Flying Clubs - Ceiling Unlimited

One thing you do not always learn during the course of initial flight training is the social potential of general aviation. Personally speaking, I did not initially think about interaction with other pilots right away as I was focused on learning and experiencing the whole new world available to me. However, after a couple of years with my ticket, I noticed that I was sticking around the airport more and more trying to catch my CFI, even for just a few moments simply to talk about our most recent flying experiences, some new type of airplane that recently entered the market, or just other happenings around the airport. Given my CFI's obligations of running a business as well as an environment that was not particularly conducive to connecting with the other pilots around the outfit, it was difficult to get my fill of flying-related interaction. So, I hit the internet to see what else was out there and ended up joining Leading Edge Flying Club (LEFC) at KPWK, and over the course of the past two and a half years, the quality of my experience continues to climb at an incredible rate.

LEFC members with the club's Sky Arrow after a quick Saturday morning breakfast trip to KJVL

I feel that all great ideas are built upon the foundation of a simple concept. LEFC was the result of a small group of pilots who came together to fly great planes and have a great time doing it with great people. Easy enough, right? Several years later and that group of individuals has grown to a much larger (I believe over 80 at this point) collection of friends and flying buddies. My introduction to the club was via an e-mail I sent inquiring for more information - the response I received the next day was a phone call from one of the members as he was getting out of a club plane after a quick flight. Talk about practicing what you preach!

So, what has made this experience so meaningful to me? I can easily point to a few critical elements: leadership, commitment, opportunity, and members from a wide range of backgrounds.

From a leadership standpoint, most of the individuals responsible for the core drive of the organization evolved from the initial cluster of pilots who banded together at inception. Obviously, to get something going, those individuals have a special amount of motivation and dedication to aviation. They commit so much of their own free time to enable all of us to reap as much as we can from the group. There are so many elements to running a club apart from the already enormous task of ensuring a healthy fleet of aircraft. The administrative burden alone is quite substantial; financially, there is money coming in, money going out, and someone needs to ensure that at the end of the day the debits equal the credits. In addition to the administrative side, the leaders are tasked with growing the membership pool and keeping the existing members engaged. I think it would be very easy after a period of time to be fixated on the original core ideals of the club and resist drivers of change. In my experience with LEFC, this couldn't be further from the truth. As far as I can tell, new ideas are embraced, whether through open invitation from the membership or expansion and alterations to the composition of the board that oversees it all. This is essential in a collection of individuals greater than just a few; while we all come together via a common love for flying, not everyone has the same objectives or comes from the same background.

Commitment is sort of a sub-component of strong leadership, but it also involves the greater membership as well. One element of commitment at our club comes in the form of regularly scheduled breakfasts. Excluding a few exceptions throughout the year, we meet for breakfast on the first Saturday of every month at a restaurant just down the street from our airport. Committing ourselves to a regularly scheduled event eliminates the difficulty of trying to pull together a large group of individuals at a mutually agreeable time. Sure, there are months here and there where only twenty members show up and there are several empty seats, but there are many more months where there is no elbow room as every available space is occupied. There is also a commitment by leadership to ensure the success of each meeting, generally done through a good deal of planning. This means scheduling interesting guest speakers (recently Dr. Bruce Chien flew up from Peoria, IL to speak with us - I just read an article he was featured in within this month's AOPA magazine) or setting off group discussions with interesting topics. One forum we occasionally hold is called "True Confessions," which is where all of us drop our pilot egos for a bit and admit to mistakes made so that the greater population can leverage each pilot's experience as a learning opportunity.

