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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop S73 Cherokee number two following twin traffic three mile final one trolley bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:24
Bobby Doss
What's up Wally?
00:25
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:27
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. Kind of a unique recording situation. We're down to the wire on a holiday weekend and you're at the flight school and I'm not at the flight school. Very unique situation. Normally I'm there and you're in Hawaii. I'm not very far away, but I am going on a trip. So we had to squeeze this in before you administer a checkride and before I get on my way for a holiday weekend here. But today is all about pre flight action. And we've done 150 episodes and I don't think we've ever done one specifically on this, but we've both seen a lot of missteps, a lot of premises and thought processes that we don't necessarily agree with. So we wanted to break down all things 91.103 and talk about it all.
01:18
Bobby Doss
Wally, you don't fly a plane without pre flighting it, do you?
01:23
Wally Mulhern
No, I don't. You know, any time I've been in an airplane, there's been a pre flight at least a walk around. And depending on what has happened with the airplane, you know, maybe my behaviors are a little bit different with a pre flight as well. You know, we could have a situ, you know, my own personal airplane. It's, it's not unusual for the airplane to go six weeks without flying. So, you know, I'm looking for different things when I'm walking around that airplane. I'm looking for things that, you know, I'm looking for bugs, I'm looking for dirt daubers that made a nest in the pitot tube. You know, birds nests in the cow flaps.
02:20
Bobby Doss
I mean.
02:21
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when you're at a flight school and you're standing out on the flight line and the airplane comes in and the fuel truck pulls up and puts fuel in it and then you go to jump in it. I'm not saying you don't check those things, but there's a situation where, okay, it just flew in, I'm about to fly it out, you know, I, I think, you know, 20 minutes ago the airplane was airworthy. So, you know, probably airworthy now, but. But I look at it from a different perspective.
03:00
Bobby Doss
Yeah. And I think there's situations like that can make a pilot or CFI or a family a little complacent. You know, hey, this has been in our hangar. No one else has touched it. I was the one who put fuel in it last. Those sorts of mindsets could make us complacent and make us miss something. But I think today's thought process in my mind is really all the way from waking up and I'm going to fly. What else should we be thinking about? And 91103 is a really short regulation, but the word all is in it. And I think the word all is what makes it all encompassing. That the pilot really should understand all factors as it relates to that flight. And I did some research the last couple of days preparing for this.
03:48
Bobby Doss
And the resources out there for pre flight action is immense. And I'm just going to run through some of those if you want to go read more about pre flight action. There's tons of resources from the FAA and other places, but there's an advisory circular that I didn't even honestly know existed. It's AC9192. And the title of the advisory circ is Pilot's Guide to Preflight Briefing. And it's 21 pages. There's a great checklist at the back, tons of hyperlinks, lots of information in there. The aim, we've done shows on the aim 511-511 is all dedicated to pre flight action. The Risk Management Handbook, the Pilot Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, tons of acronyms. A maneuvers Guide, Arden Maneuvers Guide for our Flight Schools, available to the public.
04:40
Bobby Doss
So if you don't have a good maneuvers guide, you're welcome to go Download it at www.unitedflight.com MG for Maneuvers guide. Our latest and greatest version will always be at that link. And there's about six pages dedicated to pre flight action inside of that maneuvers guide with a lot of good resources, more acronyms to help you think through the go no go decision or finding things that might need to be addressed with your aircraft and the environment before you get going. Any resources that you think I missed there, Wally?
05:18
Wally Mulhern
No, that sounds pretty all encompassing to me.
05:22
Bobby Doss
Yeah. So let's talk through really what I like to think of as the pre flight action. And that's really something we've talked about a lot. Right. You're at a flight school about to administer a checkride. I bet you have a Pretty good idea what the probability is of you flying these two or three flights that you might fly today. Am I right? And you haven't even got to the aircraft yet, right?
