6 November 2023 / FLYING

For a Rusty Pilot

Between March 2020 and May 2023, I took one flight. Since then, I’ve put in 18.3 hours. From rusty pilot to proficient, here’s what I (re-?)learned.

Communication and radio work

This was the first skill to go, and the last one to come back. I guess that’s OK, because it’s aviate, navigate, communicate – not the reverse. Still, everyone knows the best pilots sound cool on the radio (obviously), and I was achieving neither. Let me recount some of my errors.

I’m constantly forgetting my own tail number. I hear it when it’s called, especially by context – but I find myself peeking under the glare shield before I make my own calls. Maybe it’s just a confidence problem?
Non-movement areas and run-up areas are tricky, especially because they’re airport-specific. KPAO and KBJC both have extensive non-movement areas, but while at KPAO you request taxi and they advise routing in the non-movement area, at KBJC you taxi yourself to its edge before calling ground. For run-up, at KBJC you pull up on the taxiway to hold-short the runway before calling tower, but at KPAO you call tower from in the run-up and they give you taxi instructions for the brief trip to the runway.
It took me a while to get the cadence of flying again, and knowing when to expect them to call me vs. someone else. There’s a lot less “was that for me?” these days, now that I’m more proficient. Well, none, lately!
I had a few readback incorrects, especially early on. One time I read 132.75 as 123.75, mistook “taxi runway 3, bravo three” as “taxi romeo three, bravo three”, which made no sense for my current position on the airport and gave me pause. I read back cleared to land 30R once on upwind from 30R when tower simultaneously cleared me to land 30L (a runway switch) and a frequency change to the secondary tower. After I fumbled that one and my instructor stepped in to fix it, tower said “let’s see if your guy can get it right next time”. My instructor took the radio calls after that …
Had a few times where I forgot to read back my own tail number, or even read it back wrong!
It’s tower, not ground. There were plenty of times I said “Metro Tower” when it should’ve been “Metro Ground”, or vice versa. Luckily never on the wrong frequency! Oddly, I never catch these until after, in a sort of “did I say ground?” and my instructor says “no, you didn’t”. Thankfully tower (ground?) is always nice about it.
It’s Metro, not Rocky Mountain. Virtually every airport I’ve been to in California is called by its airport name, e.g. “Palo Alto Airport” is “Palo Alto Tower”. Of course here “Rocky Mountain Metropolitan” is called “Metro”. Thanks. I screwed that up plenty!

Angles: magnetic, true, courses, headings, and crosswinds

East is least, west is best. But is that for converting magnetic to true or the reverse? Is there a nmemonic for that? Just like “East is odd, west is even odder”, it requires knowledge of some external fact. Not much of a memory aid, is it?
ForeFlight gives true course, VORs give magnetic. So if you simply draft a line from a VOR to a destination, and read the bearing there, it’ll be different from what you’d fly on the VOR.
If you read it, it’s true. If you hear it, it’s magnetic. That’s a helpful one to remember which winds are given in true versus which are given magnetic.
Wind correction angles and the E-6B. I spent a good long while at my desk trying to remember enough trig to derive an equation to calculate the required heading given the desired ground track, forecast winds, expected ground speed, etc. I eventually remembered, dumbass, you’re supposed to use an E-6B for that. Unfortunately I lost mine (how??). Remind me never to try deriving trigonometric relationhips again, I’m not good enough at math for that anymore.

Forecasted barometric pressure

Every tenth of an inch of barometric pressure represents 100 feet of difference between true altitude and pressure altitude. As pressure fluctuates constantly and rarely in solid patterns, it’s good to have a pressure forecast in order to do performance calculations for your destination. But is pressure included in the TAF, MOS, or even non-aviation forecasts? Nope.

I know how I did this in California – I ignored the effect of pressure on performance. I trusted I wouldn’t be flying in pressure gradients strong enough, or in conditions in which pressure changed rapidly enough, to matter, since mostly that means stormy weather. Perhaps I just used the METAR at departure time and rounded up a few hundred feet?

Either way, in Cali I was definitely trusting that temperature would be the governing effect, which it definitely is – but still, best to at least do it eyes wide open.

Limitations of the performance charts

I’m even more surprised now by just how limited the performance charts are. It’s very easy to stray outside them, even if mostly on the safe side.

