June 2005-
What a great day! It is warm without being hot. There is a slight breeze and even the mosquitoes are only buzzing and not biting. You are at the airport and have pushed back the T-hangar doors, letting in the fresh summer sunshine and warmth.
There she is—your airplane.
Ready to go, she is fully fueled with a bug-free clean windshield and just the right amount of air pressure in each and every tire.
I have some advice for you this fine day. Don’t go flying. This is counterintuitive to everything you have ever read in a magazine like this. Sometimes the most joyous and educational flight you can have is the one you didn’t take.
Today is not the day to aviate. You’ve got much more important things to do and I’m the guy that is going to help you do them.
First, let’s put a little music on. Personally, when hanging out in a hangar, I prefer my MP3 player to almost any other musical appliance you can name. Twenty gigs of personally picked-out music.
If you have any sort of AM/FM radio in your hangar, that will serve in a pinch. To set the mood I suggest you tune into the local college’s public radio station—you know the one I’m talking about. All symphonies you’ve never heard of, all the time.
If you are feeling industrious today you could sweep out the hangar. Many pilots of greater experience and élan than you and I have swept out hangars. Jimmy Doolittle probably took to the broom occasionally and I’m sure that even “Slim” Lindbergh had been known to move the dust bunnies around a bit. There is no happier hangar than a clean hangar.
That exercise may have worn you out a little bit so I say it is time to take a short breather. Break out the lawn chairs and get something cold from your mini-fridge. You don’t have a mini refrigerator in your hangar? What are you, a caveman? What are you going to serve the other pilots when they come over for a visit? Okay, get a soft drink from the FBO’s machine and meet me back here in ten. Got it? Great!
So… what do you do now? My advice is to do nothing—absolutely nothing—for about 20 minutes. Since you are not burning fuel or paying me to instruct you, this one-third of a non-flying hour is totally free of charge.
If you sit quietly next to your aircraft or maybe under its wing, after about 10 minutes you’ll notice something. Your mind has quieted down and you are relaxed. I’m not saying your mind is empty, just relaxed. You aren’t in the air today, so you’re not worried about situational awareness, the weather, the health of your engine or the amount of fuel you have left.
Once the clutter of daily life has left your mind, you are ready to move on to the rest of your grounded day. Let’s hit the books. Aircraft manuals are sometimes as dry as a 007 martini. When you have to study the manuals they can be downright daunting, and—can we say it here?—boring.
You’ve always said you’d give them a good read someday when you had the time. Well, Bub… today is the day. You’ve got nothing but time and with your quiet state of mind combined with the comfort of a cool one and a cozy lawn chair, you are receptive to learning.
I’m not telling you that you have to memorize anything or for that matter, even study this stuff. Just peruse it and find things that interest you. I think you’ll discover facts and figures about your aircraft that you have forgotten over the years that now take on a new meaning in the T-hangar light.
The best part about reading your manuals near your airplane is that if you have a question you can ask the machine itself. When you study manuals at home or in a ground school setting and you have a question about exactly where and how a suction pump is installed on your aircraft you have to trust the picture or description in the book.
When you are sitting right next to your airplane, drink in hand, and you have a question like that, the answer is as close as a few DZUS fasteners and a flashlight.
When you took the manuals out of wherever in your aircraft that you had stored them did you notice a little clutter in the cockpit? A little trash lying around the old flight deck? Have you been meaning to get that Ho-Ho wrapper out from under the rudder pedals but haven’t ever found the time to run a litter patrol of your airplane? Today is a great day for catching up on things like this.
You’ve been sitting in that lawn chair long enough; it is time for action. Find that Shop-Vac! Plug it in and get to work! If you occasionally have the opportunity to fly your aircraft upside down or even practice spins you are going thank yourself on a later flight.
Back when I flew T-34s for the forestry department, we used to clean the cockpit by flying inverted with the canopy open. In your airplane, next time you fly upside down or hit bad turbulence, you probably don’t have that option and will end up eating dirt.
