Inspiration for sticking to your flying lessons (catch up with canine pilots)

We’ve hit mid-December, historically a time when a lot of flight students in Maskachusetts would give up, at least until the spring. They wouldn’t schedule lessons due to Christmas parties, Christmas shopping, holiday trips, etc. And then it would be January and the idea of being out on the ramp was not appealing. Perhaps things will be better this year due to coronapanic. There are fewer in-person parties. People who travel internationally risk getting stuck due to a false or true positive COVID-19 test.

Here’s some inspiration for sticking to those flight lessons, whether you’re in a frigid slave state or a sunny free state…

Let’s back up to a flight that I did in the Cirrus with a helicopter student and her boyfriend, a non-pilot business manager. At the end of the day, which I thought would have impressed him with (a) the awesomeness of the Cirrus, (b) the awesomeness of his girlfriend as a fixed-wing pilot, and (c) the awesomeness of me as an instructor (sage advice from the right seat, checklist discipline, etc.), he said “It seems like the goal is to do everything like a robot. If that’s the goal, why not just get a robot to do it all?”

“I taught two dogs to fly a plane” (Guardian):

I have been a pet behaviourist for more than 25 years and have also worked for the film industry, helping animals to “perform” on camera. I have trained a 190kg boar to pretend to attack an actor, a cat to plunge shoulder-deep into water as if catching a fish and a cockatoo to winch up a bucket, take out a coin and drop it into a piggy bank. But when a TV company asked if I could teach a dog to fly a plane, I faced the toughest challenge of my career.

Initially I was hesitant about the project, which involved taking 12 carefully selected rescue dogs through a training regime that would ultimately allow three of them to take the controls of a Cessna light aircraft. I wondered if the idea was in the animals’ best interests, but was won over by the programme’s aim: to prove that an abandoned dog, given enough love and attention, is capable of far more than people might expect.

We had only six weeks to turn the three finalists into pilots. The Civil Aviation Authority had issued guidelines: the dogs had to be secured while in flight, and we couldn’t make any alterations to the aircraft. I had a simple rig built to mimic the plane’s seat and controls. After making sure the dogs could be seated comfortably, we used a broom handle and a cutout piece of plywood to represent the plane’s steering yoke.

During the flight, they would be sitting in the pilot’s seat, facing forward with their trainers behind them, so we had to come up with a way to give them steering directions. I designed a second rig, which could be placed in front of the dogs and included an arrangement of lights – red to veer right, blue for left and white for straight ahead. Each light also made a distinctive sound. We operated this system from the back seat via a controller.

After six weeks, I was delighted at how far the dogs had come. Their final test was to perform a figure of eight in an airborne Cessna, making banking turns while controlling their altitude. We needed a human co-pilot to take them to 3,000ft before giving control to the dogs (as diligent as our pupils had been, they weren’t able to take off and land safely). [see also “Other instructors who worked with Hazmi and Mihdhar remember them as poor students who focused on learning to control the aircraft in flight but took no interest in takeoffs or landings.”]

All three of them performed admirably, flying the plane for minutes at a time, but it was Shadow who ultimately got the bit between his teeth and successfully completed the final figure of eight.

If the dog could do it, maybe there is hope for us humans!

Separately, ground school is ON for January 3-7. It’s an MIT course, but on Zoom for 2022 as it was in 2021. No need to wear a mask or try to survive Boston winter weather!

13 thoughts on “Inspiration for sticking to your flying lessons (catch up with canine pilots)

  1. About time for Greenspun to teach flying in Fl*rida & make a vijeo. 30 years ago, a flying lesson would have been a process of discovery. Today, you can figure out from gootube vijeos how robotic it is.

  2. Good luck and best wishes for the Ground School course – I recommend it to everyone I know who is even tangentially interested in aviation or becoming a pilot. One thing that might help tip some fence-sitters:

    At one time you did a breakdown of the cost for someone become a small aircraft pilot and compared it favorably to other expenses that people of middle and upper-middle class means can afford. It would be great if you gave us some of those numbers, in updated form, for 2022.

    I know that a lot of people have the impression that getting a pilot’s license and flying an airplane are unattainably expensive, and that analysis helped me convince a couple of people that it’s not so far-fetched after all.

    • @Philg: In fact, if you can have those numbers within a few days or so, I will make them a part of my post plugging your course. I know I have some adventurous friends with nonnegligible disposable income and have hiked and biked and swam half the planet, it seems. They might be interested in a new challenge; some of them are Rifle Team folks who aren’t preternaturally risk-averse and are used to handling things that can potentially be dangerous without freaking themselves out. “Don’t do THIS because you could DIE” doesn’t bother them as much, in other words.

    • I’d be interested in the dexterity, cognitive abilities that one should possess if they are over 50. I know a medical certificate would be required, but is there a big limiting factor that will make it harder if you are over 50 to comprehend/pilot the aircraft. At this point my “Atari Asteriod” skills are not what they used to be.

    • JJ: old people take longer to learn the stick and rudder skills, but are much quicker to learn the aeronautical judgment that makes those skills unnecessary. Up to age 70 or 75, I don’t think there is a big net safety difference.

    • Alex: I think 10 hours is a good budget for learning to fly and 70 for getting a certificate to be pilot in command. Figure $200/hr so $14,000 tops. The more condensed the program of instruction the fewer hours will be required. (Europeans come over and hammer out a rating in 3 weeks and finish closer to the FAA minimum of 40 hours.)

    • @Philg: And then at that point you’re looking at the expense of aircraft rental, ground crew, fuel, etc? Let’s say someone wanted to fly 10-15 times per year? Is there a place I can look that would help me estimate the cost of renting a good single-engine plane that can seat three or four? I’m looking for real ballpark, back of the napkin figures here so that someone could say: “Yeah, for an up-front cost of $X and then $Y per year, I could fly myself and some friends maybe a dozen times a year to various places where we could sightsee, hike, vacation, etc.”

    • If someone wants to fly 15 times per year we can assume roughly 2 hours per day of usage (people don’t usually want to spend more than 1 hour in a four-seat airplane with the engine running, so that’s about 2 hours round-trip). So that’s 30 hours per year times $150 per hour = $4,500. Add in another $500/year for recurrent training (instructor plus flight time). A flight school or flying club’s rates usually include fuel. For someone who lives in eastern MA, that’s 15 trips to Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Maine, and Burlington, Vermont. Of course, it would make more economic and practical sense to go by Honda Accord/ferry, but flying is a hobby. Nobody compares model railroading to the utility of a freight train.

    • @Philg: Thanks, those are good introductory ballpark numbers. I’m thinking of people who have friends that are kind of far-flung and might enjoy being surprised with an airplane trip. I just got a New Years party invitation from a friend who lives in South Carolina. While I’m not in the mood to drive to SC and back over New Years, if I had a pilot’s license and access to a rental plane I would plausibly fly there, attend the party and give my friends a ride around in an airplane. That would be a lot of fun and worth the money and planning time.

  3. In cruise on cross-countries, I let Bundi the Vizsla fly my Columbia 400 all the time. For landings, I’ve set a conservative max 10-knot crosswind component for him. It’s always gone fine. There was that one time when he dropped it in from about 3 ft., but really not bad.

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