05:50
Wally Mulhern
Absolutely. I mean, you know, three weeks ago in Houston, when you looked at your, you know, your weather app on your smartphone, it was nothing but sun for as many days as would display now. The last, I don't know, few days now, all you see is clouds and rain showers for the next, I think until next, I don't know, about five days from now. So right off the bat I'm thinking, okay, we may have some issues. And then of course I'm looking at what type of checkrides I'm doing. I'm thinking, okay, I'll have a double eye checkride first thing in the morning. So we got a little bit more leeway. The, the pilot is instrument rated and current and all that stuff. So we do have some leeway as far as is flying into the clouds on the checkride and that kind of stuff.
06:49
Wally Mulhern
But the ones after that are pretty much VMC type checkride. So we do have it scheduled to where the, you know, the one that we could fly in the clouds is during the day when the clouds may be present and if they're going to go away later in the afternoon. Yeah. And as I'm driving in, you know, I'm looking up and I'm looking around and I've got an idea. I know that, you know, it's not like it was two weeks ago where I would just hop up in the morning, look out the window and say, all right, I'm good to go. Because I mean my first thought when the alarm goes off is do I shut the alarm off and go back to bed or do I get up and take a shower?
07:36
Bobby Doss
Yeah, and you're right. I think we had something there like 60 days of this high pressure system right over Houston. We had no issues for a long time and it was nice. And now the forecast doesn't look so good. But even before you look at the weather, right, these check rides you're doing today were supposed to happen a few days ago and you took yourself out of the picture because you weren't feeling well. So right, there's even, there's even a pre donning of that pre flight in my opinion. Right. Where it's obvious when you're not feeling well.
08:12
Bobby Doss
But there's all these other factors that I think we Take, we should be taking into account prior to taking on a flight and that pre flight action where you're assessing yourself at home and you're getting up, you're looking at the weather, all that happens way, way before we get to what I think is the common premise of pre flight action, which is now we're at the airport, we're going to do a wait and bounce, we're gonna do all these other things to get prepared for that flight.
08:42
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, well, and it comes with other things. You know, it just so happens with my airline schedule, I'm in the middle of quite a few days off and I actually picked up a trick, a trip for a week from today flying a charter. And so a week from today, I'm gonna go fly, do my airline job. And I'm already, you know, this morning as I was driving in, I was thinking, okay, I need to go in and I need to update my iPad because we just. Before we can update to the latest iOS, we have to be authorized because they have to do all the testing that they do to make sure the new iOS doesn't mess up all the apps that we use. And we just got authorized to update to the latest iOS.
09:33
Wally Mulhern
So I'm thinking, hey, when I get home tonight, I need to go ahead and update my airline iPad to the latest iOS, make sure my weather app. And it's a week out. I'm a week out. I'm already thinking that because I don't want to wait. I don't want to be that guy that's on the phone with our IT people three hours, two hours before the flight saying, hey, my iPad won't boot up or whatever. It's never happened. But you know, again, I'm a week out. And I'm thinking along those lines, if.
10:09
Bobby Doss
It ever will, it will now. Wally, you just jinxed yourself. Never. It's never happened.
10:14
Wally Mulhern
I know.
10:15
Bobby Doss
So all the resources that are out there, we talked about, all the pre, pre flight actions that you should do are important. And I thought we would just walk through really kind of the thing that the FAA recommends. And that's the PAVE acronym. Pave. I'm sure most of our listeners are aware of the PAVE acronym, but I'm using our maneuvers guide as a reference. You know, this is something that's documented in the FAA paperwork that they recommend this and the P is pilot, and we could probably do an entire show on just pilot. But you're about to do A checkride. The first thing y' all are going to do is qualify that pilot, I assume, is that correct, Wally?
11:01
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, that's correct. Well, actually the first thing that we do is qualify me, but. And as I, I tell the people, based on the fact that I'm here, I have qualified me, so I'm good to go.
11:15
Bobby Doss
So then we're going to. The applicant's not going to ask to see your documentation and review your medical and your, you know, give you a little stress.
11:24
Wally Mulhern
Well, they haven't yet. Maybe, maybe we'll start challenge someone.
11:29
Bobby Doss
To take that on. I challenge someone to take that on in the future. But from a pilot perspective, obviously the documents obviously a met a valid medical meets the requirements for recency or currency. From a. Are they legal to fly with passengers, etc. You the need to have the current charts, the current things. Most of us, as Wally discussed, probably have an electronic flight back nowadays. And we sure want that battery to be charged, we want that iOS software to be valid and good for us foreflight any of those charts, etc. All that stuff up to date. And then I think it's probably what you did before you got here, but it's the I'm Safe checklist. You want to walk through the I'm Safe checklist, alternating letters together here, Wally?
