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I Learned That the Hard Way

12/30/2017

It's always better to learn from someone else's mistakes, right? But sometimes we get to learn (and teach others) from our own mishaps, missteps, miscalculations, and misfortune. It's usually not fun, and as pilots we tend to conceal our faults and shortcomings and promote our strengths as much as possible—especially in front of our fellow pilots. Not only is our pride on the line, but for some pilots their livelihood is at stake as well.

I have noticed that there is a trend toward openness and transparency among pilots, and in general I think that's a good thing. In that spirit, I've decided to write a series of blog posts about some things that I've learned the hard way in my short career as a pilot. This will be a series of posts, and I have a preliminary list of topics in mind. I can't promise that the list won't change, but here are some of my ideas:

My Story—AKA "A Fateful Day in February"
It's Never Wrong to Go Around—Except when it Is
Lenny the Loser—AKA "Accidents Only Happen to Bad Pilots" or "The Worst FAA Training I've Seen"
What Does That Number Really Mean?—Understanding Automated Wind Reports
Success Chains Can Be Broken Too

I hope to make this series as interesting and helpful as possible, and I hope you'll continue to follow along! Look for the next blog post in a few days!

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Visualizing Commercial ManEUvers in CloudAhoy

12/13/2017

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Recently, I started focusing once again on commercial maneuvers. I had started working on these (chandelles, eights on pylons, lazy eights, etc) several months ago before changing my focus to instrument training. One very useful postflight tool I've been using is CloudAhoy. It's helpful for visualizing and analyzing many aspects of the flight. After almost every flight, I look at the CloudAhoy data to see how well I did at flying a stabilized approach to landing on my desired glide path and airspeeds. But as you can see from the photo on the right, it's also helpful for seeing how well I did on maneuvers—in this case, eights on pylons.

As you can see from the images on the right, I made some significant improvement from the first set to the second and third sets. Of course, I knew this while flying, but it's good to get the visual feedback as a confirmation. CloudAhoy also gives me graphs of airspeed and altitude, but maybe I'll cover that in another blog post!

If you're doing training, whether it's primary or advanced, I'd recommend taking advantage of tools like CloudAhoy to help you learn from each of your flights.

Second and third sets of eights on pylons

My first attempt at eights on pylons

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I Learned That the Hard Way

Visualizing Commercial ManEUvers in CloudAhoy

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