There’s nothing for <2200 lb takeoff in a C172. That’s what I’d weigh with just me, half-gas, and a day bag. Fine, that’s just over 2100 pounds, I’ll round up.
Nothing for below 32 F. Again, OK, I’ll round up, but it’s very often very cold here in KBJC and that’s a legitimate concern!
Nothing for over 8000 ft PA, which is funny considering plenty of folks have had these airplanes up in Leadville – almost 10k feet elevation. Most of them do it with extremely light aircraft loadings, e.g. removing the back seats and half-gas. You’ll remember these extremely-light loads also aren’t described on the performance charts! Now, am I doing any of this? No. Does somebody do this? Yes. Do somebodies also regularly fly above gross? Yes, they do that too.
You are supposed to interpolate between values in the performance chart when able, otherwise round up. Mostly, given the way the performance charts are written, that means rounding temperatures OR pressure altitudes (realistically, temp) but not weight. But, theoretically at least, you can interpolate between all of them. Would be nice if there were some kind of app or calculator that used manufacturer-approved interpolation rules … But perhaps a Cessna phone app would be a little too modern. Anyway, I wrote my own interpolation utility to handle this for me, but I haven’t had a chance to use it just yet. Hopefully it doesn’t get me into trouble.
There’s nothing to account for runway slope. Crazy! It’s all rules of thumb, which range from a generous -22% for landing uphill and +7% for landing downhill to a more severe -10% and +10%, respectively. The only POH example I could find was from a DA40, which listed … +5%, on the even more generous side. I went with the +/- 10% rule, which is popular and conveniently means 1% of grade is “worth” about 2 knots of tailwind or 9 knots of headwind. I hope it’s popular because it’s true, not because it’s convenient, though … Because I can definitely see the vicious cycle forming.

Stick-and-rudder stuff

Luckily climbs, turns, straight-and-level, etc. were never terribly hard (same with simulated instrument) but I did have trouble with all the SAME things I always had trouble with. It’s nice to start where you left off though, I suppose?

Turn into, dive away. I never really learned that even for my checkride – No, I can’t remember ever really knowing this! It makes more sense now for some reason. A lot like the compass errors during turns, which I maintain is just a hazing ritual since why wouldn’t they just teach us to achieve straight / level / constant-speed flight before taking compass readings? I think this was from airplanes before gyroscopes existed and you really did have to make precise turns off a magnetic compass.
Hold the aileron in even after touchdown. I remembered, thankfully, to hold the ailerons throughout the takeoff roll, but I forgot to hold it during landing roll. Oops!
Slip more. Let’s be real, I didn’t love slips even during my (brief) stint of instrument training. There’s something about flying low to the ground, in a fast descent, misaligned with the runway, with erroneous speed readings, in order to resolve an unstable approach with mismanaged energy, that just feels like a bad idea. Again, it seems like something that was more critical when everybody flew fabric-body tailwheel planes with no electrics and they needed some way to slow down.

The VORs are just disappearing one by one

This is always something I read but rarely something I experienced. I don’t remember tuning a VOR to find it inactive or broken in California. But now, every time I plan an XC I find the VOR is down, NOTAM’d or not. There were a few VORs north of LA on my practice XC plan to Trona, and most were NOTAM’d non-functional. Then I planned to fly direct BRK (Black Forest) on my way to KPUB, but I found it non-functional.

I suppose these days were’re supposed to use RNAV (GPS) to get between waypoints, and eventually names like “Black Forest” will just refer to a named point in the sky instead of a radio emitter on the ground. Like “the racetrack” south of San Carlos (KSQL) that hasn’t been a racetrack in about three decades.

But it does make the whole “cross-reference your position with VORs” a little trickier, since verifying your GPS (primary) location only works if the secondary method is non-GPS. Maybe the secret here is just that GPS works especially with WAAS and RAIM and we should just trust it to be correct?

XCs are boring

It’s true, especially over the empty American bread basket! There is just nothing going on. I’ve spent so many hours with high workload either around SF’s Bravo or at KBJC’s parallel runways that toodling between KBJC and KPUB, for example, with silent radios and negligible airspace, was just … boring.

I wish there were a “Denver tour” for nice scenery, but it looks like that’s basically fly north and south along the mountains and check out the foothills and snowy peaks. No Bravo transitions, frequency changes, etc. Pretty chill.

Anyway – I know this was a long one. I’ll enjoy reading it years from now, especially when I’ve come up with longer-term solutions to some of the annoyances I listed here. Wish me luck!