12:19
Wally Mulhern
Sure.
12:21
Bobby Doss
So I is illness. Right. And that got you. I think it was three days ago. And so if you're sick. Right. And I can remember situations where I've really felt fine but had a head cold on a commercial flight. I thought there was a nail going through my brain. It would hurt so bad, the pressure in my head. You surely wouldn't want to be a single pilot flying an IMC with that kind of pressure problem in your brain or in your nasal cavities, actually.
12:54
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. I'll tell a funny story about this. This was years and years ago. I was flying a airplane to a radio shop to get some work done on it. And it was an older airplane and the engine, I don't know, it had a certain sound to it. And I just remember coming into land thinking of, wow, this engine sounds so smooth today. Something about it was just humming along. And then we landed and I did something and my ears cleared and all of a sudden the whole sound of the engine changed and I just went, oh, okay, yeah, there's that old engine that, that we have in this airplane.
13:43
Wally Mulhern
So that was probably a day that I probably shouldn't have been flying, but you know, and that was A little bit of a lesson learned because it really did affect the way I heard things immensely.
14:01
Bobby Doss
What's the M M and I'm safe, Wally?
14:05
Wally Mulhern
Medication. You know, we're, I, we cover this especially on private and commercial orals. I'll talk about medication and people have kind of gotten away from this answer. And I would always say, okay, you wake up in the morning, you've got some, maybe allergy symptoms, sneezing, runny nose, itchy eyes, scratchy throat, that kind of stuff. You go in the bathroom and you see a bottle of allergy medication and you don't know if you're good to take it. You know, if it's legal to take and still fly, what are you going to do? And used to be, I mean, two, three years ago, the standard answer was oh, I'm going to call my ama, my AME and I said okay, it's seven in the morning.
15:06
Wally Mulhern
Who, who has a personal line to their AME and is going to get the doctor to pick up the phone and say hey Bobby, how are you this morning? You know, most of us probably don't have that. So, you know, if you are taking, you know, before you start a medication, you should probably check to see if it's on the FAA approved list or disapproved list from the faa. You know, you go to A. I know a lot of people that have allergy issues and will take a, you know, like a daily, some sort of allergy medicine daily.
15:48
Wally Mulhern
And you know, a lot of times the doctor will want you to take medicine A, but if you can tell them, hey, I'm a pilot and they'll say, oh yeah, well you can't take Medicine A, we'll put you on Medicine C. It's basically does the same thing without that side effect. So there are alternatives, no doubt.
16:08
Bobby Doss
And I think I've been pretty candid. I take some blood pressure medicine and it's on the approved list and it's, you know, it's very safe and healthy for my body and it's very safe and healthy to fly with that medication. But there are a lot of meds out there that aren't on the approved list that you would want to avoid. The S stands for stress. And I'm sure we all have stress. If we said if we had any stress we wouldn't fly, many of us wouldn't be flying at all. But I think it's the extra stress right am I have, my wife and I've been fighting religiously for the last three days. Probably not the best thing for me to try and jump in a plane and make a flight. I think it, yeah, those undue stressors.
16:49
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, there was, you know, I'm a big fan of the YouTube channel pilot debrief and we had Hoover on here as a guest a couple months ago and he just recently did an accident investigation about a crash of a pilatus that was going from somewhere in Nebraska up to South Dakota or something. And one side note was that the pilot's adult daughter had just passed away, I want to say about 14 days ago. And you know, and of course, I mean we don't really know what happened, but there were some people who passed away in this crash and you know, that came up in the debrief. You know, how was this pilot mentally knowing that he just buried his, you know, 40 year old daughter just two weeks previous to the crash? So I think that would stress me out. So.
17:56
Wally Mulhern
No, but you know, the problem with that is it's not quite measurable. I mean medication, you can say, no, I'm not taking any medication or yes I am. Let me investigate. Well, you know, we all process stress a little bit differently.