Another key element of flying club success in my mind is opportunity. This comes in many forms, one of which was implied above, and that is the opportunity to regularly get together. In addition to recurring breakfast meetings, the club offers members a space to congregate in the hangar where our airplanes are housed. This isn't just a space to drop off and store belongings while flying. No, this is a space in which many members have invested countless hours to outfit and continually keep in tip-top shape – note, a refurbishment is ongoing as I type. There are plenty of areas to sit and socialize (even a few seats from a former Midwest Airlines 717), computers for weather briefings/flight simulation, and most importantly, in my opinion, a stocked fridge and large snack table. This type of atmosphere leads to further social interaction and frequently the opportunity to fill an otherwise vacant seat in an aircraft (NOTE: I can't say it enough, empty seats are wasted seats!!!). On numerous occasions I've run into others who just stopped by to see what was going on without any intention of flying. If the weather changes, as it frequently does for us Midwesterners, you don't need to go anywhere to get a heavy dose of hangar flying.

Having people in the club from all walks of life is one more component which I have found particularly beneficial. We have individuals from all sorts of professions/backgrounds - a motley crew that would likely have little chance of coming together save for the common bond of aviation. I think this adds so much to our interactions as each story told completely differs from what the next pilot will tell. A conversation may evolve from discussion about how much fuel a 777 burns taxiing to the particulars of flying a hot air balloon to the highlights of flying to Oshkosh for the first time. This really adds to the uniqueness of the experience and in my mind is a critical element for people staying committed and finding the time to get out to the airport on a regular basis.

Overall, general aviation has been at a crossroads for a number of years, and it is time for its stakeholders to take charge and lay out a course to properly shape its future. We are not attracting enough new blood to this incredible hobby, while at the same time we are not retaining enough people in the active pilot population. There are numerous factors that have gotten us to this point, and I do think that we can get things pointed in the proper direction if we can get more flying clubs to adhere to the basic fundamentals I laid out above.

Some more Oshkosh 2012

Now that the 2012 airshow season is in the past, every now and then I'm going to try to throw in a few more shots I took this year.  Each season I attempt to take a few baby steps in the direction of being remotely capable with a camera.  We have a Nikon D60 with a 70mm to 300mm Sigma lens (very basic model) that is now in need of a thorough cleaning after being put through its paces at countless airshows and a trip halfway around the world to Vietnam.  So, this year's crop of photos required a little more editing to work out a few dust spots.

My goal for the year was to enhance my panning skills; panning is what you do to really capture motion.  As in the examples below, panning is done at a manually set shutter speed that is slower than what you would typically use for normal shots such as a family picture. The effects which you are looking for are the blurred background, a blurred propeller and a nice clear picture of the object in focus (in the center of the frame, of course).  With my skill level, I normally come home from an airshow with several hundred pictures that result in only a small group that I'm really happy with.  Growth is the key, though, right?

The shots below were taken at EAA AirVenture 2012 and are two of my favorite aircraft.  First is the Avenger - a WWII carrier-based torpedo bomber, this is an impressive aircraft in size and noise output as it rumbles down the runway.  Just as impressive is the short distance this beast needs to get into the sky.  Second is a shot of a P-51 Mustang, which is the airplane I would buy if I ever win the lotto.  With its sleek design and Rolls Royce Merlin engine, it just commands respect.

Enjoy!

Every flight is a lesson

Of everything that draws me to flying, there are two key aspects which rank towards the top: the ability to share the experience with others; and the challenges to your brain you encounter in every phase of every flight. 

Since I first got my license, I have always enjoyed taking people up with me.  I can't remember the last time I went up by myself - I view an empty right seat as a wasted opportunity.  Whether it is the excitement when someone sees the approach end of a runway for the first time out the front of an airplane or the questions from a passenger as their curiosity unfolds as the flight progresses, I really value the opportunity to take a non-pilot up (repeat customers are just as fun as first-timers).  What about flying buddies?  Talk about really enhancing the experience; I'll address my opinion of the endless possibilities of flying buddies in a future post.

Having recently been checked out in our flying club's Piper Dakota, I've been eager to take my wife up and show off all of the neat ins and outs of the airplane (and also provide a first-hand advertisement of where a high performance machine can take us).  So, I sort of threw together a rough flight plan to head out to the northwest of KPWK to enjoy the perfect flying conditions and do some aimless flying.  I like doing this when I'm new to an airplane to sort of re-familiarize myself / make sure I know where everything is so that there are no hesitations when I'm in the traffic pattern and other critical phases of flight.

