This is going to be brief, but if you are just getting into flying airplanes, what I am about to share will better prepare you to be in the right headspace. Science tells us that when we prepare ourselves mentally, painful realities can be easier to swallow. So here it is:

EVERYTHING in aviation will ALWAYS 1) take longer than planned or expected, and 2) will be more expensive than anticipated.

It doesn't take a big imagination to visualize what this might look like, but here are a few examples:

• Did the flight school tell you it would take 3 months to go from zero to Private Pilot? It will probably take at least 4-5 months. Weather, maintenance, unexpected life events, scheduling problems, staffing problems, etc. can and do get in the way.
• Did you budget out $8,000 to finish your license? You will probably need a couple thousand more dollars to get everything finished up after your flight school raised rental rates and you had to switch to the more expensive examiner because the original one went on vacation.
• Your XC flight is estimated to take 1.5 hours, so you can probably make it home in time to make that dinner date. But guess what? Your pre-flight revealed you needed to add more oil, and it took you 20 minutes to acquire a bottle of Aeroshell because the FBO employee was on break. Actual headwinds were also much stronger than forecast, and this slowed you down considerably. It also increased hobbs time, so your bill was $50 more expensive than planned.

Sometimes you will feel like you can outpace or outsmart the Golden Rule, and you might - occasionally and temporarily. But it will always come back around, and for the sake of your sanity, its always best to go into any aviation-related activity with this Golden Rule in mind so that when it inevitably proves to be true over and over, your expectations have already been set to anticipate and (hopefully) accept it.

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I grew up playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. I was first exposed to Flight Simulator 98 on my dad's computer, and soon graduated to MSFS 2002, and then later MSFS 2004 (my computer was never powerful enough to run FSX when it came out). I was the nerd who, in 5th grade, would sit for 5 hours as I "flew" to Hawaii on a Friday evening after school  (years later I would actually create a course on flying private jets to Hawaii because I couldn't find one anywhere else). I had logbooks, and I completed the old AOPA online training courses and printed the certificates. I had printed approach plates in a binder. As far as I was concerned, I was a professional 5th grade pilot, with a limitation on my certificate stating "Personal Computer only." Girls probably weren't impressed, but all my mom's girlfriends thought it was adorable. A win? Beggars can't be choosers.

You can imagine my horror, then, when years later, on my first day on the job as a certificated commercial pilot - dropping skydivers out of a Cessna 206 - I completely destroyed a brand new tire during landing and found myself sitting helplessly on the runway in a puddle of disbelief and humiliation. 

If you have ever made an oopsie while flying someone else’s airplane - particularly if it is one that handicaps the airplane on the runway - you will know the feeling I am talking about. Your stomach drops through the seat. You feel hot, and your eyes get wide, and you don’t know what to say. You can’t believe it. “This can’t happen - not to me!”

As pilots, we train for all kinds of incidents and emergencies, including engine fires and engine failures. There is a beautiful saying, which sums up pilot training better than any other: “We don’t rise to our hopes; we fall to our training.” In other words, hope is not a strategy. You will probably revert back to whatever training you had, but you probably won’t magically inherit Bob Hoover’s energy management skills when your engine fails. If those abnormal maneuvers and procedures were taught thoroughly and practiced sufficiently and recently, those are what you are likely to execute.

But when was the last time your CFI had you practice blowing a tire on landing and ending up unable to move? When was the last time your CFI even talked about that? No one told me what to do if I experienced something like this. There was no training to fall back on here. This wasn’t something that had been practiced. And yet, there I was. Picture a Cessna 206, which is slightly larger than a 182, sitting lop-sided on a runway, unable to move because its left main tire was shredded. The engine is still running. Inside sits a stunned pilot, whose years flying a virtual Airbus to Hawaii was supposed to prepare him well enough that there would be no incidents or accidents - certainly not on day one! 

I never thought I was god’s gift to aviation, and I was conservative with my flying. I was safe and studied hard. I was humble, but all the indicators pointed to the fact that I was competent enough: My instructors had only good things to say about me during training. I never failed a test or checkride. I was able to prepare for and pass two separate checkrides in a single day (commercial multi followed by commercial single-engine). I was reasonably confident in my abilities as a pilot, and because flying was my life-long dream, I made sure to do what I had to in order that I could be the best pilot I could possibly be. 

So how on earth could I be the guy who blows a tire on the first day of his professional flying career? 

