Arlo Gilbert’s Blog

Today I had a perfect landing….

That landing where you flare at the perfect moment and your wheels touch down just moments after the stall warning goes off… that landing where you aren’t sure if your wheels have even touched the ground or if you are just in an extended ground effect…. perfection.

I swear, that sensation is better than any other feeling I have experienced (other than my kids saying “i love you daddy”)… I knew the perfect moment to flare.. I just felt it… 

Anyways, this post makes no sense to non-pilots… but if you’re a pilot and you’ve ever had that moment, then you know exactly how I was feeling. If you are a golfer it’s that rare perfect drive…

In any case, we did that landing followed by 12 more today, it was a lot of fun, it was exciting and I ended up learning a lot.

We spent a lot of time today working on VOR’s and I now know something that many pilot’s don’t know… when you get handed off from new york approach to white plains/westchester tower.. the want to know only two things from you.. Tail number and distance+direction from them… when you call in with those two items it is literally exactly what they want to hear and as a result you get WAY heavy priority over the other planes in the area, even big jets because (jmho) you are giving them respect by not wasting their time.

So I’m up at bat shortly to do my “tests” to determine if I am ready to solo, that involves me doing some tests on major emergencies in the sim (which you can tell i’m great at already by reading previous blogs ).. and then it involves a customary sole crushing by the head of the school, Larry Gottschamer… where he determines whether you are actually capable of flying a plane without an instructor.

Soul crushing is really a bad word though (larry made up the term, i just use it), see I had been a bit misled by some instructors to believe that I was on the verge of soloing when the truth is that I was simply not ready for that.. I now look at my first soul crushing as a “thank g-d that somebody had the insight to NOT let me fly alone” because the truth is that I did not have the skills needed. Now however, I do.

Larry probably saved at least one life and even though I know that he felt terrible for having crushed my soul, the fact is that the experience of failing terribly at something got me to do two things.. 1) take a break for a few weeks and 2) really begin slowing down on my desire to complete training.. I like my instructors, I like my time in the plane with them so why in g-d’s name would I want to rush?

Much like as a child you are in a rush to grow up but as a grown up you get to look back and say “why? childhood was great, people helped and took care of me and looked out for me and gave me great advice!”… now I actually look at the completion of training with a bit of sadness because I will not have the fun times in the cockpit with great guys like Al atPerformance Flight at Westchester County Airport and the mistakes that I make will be made by myself, not with somebody more experienced there to save me.

So Larry & Al.. thanks for not letting me grow up too quickly as a pilot.

Today I crashed. Badly.

At 600 feet in the air after takeoff my engine quit. I switched tanks, turned on my fuel pumps, switched to alternate air intake, tried to get the engine going again.. but no love. So I turned as fast as possible, but I didn’t maintain enough altitude and let my airspeed drop… then I crashed into the ground about 400 feet from the runway I had just taken off from… and I probably died. If it wasnt an amazing full sized simulator at my flight school.

My instructor got a chuckle today out of the following scenarios:

• fire in the airplane
• forgot to disconnnect the parking brake
• total pfd failure followed by total gps and comm failure
• went up above the clouds and then magically within 2 seconds the cloud cover went from scattered to totally overcast
• ice on the wings in a non-certified for known icing plane
• he accidentally turned full flaps on (his fault) and then was suprised that I stalled during my climb.. thanks al for at least botching up ONE thing

Overall the simulator at performance flight is wonderful, it simulates a Cirrus SR-22 which means it is significantly faster and more powerful than the plane I normally fly but it gives you the ability to experience catastrophic emergencies that normally could mean “goodby cruel world!”.

The great thing is that out of all of the above emergency simulations and more, I failed only on one… of course one in real life would be too many, but in a sim with a trigger happy funny guy instructor who is hoping that the tornado that just appeared on takeoff in new york during january might trip you up… I think I did pretty well.

Tomorrow we go up and practice a lot of these emergencies in a real plane, engine outs, failed pfd’s etc..etc.. this will be exciting!

If i’m alive I will blog again

-Arlo

This pretty much sums up all of my thoughts about the current valuation system….

I promise I’ll write something soon.. this video was just so fantastic I had to post it.

I’m warning you, if you watch this video, you will have this song in your head for at least 48 hours.

Ah the joys of Sesame Street…