Here's an arbitrary picture of a Cirrus SR20.
Today's assignment was to evaluate the (old as crap) Avionics systems on this thing, find deficiencies, and report them as a class exercise. Oh the things I do for my country. The idea was to follow the flight plan we'd originally loaded Sunday, make a pre-planned change, and evaluate pilot workload, suitability, etc. What I wasn't expecting was for her to fork over the stick and have me drive and to the extent that I did. Before that fun, we got a call shortly after takeoff and were told to alter the flight plan altogether (pretty sure that wasn't the plan to screw with us), crap! So we quickly inverted the route and we could still meet our objectives as this was before hitting the first waypoint. Money. So now we hit the pre-planned change a lot quicker than planned and at that point the stick is mine. I always figured there was something I didn't know about the difficulty of flying and I found it pretty quick, that little bugger is like a fart in the wind but the correction required isn't much different than a big truck in the wind. You just have that pesky 3rd dimension to worry about. It's definitely something to get used to. And the wind, we were near the Tehachipi pass which is where the US's largest wind farm lives. . . yet another learning experience. I figured in our glider experience a couple weeks back that the pilot was recovering from all that buffetting. Nope. You get out of that pocket and the airflow corrects the aircraft. I've had sketchy moments in cars that were similar, just let the oscillations do their thing and the car will keep going straight. Well at some point I had to turn before our waypoint again to stay out of that airspace which meant I couldn't stare at the screen that told me which way to point the stick so I eyeballed azimuth and use the instruments to keep it level. I was quietly crapping my pants, but really if I could have had a ride where the pilot threw the thing around I would have been a lot more at ease. Finally, we were basically headed back, so she had me scrap a waypoint in the nav system while flying so I could evaluate my own pilot workload and point it directly back to the airport. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that my paycheck today would be derived in such a way. Such a cool experience that will be very difficult to top.
Today's assignment was to evaluate the (old as crap) Avionics systems on this thing, find deficiencies, and report them as a class exercise. Oh the things I do for my country. The idea was to follow the flight plan we'd originally loaded Sunday, make a pre-planned change, and evaluate pilot workload, suitability, etc. What I wasn't expecting was for her to fork over the stick and have me drive and to the extent that I did. Before that fun, we got a call shortly after takeoff and were told to alter the flight plan altogether (pretty sure that wasn't the plan to screw with us), crap! So we quickly inverted the route and we could still meet our objectives as this was before hitting the first waypoint. Money. So now we hit the pre-planned change a lot quicker than planned and at that point the stick is mine. I always figured there was something I didn't know about the difficulty of flying and I found it pretty quick, that little bugger is like a fart in the wind but the correction required isn't much different than a big truck in the wind. You just have that pesky 3rd dimension to worry about. It's definitely something to get used to. And the wind, we were near the Tehachipi pass which is where the US's largest wind farm lives. . . yet another learning experience. I figured in our glider experience a couple weeks back that the pilot was recovering from all that buffetting. Nope. You get out of that pocket and the airflow corrects the aircraft. I've had sketchy moments in cars that were similar, just let the oscillations do their thing and the car will keep going straight. Well at some point I had to turn before our waypoint again to stay out of that airspace which meant I couldn't stare at the screen that told me which way to point the stick so I eyeballed azimuth and use the instruments to keep it level. I was quietly crapping my pants, but really if I could have had a ride where the pilot threw the thing around I would have been a lot more at ease. Finally, we were basically headed back, so she had me scrap a waypoint in the nav system while flying so I could evaluate my own pilot workload and point it directly back to the airport. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that my paycheck today would be derived in such a way. Such a cool experience that will be very difficult to top.
