I was able to fly on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, but I’ll just tell the story of Saturday, when I was betrayed by my simple lizard brain.

I almost canceled my Saturday flight after Friday’s horrible weather, but instead I dutifully trucked on out to Leesburg for a 2:00 flight, fully expecting to be grounded because of winds. Winds were out of 300 at 12 knots gusting to 18, so there was a 9-10 knot crosswind from the left on takeoff from runway 35. Part of my pre-flight work was calculating the crosswind component using the graph in the POH and checking that against the maximum allowable crosswind for the Cessna 172R I’ve been flying. No big deal really, and I’d done it 100 times in ground school, but getting the answer correct takes on a brand new importance when you know your own butt is on the line.

The plan for the day was simple, fly out to Av-Ed practice area at HOAGE, an introduction to slow flight maneuvers, then practice pattern work and landing configuration changes at altitude, in preparation for my first landing.

After a slightly bumpy takeoff (my first departure in a crosswind) we had a fairly uneventful flight out to the practice area, being sure to stay clear of Dulles Class B airspace. Leesburg Executive is tucked under the Class B; pattern altitude at Leesburg is 1200 MSL and the Class B floor is 1500. Three hundred feet sounds like plenty of room to maneuver, but we were trying to gain altitude while at the same time battling gusts and turbulence coming down off of the ridge that made for a queasy ride. On more than one occasion we topped out at 1450 or 1475 and almost trespassed into the B. I’m sure that if we had just peaked into the B (and by extension the ADIZ) there wouldn’t have been a problem, but I didn’t want to chance a visit from the orange Coast Guard helicopters.

So then, to the practice area. Once we had ascended to 4000 feet, my new instructor John decided to introduce me to slow flight. He lowered 30 degrees of flaps and throttled back to 1800 rpm, then pitched the nose of the aircraft up. I listened intently as the engine idled back from a healthy hum to a rather sickly burble and watched as the airspeed indicator dropped from 85 to 65 to 55. I know intellectually that the plane can fly just fine at this configuration, but my inner ear was doing back flips, my simple lizard brain started to panic just a bit, and I almost grabbed for the airsickness bag. I had just regained my composure when the stall warning horn sounded and I almost jumped out of my seat. That is not a sound I want to hear ever again, and yet I know that I will (next week, actually).

Next up was pattern configuration at altitude. We set up a simulated hard deck at 3000, which gave me 1000 feet to practice all of the configuration changes (throttle, airspeed, flaps, and pitch) that I would need to execute at landing. The first few times I had problems managing the cockpit variables while simultaneously simulating pattern radio calls, and I crashed through the 3000 foot hard-deck. The first time I did it, John laughed, looked at me and said, “Whoops… we just died”.

Soon enough though I had it, and it was time to return to Leesburg. Enter the a bit of ADIZ drama. A few miles outside of the ADIZ, we called Potomac Clearance and requested and received a squawk code for our return into the ADIZ. Just as we were crossing the ridge – a good landmark to entry, we radioed again to confirm that our transponder was on scope. Rather than a polite clearance, we were greeted with “Cessna 09ES, I don’t have you on scope, stay out of the ADIZ!”. John pulled a quick 90 degrees left and we followed the ridgeline north for a few minutes until Potomac told us that we were on scope and we were cleared to enter.

What followed was a rather uneventful return to the traffic pattern at Leesburg with a slight 3 knot wind at our back the entire journey. I’m glad we took the time to practice all of the configuration changes at altitude before we did any work inside the pattern; it was packed with traffic. I actually found setting up the configuration changes on the pattern legs to be easier than our work at altitude because it was easier to judge our rate of descent against the field, but working the mic seemed much more difficult. Simulating radio calls is easy enough at altitude in empty airspace, but I had the devil’s own time trying to sneak in my announcements among all of the other voices on the Leesburg CTAF. It didn’t help that I seem to have developed mic fright, so my mind would go completely blank as soon as I depressed the mic switch.

I spent a few years as a disc jockey my college’s AM station, so I thought that communications would be one thing I was sure to ace, but speaking on the CTAF or to clearance is a lot different than rambling on the radio; I think it is knowing that I need to speak succinctly and that someone is going to answer me.

Finally, I turned base to final and made the runway centerline. I engaged the final notch of flaps and pitched the nose slightly forward to keep us on the glide path. John worked the throttle while I managed airspeed, rudder and pitch. Luckily, runway 35 was shielded from the winds by a stand of trees, because I was not prepared for a crosswind landing, although we had discussed the possibility and side-slip landings during our pre-flight briefing. About 20 feet above the runway, I pitched the nose up slightly more to make the correct landing attitude, and John eased back the throttle as we made a soft landing.

That was the day. My mic work is improving, as is my cockpit management. As soon as I get control of my simple lizard brain, I should be just fine.