18:14
Bobby Doss
Yeah. And let's be honest, how many of us are going to really say I can't handle this. Right. That's the unfortunate part is we all have egos, men and women, and very few of us probably have the wherewithal to say this is beyond what I can handle today and I probably shouldn't fly. So you got to take a deep look and you got to be honest with yourself because it's not going to go away.
18:38
Wally Mulhern
Right.
18:39
Bobby Doss
How about the A, alcohol?
18:43
Wally Mulhern
I think it's actually alcohol and drugs. You know, we have the eight hour bottled of the throttle rule. But I think if you're counting backwards on the clock for eight hours, then the answer is you probably shouldn't be flying. You know, I know if you work for a, you know, 121 or 135 operator, those airlines or those companies are probably going to have more strict rules, maybe a 12 hour rule or something like that. But I really think if you're having a count backwards, you probably shouldn't be flying.
19:27
Bobby Doss
Yeah, that's a good point. And I don't, I, you know, I think alcohol probably affects everyone differently as well. And it's one of those things where if you have any doubt, you just shouldn't fly. There's no question about that for sure.
19:42
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. And, and those come up in private pilot orals and commercial. And a lot of times I, I look across the table at the applicant and they're kind of smiling a little bit. And, and I'll, I usually have to say, oh, wait a minute, you're not even 21. You, you can't go have a, a beer at the local tavern. They go, yeah, that's right. So it's. But we still do cover it, you know, we do talk about it.
20:17
Bobby Doss
Yeah. My son's 20. I'm pretty sure he's had a drink at some point in his life. So it doesn't necessarily mean if it's legal. Wally.
20:24
Wally Mulhern
Right, right.
20:26
Bobby Doss
Fatigue is the F. And I'm say fatigue. And man, as I clipped the 50 a couple years ago, I feel tired all the time. Wally. Again, I think this is a lot like stress. If I just said I was a little tired, I never would fly. But I think fatigue is one of those things that it could be very different if I was going to fly to Brenham, which is probably a 35 minute flight. Not saying I would fly it exhausted or tired, but the workload is much less on a VMC kind of a day compared to if I was going to fly to New Orleans in IMC the whole way there. That might be a very different level of fatigue that my brain and body could take on those two flights.
21:12
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, and the fatigue will affect all different parts of your body. I can remember many years ago going to my eye doctor and talking to him. It was, I don't know, I was probably around 45 years old and I got to that point where I was having to move books farther away from me to read them and I needed bifocals. And, you know, it probably took a couple years of going to the eye doctor to kind of tweak the exact right prescription. Because as pilots, not only do we need the near vision and the far vision, but we also need that intermediate vision, which is the instrument panel. And I can remember talking to my doctor about, you know, that intermediate vision. And he said, well, when do you notice this?
22:14
Wally Mulhern
And I said, well, it's usually right about this time on the typical flights that I fly. And he goes, well, what time of day is that usually happening? And I says, well, it's usually about 4am Houston time. And he says, well, you don't think fatigue might have a little bit to do with that? And all of a sudden, this light bulb went off. I went, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, fatigue can, you know, it's not just I feel tired. I mean, sometimes it does affect, you know, motor skills, but in my case, I, I think, you know, that's when I was noticing. Struggling a little bit with the vision.
23:01
Bobby Doss
Very interesting. What about the e. In. I'm safe.
23:07
Wally Mulhern
Eating, eating. So, you know, I, you know, I'll go back to my airline situation. I mean, I, I do a lot of Hawaii to the mainland, whether it's the west coast, middle of the country or Houston. And about every, oh, I'm going to say about 20% of the flights, I mean, one out of five, we have a medical situation on board the airplane. And it's almost always the same scenario. It's. We have a person in the back who has fainted. We have medical personnel. They're administering oxygen. He or she is conscious now. We're giving them some orange juice. They don't want any. They're. They. They don't want to make a big deal about it. They say they feel fine. But our protocol is to go ahead and call our medical people and, you know, get an assessment from a trained physician.
