This week's episode comes in as a listener suggestion from a current instrument student. The guys discuss some tips and tricks to not let yourself get behind the aircraft.
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop 773 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?
00:26
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:28
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. This week we had a little help from the flight school. We had one of our instrument students who's working on passing their instrument checkride. I think they did their final stage check very recently came up with the topic of how to stay in front of the aircraft. And Wally, it's not something that's easy. Depending on your trajectory and your aircraft aviation career, the planes are going to get faster, things are going to come faster. Airports, the ground, everything comes at you faster. We all struggle at times for staying in front of the aircraft and I thought it was a great topic. So we're going to dive into some tips and tricks and things that we think about, things that other pilots think about to stay in front of the aircraft.
01:13
Bobby Doss
I've always joked with everybody, when you're doing check rides at United Flight Systems, you are thinking about landing the second checkride when you get to the airport for your first flight and you're going to do two check rides and you're already done for the day. You've thought so far in front of that aircraft because you fly big iron really fast stuff, these little slow planes. You're so far in front of it. What do you do to be so far in front of it? Is it just experience or is there some technique in there?
01:44
Wally Mulhern
There's a lot of technique. A lot of it is experience. You know, I use a lot of sports analogies on the show and one of them you hear, you seem to hear this in football more than other sports, but you hear a player talk, a rookie in the NFL talk about how in year two of their football career the game slows down and it's not really the game slowing down, it's you speeding up, I guess, or the athlete, the football player speeding up. And you know, that's kind of the way, that's kind of what we're thinking about here. You know, I tell people all the time, you know, I've lived in Houston a long time. I know what the typical weather is here. Okay. I know what it, what the temperature should feel like certain times of the year.
02:38
Wally Mulhern
And just to the south of us, we have this big body of water, Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America, I guess. And if the wind is out of the south or the southeast, we typically get warm, muggy weather here. If I walk out of my back door of my house on the way to the airport for a checkride and the temperature is unseasonably cool, which this time of year it still might be hot or warm, but you might go, oh, yeah, it feels nice today. We're right off the bat, before I even get in the car, I'm thinking that the airport I'm going to, if it's, well, regardless of what airport it is, I'm thinking that the winds are probably out of the north.
03:23
Wally Mulhern
We are probably taking off to the north today, you know, and again, I, I haven't even gotten in my car yet and I'm kind of thinking those things if I'm flying a, you know, an airline trip. And of course at the big airport here, we basically never take off to the north unless it's a hurricane, just about. So that's extremely unusual. But what I, you know, I'm already incorporating this in the ground portion of the checkride. We're going to talk about. Okay, well, we got a three knot tailwind for takeoff. How's that going to affect our distance? How about landing distance? What about landing with a tailwind? Can we land with that three knot tailwind and you know, we'll dive into the performance data and take a look at that stuff. But right off the bat, you know, I'm thinking along those lines.
04:17
Wally Mulhern
I'm thinking of if it's an instrument checkride. Okay, well, we need to get three approaches in. I need to do this and this. And I know here in the Houston area, if the winds are out of the north, it's a little bit of a challenge to find precision approaches that land to the north. Especially if I'm in, if we're in an airplane this particular today that does not have WASPs, I got to find an ILS that lands north. And it can be a challenge. And so yeah, in the car on the way to the airport, that's, those are the things that I'm going, you know, that I'm kind of calculating, if you will.
04:59
Bobby Doss
So I hear a little bit of experience, a little bit of thinking ahead. Right. What, what, as we talk about this and we're trying to introduce the topic, what are we not doing as student pilots or unproficient pilots, wherever we're at, that we could be doing to give us some of this muscle memory, some of this experience. What would you suggest pilots do to make themselves better as it relates to repetition and practice?
05:31
Wally Mulhern
I think we have a, a big deficiency in pilot development. I'm not going to say pilot training, I'm going to say pilot development, but I think we have a big deficiency in the lack of real pilot and command time, real solo time. And I know a lot of the flight schools don't allow that. They don't allow you to just go get in an airplane and go fly. I know when I was coming up, this is a long time ago, but I probably went out and flew, oh, I don't know, 20, 30 hours when I was working on my instrument rating. I probably flew 20 or 30 hours of flying instrument approaches by myself. Certainly not under the hood and of course in VFR conditions because I wasn't instrument rated at the time.
