your license.

·         Freedom to come and go as you please.

So get in that airplane and go, now rather than later.  And when you see me ask me how I’m doing on those last 13 states. I only have three more years to get them in.

Took a rode around the patch in a 1960 C310 today.

A D Model with the Tuna Tanks. Meticulously restored by John P. the owner. We blasted off just as the snow squall was on the airport. Departed runway 26 at Danbury only to hit some moderate snow aloft at the departure end. Came right back around and landed. The squalls were coming in waves and it lowered visibility to just above three miles. Would have been nicer to take the old girl around a bit but we looking at radar we wouldn’t have got back in if we left the pattern. At least not without waiting a long time or filing.

It was a fun break from helping Pete run CAT 6 network cabling to the new side of our building. Damn snow cut the ride short and now we’re running cable again.   

Thank God its Friday

Reflecting on Milestones.

On 2/20/2012 I’ll have been writing in this blog for five years. I started adventure.58victor.com to come up to speed with Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS2007). At that time I owned a cloud computing business that I ran out of the Verizon Datacenter in Elmsford New York.

According to Microsoft- MOSS2007 was going to be a big seller in cloud computing and would complement our existing Hosted Exchange offering. At that time I was still deluding myself that the downturn in technology after the Y2K/DotCom crash was “just about over” and a wealth of new business was right around the corner that would keep me in airplanes and avgas like the good old days.

In 2008 I made another transition, the flight instructing that I was providing for a few aircraft owners on the side became more frequent. There were many weeks where I would bill more hours instructing then I did on my day job. The money flight instructing was a third of my bill rate as a technical project manager but I wasn’t getting much of that work and when I did it was unbearable. Managing projects across large geographies with incredibly short schedules and questionable resources isn’t something I relish so when I received a contract offer from a financial services company in lower Manhattan where the bill rate was only slightly higher than what I got paid as a CFII I declined.

I sweat this decision out until my wife Judy told me she like the flight instructor a whole lot more than the crazy man who works in the city and commutes five and a half hours a day. Anything to keep the bride happy. 

In 2010 I opened Motion Simulations (http://www.fullmotionflight.com/) and I’ve been flight instructing full time. I still keep the 58victor site up to date with my observations, although I just changed it over from SharePoint to  Google’s Blogger. Five years of talking about flying, Cross Country, IFR,  in little airplanes. What's not to like.

Another entry to the Single vs.Twin argument

Bookends

"Time it was, and what a time it was, it was

A time of innocence, a time of confidences

Long ago it must be, I have a photograph

Preserve your memories, they're all that’s left you"

I've spent a day converting my adventure.58victor.com blog from a self hosted site to this new site you're currently reading. Its part of the rebranding effort I'm undertaking prior to Motion Simulations' third year of operation.   

As I was doing a bulk copy operation I came across all sorts of pictures that I hadn't seen in years and I will be sharing some of them with you.  

It made me think of that song

Teaching Partial Panel on Glass

In the past year I’ve been lucky enough to have acquired a decent amount of experience in G1000/GFC700 Equipped aircraft. One of my customers purchased a G1000 equipped Bonanza late in 2010 and his insurance company required he undergo a quantity of dual prior to being able to solo the craft or carry passengers. Fortunately, I was the instructor he chose to use and over a year together we flown a considerable amount of time both VMC and IMC , in all manners of airspace.

Fast forward through that time and I found myself preparing a few pilots for their Instrument Practical Exam. For those unfamiliar with the rating requirements, an element of the practical test standard requires the applicant to demonstrate ability operating the aircraft partial panel

Devising a plan to meet this requirement posed some interesting questions. What constitutes partial panel in a glass aircraft and what are we trying to teach/demonstrate when flying partial panel?

Instrument crosscheck, reading, interpreting and verifying that the flight instruments display correct indications, without ambiguity, are the primary skills taught to pilots during their instrument training.  In a glass airplane, attitude and direction is the product of the AHRS or attitude heading reference system. Airspeed and altitude are devised from the ADC or air data computer.  These devices are backed up by a conventional altimeter, airspeed indicator and an electric attitude indicator. If the AHRS unit were to malfunction in flight the pilot then would transition to the backup instruments for attitude altitude and airspeed while utilizing the navigational system data depicted on the multi-function display for position information.