More news from the training:
I completed ground school at Av-Ed last week and took the final exam on Friday night, which follows the format of the FAA written exam — 60 multiple-choice questions drawn from among the 600 possible questions that may appear on the FAA written. A passing grade for the Av-Ed exam is 80%, which is required before they will let you take the FAA written – whose passing grade is only 70%. I passed the Av-Ed exam with an 88% — I missed two questions about P-factor, two questions about weather (conditions leading to lenticular cloud formation and advective fog formation), and one about determining manifold pressure in a variable-pitch prop aircraft.

So, the next step is to take the FAA written, which I am going to try and schedule for the second half of this week.

In other news, I finally got to fly again over weekend (1.5 hours of basic maneuvers in the HOAGE airspace) and I learned some really important lessons.

There is a saying that good photographers talk about cameras but great photographers talk about tripods. In the same vein, I’m learning that good pilots talk about aircraft while great pilots talk about weather, weather, and weather.

I started reviewing Area Forecasts and radar outlooks on Wednesday of last week in preparation for my Saturday flight, and then on Friday started reading TAFs for Leesburg, Dulles, National, and Frederick. On Saturday morning, I read the TAFs and METARs for those places, printed out kneeboard charts of JYO (thank you, AOPA) and drove out to Leesburg.

On the walk over to the FAA station to file the flight plan (an out and back from Leesburg to the HOAGE airspace) I mentioned to Alon that I’d grabbed recent weather and altimeter settings just an hour before. Even so, Alon asked for a full weather briefing from the FAA flight desk, and the staff member there treated me to a four or five minute full briefing of the weather, NOTAMs, and ADIZ – much to the dismay of the line of people waiting behind me to file. Finally, during our preflight check we tuned to the Leesburg AWOS and got the latest weather and altimeter setting. So… weather, weather, and weather.

The second lesson is that pilots are very comfortable about taking in a lot of information very quickly. I know we’ve talked about this is meetings and I thought I understood it, but on Saturday I got a crash course (pun intended) on seeing-and-avoiding while also managing throttle, fuel mixture, trim, radio, instruments, avoiding the Class B airspace above our heads — and oh yes, I’m also flying a plane. Alon assures me that as I get more experience I won’t be quite as overwhelmed, but wow, cockpit management is a true challenge.

On a related note, and probably more importantly, I’m learning that they quickly determine what can be safely ignored. Returning from the HOAGE airspace we were crossing the north-to-south ridge between Purceville and Berryvile at 3500ft, when ATC alerted us to Bonanza traffic at our 10 o’clock at 2500 and C172 traffic at 2 o’clock also at 3500ft. I quickly saw the other C172, but I couldn’t locate the Bonanza. I told Alon that I had no-contact on the Bonanza, and he snapped, “The Bonanza isn’t a factor; watch your rate of descent!” In a split second, he’d determined that we had other things to worry about and that we should safely ignore the Bonanza.

I had an interesting day today out in Leesburg yesterday.

I went out for a three hour training session, including a flight. Yesterday’s storm cleared the air and presented us with a beautiful day. There were some overcast cumulus clouds at around 2700, but they were moving off to the east, so my instructor Alon and I initially filed a flight plan with FSS to go out to Winchester/HOAGE, but we immediately had to cancel and re-file due to low ceilings on the ridgeline just west of Leesburg.

We re-filed for Frederick, then went out to the field to pre-flight the 1982 172P we were to be flying. I chose the 172P because it had a carburetor rather than fuel injection, and I wanted to get some experience flying a carburetor aircraft before the weather got too cold and I switched over to an injected aircraft. Also, the 172P is a little cheaper to rent, so I figured I could stretch those dollars further during this first part of my training.

We did a slow and thorough pre-flight, going over every inch of the fuselage, rivet-by-rivet, top to bottom. Early in the preflight, minor problems started to appear. First, there were two rivets missing from the canopy, and one too-loose screw near the alternator assembly. Not a big deal though, and not uncommon in older aircraft, as you well know. Then we noticed that one of the hinge-pins on the right cabin door was loose. The door operated fine and did not pose a safety threat (and according to FAA rules were not a problem), but the combination of that issue and the one on the canopy made Alon feel a bit uneasy.

Finally, we were checking the cockpit and found that the pilot’s radio was inoperative. It received just fine, but could not transmit, which meant that Alon and I would have no way to communicate (except shouting) for the duration of the flight. We found that the broken comm was noted in the maintenance book, but the repair could be legally deferred, because the craft still had one working comm.

He hesitantly offered to take me up anyway, but I was adamant that if I could not ask questions during the flight that I wouldn’t learn anything, and we would both be frustrated. Also, at that point, neither of us completely trusted that the aircraft to take us up.

We completed the formality of pre-flighting the aircraft, just so I could get the experience, then radioed back to the FBO to see if there were any other 172s available. All of them were either out or grounded for repair, so we had to scrub the flight.

So, today was disappointing, but I learned a valuable lesson; go with your instincts, because what is technically airworthy according to the FAA is not always safe. Little things can add up quickly, and I’d rather learn that lesson on the field and not at 4000 feet.