There seems to be a raging debate among student pilots as to which type of plane is better to learn in, high or low wing. While it's not quite to the level of Ford vs. Chevy, the High vs. Low debate still stirs surprisingly strong emotions. For my part, I never gave it much thought. I had flown in my friend's Piper Warrior (low wing) and also his Pietenpol Air Camper (high wing) 20 years ago. Maybe it was because I was just too new to flying and the whole experience was so cool that I couldn't dissect the nuances between the two to form an opinion one way or the other. I was just thrilled to be in the air. I'm a photographer, so the high wing does make more sense for taking photos, but if I'm the one flying, I'm not the one taking photos so what do I care?
When I first started training, I decided to stick to the Cessnas (high wing) because (a) I figured sticking to one type of plane for my early training would eliminate some variables from the equation, and (b) the Cessna 172s make up the vast majority of my school's fleet, so it would be easier to find an available plane. For the most part, my reasoning has proven solid, though it seems recently the school's maintenance department has determined which plane to pull for maintenance next based solely on which one I had reserved. Usually when my school pulls my plane for maintenance, they'll try to book me in another C172. Failing that, they'll move me to the simulator (in which my instructor sees little value) or a ground lesson. Such was the case with today's lesson. The Cessna I booked went in for maintenance, so I got bumped to ground. My instructor and I keep our eyes open to see if anything opens up last minute on the schedule when that happens. This time, I got a text from my instructor, "booked us in a Grumman." The Grummans are small low-wing trainers, a bit smaller than the Pipers the school also has. They look cool, though, which is always important. At this stage in my training (40+ hours), I was pretty confident I could adapt to the plane without much fuss. I was pretty stoked to try something new.
Parallel to this, my birthday was at the beginning of this month, and my wife got me a yoke and rudder pedal set so I could set up a flight simulator on my computer. While I hadn't actually flown for real in a month, I had logged a whole lot of time on the simulator. You'll find similar debate among students and instructors as to the efficacy of simulators in training, especially at the private pilot level. As mentioned above, my instructor doesn't see a whole lot of benefit for early-on training. (Neither does the FAA, which is why you can only log 2.5 hours of sim time towards your required hours for private pilot.) Without question, the sim is different than the real thing. I agree with my instructor that in terms of teaching the basics, there's no substitute for the real thing. So much of what we learn is by "feel," and you don't get that on a sim. Having said that, I have found that one advantage of a home-based simulator is the ability to repeat things over and over again to build that mental and muscle memory.
Take for example the "dance" between ailerons and rudder when lining up for landing. You get that wrong in the plane, you're 20' off the ground with little room for error. It's not the right time to have to mentally sort out rudder opposite aileron to stay on center. You get that backwards, and you're going sideways down the runway. (See previous blog entry.) On top of that, you have to be flying on a day when ATC is letting you do touch-and-goes to get more than one crack at it. On the sim, you can get 30+ simulated landings in an hour. You can set up a scenario and just fly it and fly it again and again and again to begin to sort things out in your mind. I think of it as chair flying with visual aids and props. You're not as task-saturated in the sim as you are in the plane, so it's easier to recognize things you didn't do when you don't get a good result. Many times in the plane after a bad approach, my instructor would ask "what happened?" I couldn't really figure out in that moment what went wrong because I was also flying the plane and concentrating on that. Here, when something goes wrong, you hit pause and evaluate what you did and did not do so you can correct it next time. And if you crash, you just hit "load flight" and go again. The FAA doesn't need to know you bent your virtual plane.
Back to today's lesson. Having probably spent 30 hours on my home sim since I got it set up, I was anxious to put theory into actual practice. Hammering away on procedures (particularly landing procedures) trained my mind to keep track of visual cues as well as the instruments more consistently than I think I had been in the past. I wanted to apply that to an actual flight to make sure things translated well from one environment to the other. Flying a different type of plane added another layer of "let's see how it translates" to the process as well. I had something to prove to myself this flight.
My instructor and I decided that since this was a new type of plane for me, we'd go out and fly some maneuvers to give me a good feel for the plane before heading to the airport for touch-and-goes. Alas, even without knowing what ATC was going to do, our plans for touch-and-goes was thwarted by a severely worn tire. We had called a mechanic out to put air in one that looked low, and as he was topping them all off, he asked "you doing touch-and-goes?" We said we were planning on it. He said it wasn't a good idea with the tire like that since one hard landing would leave us stuck on the runway. That happened to my instructor the previous week, and for some odd reason he had zero interest in repeating that scenario. We agreed that if we were going to do them, we'd do two or three at the most. With our plans for flying around first, that was probably all we'd be able to get in anyway.
The biggest difference between the Grumman and Cessna (besides the location of the wings) is that the Grumman relies solely on the differential left and right brakes for steering on the ground. The front wheel is just like a shopping cart wheel, there to keep the nose from hitting the ground. Of course, either I didn't entirely pick up on that nuanced difference or my feet were still in "Cessna mode" so I wasn't quite as smooth on the taxiing as I wanted. I kept wanting to steer with the rudder, not brakes. Next time, I'll do better.
Once in the air, though, the Grumman proved to be very easy to fly, surprisingly similar to the Cessna. The low wing certainly gives a lot more visibility. It was a little bumpy, and the Grumman being a smaller and lighter plane than the Cessna was a bit more susceptible to those bumps and I found myself needing to really stay on top of my altitude. I'd blink and I'd be up 200'. When you're flying under a class B airspace shelf, it's important to stay far enough below so not to make folks watching the radar screens nervous. We flew to the southeast practice areas where I did some slow flight and stalls, some steep turns, then we headed west across Castle Rock (which doesn't look nearly as imposing from 8500') then up to Chatfield Reservoir and our Southwest practice area. Once at Chatfield, I called ATC and asked for touch-and-goes. They said no, so--sadly--I would only have one shot at landing the Grumman today to see if my landing work on the sim translated to the real world. I do like being able to see the runway all the way through the downwind-base-final process, though even with that I still found myself just slightly askew from the centerline and needing to slide a bit further to get better lined up so is it really an advantage? The landing wasn't quite as good as I had hoped, but I've had lots worse, too.
Today's flight was in many ways just flying for the fun of flying. The skies were clear, the scenery was cool, the atmosphere very relaxed. On one hand, I didn't feel like I was pushing myself very hard and some might say I wasn't using my time wisely. On the other hand, it was my first time in a different plane, and that I adapted so quickly and easily to it gave me a big confidence boost. The maneuvers I was doing felt natural to me. I didn't have to think from one step to the next, it all just kind of flowed. That and I could feel myself spending more time bouncing back and forth between looking outside and inside at the instruments, and keying off of what I was seeing outside the window to stay more on top of what the plane was doing in the air. (Thanks, simulator!) So maybe an easy day in the air isn't so much just taking it easy as it is recognizing how far I've come, and giving me confidence that the skills I'm still working hard to develop will--eventually--feel as natural as the rest of my flight today.
And I'm still in the "doesn't matter" camp when it comes to the high/low debate. I'll definitely be flying the Grumman again. Always good to have more options.