This is the point I want to get across to up and coming aviators, because it is something that I see all the time on message boards and forums. Shit happens. Period. We all make mistakes, we all screw up, we all get caught off guard or complacent. Sometimes it is truly not our fault, and sometimes we had something (or everything) to do with it.

In my case, here is what happened. In the month prior to this incident, I had been doing a lot of multi-engine flying in a Piper Apache while training for my multi-engine commercial checkride. The brakes on twin-engine aircraft are quite robust because they need to be able to stop a fairly massive wad of metal, particularly if on a short runway. My training airport had a runway of under 2500 feet, so I was used to laying into those brakes pretty well!

The Cessna 206 I was flying during this incident was extremely, extremely light during landing, for a number of reasons. Skydiving businesses want to fill their airplanes with as many jumpers as possible. Each drop costs them a fixed amount in pilot time, fuel, and aircraft wear, so the more people they cram into the aircraft, the more money they make per flight. They are constrained not only by the physical size of the aircraft and FAA maximum passenger limitations, but by aircraft maximum takeoff weight limitations. Aircraft performance is affected by weather, and on hot days, a runway might not be long enough for a fully-loaded aircraft to takeoff. So in order to keep the aircraft as light as possible - and to allow for freedom of movement - they remove every seat in the aircraft except the pilot seat. 

They also minimize the amount of fuel on board. Daytime VFR fuel minimums require 30 minutes of fuel remaining every time you land. And in order to keep weight down, in addition to the 30 minutes of fuel, the aircraft will only bring enough gas for 1-2 runs at a time. 

On this particular day in May, I was finishing the last run before needing to add fuel. The airplane was empty except for me and a little over 30 minutes worth of fuel. 

I was landing on a 3,400-foot runway, which had a taxiway turnoff halfway down the runway, at about 1,700 feet. For some reason, I wanted to make that bisecting taxiway upon landing. My memory recalls that upon touchdown, I laid into the brakes - as I had been doing on the Piper Apache - and immediately I heard a squealing sound for about 2-3 seconds, followed by a “pop” sound and an awful aircraft vibration and slight yaw to the left.

What I suspect happened was that I may have been on the left brake during touchdown. Or, the aircraft was so light that any intense brake pressure might have been enough to fully lock up the brake, and I literally burned a hole straight on through the locked up tire after applying too much brake pressure, too fast.

Whatever happened, the evidence is undeniable: I messed up. Pilot error strikes again.

The airport is a quiet, un-towered little airport in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and thankfully no one was in the pattern. The first thing I did was turn off the engine and make a radio call, warning anyone in the pattern that I was stuck on the runway. The skydiver operator heard this radio call, and told me over the radio that they would come out and help. What I saw next was an army of skydivers rushing the field, heading towards me. I will never forget that sight. 

I will also never forget the endless (and well-deserved) hell that the skydivers and owners gave me as 7 or 8 of us lifted the left wing up off the damaged tire and pushed the airplane off the runway and onto the taxiway. I felt like crawling into a hole and never re-emerging. Some pilot I am, screwing up like this on my first day. Time to surrender my pilot’s license, I’m not cut out for this, and I have no business flying anything more than a computer desk.

A new tire was placed on the aircraft, and we were back in business. The owner of the company was so gracious. I offered to pay for the cost of the brand new tire that I had destroyed, but he refused to allow it. He told me that it was incredibly important that I get back in the airplane and move on. He undoubtedly had skydivers lined up to jump and no pilot around to fly the airplane except me, so it made sense that he would ask me to fly again that day, but I felt that his encouragement was genuine and that it really was important for me to get back on the horse so that I wouldn’t dwell on this incident.

So I did. I got back in the airplane, and made a few more runs. No further incidents. Since those days, I have moved on to flying Citations, CJs, Hawkers, and Challengers, and with the exception of a blown tire on takeoff in a Hawker (caused by an unplanned 5-day stay in -50F weather in Arctic Canada on our way home Amsterdam...an incredible story for a later date)...no blown tires since!

When you make a mistake while flying - and you WILL - that is okay, because we are all human. When you don’t live up to your own high expectations for yourself while flying - and this WILL happen - that is okay too. As I sit here writing this on my layover in Dallas, Texas, I recall greasing the landing in strong crosswinds yesterday. It was textbook perfect, and I felt most pleased with myself. Days before that, on a clear, zero-wind day, I slammed that airplane into the ground so hard I think I left dents in the pavement. Not my best work at all. But bad days happen, and all pilots - professional and weekend warriors alike - should become comfortable with this fact. We all screw up, and the important thing is that we 1) acknowledge our contribution to the event, 2) learn what we can from it, and 3) get back in the airplane and move on.

