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Flight Training
by Dale Brown, 2007

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, 2/24/08

I'm in the Admirals Club lounge at DFW Airport, with about 30 minutes to go until we need to head to our gate for boarding for our return trip to Reno. I had a glass of really CRAPPY red wine and can't wait to get some GOOD wine at home.

Flight training at Simcom was excellent, despite numerous glitches in the simulator. My instructor, James "Rock" Rockcastle (a classic techno-thriller novel character name if I ever heard one) was EXCELLENT. He pulled no punches: he threw me in the simulator at 0800 with a minimal pre-flight briefing and set-up, and no time to get re-acquainted with the sim, and just had me fly the sim like I'd fly the plane.

Rock is also the master of the photocopied handout, but every piece of paper he put in front of me was relevant and important, and I'm thankful for his efforts to get all that info to me.

I learned that I still have some skills even though I haven't flown a twin Cessna in 2 years and haven't flown ANY plane in almost 4 months, although my skills using "raw" data--flying without an autopilot and flight director--were rusty at best. I did OK even in single-engine situations as long as I had aids like the flight director. Take away the FD and add a single-engine emergency and perhaps one or two other malfunctions, and getting the plane safely back on the ground became a bit more problematic.

I crashed the sim once, but in my own defense it was a rather exotic malfunction: flying a coupled approach to minimums and having a runaway trim and a failed autopilot disconnect button (lesson: never let the autopilot fly the approach below 500 feet above ground level). I ran the sim off the runway in a couple of aborted takeoffs but I would've survived all of those episodes (lesson learned: don't try to fly the plane with airspeed below blue line with a failed engine with the gear down--it won't fly. Crash-land straight ahead with the wings level. Better to have the insurance company sort it all out than the coroner).

My son didn't want to take on the "Increible Hulk" and "Dueling Dragons" roller coasters at Universal, but he did try the "SlingShot," a chair attached to spring-loaded cables that launches you 400 feet above ground in a couple seconds. I'll try to upload the video of that ride. He did it! Pretty amazing. On the other hand, I did the roller coasters and the "SlingShot" a couple times each. Loved them. My son also did the simulated shuttle launch experience at the Kennedy Space Center and loved it.

Big surprise: we're returning to Reno tonight in the face of yet another winter storm warning, with 2-3 feet of new snow over the Mount Rose summit and 8-12 inches in town. It's looking like another long drive home. Wish us luck.

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