Phase 3 E in Tennessee

March 15th thru April 19th

2003

Well here we go again. We finally got on our feet enough to invest some more money and time into getting my license here in Tennessee.  Going back out to Tulsa still wasn't an option for us and besides I wouldn't have to miss work plus the money spent travelling back and forth could be spent on flight training hours instead of trip expenses.

Here Goes Something!

Every Saturday until we ended it on April 19, 2003, Donna and I pulled out of our store after work and headed out on an hour and a half ride one way drive. Once we were there we set up camp right on the airport for the weekend, usually not arriving back home until dark thirty Sunday nights.

The first thing to learn was preflights which took me at least 20 to 30 minutes to complete.  Something, by the way, I take very seriously especially from my prior experiences at the RotorWay Factory. This fellows ship was in great shape and of all the times we flew I only found one thing wrong with it which was a hose clamp had either come loose or had been left loose by mistake on the oil filler inlet tube where it goes into the engine block.

Up until now I've had about 2 shots at watching the start up of one of these beasts and 0 time flying on and off a trailer.  The check list we were working with was right out of the manual and contained all kinds of things you had know about and look past such as the heater and spot light this ship didn't happen to have onboard and many other things so during the whole thing you had to sort out the needed items from the not needed ones that applied to the ship we were flying. Starting this thing up and shutting it down was a pretty intense sequence of events.

Once we were warmed up and ready to lift off the platform we would

lift off the to a hover and then hover forward until the tailboom cleared the platform.  At that point we'd stop in a hover and adjust the trim to neutralize the pressure on the cyclic before making our turn and heading out to the runway clearing our tailboom on every turn and announcing our intentions on the radio.

At a hover and prior to taking off down the runway I had to run through a system check:
Engine and rotor in the green
gauges in the green
mixture setting Full Rich
All chip and warning lights out
Fuel Quantity is XX Gallons
Next was a Radio call to report our intentions.

We'd takeoff and then turn into the crosswind part of our pattern and coming up on our target altitude about to turn to our downwind leg of the flight I had to scan the skies for traffic by turning my head back and forth to look for traffic prior to making the turn. After the turn to downwind it was time for another radio call to report our position in the pattern and our altitude.  Also during the downwind leg and before we enter our base leg I'd have to check everything and call out the checklist once again,

Engine and Rotor in the Green
All Gauges in the green
All warning lights are out
Mixture Control at full mix
Fuel Quantity is XX Gallons

Then at the end of the downwind leg I had to be sure to turn my head to scan for traffic prior to making the turn to our base leg and once on it announce our position on the radio.  After turning on final another call out on the radio reporting our position and intentions.

During these flights the CFI would mark down everything I did wrong and sometimes right on a list.  After we landed and got the ship shut down he'd critique me with it.

This is pretty standard stuff in the aviation world and is certainly the way it should be done.   If I had the flying part of this ship down first I think I could have progressed alot faster ... but learning the ship, the pattern, and adding all that other stuff to the mix all at the same time from the get go was a pretty big bite for me to chew especially since I hadn't been playing professional helicopter boy for the past 9 months. I kinda figured I'd first be allowed to get the hang of flying the ship in all the different maneuvers and then add all that stuff later, but he required that I absorb it all at the same time.