As far as I am concerned, time is THE most finite resource we have as humans. As of 2020, the average human lifespan is about 636,000 hours. Read that again: your life will last, based on averages, only 636,000 hours, and you will be asleep for a third of that! That leaves about 420,000 hours in your life to be awake and conscious, doing what you love, with the people you love...and doing what you must to make ends meet.

For this reason, in whatever it is I am doing, I charge for my time. To that end, my policy with student pilots is simple: you pay me when I am giving any of those limited 420,000 hours to you. This means that from the moment of our agreed upon meeting time, to the moment I have put my signature in your logbook, you are paying me. I find this approach reasonable because I am NOT out to gut anyone's wallet. In fact, I do everything in my power to help a student's dollars go as far as they can (see my article: How To Save Money During Flight Training). I love being efficient with my time and money, and I love helping others do the same.

When I was actively instructing throughout the Willamette Valley in Oregon between 2017 and 2019, I charged $50 per hour as a freelance CFI to students that I acquired through my own marketing, and $40 per hour as a 1099 CFI for a local flight school who found students for me. This was all Part 61. I also worked as a W2 part-time employee for a flight college, instructing under Part 141, and for that I was paid about $23 per hour. This difference in wage between freelance CFI and W2 employee CFI is unfortunately just a reality in the flight instructing world. Naturally, I did what I could to do more freelance work and less work at the college. I found these amounts to be fair for a CFI (not CFII or MEI) with about 500 hours total time. 

I began learning to fly as a senior in high school. Though I was absolutely blessed to grow up in an upper middle class household - an extreme advantage, no doubt - my parents did not pay for my flight training. I worked two jobs after school and on weekends, and over the course of 10 months and 42 hours of flight time, I was able to obtain my private pilot’s license. Working for minimum wage meant I had to make each and every penny go as far as possible. I was fortunate to work with an instructor who gave me a discount on her time...but in exchange, the expectations were high: I needed to show up prepared and ready to go. 

I made a bone-headed comment to my CFI when I was 17 and learning to fly. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of my instructor benefiting from training me in the form of hours and experience. She put me right in place, and for good reason. I absolutely cringe when I think about what I said, especially now that I have lived through the process of becoming a CFI. Acquiring all of the certifications and paying for all of that flight time throughout training was expensive and a lot of work, and instructors should absolutely be paid well for the experience they bring to the table and the service they provide.

Having said that, I am very sensitive to the money-strapped student pilot. In fact, I am happy to give a good rate to students I work with who are in a situation similar to mine, to help pass along my first instructor’s generosity and keep flying as accessible as possible to. If they communicate to me and are upfront - and if they show up early and very prepared - I will do all I can to keep their costs minimized, even if that means I don’t get paid quite as much.


Even if a student is not strapped for cash, I try to be efficient with all of my students. I let them know during our first lesson my policy: I begin charging from the moment of our agreed upon meeting time, to the moment I have put my signature in your logbook. If the student is running late, I still charge from our agreed upon time. My policy was especially important when I was commuting 45 minutes each way to the airport. In that situation, I wasn’t going to charge for my commute time, as it was my choice to live and work where I was. But I was going to charge for all the time I was at the airport on behalf of my student.

I am adamant that my students understand that starting from the time that it becomes apparent to me that they can competently fuel and preflight the airplane on their own, I encourage them to book the airplane slightly early so that they can show up before our meeting time, preflight, fuel, and be ready to fly the moment I arrive. Here’s the thing: I like making money in exchange for satisfying and challenging work, but I have no interest in being paid to give up any of my 420,000 hours of life watching a competent student perform a mundane preflight. Further, students need to get used to performing preflights on their own, and this independence will only develop with my absence. In any case, I’d much rather show up, have a quick talk about what we will be doing that day, make a quick walk around the airplane, double check oil and fuel caps myself (ALWAYS do this as a CFI - a lesson I learned the hard way), get in, shut the door, and fire up.

