Category Flying and Gliding

Armed with an aeronautical chart, a firm grasp of latitude and longitude, and a clear distinction between the true and the magnetic poles, it’s time for a glimpse of the way pilots navigate.

Most modern planes come with sophisticated electronic navigation systems, called “inertial navigation,” which use extremely sensitive motion detectors. Others use a network of space satellites to help the pilot determine his airplane’s position around the globe. The cockpits of modern airplanes are becoming crowded with all sorts of “flight management” hardware, computerized gadgets updated electronically on occasion. Some depict the airplane’s flight path in relation to a background that looks exactly like a sectional chart or another type of chart.

Gyroscopes зге spinning wheels usually made of metal that, once they start rotating in a particular position, tend to resist distur­bance. In obedience to Newton’s laws of motion, a gyroscope that starts spinning in a north-south orientation, for example, will tend to remain lined up north and south. As the airplane turns, the directional gyro notes the difference between the direction the airplane is pointed and the gyro’s north-south orientation, and depicts it on the face of the instrument as a heading.

But the most “retro” navigational technique, and the one that demands the most skill from a pilot, is dead reckoning.

Dead reckoning was first used by the ancient mariners who plied the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Those sailors knew that if they headed in a particular direction at a set speed for a precise amount of time, it would be easy to calculate how far they had traveled. For example, if a ship left shore and traveled at a speed of 10 knots in a northward direction, after one hour it would be 10 nautical miles north of port.

In theory, dead reckoning is a relatively simple form of navigation for a pilot to use. A pilot flying over the earth at a certain speed and direction for a specific time could, with a simple calculator, a protractor, and an aeronautical chart, easily deduce his position in, say, an hour. But, as in everything else, real-life conditions make such “simple” navigation a little more complicated.

Plane Talk

The origin of the phrase "dead reckoning’ is lost in the mists of time, and there is still dis­agreement about it among pilots and navigation experts. The lamest explanation I’ve heard is that it derives from the nautical practice of navigating by referring to objects that were ‘dead in the water.’ The most likely origin of the phrase is from ‘deductive’ reckon­ing which means deducing your position based on a senes of observations.

Unlike the rest of us, pilots don’t use statute miles (the common miles) in measuring distance. Instead, pilots use slightly longer nautical miles, perhaps be­cause early flyers felt a kinship with seafarers. A statute mile, which got its name from a 1593 British statute that set the length of the modern foot, is 5,280 feet long. A nautical mile is defined as one minute of geographic arc, or 6,076 feet. That means speeds measured in nautical miles per hour, or knots, are faster than speeds measured in regular miles per hour. In fact, 100 knots is equal to 115 m. p.h.

Navigating over the surface of the earth has other complications. One of the most fundamental is that there’s no instrument on an airplane that can tell a pilot if he’s pointing directly at the North Pole. After all, the North Pole is simply an ordinary point on the earth’s surface with no special physical quality. It just happens to be the pivot location, one end of the spinning planet’s axle, if you will.

Fortunately, there are a couple of points on the earth’s surface that do possess a special physical quality. Near the North and South Poles, but still many hundreds of miles from the actual poles themselves, are points where the magnetic forces of the planet rise out of the earth’s core. These points are called the magnetic poles. For pilots, directions are measured from the magnetic north and south poles (though in the Northern Hemisphere the southern pole is mostly irrelevant, and vice versa).

Inside an airplane’s cockpit, the pilot has two instruments at his disposal to measure the direction to the magnetic north pole. The primary instrument is the simplest and most ancient—the magnetic compass. Compasses haven’t changed much since the Chinese first conceived them, and the aviation version is a lightweight card attached to a magnetic bar that points toward the magnetic north pole. The whole thing floats in a bath of white kerosene to stop it from jiggling too much in flight.

Even with the stabilizing help of kerosene, the compass can be somewhat jiggly and difficult to read in flight. So early aviators built the directional gyro, or DG. The DG

doesn’t point northward by itself, though, as the compass does. The pilot must set it before flight according to the magnetic compass. Periodically during flight, he must reset the directional gyro, which wobbles a bit due to friction in the stabilizing gyroscope. (We’ll talk about the array of flight instruments in more detail later in this chapter.)

If the earth’s surface were flat, the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. But when we’re traveling on the curved surface of a globe, the shortest distance between two points turns out to be something else: an “equator.”

Recall that the geographical equator is a line around the earth that splits the globe into two exactly equal halves. If we ignore the location of the poles and forget that the geographical equator is a line whose points are all at equal distances from both poles, we can imagine a multitude of possible equators circling the globe. In fact, we can imagine connecting any two locations by an equator—that is, the equator will run through both locations with exactly half the globe on either side.