06:33
Wally Mulhern
But the local airport that I flew out of Monroe, Louisiana had an ILS approach, they had a VOR approach, and this is before RNAV approaches and we had an NDB approach. And those were basically the approaches that we would get on the checkride. So I could go out and in one hour of flight time, I could fly all those approaches right there and, you know, just stayed within 15 miles of my airport. Now, were fortunate to have those that, you know, that configuration there. But I can't tell you how many times I, when it came to the checkride, it was nothing because I had done this stuff so many times. And it's not the exact approach because the approaches went to different runways.
07:24
Wally Mulhern
But I get on, I see instrument checkrides where maybe the debrief I mentioned to the applicant, I say, you know, you're struggling a little bit with your interaction with atc. And I've had people tell me this a lot that, well, I don't ever talk on the radios. My instructor always talks on the radios. And that just about gets me to come out of my chair. I'm thinking you are coming to me telling me you want to be certified to fly single engine IFR tomorrow into the busiest airspace in the country. And you're not in your training, you're not talking on the radios. That's a deficiency to the CFIs out there. You got to let your students make mistakes. You've got to let them get tongue tied. You've got to let them learn how to read back these clearances.
08:22
Wally Mulhern
Again, we're talking about instrument training here.
08:26
Bobby Doss
So as the student pilot today asked about maybe covering this topic, and they're obviously falling behind the airplane just to add instrument, I'm sorry, just to add radios on top of all this instrument work. I mean, they're going to just say I'm more overwhelmed. I'm going to get further behind the airplane. Why are you, why are we all suggesting that I do more work when I'm already saying I'm already falling way behind? What, what is that going to do to them in their workload?
08:56
Wally Mulhern
Well, it's going to add to the workload. However, I do believe, you know, I, I do a lot of double I checkrides, I do a lot of mei checkrides and I, in those, the ground portion of those check rides, I say to the applicant, I say, what is the primary job of a flight instructor? And we get around to them, I, I convince them that the answer should be to teach. And, and I, you know, I, it's kind of a, I bait them into it and they go, yeah, obviously to teach. And I go, and again, we're, Safety is number one. So we're making the assumption that safety is there.
09:39
Wally Mulhern
But I take it one step further and I say maybe the primary job of the instructor is not to teach, but it is to provide an environment where learning can take place and think about that. So provide an environment where learning can take place. For any of us to learn something, does somebody have to teach it to us? And the answer is no. And sometimes it can be more powerful if you kind of learn it on your own. And I think of as instructors, when you go through some formal CFI academy or school or whatever, you're taught that you got to be talking, talking, talking. And sometimes silence is good in an airplane.
10:28
Wally Mulhern
I think, especially double I instrument instructors, we have to realize that your student is, might be using 85% of their mental capacity to keep the airline, the airplane straight and level. And then you start throwing in there all these extra things. Term time, twist, throttle, talk, whatever, get the weather, okay, what are the minimums? What's the inbound course? And now you're overloading your student. And so maybe just maybe talking a little bit less might be a little bit more. I mean, I, I've used the, you know, most of, you know, I'm a drummer. I don't currently play in a band, but I have played in a band. Sometimes I have to realize that the most effective thing I can play on a song is to not play. You know, maybe the song, all it needs is the vocal and the guitar. Okay.
11:30
Wally Mulhern
And if I start playing drums or whatever, I'm just going to get in the way. The best, the most effective thing I can do is to not play. And sometimes the most effective thing an instructor can do is to not say anything. Sometimes we just need to keep it quiet.
11:47
Bobby Doss
Yeah. So I think that might overwhelm her or the person that brought it to us. Her name's Amelia, by the way. So lots to unpack and we have some time here, so we're going to unpack these things. Let's first talk about what we want to talk about first. And that's think before you go. So I think preparation is the best thing that a pilot can do to be a better pilot. Right. And we can all talk about pre flight actions, we can all talk about how well we prepare. But an instrument student flying on a VFR day, even by themselves to go get a hundred dollar hamburger can prepare to shoot an approach at the airport that they're going to get to and do that all by themselves or with friends in the plane and just follow the navigational aids to shoot that approach.
12:35
Bobby Doss
But it does take prep, it does take time and effort. And I think if I know what I've seen, it's the lack of that planning, it's the thinking before you go. So you're thinking when you walk out the back door and the temperature's cool. Okay. I'm already preparing, I'm already thinking about things I question. And I've learned a lot recently about how much I prepare for a flight that's four or five days from now. And I know when I don't have a good flight, it's probably because of lack of preparation. Right. I flew today and I don't think it was that great. I don't think I did a good job. I was distracted, I was in a hurry, I didn't prepare, I missed some radio calls. I didn't have every number I wanted written down. So it wasn't good.
