Flight Lesson #1
If Anatoli Davydov were in Cuyamungue, NM, today, he might have been inspired to reenact one of his few lines from The Hunt for Red October, for he would have just been overflown by a low-altitude, multi-engine turboprop—with me at the helm.
I drove up to Los Alamos early this morning and grabbed a breakfast burrito from Chili Works. I ate in the airport terminal, listening to three pilots discussing their maneuvers for the upcoming "airshow" to be held at the White Rock 4th of July celebration tomorrow. I've seen this airshow in years past... it's really just three general aviation planes doing a bit of loose formation flying and one guy does an aileron roll. Last year it lasted about five minutes. Still, it was interesting to hear these guys working out the timings, etc.
The weather was pretty abysmal; when I had woken up, it was a 7000' ceiling and light rain. I thought my chances for getting some stick time were zero when I left the house. Luckily, as the sun came up the lower clouds boiled off leaving a 20,000' ceiling with scattered clouds in the valley. There was still patchy rain, but now the possibility of me getting to control the aircraft some did exist.
The DHC-6 Twin Otter pilots showed up shortly after I finished eating and we did the pre-flight. Scott pointed out some things to look for and I identified some of the mechanical features I had read about in my training manual. A brief check of the weather confirmed that it was VFR all the way from LAM to SAF (that's all of 15 miles as the crow flies), so we loaded up and off we went. Once he had climbed up to about 2000' AGL and had turned off to the south, Scott let me sit in the copilot's seat and put me on the controls immediately.
This is by far the largest and most complex aircraft I have ever flown. I have a very small amount of time on a friend's Cessna 182 (maybe an hour of total time, though none of it was with a CFI and thus not log-able; plus it was all at least three years ago), but flying the otter doesn't feel at all like flying a lighter aircraft like the 182. I found myself muscling the controls way too much, to the point where my arms were getting tired. Presumably this was just anxiety; the yoke doesn't need all that much force. Also presenting some difficulty was the weather. The windshield was frequently totally obscured by light rain, and the horizon was indistinct due to hanging mist and low clouds. I found myself flying essentially by instruments quite a bit.
I like to think that my first logged flight time was in a multi-engine turboprop under simulated instrument conditions... but that's a bit of a stretch.
The good news is that I was able to make coordinated turns, though I had a tendency to over-bank. I managed to follow some obvious surface features and maneuver to avoid small clouds. Unfortunately, the small clouds started to consolidate and I had to return to passanger status so that we could land at SAF before conditions deteriorated further.
In total, I logged 0.4 hours. In the remarks section of my flight log, Scott listed it as an "introduction to flight and turbine aircraft."
The fuel stop at SAF was brief, as was the flight back to LAM (which I took no part in). Afterward, Scott encouraged me to bring my training materials along to China Lake, where we will be for the next three weeks. He said we could knock out some of the ground training stuff in the evenings and if we had to fly away from IYK to get fuel for the otter, maybe I could get some more stick time. He even gave me some old sectionals he had in the plane to help me study.
Still very excited about flying. Will probably investigate instructors when I return to Los Alamos at the end of July.