While this, by no means is an easy task, redundancies mandated by the FAA place these backup instruments on the panel to provide the pilot with the critical flight information required to assure the desired outcome safely.  As glass cockpits are relatively new to piston powered general aviation aircraft the documentation available to the applicant, instructor and designated pilot examiners on what is considered a failure and guidance on how to simulate one is scarce.  

Simply dimming the display can be used to simulate the loss of a primary display unit but this leaves the pilot without any navigation information. Additionally, in the real world, if the display unit were to fail, pressing the big red display backup button on the bottom of the audio panel would put the system in reversionary mode and light up the MFD, with the PFD’s data.

I had a conversation about that with our local DPE and his response was “he’s got to play the game”. I understood this to mean that the applicant would forgo the actual display failure procedure and fly NAV data off of the NAV Range ring and the track vector on the MFD while using the conventional instruments for attitude altitude and airspeed while the PFD was dimmed.

Pulling the breaker on the AHRS is a more accurate method in my mind of demonstrating partial panel as this provides a more conventional, gyro’s failed experience. When the AHRS is failed the attitude indicator and the HSI display bright red X’s . However the NAV portion of the HSI still displays the course deviation indicator and its deflection off of the chosen navigational source. It also makes the applicant divide their scan across the panel. Failing the Air Data Computer (ADC) by pulling the breaker is really a non-event as we have the airspeed and altitude directly readable off the standby instruments. Additionally most pilots flying high performance aircraft typically fly defined power setting that produce specific airspeeds. More noteworthy is pulling the ADC breaker will eliminate the Mode C data required by the transponder- a big drawback in these parts with the New York Bravo a scant 15 miles away.

To me it seems that the primary difference and difficulty in flying partial panel on glass is the lack of the turn coordinator. The attitude reference in the glass airplanes has the pyramid shaped pointer at the top of the display. The base of the pyramid represents the ball while the top details the bank angle. If the base is off center to the pointer “stepping on the base/ball” coordinates the turn.  The HSI indicator has graduations on either side of the lubber line to determine rate of turn, the closest mark represents half standard rate and the second mark is standard rate. While maneuvering a magenta arc moves through these graduations to detail to the pilot the rate of the turn.

With the display or AHRS gone the rate and quality of the turn information goes away as well. This leaves the pilot somewhat unable to perform standard rate turns which makes turns to headings more difficult especially in the  vectors to final situation one would likely be in if the equipment checked out in IMC. Most of the bigger airplanes are now adding redundant AHRS and ADC units to their glass implementations. Maybe one of these days there will be no partial panel, but until that occurs we’ll have to keep teaching and evaluating pilots skills flying it.

Getting Ready for the Sun and Fun

In late March or early April each year is when the Sun 'n Fun fly in runs at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland Florida. Sandwiched between the Bravo Airspaces in Orlando to the south east and Tampa to the west, the Sun N Fun serves as an unofficial green flag to the airshow and flying season.
Billed by the organizers as “Spring Break for Pilots” Judy and I have attended this show about eight times first in 1990 and 1991 and then starting up again in 2001. We attended pretty regularly until we started going to Oshkosh every year, now we try to make it to Sun and Fun every other year.

We last attended in 2010 meeting up on the field with Pete and Beth from Beaufort North Carolina. We first met them at Oshkosh in 2009 when they were tied down directly behind our plane. Beth likes coffee and it was their first year at Airventure and they had left their coffee pot behind. The necessity of caffeine broke the friendship barrier and we’ve been hanging with them at distant places with airplanes ever since.