Imagine an equator connecting two points— connecting Rome, New York, to Rome, Italy, for example. Another word for this line is a “great circle,” and a great circle is the shortest distance between the two points—even if that means flying from Rome, New Y ork, to the northeast and arriving in Rome, Italy, from the northwest.

From a pilot’s point of view, navigating across a great circle route is more difficult than flying a straight-line route. Great circles force pilots to constantly change course, while straight-line courses give us the luxury of pointing the airplane in one direction and holding it there.

But airliners and other planes gulping large amounts of fuel for hours at a time can save a lot of gas and money by trimming minutes off their flight times. So, with the help of computers and complex navigation equipment, they manage to fly a gradual great circle route.

Latitude and longitude represent a set of imaginary grid lines that give map makers, or “cartographers,” a system for pinpointing any location on the surface of the earth. The horizontal lines on this imaginary grid are the lines of latitude; the verticalrunning lines are the lines of longitude.

Latitude

Midway between the earth’s North and South Poles is the equator. The equator is a line whose points are all at equal distances from both poles. It divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres and can be thought of as the starting point for latitude. The equator is the line of zero degree latitude, and every location north and south of the equator is measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc.

Each degree of distance in a northerly or southerly direction from the equator is about 69 miles in width, meaning each minute of arc is a bit over a mile wide. That means you cross one second of latitude for every 101 feet you travel in a northerly or southerly direction.

Longitude

But longitude is not quite so simple to explain. That’s because lines of longitude aren’t parallel to each other the way lines of latitude are. In the case of latitude, each line is parallel to the equator and parallel to each other. In fact, we sometimes call lines of latitude “parallels.” But lines of longitude, or “meridians,” as they are also called, converge at the poles. All 360 of them meet at the North and South Poles in a space that can theoretically has no distance at all. If you stood at one of the poles, you could walk around all 360 degrees of longitude in a few steps.

Lines of longitude converge at the poles because they were conceived as running north and south. Because every north-bound trip ends at the North Pole—going any farther would be a south-bound trip—the lines of longitude end at the poles, too.

At the equator, the degrees of longitude are 69 miles apart, as wide as degrees of latitude. When you move north or south, however, the degrees of longitude grow narrower, since they all have to meet at the poles. That s why aeronautical sectionals and other maps feature perfectly parallel latitude lines but curving longitude lines.

Though latitude and longitude form the fabric of our mapping and navigation methods, pilots don’t often refer specifically to them. Instead, they refer to compass directions, or “azimuth,” and the time and distance of flight. These terms suffice to convey the important aspects of navigation for pilots.

Navigation is the element that transforms flying into traveling. The pilot who loves flying for its own sake can take his airplane aloft and enjoy the sensations of flight, then return to land without ever wandering more than a few miles from his home airport. The pilot who wants to get from one airport to another, or make his way to a particular site that he wants to see from the air, must be able to navigate—to plan a specific course between departure point and destination and then put that plan into practice in the air.

Drawing a Map

Road maps don’t need much explaining (unless we’re talking about learning to fold them up again so they’ll fit back in the glove box). They depict the features that are

most useful to automobile drivers—things like roads, parks, churches, schools—anything that drivers can easily see and use to navigate.

Aviation maps follow the same principle. They depict the features that will prove most useful in helping pilots navigate. But the definition of “useful features” to a pilot means that aeronautical maps look far different from road maps.

The Chart

First, don’t call an aeronautical map a “map.” It’s called a “chart.” There’s really no logical reason for the terminology, except that pilots always have to be different.

The differences between a road map and an aeronautical chart go much further than terminology. Most noticeable is the scale to which they are drawn. Aeronautical charts are designed to work for an airplane traveling a couple hundred miles an hour, not for a car traveling slowly and stopping at every corner. If aeronautical charts were drawn on the same small scale as a city road atlas, a pilot traveling at high speed would have to turn the page every minute or so.

Not only does the scale of an aeronautical chart differ from what we generally see on a street map, its features differ as well. When navigating by car, street names on corner signposts are critical to making your way to a particular restaurant, for instance. But in the air, the names of roads are far less important (and far less legible!) than the shape of the road against the terrain. A pilot compares the shape of a road with a distinctive pattern to a similar pattern on his sectional chart to find his way by air.