13:22
Bobby Doss
I think we should all think before we go if we're going to stay in front of the aircraft. Wally, I jokingly say to you and my people that were go to the flight school and they're going to be your applicant. Wally's thinking about landing in Honolulu before he leaves Houston.
13:39
Wally Mulhern
Absolutely.
13:39
Bobby Doss
How accurate is that statement?
13:41
Wally Mulhern
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, Honolulu, that's.
13:47
Bobby Doss
But you don't have a back door in Honolulu. How do you know what the temperature is?
13:51
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, well, it's always the same out there. The wind, 030 at 15 knots. Temperature, we used to say in Guam that altimeter, 3030. Wind 020 at 15. If it was raining, it was 75 degrees Fahrenheit. If it wasn't raining, it was 85 degrees Fahrenheit. You know, these tropical islands are, the weather is kind of always the same. I mean, we're going to land eight left out in Honolulu, except for when eight left is closed. Then it's going to be Runway four. Right. You know, the trade winds are out of the northeast. So it's, it is, you're expecting that now. Can things change? Yeah, yeah, they can. And, and you kind of go, okay, well let's go with plan B. But we're going to set up, I'm going to set up to land 8 left in Honolulu every time, you know, when I'm going tokyo.
14:48
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, it's a 14 hour flight and you know, I'm going to look at the forecast. I'm going to see where the winds are supposed to be when we get there. Because the, you know, in general, the Windsor, the forecast winds are pretty close, at least from a directional standpoint. So we can have a pretty good guess of whether we're landing north or landing south. So we're, you know, we're going to go ahead and load all that stuff in there knowing that there's a chance that we may have to change it, but there's a chance that we may not have to do anything, that it's already there. We're ready to go.
15:23
Bobby Doss
Yeah. And I think some of my more recent jet flying has made me think of that very differently than I did before. Right. If we're, if I was going to go on a training flight a year ago, that flight's local every time. Right. We're not really going anywhere. And if I was even going to Austin, how much is the weather going to change right now? Flying from here to Denver, that's a big difference. There's going to be a significant difference and I have to plan for that. And I don't just start thinking about that. I really think we move into the second part of this podcast, which is plan, plan. I, if I'm, if I get called for a vision jet trip and I know I'm going four days from now to Denver, I plan that flight today like four days in advance.
16:11
Bobby Doss
You don't do that if you're going to go to Conroe for a hundred dollar Hamburger. That muscle. And that experience takes practice and purpose. And so I plan and I plan. I think about the wins. I look at the taff. I don't think. I think I looked at tafs to practice for checkrides. I don't think I really looked at a TAF for, like, real future forecasting until I started flying states out of the way. Well, you don't fly a Cessna states out of the way. So when you think about flying from here to Navasota or Conroe or College Station, which are all within about an hour, you should still be planning that trip a day or two in advance. That's what puts you in front of the aircraft. It's the where do you.
16:58
Bobby Doss
You know, it's getting to your flight school and asking your instructor, where are we going today? And they say, college Station. And you say, oh, let me plan it. And you sit there and they watch you plan for 30 minutes. That's a waste of time. Like, you can make that muscle. You can earn some of Wally's experience knowing what's going to happen in Honolulu because he's been there thousands of times. You can do that because you're planning ahead. Plan, plan. I don't think I ever looked at a remote airport taxi diagram until I was five miles out, ten miles out. Now I'm looking at Centennial, a week out. Yeah, I know what taxiways are called. I know what I'm going to exit. I know if one's closed, I'm looking at notams days in advance. That's called planning, planning.
17:48
Bobby Doss
And I've got a great mentor who doesn't let me slough it off. He's. He. If he calls me and says, we're going four days from now, three days, he goes, send me your plan. And I'm like, shucks, I got to get my plan together. I got to send him my plan. So then I build my plan. He goes, do you miss something? And when he says that, it's like a dang dpe, Wally. When he says, have you missed something? I say, yes, sir. I don't even say anything else. And then I go, look. And I'm reading and I'm planning and I'm thinking through it. Last time it was icing. I wasn't. I wasn't thinking about icing. And I'm like, man, when we did and were still in Houston, we hadn't even left yet.
18:27
Bobby Doss
He's like, when we come back, is there any concerns when we depart? And I'm like, well, just the mountain and stuff. He goes, anything else? I'm like, he's got something I'm missing. And he's like, when are we gonna have icing, like thousand feet? That could be a problem. We might, we might need to be worried about that, right? And so the more you plan, the more you can think about it. Days in advance even it will help you. Somebody comes to you for a check ride, how long did they know about their flight plan before they meet you? But you're gonna, your assignment for them?