Taking off from Danbury VFR the plan was to pick our way southwestward around the New York Bravo as the IFR routing would have put us in the clouds while joining v16 over JFK. The surface winds were blowing big during the departure from runway 26 and it required two hands on the controls to keep everything upright climbing into 50 knot winds aloft at 3000. AIRMET’s Sierra  Tango and  Zulu were in effect for most of the northeast with low clouds turbulence with the freezing level at the surface. Icing up an airplane in the busiest airspace around isn’t the way I want to get on the nightly news so we headed west from Danbury and try to get a bravo clearance at 3000 direct to Solberg New Jersey. In that neighborhood jogging southeastward towards Robbinsville kept us clear of the Philadelphia Bravo to join Victor 1 east of the MOA’s and Restricted areas.  Calling the approach controller we apprised him of our plan.

He counter offered down the Hudson at 2000 till south of the statue of liberty the over to Colts Neck where we climbed a bit and headed southwestward. The weather cleared up nicely around Salisbury MD and we climbed thru a hole to 6500. Rewarded with some spectacular tailwinds we pulled the power back and changed our destination from Hampton Roads Va to Kinston North Carolina.

Departing Kinston on an IFR flight plan filed to Lakeland we arrived there two and a half hours later, where Pete had saved us the Number 1 camping spot. New York to Central Florida in six and a half hours flying with an hour lunch break thrown in nearly rivals the elapsed time it would have taken to get to Lakeland commercially when driving to airports, checking in, flying, luggage and rental car retrieval,  along with the drive to Lakeland are factored in.

We didn’t attend last year and fortunately we missed the tornado’s. I have been there when there has been severe weather but generally our experiences at the event have been pleasant. Camping at the end of runway 9 is a lot of fun. The showers in the campground are first class and the local EAA chapter's corn roast nightly is a good activity after the sun sets. We used to spend the week but the last few times we have gone we’ve limited our stay to a few days usually adding in another destination either on the way there or on the way home. We did Key West for a couple nights then Sun and Fun  four years ago and did a few nights in St Simons the year prior to that.

We’re planning on attending again this year and if you’re thinking of making the trip we’ll see you down there. I’m planning a Sun and Fun NOTAM briefing session in our new classroom space at Motion Simulations  the Monday before the show. If you’re interested in attending please call or send an email to info@fullmotionflight.com and we’ll reserve a spot for you.

One Pilot or No-Pilot Aircraft

I received an email tonight from my friend Captain Bill from Dallas that he forwarded to “his list”. The email was about UPS and FEDEX trying to transition to single pilot aircraft. Now understand that in the author’s context single pilot aircraft are not the Cessna 208’s that they use to feed remote locations, rather the cargo jets they operate as the backbone of their overnight delivery operation. These companies would eliminate the Second in Command and the Flight Engineers  from the payroll and use one pilot. The idea is the remaining pilot would take off from wherever they may depart from, then turn control over to a drone operator at a base somewhere. The Pilot would retire to a lounge to sleep while the remote pilots fly the trip. Once the airplane is set up for the approach the onboard pilot would return to the controls and land the airplane.

The premise is by flying cargo, with no paying passengers, there will be less public outcry about safety. The email went on to detail how the F35 will be the last new military aircraft to have pilots in the cockpit. Going forward the military’s preference would be to deploy the remote piloting capability that we’re seeing with the predator drones deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. An extension of this would be applied commercially to freight then ultimately passenger flights.

The author retired as an airline captain after flying numerous other roles during his career. He was lamenting on the sun setting of his profession. I thought about this a bit and got a little morose about how technology displaces so many workers and how capital always seeks the greatest return.

A sobering thought which made me reflect on my own career.  I started working as a machinist running Bridgeport J Millers which turned into CNC machines. I learned to program them over time and eventually stopped cutting metal for a living after a few years to become a CNC programmer. That morphed into several other positions in technology which were a great way to make a living from 1983 until 2004. Those positions allowed me to pay my bills with enough left over to start taking flying lessons in 1985, get my pilot license, get married and buy a home in 1986. I purchased my first airplane in 1988 and my current one in 2000. My computer career culminated in several really lucrative years which peaked with the Y2K and the dot-com boom. Business starting diminishing in the commercial vacuum that was the 2000/2001 recession and largely collapsed by 2004 due to the combination punch of companies off shoring and out-sourcing domestically to low wage H1B and L3 visa holders.