One of the first things he wanted to do is see if I did in fact know how to plan and fly a cross country. I showed him my logged flights and copies of my flight plans from my solo cross country trip which by the way is how I met this fellow in the first place. He's based at the one of the airports along the path of my first cross country so he for sure knew I could do it but he wanted to see it first hand anyways. Well for starters I hadn't done any flight planning since RotorWay and when I went to figure my flight plan for some reason I just couldn't get it right lol.  I ended up going home and doing it and figured out what I was doing wrong. Wella,,it turned out to be a very simple thing.   I was inputting my heading/groundspeed before the planned TAS function on my Electronic E6b calculator. Also The Electronic E-6b figures in the TC and outputs it to the point of the TH which was another problem I encountered when I was attempting to do this on site at the airport.  The CFI thought I was skipping past it and kept insisting I needed it on my sheet.   In my experiences thus far I've found that just about every CFI uses the old style wheel for calculating these things and literally has no idea how to work the electronic version.   I guess that's why RotorWay pitched such a bitch on my using it lol.   The Electronic version is as close to idiot proof as it gets providing you follow the proper sequence.  I've also got a different type of protractor I use.  It was one I used way back when in my boating days for crossing the seven seas.   It takes a few steps off plotting a course line thus leaving less of a margin for error.  This for some reason just as with the Electronic version of the E-6B is another tool CFI's don't like to see.  I guess most of these guys don't like to see change, hell I bet a few of them still cut there lawn with a sickle lol.  Another thing I started out doing is figuring the distances in statute miles opposed to nautical miles.  Maybe it's stupid but our RotorWay has an airspeed indicator that is in MPH not Knots.   It doesn't make sense to calculate everything in nautical miles and then fly it trying to use an airspeed indicator that reads in statute miles per hour.  Anyway for that reason when I flew my RotorWay I figured everything in statute miles and I had a blond moment and was doing the same thing at this fellows school until he asked me why in the hell I was doing that lol.  If you think about it, it's pretty stupid for RotorWay to give us that mph unit in our ship when every thing in the aviation world has always gone by and still goes by nautical miles.   Someday when we get the money and find one that reads at less then 40 knots we're dumping that mph airspeed indicator in our ship and installing the real deal but until then we'll just have to deal with it the best way we can.

On the next trip to the CFI's place I showed him how I arrived at my figures and we were good to go.  He taught me a new term that day lol...Perishable Skills!,,Lord I hate that term.   What that means is, if you don't use it you loose it, and it is so true lol.  There were many things I had to completely learn again and this was just one of them.  I never dreamed as much as I put into this flying thing that so much knowledge would be so lost in such a short time. I've studied up for all this stuff 3 times if you count the written test and at this point each time a few months goes by and I'm very close to brand new lol.

 
Well I've got a Whopping 2.3 hours time in this baby
and here we go on a planned cross country the CFI had me do.

I anticipated this trip all week and even if I did consider it a waste of time and money I was really looking forward to it, it sure beats the hell out of flying that pattern over n over again weekend after weekend lol.   The plan was to fly from our location and fly south to 3 more airports and then return. The whole trip was around 142 miles over all.  We started out heading to our first airport which I hit right on the money crossing right over the midfield.  I was a few minutes behind the time I had planned on for the leg due to my airspeed and altitude floating around a bit but none the same there it was.  Next was a slight left turn to our next destination.   I missed that one by about a mile or so and had to circle to locate it, I knew I was there I just couldn't see it and finally I picked it out on our right at about the 2 o'clock position.   Next was a slight change in course and it was on to the next one.  A few miles or so out on this portion of the trip the CFI said to turn around and return to our home airport due to make believe bad weather conditions coming up from the south.  Hummm!  I hadn't planned on this at all and I had to come up with a course in my head, meaning account for the wind direction and speed plus magnetic variation to come up with a course back home.  I had my chart on my clip board track up for that part of the trip and I looked at it for a bit and just couldn't get the picture in my head.  What I ended up having to do was turn my chart over, North side up and within a few moments I picked my course and turned the ship to that heading. About half way back the CFI wanted me to tell him where we were and with a large lake off our right side that seemed like a pretty easy task.  Well it was, but at the same time it wasn't, because he didn't want to know about where we were at, he wanted to know exactly where.  You can see on the chart that this lake had a pretty distinct shape to it and on the chart right at the north west corner of it it appeared there was a highway running west from it. To the west there was a highway that ran north and south but in real life looking at it it didn't look like it did on the chart.  I told him where I thought we were in terms of a circle of 3 miles or so and that didn't make it with him. He pointed to a point just west and below us and said, see where that road and those railroad tracks come together,,,that's exactly where we are.  Well that was a better way of doing it for sure but we were almost right in the center of that circle I showed him and that to me meant right on the money.  What tricked me up was that road coming from the northwest corner of the lake was actually in real life about lower than it showed on the chart.  Anyways we went on from there and we ended up flying right down the centerline of the runway of our home base airport.  I couldn't have hit on it any better if I had charted it out and had all the variables figured in.  After we landed the CFI told me my dead reckoning was right on the money but my pilotage (meaning exactly where in the world are we) sucked!  Personally I thought I did a hell of a job on that trip and if my air speeds and altitudes were consistent it would have all been right on the money.

Nearing the end or so I thought

Well here we are past the 15 hours (and over $3,000 this round) he said it would take and according to him I was just hitting the midpoint in training. We still had Settling With Power and Maximum performance Takeoffs to go.