I also am adamant about letting my students know what it is we will be working on during the next lesson, and I do my best to supply this information well in advance. It is my hope that the student reads up on (or watches videos regarding) the maneuvers or lesson content so that when we do meet, my student can ask good questions, or at the very least, has been exposed to the maneuver. I find that reviewing this content on their own time is a much better way to prepare them than discussing the content in-depth just before going flying. The student will have other things on their mind and probably won’t retain the information as well as they might if they had read up on it the evening before.

A quick note on my expectations of students. My favorite teacher of all time was my algebra 2 and physics teacher in high school. He’s a great guy, but he also had extremely high expectations for his students. As in, there really was absolutely no excuse for not learning the material. He spent every one of his lunches in his classroom, willing to help guide students to the answers to their questions (no spoon feeding though), and he hung around for a few hours after school every day to offer that same help. He provided deadline dates weeks in advance, so that we could plan appropriately. He never budged on rounding up grades (89.9?% for the term? That is a B, and was not rounded up to an A)...unless he had seen you in his class each day at lunch and after school, working your tail off. Then he might give you the benefit of the doubt. To this day, I credit him with exposing me to the life-changing concept of absolute personal responsibility and ownership when it comes to learning. 

I take this approach with flight instructing. I have high expectations of my students, and I give them every resource they need to be successful, including my phone number to call at any time of day to ask me questions, free of charge. My job is to keep the student safe in the air and help guide them along the process of obtaining their pilot’s certificate, and federal law prohibits me from endorsing any student for a solo flight or checkride if I do not feel they are knowledgeable, safe and competent. And I genuinely do care about their success. As previously stated, I charge for my time, but my job description is not to spend my time poking, prodding, or babysitting someone who isn’t motivated to do the work that is required. Flying an airplane is a massive responsibility, and if a student doesn’t have the motivation to put in the time and effort, that student just won’t have the knowledge necessary to pass any evaluations and they will weed themselves out in an unfortunately expensive manner.

If a student insists on paying me $50-$60 per hour for me to spoon feed them paragraphs from the Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, that is easy money for me and I will do it once or twice until they (hopefully) realize that it’s a horrible use of their time because being spoon fed information is an incredibly inefficient way to learn (If you are interested in my take on how I recommend studying, I wrote an article on this as well). Based on my experience, this student is not likely to be successful in achieving their goal if they remain on this trajectory. But I digress.

I am not militant or without reason with my charging policies. For example, as the experienced professional, if the forecast weather for our lesson (an uncontrolled airport, prone to patchy fog, with no weather reporting) at 6am the next morning was looking questionable, I either cancelled the night before, or made the judgement call to continue as planned. If I showed up the next morning and the airport was socked in, I did not charge the student, as that was my responsibility. As students progressed in their training, I then put this judgement call on their shoulders as a form of a lesson, and hopefully they had been studying meteorology and noticing local weather patterns. I let them decide, based on the forecast for the next morning and their knowledge of local weather patterns, if we should cancel in advance or meet as planned. If I disagreed with a decision to meet as planned the next morning, I let them know as much. If they were so confident in their abilities as to override my call, that’s fine - but they’d be on the hook for my time if they were wrong (to this day, no one has overridden my call...but I have certainly been wrong in my forecasting!). 

If I showed up and there was a maintenance issue, I did not charge the student. If there were unforeseen life circumstances or events that could not have been predicted by my student and they were late or had to cancel, I was reasonable with these and took them on a case-by-case basis.

There was a particular incident where I had been working with a student on XC planning. This student wanted to do a long flight from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, all the way up to Bellingham, Washington - WAY more than 50 miles! This was one of those situations where this flight was one he wanted to make regularly once he had his certificate, as his sister lived  in Bellingham. I thought this was a great opportunity to expose him to XC flying on a route he would actually fly on his own, through Seattle Class Bravo airspace and over water. It was one of those “many birds, one stone” kinds of flights. He was a great stick and rudder pilot, and at only 17 years old, his enthusiasm reminded me of my own when I was learning to fly at that same age. However, unlike me, this student had the amazing fortune of having his training paid for by his parents. Lucky guy! Seriously, he was very fortunate and I was happy for him. But at times, it did become apparent that he wasn’t pinching pennies quite like I had to.