One could argue that the new piloting careers will be in remote flying, with large centers of rooms filled with people operating aircraft a world away. Their mantra will be “This will create a many new high paying jobs”. And just as surely, many communities that desire these remote flying centers and will offer incentives for the airlines to move their operations there counting on the steady employment they will provide.

Additionally once transport jets can be operated with a single person any shortage of pilots qualified to fly them will disappear. That alone will put an industry of people on notice that they too can be replaced with low cost labor a half a world away.    

These days it seems as if there is no shortage of highly educated and experienced people being displaced as capital seeks its return.  As a consumer I know that the price of most everything is going up. Insurance, marketing, infrastructure and facilities,   all of the elements key to operating a business will continue to cost more as time progresses. However it seems like the only negotiable component in any delivery chain is employee pay and benefits.   Creating the perception that professional skills are commodities, interchangeable and exchangeable, is a process has proved effective time and again. But honestly we all know from recent experience what will happen to those positions once they are integrated into the “faceless, nameless, delivery model”. And if anyone actually thinks the company will pay personnel to sleep, they clearly have been sleeping themselves for the past 15 years. Those Pilots will be sorting packages while sweeping the floor of the airplane.

Here is the copy from the email I got from Bill

One-Pilot or No-Pilot Planes Steve Chealander member of the NTSB 2007-2009 is a retired American Captain. He gave a safety presentation at recurrent training about two years ago. He opened the floor for questions and one guy asked facetiously when are we going to one pilot cockpit? Chealander said that is not funny. He said Fed Ex and UPS are now, (two years ago), working on the procedures for a one-pilot long haul over-water operation. The pilot would be at the controls for takeoff and landing then go to the bunk for cruise while the guy back in Memphis would take over for the cruise. One pilot passenger flights will take a bit longer to get approved. Twelve years ago, I was Director of Operations for the Alaska Air Guard. I went to a high-level conference and this three-star General gave a presentation that said the exact same thing the major said. The only limitation on fighter aircraft now is the pilot. We have the technology to do everything from the ground and it will be a huge cost savings. No search and rescue, no life support systems, no backlash when we lose a plane. So this article is right on the money. I attended a flight safety presentation last evening from a retired AF Major test pilot from Edwards, Bill Koukourikas, now serving there as a civilian. During the course of his presentation, his statement, "No future attack military aircraft within the next 15 years will have pilots in the cockpit. The last tactical aircraft with a pilot in the cockpit will be the F-35. He also indicated that, within the next 10 or so years, all UPS and FedEx cargo flights will be with pilot-less aircraft. This prediction comes from their test shop at Edwards. All drone testing, development, etc., is taking place just south of Edwards in the Palmdale area. Sounds like a continuation of the Skunk Works developments of Lockheed which previously took place there.. Simply amazing! Hey, are we pilots a dying breed or what? This post puts me in mind of the joke that was going around the cockpit 40+ years ago: "The cockpit crew of the future will consist of a guy in a lab coat with a clip board and a monkey with a baseball bat to smack the guy in the lab coat if he touches anything." Is the single-pilot/no-pilot good or bad? It's neither, of course. It simply is. We'll individually assign a value judgment to it according to which side of the street that we now or used to work on. I hearken back to the first monorail at Disneyland. At first, no one would ride it because there was no driver. Disney hired a wino to sit in the front of the lead car as it ran between the hotel and the park. There was a set of non-functioning, but impressive-looking set of dummy controls. When the passengers exited, the wino would walk to the other end of the car and sit there for the 90 second trip and repeat his actions until his shift ended. After six months, they fired the wino, but no one noticed and the success of the monorail is history. Does the next generation of aircraft need pilots? Probably not with the state of avionics and navigation gear. Would it be seductive to the operators of these planes to have computers that never call in sick, never miss a trip, don't need a set of windows that cost more than all of the houses on your block, instrument and CRT arrays? On the other hand, what happens in the event of another 9/11 when aircraft are told to land immediately at the nearest suitable airstrip? I think of what I do today: build, repair, and maintain Windows PCs. I fully expect that, in less than five years, that you'll be buying an integrated mouse, keyboard and screen that, five seconds after you turn it on, it will have contacted The Cloud, given you access to your operating system, applications, and data -- none of which are stored on your machine. During the transition, of course, I'll have a couple of years to service those folks that are wary of move from the computer to The Cloud. But it will be of no matter. The forces that drive the industry -- companies and the governments that buy computers in huge quantities -- will insist that the technology be implemented. As folks in the workplace become used to the idea, they'll have them in their homes within a couple of years. Another wino fired (in this case, us). So goes progress. Politics will, of course, attempt to insinuate itself into the process, of course, like the buggy whip manufacturers did when the horseless carriage was starting to catch on. They got the best justice that money could buy when they bought a law that said every car had to have a buggy whip holder and whip. In the global market, however, the gummint doesn't stand a chance, so I'm not that worried about their levels of control over the Internet. I take joy and gratitude for the fact that I started in props, moved to turbines, and finished my career in aviation in jets and flew with guys that flew behind props.