A third critical difference between the two maps is that road maps usually ignore all but the most heavily used airports. Sectional charts depict every possible airport and out-of-the-way landing strip, even some that are no longer usable. That’s because landing strips make particularly noticeable landmarks when seen from the sky. A secondary benefit is that if something goes wrong with the airplane in flight, it’s nice to be able to fly toward a landing strip as quickly as possible.

It won’t be long after you begin flying rented airplanes at your local airport that you decide you might like to buy one to call your own. You’ll put aside a little bit each month and skimp a bit on the entertainment budget, and before long you’ll have enough for a down payment on a little weekend fly-about.

Be prepared for sticker shock. Even a 25-year-old Cessna 172, a relatively low-power, low-speed airplane with few, if any, frills and options, will run you $55,000 or more if it’s in good condition—and there’s too much at stake to buy an airplane in less than good condition.

If you want to get a bit more sporty by buying into a trim, sleek Mooney, be ready to shell out $90,000 or more for a 20-year-old model. If you want to buy a new Mooney, the company’s latest M20R Ovation, you’ll have to slap down $407,000 just to fly if off the lot, and that’s before you start paying for insurance, maintenance, more fees and fuel, all of which can cost thousands of dollars a year.

Wish somebody else would pick up the huge up-front cost while you just enjoy the flying? Somebody has, of course—the fixed-base operator at your airport with an airplane rental business. My advice, and probably the advice of any responsible financial planner, would be to rent your plane rather than buy one. The per-hour cost to rent is lower simply because the airplane will get used far more than you can possibly fly it yourself, and someone else is dealing with the hassle of federal registration, record keeping, and so forth.

Rent, my friends, and happy flying!

Before you earn your real private pilot wings, you’ll have to take a multiple-choice written exam and an in-flight practical test.

Once your ground – school instructor feels you’re prepared for the written exam—typically after you have passed a sample test to his satisfaction—he will give you a form that allows you to take the FAA test. He will also give you a list of approved test proctors or computerized testing sites that administer the test.

If you’re taking the test in person, you’ll have to bring along a fee of $60 or so. A proctor will give you a test book containing nearly 1,000 questions, and a list of 100 numbers. Those numbers tell you which of the 1,000 questions in the test book you’ll be required to answer. In a room where several people are taking their private pilot

written exam at the same time, no two of them might have the same list of questions, reducing the chance for cheating among the test-takers. Here are a few sample test questions:

What is the one common factor that affects most preventable accidents?

A. Structural failure

B. Mechanical malfunction

C. Human error

How many feet will a glider sink in 10 nautical miles if its lift/drag ratio is 23:1?

A. 2,400

B. 4,300

C. 2,600

When flying HAWK N666CB, the proper phraseology for initial contact with McAlester AFSS is…

A. “MC ALESTER FLIGHT SERVICE STATION, HAWK NOVEMBER SIX CHARLIE BRAVO, RECEIVING ARDMORE VORTAC, OVER.”

B. “MC ALESTER RADIO, HAWK SIX SIX SIX CHARLIE BRAVO, RECEIVING ARDMORE VORTAC, OVER.”

C. “MC ALESTER STATION, HAWK SIX SIX SIX CEE BEE, RECEIVING ARDMORE VORTAC, OVER.”

The test will be graded later and your test results will be mailed to you.

If you’re taking the test at a computerized testing site, call ahead for the fee. When you arrive at the location, either at a flight-training center or at an approved commercial site, you’ll be instructed on how to use the computer screen, which is sometimes the touch-screen type. The computer program will allow you to change your answers or skip hard questions and come back to them later.

You’ll have the same four-hour time limit, and when you’re sure you’ve answered every question to the best of your ability, you formally end the test. You’ll get an instant official score, something that gives computerized testing a definite advantage. Many a sleepless night has been spent by student pilots sweating out their written test score.

The flight test begins with an oral Q&A session with an approved FAA practical examiner, who will also charge a fee of well over $100. It’s possible to fail the exam during this oral quizzing, though it’s a rarity.

Once past the Q&A, you and the examiner will begin the flight portion of the test, usually beginning with a cross-country flight that he has asked you to plan in advance. You’ll conduct the flight without any help from the examiner, and perform any one of a number of maneuvers.

The practical test is difficult to predict. A great deal depends on the habits of the individual examiner; an elaborate grapevine develops among students at each airport about the quirks of the local examiners, who are in a small group approved by the FAA to administer practical tests within a particular geographic area.

If you’re like me, you come away from each practical exam having learned a good deal from the examiner. Although they are not formally permitted to teach you anything, only to observe your skills, most of the better examiners pass along a few words of wisdom or a handy tip that they’ve learned during their many thousands of hours of flying experience.