24:25
Wally Mulhern
But almost every one of them, we find out, you know, most of the flights leave Hawaii late in the evening, Hawaiian time. Almost every one of them, the patient or the customer will say, well, I haven't had anything to eat today, and I spent the day out on the beach. I had two or three Mai tais, and guess what? They've gotten on an airplane and now they passed out. So fainted.
24:59
Bobby Doss
Thank goodness they weren't the pilot.
25:01
Wally Mulhern
Right, right.
25:04
Bobby Doss
Yeah. We've gone to a thing around the flight school where we're strongly encouraging all of our students and pilots to show up 30 minutes early. And as the flight school owner, I've had a little pushback from the team and some of the students, and I'm just like, there's so much that you can accomplish in that 30 minutes. Right. Go to the bathroom, hydrate a little bit, get prepared, eat a bar of some sort to make sure you're nutritioned up and get your head in the game around what you want to do. And you had an experience recently where one of my employees shared that with you, and they're kind of not really fond of this. What's your, what's your pre. Pre. Pre. Flight time that you have to be at the airlines?
25:47
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, it. Well, it depends on what kind of flight we're doing. If it's an international flight that requires a little bit more pre flight planning. It's 90 minutes since an hour and a half before scheduled departure time. So we made in a flight planning area.
26:03
Bobby Doss
Is that optional like you. Is that just suggested?
26:07
Wally Mulhern
Not. Not suggested. It is required. So all the pilots, whether it be two, three, sometimes we have four pilots. If it's, you know, a longer flight. Yeah, we meet together, we. We discuss the plan, I. E. The flight plan and look at the routing. We then will make a phone call to our dispatcher, usually on speakerphone. So all four pilots are hearing the. What the dispatcher has to say. And you know, we may have questions for the dispatcher. Why. Why are we on this routing? We seem to be going farther north than we normally do. What. What's going on today? Well, because there's a. There's a volcano over here that's erupting and the wind is coming from this way and so we're going this way to get you away from the volcanic ash. Oh, yeah, that's good. That makes a lot of sense now.
27:08
Wally Mulhern
Now we understand. But because of that, you know, it's another 200 miles, another 30 minutes of flying. You know, maybe some extra fuel. Well, obviously some extra fuel if it's 30 minutes more flying. But you know, all it's a team effort. So there may be as many as five people really kind of going over everything and somebody may catch something. Hey, this alternate, you know, there's a notam that the. The Runway is going to be closed between this time, you know. Oh, yeah, okay. I didn't catch that. Thanks. And, and you know, that's the whole idea.
27:55
Bobby Doss
Yeah, that's, it's. It's kind of almost comical, the pushbacks there. But at the same time, if pros are doing it, we might want to consider doing it to get ourselves prepared. So now we're at the aircraft in pave. We've done p. We did a lot there, but now we're at the aircraft. Wally, what do you think the longest aircraft pre flight is that you've ever observed an applicant doing?
28:21
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, we've talked about this here, but I have seen hour long pre flights, literally hour long pre flights. And it usually is three or four walks back into the hangar or back into the flight school or whatever from the airplane. You know, at. Back in the day when I was doing a lot of training on the 737, we used to say when we get to the airplane, the first thing we want to look at is comforts and quantities. Comfort Was basically if it's, you know, if it's this time of the year, let's make sure we got the packs on the AC system going, make sure we got the airplane comfortable in the back for the customers.
29:07
Wally Mulhern
Well, most likely we don't really have that option in our small airplanes, but we do want to look at quantities and one of the first things that we can do is check the fuel. My gosh, check the fuel. Because we may have to call for fuel. And I've gotten now where on checkrides, before we even start the oral, I will say to the applicant, okay, is the airplane here? And you know, a lot of times they will say yes it is. I said, is it scheduled to fly in the next two hours while we're doing the oral? No, it's not. Have you checked the fuel? No, I haven't. And I'll say, well why don't you go right out right now, go out to the airplane, check the fuel. If we need fuel, let's call the fuel truck right now. And.
30:01
Wally Mulhern
But I have watched people do 2030 minute pre flights and then they check the fuel and now we're waiting another 30 minutes for the fuel truck to show up. And it's a little bit of head scratcher to me.