19:03
Wally Mulhern
Probably many days. You know, I mean, there are, there are the occasions where somebody cancels and they throw someone in, you know, the day before. But, but it's usually several days, you know, and talking about this planning, we do it in everyday life, if someone calls you up and says, hey, man, the, I got tickets to see the Astros play the Yankees in Yankee Stadium next Friday night. We got airline tickets. You want to go to the game with me? And you know, I would think at some point you might be looking at what is the temperature going to be in New York next Friday night? I mean, do I need to take a jacket? And if I do, I better go get an Astros jacket, right?
19:51
Wally Mulhern
So we do it, you know, we plan for that kind of stuff and you know, we ought to be doing it more with flying.
19:59
Bobby Doss
No question. I think my epiphany or my apart for the listeners is it's not just about the flight that's local that you can still plan for that way in advance. You can know what's going to come and do more planning again. If I'm going to go to College Station and I'm going to stop for the hundred dollar hamburger, read the taxi diagram, know what's going to be in the airport, what's closed, notams, all that stuff. Plan, plan. The last thing that I think helped me as a student pilot get really good at being in front of the airplane. One was experience, no question. But the next one was I always, I learned sometime and it was good instruction. I learned that if I had a minute to do anything else, eat a peppermint or blow my nose or think about the baseball game.
20:55
Bobby Doss
I had time to do something in the airplane and I made it a point that I was going to work 101% of the time that I was in that pilot seat. And so when I get to a point where I think, this is fun, look at the Ground, I'm like, bobby, stop that. Find something to do. What's important right now? Have I done a checklist? Is there a checklist that I'm going to do in 10 minutes? I flew with a guy not too long ago where were coming back from a pretty long trip. And I said, what's next? And he's like, we're going to descend, but that's like two hours from now. I'm like, okay, to what altitude? What's next? What's after that? What's after that? And we talk all the way through taxing all the way to the hangar.
21:43
Bobby Doss
And he was like, man, I never think this far in advance. Well, if you've got that free time for two hours or 14 hours tokyo, you can get a lot of quality pilot stuff done when you're not being hammered with ATC calls, altitude changes, and, hey, divert here. Sorry. Go around. You have tons of time. Never sit, never wait. Work 101% of the time. What do you, what does your crew do on a big plane when you're flying tokyo and you got 10 hours to go?
22:17
Wally Mulhern
Oh, we're reviewing stuff the whole way. I mean, we might have the ADIs set up on auto updates so that whenever a new ATIS comes out, we get it. You know, maybe we got nine hours to go. But, you know, of course there's brakes in there. On, on a long flight like that, you're going to be in the back, in the bunker, in the seat, whatever. But, you know, it's constantly planning, and we may. I mean, that approach may get changed three or four times. I mean, were, okay, 16 left, 34 right. Okay, now 16 left is closed. It must be 16 right. And there may be three or four. Well, multiple Runway changes. But my point is, have something in there, have a plan, and you might not have to change it.
23:15
Wally Mulhern
If you don't have anything in there, you are going to have to add it. But if you do have something in there, even if you have to change it, you're back to, you know, have a. You're in the same boat that you were in if you did not load an approach. So going to have an approach in there. You know, like, I'm going to Austin today. Well, I think it's probably going to be the XYZ approach to XYZ Runway. Okay, Put that in there. You might be wrong. Okay, but you might be right.
23:50
Bobby Doss
What I've really learned is, you know, if you ask for an approach, you get it like 99% of the time. So if you're right on the winds, of course right. So if it's blowing out of the south and you ask for a north of a north arrival or approach, you're probably not going to get it. But you have to have your plan of attack there. And if you ask for the RNAV one seven, I don't think I've ever been told no to this point, I might get some diversion or some vectoring. But if you ask, can I have the RNAV one seven and the winds are from the south, you're going to get the RNAV 17 more often than you're not. And so to load that is not a risky proposition.
24:36
Bobby Doss
It's like you said, it's no more painful to reload the approach to 35 than it is to load the 17 the first time. So reloading it is no difficult.
24:46
Wally Mulhern
You know, and another thing that you can do is let's say you're on a two hour flight and you're expecting the RNAV to 17 and the ATC says clear direct to the airport, you know, pull up that approach, find the initial approach fix and then call them up and say, hey, can we go direct to such and such an intersection? It's the initial approach fix for the RNAV approach and again, 95% of the time they're going to clear you direct to that fix. So you are basically two hours away and you're kind of setting up for this approach.