The night before his XC flight, he called me around 11pm. We had planned to meet the next morning around 6am. At the time of his call, he had questions about things like calculating wind correction, magnetic deviation, etc. After talking for about 45 minutes, I reminded him that he needed to have all these calculations completed by the time we met in the morning. The flight - one way - was over 250 nautical miles, which means a lot of VFR checkpoints that require calculating. I also let him know that if he did not feel this was possible, we could call off the flight, no problem. The goal was for this flight was to be a good learning experience. In hindsight, it was probably not the smartest thing for me to allow a student undertake such a long flight for their first dual cross-country flight. That was my mistake, as I allowed my better judgement to be overridden by my student’s enthusiasm. Still, he was far enough along in his training that it was time for him to start being responsible for making go/no-go decisions in regards to how prepared he was to complete a flight. But he insisted he wanted to continue as planned. “Okay,” I said, “see you in the morning.”

When I arrived the next morning, my student had not been able to complete the calculations for more than a few of the many checkpoints along the route. In fact, he spent over 2 hours working on his calculations at the airport that morning until he was ready to fly. He knew how to perform the calculations pretty well, so he didn’t have many questions for me, which meant that he was paying me $50 an hour to sit and watch. The total bill for my time that day was nearly $400, and a significant portion of that was for my time spent doing absolutely nothing.  

I share this story because I think it is a good example of how this policy is reasonable and fair to everyone. If you do the work and show up prepared, you will save money. If you don’t, you will pay more because it boils down to this: anyone giving up their precious and limited time on behalf of someone else should be compensated appropriately for it - ideally for an amount that both parties feel is fair. In my case, I found my policy to be fair, as did practically every student I worked with. The few who took issue with my policy were welcome to find a different instructor, and I did not take that personally at all. I hope and encourage everyone to charge a fair price for their time, in whatever profession they work, as time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. 

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RELATED: Are you an Oregon-based flight school or CFI? OregonFlightSchool.com may be interested in partnering with you! Check it out.

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I then flew a slightly tighter than normal traffic pattern - still holding the all-Important 140 indicated airspeed - and flying a rounded base and final leg, I managed to glide the airplane to a gentle touchdown. Throughout the base and final legs of the approach, I used a combination of pitch, landing gear, and flaps to increase drag and slow down so that I touched down at an appropriate speed, just under Vref. I never once had to add power.

It wasn't the prettiest execution of this maneuver that my instructor had seen. In the heat of the moment, I ended up about 10 knots slow (about 130 knots indicated) while on downwind. This 10 knots was enough to really screw up my glide ratio, and I lost more altitude than I should have as a result. This meant that I had to keep flaps retracted a bit longer than I should have, and I was slightly lower than I should have been. But, the end result was the same - a no power glide to landing from 10,000 feet. This screw up of mine was a good teaching moment because it showed me just how much losing a measly 10 knots can affect my glide.

This maneuver reminded me quite a bit of the steep spiral to a power-off 180 that we did during commercial pilot certification...except on this occasion, I was in a jet. The point of this exercise, my instructor said, was that a dual-engine flame out and a glide to landing in a Citation is not a death sentence. ​

Source: https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=94991​

12/12/2020


Use of COVID-19 Vaccines by Pilots and Air Traffic Controllers


The COVID-19 public health emergency has driven extraordinary global efforts to develop an effective and safe vaccine. Some of the vaccines in clinical testing are using novel technology, such as mRNA. The vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech has been made available to the American public under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).


After careful review of available data regarding safety profiles, the FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine (AAM) adopts the following policy as both safe and operationally responsive to this unique situation:


Holders of FAA-issued Airman Medical Certificates or Medical Clearances may receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine; however, a 48-hour no fly/no safety related duty interval must be observed after each dose.


AAM will monitor the patient response to Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and may adjust this policy as necessary to ensure aviation safety. Additional vaccines will each be evaluated as EUAs are issued.

If you are looking for the cheapest, most affordable ATP-CTP course, you will do yourself a favor by checking out this list of all FAA-approved ATP-CTP providers. Go through the list and search each school individually to see what their prices are. Some will indicate the price of their ATP-CTP course, while others will force you to send them a message.

As of October 2020, prices range from $2,900 to $5000+ for the courses. We would have listed each school and their prices, but prices are subject to change. Here are the 3 cheapest as of this writing:

• SkyEagle - $3500
• L3Harris - $3500
• Kingsky - $3500

ATP school, at $3800, is an honorable mention because 4 of the 7 days of training can be completed online, saving you quite a bit of money in hotels. 

GlobalOneTraining has an ATP-CTP course for $2900 if you complete training by the end of 2020, but we are not sure what the non-discounted price is.