30:16
Bobby Doss
But yeah, it happens. I've seen it happen. And again, another good use of that arriving early so that you can get through the things that you need to get through. Checking the maintenance records. I think we all know the acronym aviate and probably that along with arrow makes us know that the aircraft meets all of the requirements to be airworthy. But it's those softer things like fuel. And making sure that it's operational is going to be a key fact to qualify the aircraft as well. We joke about it. You know, I think on checkride day the applicant may be trying to impress the DPE with their quantitative and quality pre flight skills. But what do you, without time being the guardrails, that says this shouldn't take longer than this. But what would a pre flight take?
31:09
Bobby Doss
What do you think an applicant should be Again, they've already done all the documents, they've done aero aviate, they know everything. They check the gas, its gas is on its way, the walk around component, checking lights, etc. What's your mind say would be a healthy amount of time to spend on that?
31:26
Wally Mulhern
You know, I don't know where I came up with this, but I keep going back to eight minutes and maybe it's my affection for the New York Yankees and Yogi Berra who WORE A number eight? I don't know. But you know, five minutes maybe seems a little low, maybe 10 minutes, a little high. I don't know, I, I somehow I have zeroed in on eight minutes. And again, I don't know where it came from. But really, I mean, you know, especially, you know, we know where the wear points are in the airplane. We need to check the oil. Yeah, we need to check that prop for n. We're looking at tires, things that we can see, but somewhere in that range, you know, I've, I, I don't know, I've just seen, I like.
32:24
Bobby Doss
People, I like it. Yeah, I think that's a good number. I mean it's, if you look at both gas tanks, you sump everything, you turn the master on, you check the pitot tube, you check the lights, you know, you got oil, the right oil levels there, you walk around and check things are hitting the stops, nothing's bent or abnormal, flaps go up and down. I mean that's an eight minute walk around. And the other things that you really need to be cognizant of are going to happen during the run up or taxi. And as I was taught by mine really good instructors when I was a private pilot, I was always being told to look for a reason not to go. Right.
33:06
Bobby Doss
And so right, you get to do all that and you still, as long as that's thorough but quick, then you have a lot of other opportunities to still find reasons not to go all the way to the run up area, all the way to the whole shoreline, all the way until those wheels come off the ground. You've got opportunity to decide not to go. As it relates to the aircraft component, I think weight and balance is one that in a flight school environment maybe we get complacent too. But we have some strict rules around making sure a weight and balance done for every flight, every time foreflight makes that a little bit easier where maybe if the tanks are always full, you have the opportunity just to really get the passengers wait and do that.
33:49
Bobby Doss
But you really should challenge yourself to do a wait and balance every time, a thorough wait and balance. Make sure you know where you're at CG and weight and then know the takeoff performances, performance charts based on that, based on temperature, based on the out the pressure, altitudes and know what you need. I think that's just going to make you a better pilot. And you know, the ones that I see doing that all the time, they're the knowledgeable ones and they're, they've got a rigor that's better than most. And I think that you see that you probably can assume they're a really good pilot.
34:24
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. And I'll say this. The more you do it, the easier it is, no question. You know, I can tell all, all the time. You know, I will be in an oral and we'll, you know, we'll start diving into the performance data. You know, I'll say, okay, what, what true air speed did you use for this flight? And, you know, the applicant will give me a number of the, you know, let me say 105 knots. And I'll say, where'd you come up with that? And we've gotten a lot better. We really have words out that some of us are going to ask about that because five years ago, what I used to get is, well, that's just what we use. Well, but where'd that come from? Well, that's what my instructor told me. Okay, but, you know, where is it coming from?
35:14
Wally Mulhern
And, you know, now most of the people say, well, I got it from the performance chart. And they'll open it up and go, boom, there it is right there. Like, wow. Okay, you're. You are using the chart correctly. So the more we do something, the better we are at it. I mean, any skill, you know, making a. Making a cup of coffee, you know, once you learn. Yeah, I like just, you know, spoon and a half of sugar, you know, and you kind of dial it in. So.
