Lesson #15: A whole lot of hood work

There are some of you who, upon reading the title of this lesson, are thinking, "Oh boy! Finally, Tim will learn the most important part of flying: brominating nitroaniline to produce diazonium salt!" Well, I'm sorry to report, it's not that kind of hood. The hood I am referring to will not explode again, nor ever.

Wellp, I wasn't surprised when ATIS reported the winds at 240 for 15 knots on this sunny Wednesday evening. It will be a cold day in Hell when the winds are calm enough for my first solo in the evening.

Instead, we would be doing a whole lesson of hood work. The hood, if you've forgotten, is an unattractive device you strap over your head, that obscures your vision out the window. It forces you to fly by instruments, simulating flying in darkness or in a cloud.

Ah, 739UL. How long it's been since I've taken you into the air. She feels no different than 4AC to me now, where once there would have been a world of difference, but still ... it will be nice to land a different plane for once.

About 5 minutes out from Oakland, Stephen plopped the hood on my face, and for the rest of the flight up until landing, it would be instruments only. He started out with a typical instruction: "Tune and fly to the Scags VOR, and climb and maintain 2,500 feet." So, I was tuning, climbing, and turning.

(It just occurred to me that I never did identify the station, and Stephen never dinged me for it. Guess we both forgot.)

Thanks to extensive simulator experience, I already had a good scan. I moved my eyes across the instruments I needed, never fixating on any one, and keeping up my total situational awareness. I had trouble maintaining a heading (drifting off by about 20 degrees or so), but my altitude was doing fine.

So, in the simulator, I can maintain both an altitude and a heading just fine using only instruments. So what gives in real life? The answer is my damn inner ear. The tricksy bastard plays games with me, telling me I'm banked when I'm level, and telling me I'm turning when I'm straight. So, my heading deviated wildly as my eyes (watching the heading indicator) and my inner ear wrestled for control of the yoke.

So really, IFR flight is a two-front battle. On the first front, you have to develop a good scan to avoid fixating on an instrument, and keep your general situational awareness high. That part I have honed from years of flight sims. On the second front, you have to learn to ignore your inner ear, which is a wholly unreliable sense of bank and pitch. That's something you can't learn in a sim when you're sitting in your room, so I was completely new to this unsettling disagreeing sensory input.

Stephen gave me new commands (new altitudes and new headings) and I flew them as best I could. Twenty minutes he informed me we were over the San Pablo Bay. I had no idea of this, seeing only the instruments and the top of my hood the whole flight, so it came as a bit of a surprise.

Next I would practice power-on and power-off stalls with the hood on. This means I had to rely on my instruments to help me recover from the stall, rather than looking out the window. No problem. Other than once again being unable to maintain a heading due to my stupid inner ear, I did fine. I trusted my instruments and used them to recover from these stalls.

We did three stalls, then it was time to practice recovery for unusual attitudes. The idea here is, a pilot flies into a cloud. Once the white-out hits him he panics, begins listening to his inner ear, and makes all sorts of crazy control inputs in an attempt to fly back out. Of course, all he succeeds in doing is putting himself in an "unusual attitude." So, now comes the recover time.

Now, mind you, I had been flying for about 30 minutes with the hood on, unable to see the horizon, so motion sickness was creeping up on me like a looming shadow. To practice unusual attitude recoveries, you close your eyes, your instructor makes some abrupt and confusing control inputs, and then you open them and recover to normal flight. (It's the analogy to when you blindfold your friend, spin him around really fast, and then have him try to find his way to you. If your friend had a compass he could use, it would sure be a lot more trustworthy than his completely compromised senses.)

So, I figured by closing my eyes and allowing myself to be tossed and turned in the sky, I would get sick to my stomach. Surprisingly, closing my eyes allowed me to relax and zone out a bit while Stephen flew the plane, so even though he was doing crazy banks and pitches all over the sky, I still felt mostly fine.

He then asked me to open my eyes, and I would recover the plane, ignoring what my senses "thought" the plane was doing, and instead listening to what my instruments "knew" the plane was doing. I did just fine. We did three recoveries and Stephen was satisfied.

That's not to say the motions didn't affect me at all. Even as I sit here typing this (three hours after my lesson), I am vaguely reliving the roller-coaster sensation in my head, my inner ear still spinning from the experience.

It sure was fun though.

So, I was allowed to take the hood off and take the plane back home at this point. The approach was uneventful; I called NorCal outside of Richmond and they vectored me to the Mormon Temple, then had me go to Tower, which brought me in to 27R. They vectored me just beneath to a helicopter, and I was a little worried about the downdraft from its rotor, but I didn't feel anything passing under it, so I guess we were far enough below.

Stephen had me practice two short-field and two soft-field landings on 27R, which actually went pretty well. The trick for the crosswind landing, apparently, is to make your rudder correction further out than I was doing. See, the way I had learned a crosswind landing, you crab the airplane into the wind, and fly it all the way down the chute crabbed out (facing diagonally to the direction it's going). Then, at the last minute, you "kick out the crab:" You apply opposite rudder to straighten the plane, so that when the wheels touch, they won't skid.

That sounded reasonable, but Stephen had me put in my rudder correction about 1,000 feet out from final. For one, it helps to know if you have enough rudder authority to completely straighten yourself in the crosswind: If you don't, you'll have to land on a different runway. Secondly, it apparently fixed the unsettling skidding with my landings. All four of my landings were smoother because the wheels didn't skid on touchdown.

I kinda liked the whole "crab up to the end" idea, though. I liked the idea of freaking out passengers by coming down to land facing nearly sideways. Oh well.

Next weekend will either be (of course) my first solo or my first cross-country flight. Stephen wants me to plan a flight to tiny Oakdale airport, across the state, for some practice in VFR navigation over long distances. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.

Cost so far: $4,456.46
Time so far: 53 days
Hours so far: 20.1

Projected finish date: August 2, 2007
Projected total cost: $11,000