Day 5, 6 & 7: Grounded!

That little model became my new best friend over the past three lessons.

So you know what happens when you get to fly a lot? You have to catch up on ground lessons. My last three trips to American Helicopters resulted in just that. Lot's of ground school.

I'm not going to go into an incredible amount of detail here, but I'll touch on the topics. Basically I learned about every mechanical and electrical component of the R22 helicopter, and the various physics that act upon it at different parts of flight. Today we shifted gears and we starting talking about different flight patterns and airspace restrictions. 

Needless to say, it's been a while since I've been fully engaged and intrigued in what I'm learning, mostly because the Coast Guard has dozens of "Mandated training" that has been going on lately, so it was quite refreshing!

Okay before I wrap this up, there's one super cool thing I learned that pilots can do when they fly to an uncontrolled airstrip after hours. Many of these airports have something called pilot controlled lights, which means that when a pilot is trying to find the runway, they key up the radio to the frequency of that airport, and press the send button either 3, 5, or 7 times. Depending on how many times you hit that button, turns the airport lights to either low, medium or high. Sweet right?!

Just think of the possibilities. If you live next to one of those type of airports, you could get a VHF radio in your house and turn on those lights whenever you please. Pretty much the ultimate party trick.

Okay that's all for now, below is a picture of the trailer with the extra classrooms in it that we were in. Notice that it is INSIDE that hanger. That just makes me laugh for some reason.

Day 4: Pre-flight checklists are important. Hovering still hard, but getting there!

So I had a two and a half hour block this time around, so we got to take more time to go through a more in depth pre-flight checklist. Those things are pretty in depth! There's literally 50+ items that you have to look over in order to be fully satisfied that the aircraft is ready to fly.

I just thought to myself how amusing it would be if we did the same kind of checklist on our cars before driving anywhere. People would end up walking more.

Anyway, this was a great flight, and I got to do a bit of everything. Hovering is really the last big step I have to get the hang of in order to not require much assistance while flying. I got a big more of the hang of the cyclic, but the other two controls need a bit of work for sure.

I didn't get a chance to get any really good pictures, so you'll have to wait until I get airborne again to get one. Ground school this Sunday!

Day 3: Much, much better than day 2

My mother will appreciate this more than anyone 

So this was a later lesson then the last one, and it ended up being a half day flight and half night flight. This time my instructors name was Mark. Like the last time, we quickly went through the preflight checklist so we can spend as much time flying as possible. 

Tonight ended up being half a day flight and half a night flight, so I got to experience the best of that sunset plus some night flying, which is really cool...especially if you could see the way they light up the runway for you. There is literally a giant white arrow blinking towards the longer of the two runways. You'd have to be blind to not see which runway you were supposed to land at.

For flight school, you basically run the same rectangular pattern over and over again. You take off, and once you reach about 50 knots you start to ascend to roughly 900ft and hold that altitude for the duration, while maintaining at least 60 knots. 

One kind of funny observation I noticed was on the second to last turn, there is a Target store on the ground that you can see quite clearly at night. I found myself aiming for the Target symbol as a reference point for roughly the right heading I was supposed to maintain, which ended up being pretty accurate!

Now while I didn't get to practice any hovering this time, I will fortunately say that the cyclic control made oh so much more sense to me this time around. I really felt like the commands I gave produced the results I wanted this time around. Granted, I have a ton of fine tuning to learn, but at least the movements I made on the stick made more sense to me.

Landing is another thing. I won't go into too much detail, but there is a lot more movements to landing a helicopter then you would think, so I'll more than likely be working on that the next time around.

I leave tomorrow for a week in Tampa, so I won't get any flying in until probably another week and a half. More to come then!

Day 2: Hovering is HARD

So to start, I'm currently in the middle of my night shift at the NAVCEN, so please excuse any typo's, and I'll do my best not to spill any mountain dew on the keyboard, for that drink is always present as I enter the long hours after midnight.

Anyway, I fought through traffic and got there about 9 AM today, and I was under instruction of Jeff today (He's the chief flight instructor).

Even though today was more or less an introductory day, I still feel like we went over a TON of stuff. All in all, I had about 4 hours today of ground school alone, talking about everything from the aerodynamics of the R-22 to how it flys and manuevers and what forces are acting upon, to some of the very key things not to do...which are obviously very important.

For example, did you know a preferred takeoff of a helicopter is actually taking off much like an airplane does? If you're like me, you may have thought all helicopters just take off and land straight up and straight down all the time. While they are perfectly capable of doing this, it's much safer to do this with forward motion.

Basically, without going into much detail to get confusing, if the engine were to cease and you have to forward motion, you would drop pretty fast and have no other means of slowing down besides the natural autorotation of the blades. However, with a bit of motion, you can drift to the ground and when you're about 20 ft or so above the ground, you can pull back on the stick and slow yourself down drastically and land nice and smoothly. Cool huh?

That situation I just discribed is called autorotation, and it's one of the maneuvers we did today. I have to say...it's one of my favorites. You know how a bird quickly flaps its wings right before touchdown? Well that's exactly how it felt, with a bit of a whoosh to it and everything. Cool stuff. And did I mention helicopters can land while still moving and skid to a stop all action movie style? Yeah we did that too.

Moving on, the last part of my lesson involved learning how to hover. This is much more difficult than I anticipated. Imagine standing on a basketball with one foot while balancing a stick with a plate on your nose. Not a simple feat, and just slightly over doing it on the controls will send you everywhere like a pendulum with rockets. There's a lot of fine movements with your feet and hands that allow you to stablilize the R-22, and it's going to take more than 20 minutes for me to get the feeling of it.

So that's a pretty good amount for one day, and I'm pretty wiped now. I was a bit frusterated in the end because I was starting to get a bit nauseous, but I'll take some medicine next time until I'm finally good enough to actually anticipate the motion, and then I think I won't feel sick anymore. Makes sense right? I'll be pretty ticked if I feel sick next time.

Here's a couple of the R-22s, I got to fly the one on the right.

Here's Jeff trying to finish the preflight checklist (Which is pretty lengthy by the way, which is good) before the storm came through. We were too slow and it absolutely poured for an hour before we got to fly.

That's it for now, time to stock up at CVS for the next run! I'm determined to get that hovering perfect asap.

Day 1: The Journey begins

So after months and months of carefully planning, I've FINALLY started the helicopter training process, beginning with getting my private helicopter pilot's license. I've created this blog to document the experience from start to finish...from absolutely no experience to full professional pilot (Lord willing)!

I searched the internet many times over for some sort of documentation of someone like me getting all their qualifications from start to finish, but I could not really find any, so I figured I would make one of my own. There's no sense in complaining about something that you're not willing to fix yourself if you have the option to do so. Anyway, let me start with a quick paragraph about who I am and what my intentions are.

My name is Jonathan, and I'm 24 currently serving in the USCG in Alexandria, VA. I just paid for a prepaid package that allows me to get my private helicopter pilots license, and I'll be training at a place called American Helicopters which is based out of Mannasas, VA (www.americanheli.com). For those of you wondering about how the military comes in to play, they basically cover 60% of all expenses past private helo license under the most currect MGIB bill. Basically, this first stage (my private license) is all on me.

Simple enough right? I'm quite anxious to get started, and my first lesson is tomorrow if the weather holds up. More to come!