Flying

Learning the flight environment: Private pilot training, navigating around the Southeast Asian coast, aerobatic training, skydiving training, and physiological training in an altitude chamber

Early Flight Training

When I was attending college in California and working as a Junior Fellow for the U.S government in the 1980s I became interested in the flight environment. I was doing a lot of measurements on military and civilian air traffic control radar spectra and air traffic control radar beacon interrogator signals for the government, which entailed spending a lot of time around airfields and aircraft, both military and civilian. I also got a lot of time inside aircraft that carried radars, again for the purpose of measuring those radar emissions. These included the Air Force and Navy AWACS aircraft, for example. As time went on I a did a lot of measurements on associated air traffic control radio systems such the glideslope and localizer beacon signals for landing aircraft.

I wanted to learn more about how pilots operate in the flight environment with all of these radar and radionavigation systems. So I started flying Cessna 172’s (mostly N7642-G and sometimes N7262-Q) in connection with a flight program that my college offered. Although it was not my intention to get a private pilot’s license, I eventually obtained the license anyway.

My flight training, under the tutelage of the American aviation pioneer Iris Critchell, gave me new capabilities that went well beyond the cockpit. From that training I learned many lessons that I have used for the rest of my life, including time management, prioritizing work, and doing one job at a time and then moving on to the next. Above all I learned all about maintaining situational awareness at all times.

One of My Favorite Flight Experiences: Navigating a KC-10 Around Southeast Asia

Some years later I found myself doing some work for the Navy on Diego Garcia (D-G) during the run-up to the Gulf War of 1990. Returning home by way of Guam, I hitched a ride on a KC-10 tanker that would take myself and my co-worker, John Smilley, directly back from D-G to Guam. We left the island in the afternoon and by the middle of the night we were starting to work our way around the Southeast Asian peninsula occupied by Cambodia and Vietnam.

John and I were sitting with the crew on the flight deck. We’d worked our way up there partly because we were both pilots and partly because the flight deck was heated, the rear area of the KC-10 wasn’t, and we were still dressed for the 100-degree temperatures of D-G. While we were hanging out with the crew I mentioned that I had been studying celestial navigation using a bubble sextant. The navigator on the plane was interested--it’s not common to find someone who’s actually interested in that topic, he commented. So he and I started to really talk about celestial navigation and the ins and outs of sight reduction techniques, and before I knew it he was inviting me to try out the bubble sextant on the plane. He would take a reading, then jumble the sextant settings, then have me take a reading. After I replicated about ten of his readings, he decided that I was for real. So from that point on, we worked together plotting our position on a 1:100,000 scale Operational Navigation Chart (ONC), map K-10 as I recall.

Not only did I take sextant sightings as we worked around Southeast Asia, but the navigator and John and I began to use the aircraft’s nose-mounted X-band radar as we progressed around Vietnam. Our attention was intensively focussed by the following notation on the ONC:

You can easily see what it was that had us so riveted. Working simultaneously between our celestial navigational fix reductions and the radar display (there was no GPS receiver on board), we stayed glued to the chart on the navigation table for the next few hours, gradually drawing a plot of our course as we stayed safely outside the various Southeast Asian territorial boundaries. That was a fun flight!!

Aerobatics in a Sailplane

When I was doing a radio spectrum survey near Issaquah, Washington I observed glider and sailplane operations at the local airport. The sailplanes included a beautiful Romanian-built T-tail design, designated the S-4 as I recall, that was a nice aerobatics rig. So I took some aerobatics lessons in the sailplane in my free time between the radio measurements. The aerobatics were awesome. I get sick on amusement park rides, but I never had a problem in the sailplane. I did loops, wing-over rolls, and high-speed, low-level passes, etc., and always felt terrific. My instructor, pictured above, was named Stan. I flew in the front seat and he instructed from the back seat. Someday, when I have free time (as if that’ll ever happen), I’d like to take up sailplane aerobatics again.

A nice thing about flying the sailplane was that I was relieved of all of the aspects of flight related to managing an engine. The best landing I ever made in a powered aircraft (the Cessna 42-G) was ironically when the instructor pulled the power unexpectedly one day and I dead-sticked it onto a local runway at Chino Airport, CA. In the sailplane at Issaquah, I discovered that that perfect deadstick Cessna landing was not a fluke for me. Landing with no engine, I only needed to manage my energy with the flaps (and small turns), and I nailed every sailplane landing with what seemed to be no effort at all.