Pilot shops are bursting with study aids and video programs to help student pilots pass their private pilot exams and help other pilots with their advanced certificates. The most valuable study aids I’ve found for the private pilot written exam are the Gleim study guides and the three-volume Pilot’s Manual series by Trevor Thom.

The Gleim books help pilots prepare for the FAA written exam by reprinting the actual exam questions along with the correct answer and detailed explanations of the

principle underlying the question. The Gleim series includes a preparation guide for the practical test, which is the portion of the FAA exam requiring the student and the FAA-approved check pilots to make a flight in order for the student to demonstrate his skill in a series of basic maneuvers.

The Thom books, published by ASA, are highly professional guides to ground-school material, as well as an excellent resource for studying the maneuvers and skills required for the practical test.

One other handy book for sharpening flying skills is a little treasure called Visualized Flight Maneuver Handbook, also published by ASA. Every instructor and student pilot should have a copy of this pocket-size gem, which depicts in full graphic detail the finer points of basic and advanced maneuvers.

I find that the perfect supplement to study books are study videos, which can help pilots better visualize their study material. By far the best videos are those produced by King School. The series, which is frequently updated as regulations change and teaching methods improve, is renowned for boosting test scores far above the national average.

In addition to being unequalled learning tools, the King School videos introduce you to John and Martha King, perhaps the most engaging husband-and-wife pilot team you’re likely to meet. They are excellent instructors, in part because they know better than anyone else what pilots should expect during a written exam and a practical test. That’s because both have every certificate and rating the FAA can offer, including the airship and gyroplane. That’s quite a distinction, and one that student pilots can take advantage of.

There are some extras that you might want to add to your training. Some schools, though too few to suit me, offer pre – solo spin training, where you and an instructor practice entering and recovering from simple spins, a potentially hazardous condition that students can inadvertently create out of inexperience. (We’ll talk about spins, a situation where the airplane

loses lift and twirls downward like a spinning leaf, in more detail in the next chapter and in Part 4, “Meeting the Challenges to the Perfect Flight.”)

I always recommend spin training because I believe students who can recover from them are more confident pilots. But this type of training adds another cost, perhaps extra $60 to $100 per hour. A single flight should be enough to adequately expose you to spins.

You may also want to pay for extra “hood time,” where students don a piece of headwear that narrows their field of vision, blocking the view outside the plane and permitting them to see only the instrument panel. Instructors use hoods to simulate a flight into a cloud or a flight after sunset. This sort of training got extra attention after the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law in July 1999. Many aviation writers, including me, believe his inexperience in flying without a clear view of the ground may have caused the accident. Extra training in this area could pay big dividends later.

Finally, some flight schools offer flight simulators that allow students to practice some cockpit skills from the safety of the ground. Simulators cost much less to practice in than an airplane, though instructor time is still a factor. Simulators aren’t good substitutes for everything, however. For example, you can’t improve your takeoff and landing skills in a simulator. But in case you want to become more familiar with the way flight instruments are used or you want to practice flying safely if you encounter clouds or bad weather, as JFK Jr. did, simulator training is the ideal way to learn.

Think the costs are starting to add up? Frankly, we haven’t started to scratch the surface yet. The cost of an airplane is where flying gets really expensive. Airplanes require much more maintenance than a car, use more fuel, are more expensive to insure, and have a far higher sticker price when they’re new—well over $100,000 for even some of the smaller models (which is why I recommend renting your airplane).

That’s all in order to prepare you for the economic reality of learning to fly. The least expensive flight school, including ground instruction, flight instruction, and airplane rental, will cost $3,000 or more. It’s not unheard of for a quality program to cost as much as $6,000 or more. Most private pilot training packages include 20 flight hours with an instructor and another 20 solo. Don’t count on finishing with the FAA minimum of 40 hours. It will probably take longer, so accept that and budget the cost from the very beginning.

On Course

But here’s one area in which you can legitimately trim costs. Don’t opt for the expensive training airplanes such as a Beechcraft or the larger Pipers and Cessnas. There will be time to fly them later. During your training, settle for the smallest, and least expensive, Cessna 150s, Cessna 152s, Piper Archers, or Grumman Cheetahs. If you’re flying from a high-altitude airport, you may need the extra performance of a Cessna 172, Piper Cherokee, or Grumman Tiger, which cost more. As long as your FBO pays for high-quality maintenance, less expensive airplanes don’t mean less safe airplanes.