Page 18 - Volume 16 Number 6

any mods he deemed useful. He just didn’t perceive that his flying style was a problem that needed fixing. If the airplane were broken, he would get someone right on it. However, his broken approach to piloting was just as important, if not more so, but he hadn’t put himself in the shop yet, in spite of my needling.
What’s So Important?
What makes us succumb to urgent pressure and depart without running a checklist? Why do we skip refueling when we return to home base, and then depart on the next flight with half tanks, because we’re too rushed to call for the truck? Did we really need to make the trip despite pilot reports of moderate to severe turbulence? Perhaps it’s an ego thing. We may think that the world won’t turn if we’re not out there giving it a push--or maybe we’re afraid that it will keep turning, after all. We don’t want society to discover that it can function without us, so we dare not take a day off.
Airplanes are not just another jump-in-and-go mode of transportation, because there’s a lot more at stake. In return for the ability to leap over traffic jams and ignore security checkpoint lines, we have to be willing to pick our times to fly or not fly. I rather doubt that my aforementioned client had canceled a trip in years.
It sometimes takes a scare to bring us back to reality, if a respected friend won’t share his concerns with us. Late one fine afternoon, I rushed off to make a short positioning flight so the airplane would be handy for a long trip the next day. I departed my usual one hour late, found the airplane wasn’t ready for tomorrow’s mission, and finally got airborne at sunset. In the thickening gloom, I suddenly realized I had no idea where the instrument light switches were in the strange cockpit, nor had I tossed a flashlight into my flight bag. Panic stricken, I fumbled over the dark panel, until I finally recalled where the rheostats were
hidden. I learned my lesson; the next time I picked up an unknown airplane, you can bet I was prepared.
Hard chargers don’t usually respond well to sharp commentary about their flying. I kidded one of our local pilots about testing the airplane’s turbocharging, because I saw him flathatting out of the pattern at 200 feet AGL. He just said he was going out to check on something and didn’t need to go very high, but he got the intent of my comment. Had I simply told him to quit buzzing the neighborhood, he would have bristled indignantly and wrapped himself in invulnerability. The secret is to catch active lifestyle individuals in a receptive moment and make them think.
Back To Basics
On our recurrent check flight, I asked my hard-charging client to show me his flight planning procedures. We were in familiar country, so any books and charts he had aboard were scattered behind the seats; he knew all the local frequencies and could set up most of the approaches by rote, relying on the airport data in his GPS for the rest. But, I knew of a recent change and asked him to show me the update; sure enough, his revision was behind a couple of cycles. Instead of berating him, I told him a war story about the time I got caught in a similar circumstance, which made me more diligent about having current data in the cockpit.
The hard-charger’s departure continued to demonstrate his well- polished, yet unconcerned, flight procedures. Not only was the gear retracted as soon as the struts were extended, he pulled the power back to cruise-climb settings before we even reached the end of the runway, snapped off the boost pumps in one swoop, and took his feet off the rudder pedals while settling into a shallow climb. He was simply taking care of business in his airborne office, clearing the “desk” of details as quickly as possible. I suggested
16 • TWIN & TURBINE
JUNE 2012