25:23
Bobby Doss
Yeah, I think it just takes the workload down, keeps you way in front of the aircraft and then you can start thinking about other things. Do I need to call the FBO on the common traffic frequency or their numbers to get fuel going or a spot to park my plane? A lot of things I don't think we think about in the training environment, that is the real world environment that you can work 101% of the time that you're sitting in that captain's seat. And if you have any aspect of a crew, you should be using that crew to help you along the way. And I think for training purposes we're saying, hey CFIs, let the student, let the person that's learning do a lot more work.
26:06
Bobby Doss
Let them be pilot in command the whole time because we creating a deficiency by doing a lot of the talking or a lot of the doing when they're working on instrument stuff because it is going to be all their job when they're by themselves.
26:20
Wally Mulhern
And, and here's a question I'll pose. This goes back to something we had talked about earlier to all the instrument students who are out there. I would just wonder how many times you have gone out without an instructor in the airplane and flown an instrument approach. I'll bet the percentage of you who would say I have is pretty darn low.
26:43
Bobby Doss
And I'll say this, when I bought the fly school and I was flying, I was an instrument pilot. And I remember Bob Watts still chugging along, helping me at the fly school, he said, if you get the chance to shoot an approach, you are an idiot for not shooting the approach. And so every time you fly to Austin to pick up your daughter, VFR or not, you should ask to shoot the approach. And I think that gave me the experience to be a pretty good instrument pilot. I shot the RNAV3 one into Austin executive dozens of time when there wasn't a cloud in the sky. And it gave me the muscle memory of knowing the fixes, names, knowing the altitudes, knowing the turns, being prepared. That made me a better instrument pilot.
27:31
Bobby Doss
And then when I did it at night in IMC with my wife, I wasn't concerned. I knew exactly what I was going to do. Now had I shot a visual left downwind to 3:1, every time I ever came there, I would been scared to death because I wouldn't know what was going to be next, what was coming. I would have been way behind the airplane. So I think that's a great tip that Wally just gave everybody.
27:54
Wally Mulhern
And even if you are flying a visual, why not load the approach and kind of, you know, if you've got a, a fix that's supposed to be a thousand feet, you know, three miles from the end of the Runway, you know, have that in there, have it ready to go.
28:08
Bobby Doss
Oh yeah, any glide slope is going to help no matter what. Like use all those tools when you can and make sure you know what the automation's telling you. If you're using that stuff, you had a real good tip. As we wrap up as a dpe, if I'm a instrument candidate, I'm an applicant, I'm going to do my checkride and I only fly at 8am but our checkride starts at 1pm what should I do before I meet you?
28:35
Wally Mulhern
Well, I, I think it's really important to fly, you know, hopefully within a few days of the checkride. Fly at the time of the day that you're going to be flying on the checkride. I I had a situation a few, not too long ago where we had a checkride that had been discontinued and we just needed to do a few of the high altitude maneuvers. And so we were flying early in the morning and the applicant was really, I won't say complaining, but really commenting about, wow, I'm not used to having the sun come from that direction because we go out west to the practice area and then we're coming back in, we're flying east to get back to the airport. And the comment was, wow, I'm just not used to having the sun in my eyes. This is, this is very challenging.
29:34
Wally Mulhern
And you know, my, it just made me think and I've said this before, but it's probably been a long time, you know, I'll would have taken is, hey, if I'm doing my checkride at 7 in the morning, maybe a few days before the check ride, let's go fly at 7 in the morning. I mean, we can't control the weather, but hopefully the weather is kind of what we're going to see on the check ride and just, you know, things are different. The Sun, 6pm The Sun's going to be out of the west. Obviously if you're heading west, you're going to have some issues with that.
30:09
Bobby Doss
Yeah, it's a great tip and I hate to ever say one more flight, but you know, one more flight might save you a whole lot of money in that situation if you're going to do your checkride at a different time of day. No question. So with that, let's recap the show. We are going to think before we go all of this to help us stay in front of the airplane. We are going to plan, plan, and we are going to never sit, never wait and work 101% of the time that we're in the aircraft. And if you're a flight instructor, you're going to keep that mouth zipped up a little bit and let the student handle a more of it all so they can learn to be in front of the aircraft.
30:50
Bobby Doss
As always, thanks for listening to the show and stay behind the prop.
30:56
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.