When I asked him how many more hours I would need he said he couldn't answer that and said I still needed to get through settling with power and maximum performance take offs, and that I HAD to do more cross countries.   He said he over looked alot of things prior to our first 16 hours he hadn't figured on.   There was a whole lot of things as far as ground school was concerned he never counted on having to teach me and his material was quite a bit different than what I boned up on for RotorWay's flight school like memorizing the entire Schweitzer helicopter manual,  not to mention most of what I had learned priorly had to be relearned because of the time lapse between training sessions I had undergone.  He spent alot of hours doing that at no charge.  Personally I think he runs a pretty good school but at the same time under these methods I think I wasted alot of time and money once again.  There's no doubt in my mind that if we had enough money and continued with this fellow I would eventually become a perfect first class pilot in a year or two lol.  Anyways in black and white I know for a fact I needed to do settling with power and max take offs and I think a couple of hours should more than get through that but, making me do more cross countries was way out of line.  I've had way more than the required time on them not to mention as far as I was concerned I'm pretty damn good at them.  There were a few more issues in all this too but at the point of hearing him say I had to do more cross countries I said my goodbyes to him and decided to go else where and finish up.

 Something I'll never forget this fellow here in Tennessee for, is he was the guy that taught me how to do Run On Landings.  Yaknow something, as much as they freaked me out riding along with someone else doing them, they're about the kewlest thing I've ever gotten to do in a helicopter lol.  Another good thing about this fellow is just like CFI Bill Orth at RotorWay and CFI Frank Sweet in Tulsa, he did let me fly the ship and whatever happened was certainly the result of me on the controls lol.

Finding someone else turned out to be quite a chore.  Schweitzer helicopters aren't easily found anywhere around me.  The closest one was a fellow over a days ride from us and although he is one hell of a pilot he one of those hardcore training guys.   A couple friends of mine here in Knoxville went to him and said they learned alot from him and did get their tickets but it was the most belittling experience they have ever had so that guy was sure out lol.  Donna, Brandy, and I talked it over and decided if it took years to get through it all we weren't going to anyone like that.   Unless someone like Frank Sweet comes along in a Schweitzer, we we're just going to chill out and wait for a time when we can go back to his school in Oklahoma.  We really hate to see our helicopter sit in the barn but there was always the fly-ins to look forward to and thanks to the wonderful friends we've made there's always someone to fly with me and take Donna and Brandy for rides so it isn't at all as bad as it seems.   Later on another option came to our attention that was available to us.  It was a fellow in Atlanta that was great to work with but, <sigh>  he trained in Robbies.  Humm I thought Naaaaaaaaaa!  Hell if learning a Robbie was anything like learning a Schweitzer it would take another $3000.00 or so to get up to speed in it.  Hell I figure it cost me $1000.00 in time just to learn to start a Schweitzer so that was sure out lol.   

You'll also find some of these charts in the flight training files and maps section. 

Here's a neat chart I made up for converting time from Zulu time to current time across the USA.

I used this mainly for easily decoding times on Taff and Metar reports but it's also useful doing cross countries and flight planning for you lucky people that get to travel long distances.

This is a weight and balance form we used to figure the Schweitzer's CG with. We plan to make one similar to this one for our RotorWay

Cross Country Planning Using Electronic E6B
Locate departure & destination points
Plot true course on chart
Circle check points on chart
Measure the distance in nautical miles
Note the magnetic variance + or -

From chart enter:
locations
Identifiers
Elevations
Coms
Altitudes
Course headings

Enter:wind direction
    wind speed
                  temperature in Celsius
             compass deviation

Using PLAN TAS calculate
TAS (true airspeed)

Using HDG/GS calculate:
GS (ground speed)
 TH (true heading)

Add or subtract magnetic variance to get MH (magnetic heading)

Add or subtract compass deviation to get CH (corrected heading)

Calculate LEG TIME

Using FUEL REQ calculate fuel burn

Add up leg distance column

Add up ETE column (estimated time enroute)
Add up fuel burn column

Using ENDUR calculate fuel reserve

Theres a downloadable version of this in the cross country section

This is copies of my log book showing the times along with the maneuvers we did each flight.

Miscellaneous pics

This was pretty much our weekend view of the world on weekends for a few weeks.

END