35:48
Bobby Doss
So now the aircraft's good pilot and the aircraft are good. The V is for environment. And I think we've spent a lot of time in the past on weather. Assessing hazards, risks, making sure we know all the things that could be a problem for us. I think weather is the one that everyone thinks about in Houston. I think a lot about humidity and carbureted engines. I want people to know what the temperature dew point spread is even on a hot day that could be dangerous. And I think notams, another acronym that we won't spend a lot of time on that I think a lot of people use for learning everything, all things about a flight is NWcraft. That's NOTAMs weather known ATC delays, Runway links, alternates available fuel requirements, takeoff and landing distances. That's kind of the all things acronym. But the.
36:46
Bobby Doss
The actual environment is something that you should be taking into account. As Wally said, he did it when he was driving in. The last letter in PAVE is E for external pressures. And this one's one. I just Man, I can't stress enough. I see it every day on a lot of flights. Good weather, bad weather. You know, students who want to solo and they don't even notice that it's a 15 knot crosswind, but they want to get this solo done so bad. Wally. Yeah, not good to have that much stress we had. And it's not, I don't even know that it's always real, but I'm always trying to take this into account. So recently we had a young man who is, he's like 17 and so he's young, wants to solo.
37:39
Bobby Doss
For some reason they had this mindset they were going to Brenham which again is about a 35 minute flight and the dad asked permission to ride in the back and dad just so happens to be an airline pilot. And all I could think about was the external pressures that would create. Kid might be an amazing pilot, dad might be the greatest dad in the world, but man, can you imagine the performance anxiety? Not. And I wasn't so worried about the kid or the student, I was worried about the instructor. The instructor is the one that's going to endorse this young man, the solo and it's a supervised solo. So here we are, we've gone to Brenham, Dad's in the back, but we get dad out. If dad was gone, dad was going to get out.
38:23
Bobby Doss
Son does three laps in the pattern and they're not just quite perfect. Can you imagine being a 20 year old kid getting out of that plane telling a 20 year veteran of a major airline that hey, those weren't really good and we're not going to do it today. All that effort, that's an external pressure that most of us would never experience. And ultimately our chief did not approve that right along and the young man was able to solo and he's been successful. But those external pressures are huge. And I don't know that the dad even was thinking the pressure that he would be creating.
38:57
Bobby Doss
I'm sure he thought about the sun, but I don't think he's, I don't, you know, he was probably thinking, I'm not going to make the guys do it if it's a bad day, but man, those things just start adding up and we know the Swiss cheese.
39:08
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. So yeah, I would fault the dad on that one. You know, if you want to go over and watch your kids solo, get in the car, drive over to Brenham. You know, I see it with applicants, I mean, we're taxiing in and the whole family is sitting there at the flight school and it happens. So I don't know, I've probably had it happen 10 or 15 times where you walk in, where you're taxing in an area, they're out there, everybody's got their phone up, they're videotaping it. And most of the time it's a happy reunion. But there have been times where it hasn't been happy and it's, it's really awkward. So I would just say to the families who, if anybody's listening. Yeah. Be discreet about your coming and watching your kids solo or, or pass their checkride or whatever.
40:10
Bobby Doss
Yeah. One last example. I got a phone call. Well, one of our student success members got a phone call yesterday and a dad was trying to coordinate a solo on a young man's 16th birthday. That's six weeks from now. And all things say the young man is solo ready and gonna be a great pilot if he keeps on track. But to I know how important that would be to be a 16 year old do it on my birthday. But we're way too far in advance to start applying that pressure that this is what we gotta get done. And if we can't get it done, it's gonna be the end of the world. Because it's not going to be the end of the world. 16 years old in one day is just as cool as 16 years old.
40:52
Bobby Doss
And we're not going to take any chances. And those external pressures should not be driving our decision making in aviation for sure.
40:59
Wally Mulhern
Right? Absolutely.
41:01
Bobby Doss
Well, I know we could go on and on, Wally, for days on this topic, but we're at the end of the time for the day. All things pre flight action, tons of resources out there that we mentioned, from the advisory circular to the AIM, to all the pilot handbooks, to everything that you could research to learn more about being able to pre flight better. But don't spend an hour at the aircraft unless it's absolutely necessary. Get your walk around done effectively, but quickly and always remember to stay behind the prop. Thanks for listening.
41:35
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@brave.theprop.com behind the prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.