Halifax- Why you need to learn how to use an E6B Flight computer

I get a lot of questions from new and student pilots about the necessity of learning some of what are admittedly antiquated aviation technologies. Learning VOR and ADF navigation in the age of GPS moving map navigators and geo-located iPad’s is an annoying but necessary skill that still must be demonstrated to an examiner on a practical exam. However, the one item generating most prospective pilots ire when studying for their knowledge tests or preparing for cross country flights  is the E6B flight computer.

Developed by Naval Lieutenant Phillip Dalton in the 1930’s the E6B was named after its original part number for the US Army Air Corps in World War II. Needless to say people have been using Lt. Dalton’s device for a long time now and when I’m asked about the why someone would want to learn to use one I tell my story. 

A few years back we received an invitation to attend the wedding of Judy’s cousin Paul to his beautiful bride Elizabeth in Nova Scotia.   Paul and Elizabeth held their wedding on the July 4^th weekend knowing that people would be travelling from all parts giving everyone a few extra days to arrive, enjoy the party and then get safely home.  

Neither Judy nor I had ever been in Nova Scotia before, having never traveled northeast of Portland Maine. Receiving the invitation gave us a destination for our Independence Day holiday. That the wedding was in another country and a single fuel stop away in the Mooney the stars started aligning for a bonafide airplane mission. Going to the wedding became a foregone conclusion.

Preparing for the mission I visited Sporty’s website to purchase both the Canadian and US charts VFR and IFR with all the associated material AFD’s Approach Plates, Enroute and Sectionals.

Considering we were embarking on an international operation, we checked in with AOPA who provided all sorts of guidance on what would be needed and expected by both US Customs and NAV Canada.  As the weeks unfolded between receiving the invite and the wedding, Passports, VHF radio station and operator licenses and our US customs decal was applied for and acquired.

While reviewing the charts and formulating a route I decided that rather than fly across the water from the Maine coast, my preference was to head northeast from Bangor on Victor 93 to Princeton than V318 to St John then V314 first to Greenwood NDB and continuing on to Halifax. We chose this routing as we would have to overfly about 35 miles of open water.  I’m squeamish about flying single engine over water and back then I was even more so. While we were studying the charts we became perplexed by a symbol we had never encountered on the sectional chart before. Judy got really excited when checking the legend  and seeing the symbol was  “pack ice”.

As the day weekend drew near we started checking the weather and on Wednesday July 2^nd departed for Bangor Maine after leaving work at lunch time.  Arriving into Bangor around 3PM we were held on a taxiway to let a gaggle of KC 135 E models taxi for departure. Part of the 101^st Air Refueling Wing of the Maine National Guard these old turbojet aircraft were turning the field IFR with gobs of thick black smoke as they taxied en mas for departure..  