If a clean cockpit is happiness, then a gleaming propeller is Nirvana. When was the last time you made sure the mags were off and then gave your prop a good polishing?
Okay, it is probably time to stop preening your plane. Your T-hangar neighbors are beginning to talk about you behind your back. Plus, it is such a nice day that sitting in that stuffy, albeit clean, hangar holds no allure anymore.
Put away your cleaning stuff, recycle that drink can, bring your lawn chair and follow me. It is time to practice our takeoffs and landings. The following technique is one I’ve used with all of my pre-solo students and I think it is very effective for pilots of all skill levels.
What are we going to do? Sit by the runway and make fun of others! We’re going to get our lawn chairs as close to the runway as safety and the Homeland Security geeks will allow us and watch takeoffs and landings for about an hour. We will critique each and every one.
Who is coming in too high? Is that airplane carrying too much power? How much power should you carry? Every airplane, from single-engine Pipers to Boeing 757s can teach us something as they whisk by in the pattern.
This is especially true on weekends at your basic General Aviation airport. Some people think of weekends as a great time to practice their flying skills. Tongue in cheek, I’ve been known to call weekends “amateur days.”
If you want to see some really interesting landings I suggest you observe the pattern on weekends when the giants of industry come out for the first time in six weeks to get current. What does a stabilized approach look like? We’re going to find out from the comfort of our lawn chairs.
I hope you brought a cooler because it can get hot and thirsty out here. Everybody knows that watching the traffic pattern at an airport is a spectator sport. Every large airport has an aircraft viewing area.
In Mexico City, there are actually large bleachers at the end of the runway to watch the fun. Being a very high-altitude airport, the fun at Mexico City can get gnarly and the crowd knows it.
If we are lucky, we’ll get to see dozens of takeoffs and landings during our stay by the runway. We’ll learn a lot from watching the good ones and even more from watching the near-crashes. After about a hundred landings it is time to move on. Where to? Why, the ramp, of course!
What can we learn by hanging around an airport’s General Aviation ramp? What can’t we learn? For starters, observe how the pilots treat their airplanes, post-flight.
Do they get out and do a good job of chocking and tying down their bird? Or do they totally ignore the well-being of their ride and depend on a teen-aged line person to care for their four hundred thousand dollars of equipment while they load their golf clubs into the rental car?
These aircraft have flown their people through hostile skies at very high speeds. They have made it possible for these people to make their family reunions, business meetings, and yes, even golf outings. What kind of respect do the airplanes get after a hard day of flying? You can tell many things about a pilot based on how he treats his aircraft.
While we are watching the good, the bad and the truly ugly when it comes to tying down an airplane, let’s also try to notice the general safety attitude on the ramp. Is the line crew attaching that ground wire before they fuel that jet or are they just blowing that little safety detail off?
You and I are not alone. There are other “ramp tramps” hanging around today at the airport. Some of them are very old (hey, stop looking at me like that) and some are young. We need to sit down and talk with a few of them. That old guy sitting behind the chain-link fence may be a P-51 driver from the Big One. That kid you take the time to talk with and perhaps show your airplane later may be the first person to walk on Mars.
Aviation is a very small and tight-knit community. Take the time to meet a few other people in our world. I’ve known these ramp “bull sessions” to go on for hours and hours. I’ve learned more about life and flying sitting on a hot ramp than I learned in my six years trying to get a four-year degree at FSU.
Your fellow pilots are not only good looking and fun to be around, they are also brimming over with wisdom and things to teach you if you’ll only take a day off and listen.
Where has the day gone? The sun is heading west and we’ve spent an entire day not flying. I don’t know about you but I could eat the south end of a northbound rhino. Let’s head out and find a barbeque joint. Tomorrow we aviate—tonight we eat ribs and drink beer.
Kevin Garrison’s aviation career began at age 15 as a lineboy in Lakeland, Fla. He came up through general aviation and is currently a senior 767 captain. When not frightening passengers, Kevin plays tennis and lives on a horse farm in Kentucky, where he writes unsold humor projects and believes professional wrestling is real and all else is bogus.