One of the requirements of performing aerobatics in the sailplane was that all occupants (myself and my instructor) had to wear parachutes. The instructor showed me how to discard the canopy in an emergency. He said that, if we ever were in trouble where we had to bail out: “I’ll stay in the cockpit as long as I can, but if you turn around and don’t see me behind you, you’re late.”

Skydiving

So I thought, How does one really use a parachute? Well, there was a parachuting school at that same airport, and so the next Saturday I went over and signed up for a day’s worth of lessons, which included two static-line jumps. The training experience was terrific. I learned how to fall down without hurting myself (don’t put your hands out; just fall down on your side--it’s probably saved me from breaking or at least spraining my wrist a couple of times since then). Next, I learned how to put that knowledge to good use by jumping off a 10-foot or 12-foot-high platform and flopping onto the ground, absorbing the impact energy with the side of my body.

We went through all of the things that can go wrong during a jump. The instructor mentioned a lot of things that have stayed with me ever since. One of them was, “Suppose that your main canopy doesn’t open and you really want to scream. Go ahead. You can only scream for about eight seconds before you have to take a breath. When you take that breath, pull your reserve.” Then he went on: “So suppose then that your primary parachute doesn’t open and then you scream and you pull the reserve, and it doesn’t open either. What do you do then?” Well, he said, remember that the reserve pack is on your chest and is held closed by a Velcro strip. Just reach down and pull the flap open manually, and then yank out the drogue chute manually, and the thing will go on to deploy the main canopy--so no reserve deployment with the ripcord, no problem. He gave us a lot of good tips like that.

Finally, we cam to the problem of steering to a landing. The two big rules were: DON’T land on I-90 or in Lake Washington. Other than that, we were told to just steer for a gravel-covered circle next to the runway, and start heading for that spot as soon as we confirmed that the main canopy had successfully deployed (“big, round, and symmetrical” was the mantra).

Apparently nowadays people in commercial skydiving schools make their first jumps in tandem-pair arrangements with their instructors. Not so in my day. For my first jump, I had to crawl out onto the jump-plane’s wing strut, wait for the signal from the instructor inside the plane, and then fling myself off the strut into space.

Plunging into nothingness as the aircraft vanished into the distance above me, I arched my back, counted to five, (yelling “ARCH...2...3...4...5” at one-second intervals) and then looked up to check the canopy condition. It was big, round, and symmetrical, and I steered for the landing zone (LZ), avoiding I-90 and the lake in the process. I made the inside of the circle on my first jump, but missed hitting it dead-center.

I made two jumps that day, both from the relatively high altitude of 2750 feet above the ground. It was a great experience, and I’ll remember it fondly for the rest of my life. If I ever have to make a parachute jump for any reason, I know how to do it. The best part of the training, as I mentioned above, was learning how to fall without injuring myself. It has subsequently served me well in everyday life, probably saving me from injury in two bad spills that I’ve taken while walking in icy locations. The thing to do is to just flop onto your side, pulling your arms up against your body, when you realize that you are definitely going down.

Physiological Training in an Altitude Chamber

I eventually needed to go through flight physiological training. This meant altitude-chamber training. We studied (among other things) the effects of hypoxia and rapid decompression. It was great! The rapid decompression was so cool! And I liked trying to solve math problems while I was oxygen-deprived. I discovered that not even that magical elixir of pilotdom, coffee, could save me from hypoxia. Like the skydiving training, I will never forget the lessons that I learned in the altitude chamber regarding hypoxia, rapid decompression. The five factors that kill pilots and their passengers are (DEATH is the acronym): Drugs (prescription and over-the-counter), Exhaustion, Alcohol, Tobacco and Hypoglycemia.

(Go to the Using My Photos page on this site for instructions on how to obtain high-resolution versions of these images from me. I don’t charge money for my photos, but I do require a photo credit in your end-product in exchange for the use of my images.)

Skydiving 01 Frank’s first jump Issaquah, WA 1984

Skydiving 02 Drogue chute deployment

Skydiving 03 Main canopy deployment begins

Aerobatic sailplane instruction Romanian S-4 1984

Altitude-chamber

training 01

Altitude-chamber training 02