We shut down and ventured into the FBO to secure our rental car and were happy to receive their rate for a hotel room on the field. While Judy checked in I walked over to the customs office next door to the Bangor AFSS. I brought all of our paperwork with me. By showing the customs inspector all of our material in advance, my thinking was we could correct any deficiencies he found before we left the country.  I had heard the difficult part of the border crossing was always on the US side. Meeting  and speaking  with the inspector who’d be readmitting us to the US put my mind at ease eliminating any possibility of misunderstanding that could complicate our return.

Our departure the next morning was routine with the forecast calling for a mix of clouds and the ever present possibility of thunderstorm’s arising as the heat of the day increased.  We travelled in clear weather about 75 miles northeastward when I realized that the over the water routing would have been a better plan. Having never been northeast of Bangor, I hadn’t realized that there is literally nothing but forests stretching as far as the eye can see in any direction. These forests were occasionally sprinkled with dirt logging roads weaving where the terrain was most hospitable for the road builders. At one point I remember mentioning to Judy that should we have an off airport landing we would be impossible to find in this dense growth of unpopulated expanse. 

Arriving in Halifax we taxied off to the FBO. I was prepared and excited to clear customs and waited in the airplane for someone to meet us. The line guy was looking at us funny so I asked him thru the vent window where the customs people would come from. He replied that we had to call them and pointed at the pay phone next to the FBO building. I was concerned that if I left the airplane I would be violating some sort of regulation but the line guy simply stated that if we didn’t call them they certainly weren’t going to just come to us so I left the airplane and called.  A pleasant woman answered and I informed her very formally of who we were and detailing our airplane registration.  It was so disappointing when the she simply said “enjoy your trip to Canada Mr. Walsh”.

The weather in Nova Scotia was unlike anything we had ever seen with large areas of low IFR  to be followed a few miles away with sever clear. I inquired about this with the flight service station briefers who stated the tidal bore in the Bay of Fundy that was responsible for the dramatic weather swings.

All in all we had a wonderful time visiting such a beautiful place. We did an island bird tour to see puffins and other shore birds indigenous to the region and ate some remarkable local seafood at reasonable restaurants.  We stayed at an old fashioned motor inn where you parked your car in front of your room. Most of the Paul and Elizabeth’s relatives in town for the wedding were staying there as well and we ran into them while enjoying a bottle of wine on the bench in front of our room.  Antigonish had an unspoiled feel about the town and reminded me of what Danbury was like in the late seventies prior to when the Mall’s  retail monoculture transformed my hometown.

The wedding was a great party and as typical we stayed till the end. We awoke the next morning to heavy fog in Antigonish which had dissipated by our arrival time at the airport, a two and a half hour drive away.

We arrived at the FBO which was barely open as it was Sunday. I found a line guy and asked him if he would top the Mooney with 100LL and put a quart of 10-50 Aeroshell oil in the engine. Judy packed up the plane and I set about to find the flight planning room to avail myself of their computer to both get a briefing and file our flight plan back to Bangor. When the line man came back in I asked him where the planning room was he told me they didn’t have one. I inquired about a computer and received the same response. 

Our flight plan needed to be somewhat exact, more so than a normal trip as we had to file with ADCUS (Advise Customs) which has some stern warnings about arrivals being late and some substantial fines should their procedures not be adhered to in the documented manner. Lacking a computer I retreated to my flight bag for my Sporty’s electronic E6B computer and a pad of paper to figure out distances headings and ground speeds. Pressing the “on” button I was a little alarmed to find the watch batteries powering it were completely flat.

Scraping through the bottom of my flight bag I found no batteries but came across my old aluminum E6B flight computer. Calling Flight Service I received the winds aloft and then set about to compute the ground speeds for the various different legs of the flight. We filed an international flight plan and launched.  The ride to Bangor was uneventful except we were saved having to look at the desolate forests as we were flying over by an undercast at about two thousand feet below. We were cleared for the approach into Bangor and as we were rolling out Judy commented about the customs vehicle that was pulling out onto the ramp to meet us.

“What time did you tell them we’d be here she asked”? “Twelve fifteen what time is it now?” I replied. Judy looked at her watch and said “twelve seventeen”. And that’s why you need to learn how to use a E6B in your primary training.