The Drill

Later the same day, another semi-frustrating lesson, this time with John in 05D. We take off at about 8pm on 15 then turn towards San Pablo Bay. I know the drill: lower the cone of stupidity at about 600' and follow the vectors John gives me out over the Bay. We do about a 45 minute workout with me under the hood: VOR and NDB tracking (which goes OK(ish), despite my not having prepared NDB stuff yet); steep turns and recovery from unusual attitudes (both OK, but quite rough -- at one stage I find myself in an unusual attitude of my own making while doing a steep right turn, but sense it in time to recover cleanly before John had the chance to start screaming "we're all going to die!!!!"); and the usual melange of turns, ascents, descents, and just following the instruments. As with the first lesson, my flying is sloppy: I keep overshooting headings and altitudes, I can barely keep within even wildly liberal interpretations of headings and altitudes when flying "straight" and "level", and I (again) couldn't answer simple questions when under the cone of stupidity about our position in relation to the VOR or NDB, etc., without considerable (slow) thought. Urgh. Very depressing -- I thought I'd started to get this right, at least as far

One of John's favourite exercises is apparently to use "BOGUS" NDB -- actually KCBS-AM, a local AM talk radio station on 740 KHz with a huge antenna array up near Gnoss -- for ADF / NDB work, so we spend something like 10 minutes weaving around trying to home to BOGUS NDB and intercept specific bearings to it. You're supposed to tune the NDB station and then continously monitor its transmission to ensure it's still broadcasting while you're using it, so we potter about somewhere in the darkness east(ish) of Gnoss accompanied by an all-news soundtrack discussing condom use in -- synchronicity! -- Southern Africa, sex worker pay in Thailand, and the recent heat wave in Northern California (Blimey! the temperature actually got above 20C for several days in a row!). Not the usual snap-crackle-pop morse you get from real NDBs. I sense a lot of BOGUS holds in my future....

Once again we do the ILS 27R practice approach back to Oakland with me doing the flying hoodless; once again, without the hood, the approach and general flying is mortifyingly within IFR PTS standards at all times, and 05D flies itself smoothly and efficiently through the approach and onto the touchdown zone. We do the approach at 110 KIAS rather than the supposed standard 90 KIAS, mostly because this is realistic for an airport like Oakland -- you can't slow all the high performance aircraft on the approaches behind you down just because you want to loiter along in a 172. This does, however, make for interesting landings when you look up at the MAP with just a few seconds to slow down to something closer to 70KIAS and pget the flaps down -- but I cope (you have to approach at this speed sometimes in VFR anyway, so it's not like I haven't had to do this many times in the past without doing a formal approach). All in all, the approach was smooth and understandable, but I'd hate to see what it'd be like under the cone of stupidity at this stage....

Earlier, just after the runup, John plays Clearance Delivery (which ain't like playing Deliverance) while I take down a long clearance from him. This time I get it all down legibly, but I regurgitate it from memory ... backwards, starting with the transponder code and ending with the clearance limit. Seems I do this for VFR clearances as well -- it goes in one way, comes back out like a popped stack. That's the way I remember the clearance elements, unfortunately. I'll have to work on this -- my response would have driven any controller crazy, even though it contained all the right individual elements (just in reverse order). For VFR, it doesn't matter much -- clearances tend to be short and uncomplicated, and I suspect controllers are just being polite to the guy-with-the-funny-accent; for IFR, I just need to actually read the damn thing back rather than memorize it, I guess. D'Oh!

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So why do I feel things didn't go well (despite John's belief that I did OK)? I'm not sure, but it was more to do with my unrealistic expectations than anything fundamental. I think I spent so many hours on my little PC driving the ASA On Top simulator that I fixated on learning to fly it instead of 05D -- by yesterday I had little trouble holding accurate headings on the PC, and while altitudes were rough, they weren't horribly wrong. Today, all that went to pieces -- the plane felt slippery in yaw and pitch, and I just kept falling far behind the plane without even noticing. The real lesson has to be twofold here: don't be so damn cocksure about myself (there's a terrible arrogance in thinking that getting OK on something like On Top will automatically make me OK in a real plane); and, the PCATD ground trainer just ain't real life. Yes, it's hard to drive the simulator accurately, but, as I'm discovering, hard in a different way than a real 172N like 05D. Plus my sim is different from John's Elite...

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Earlier, as I'm pre-flighting N6605D at about 7.30pm, it's one of those luminously beautiful Northern California evenings, perfect for flying: warm, no clouds, slight breeze, unlimited visibility -- and all the club's aircraft are just sitting there on the ramp. Where the hell is everybody?! Then it hits me: it's Friday night. Everybody's out doing social stuff -- you know, in clubs and bars and pubs and things. I have no life....