Anyway, after cruising around Chicago's far northwest suburbs / southern Wisconsin, I wanted to pop into Schaumburg Regional Airport (06C) for a quick dinner at Pilot Pete's.  I've never been (which is embarrassing since it is like a ten-minute flight, max, from KPWK) and my recently instituted goal is to fly to a different airport as frequently as possible. As has been my luck recently, the weather for our flight was perfect - no clouds, surface winds of about 10 kts (perfect for some crosswind practice) and unlimited visibility.  We started our takeoff roll at the best time of day to fly, when the sun is nearly down, but there is enough light to still see what you are doing.  Tell me after watching this that you do not agree:

Shortly after the footage ended, we were rocketing to the northwest at about 1,800' MSL when ATC called to let us know that they weren't getting a read from our transponder. Within 30 miles of O'Hare, you are required to have an operative Mode C transponder (this is a device that essentially allows ATC to see your position/altitude on their radar screens) and so I needed to make a decision.  My first instinct was look down at the transponder (in the lower half of the right side of the instrument panel in this particular aircraft) and flip the switch on and off a few times and then cycle the numbers as well to see if anything was stuck.  ATC didn't pick up anything after my initial attempt to resolve. Oh wait, I'm supposed to be FLYING the aircraft.  As I've said before, I think it is easy to get fixated on all of the neat screens / instruments you have in a modern aircraft and forget that the most important information is located outside of the windows.  Thankfully, right about this time, I had a reminder of this lesson as we passed a Cessna 172 (coincidentally, the same 172 I used to fly in my pre-LEFC days) which was doing 360's in the northwest corner of PWK's airspace.  I had to deviate a bit to stay clear and that woke me up to the fact that there are always other aircraft, birds...etc. which you need to see to be able to avoid.

Because of this, I wanted to get out of the area, gain some altitude and take a logical approach to the matter rather than just terminating the flight early - it's hard enough to find time to get out to the airport as often as I would like, and we did not have a problem which would necessitate an immediate landing. So, we took advantage of flying outside of the transponder-required area for a while by cruising over Fox Lake and then up to Lake Geneva, where we traced the entire lake before deciding to return to base.  Once I reconnected with PWK ATC, they kindly let me know that the transponder was still not operational and therefore Pilot Pete's wasn't in the cards for this flight.   

I think one could walk away from our experience with one of two perspectives.  On one hand, you could say that we did not meet the objectives we set for the evening and had to terminate the flight early, thereby deeming the flight a failure.  I prefer the alternative in that we got to go flying and made the most of the opportunity that presented itself.  We certainly got to enjoy the great weather conditions from the air, log some time and learned a few things while doing so.  Success?  Absolutely.  A year or two ago, I likely would have made the decision to abort the flight shortly after getting the initial notification about our issue from ATC.  Back in the day, my first instinct at the hint of any abnormality was to terminate the flight and call the aircraft owner or my CFI to initiate resolution.  An example of this is when, shortly after I got my license, I returned to our parking spot and called my CFI when the magnetos were fouled in run-up.  A quick and simple problem-solving technique (which I should have thought of myself) applied by my CFI and we were on our way again shortly thereafter.  As my experience has increased, I've added the essential element of the decision-making process of assessing whether I can try to resolve the situation myself. 

Besides being representative of increased awareness and skill as a pilot, I think this element of decision-making is essential to maximizing the experience for non-pilot passengers.  If you have a big RPM drop in the run-up before takeoff, you don't need to just taxi back to the hangar and declare a maintenance issue.  Likewise, when faced with an inoperative transponder, we didn't need to land right away, nor did I need to address the situation immediately.  My opinion on dealing with things that happen in flight (or when you are about to go flying) is to first determine whether it is an emergency; second, continue to ACTIVELY fly the airplane (appropriate use of the autopilot meets this standard); and then take the best course of action.  In our case, both my passenger and I enjoyed our flight with only minimal interruption.

We pilots need to do all that we can to dispel common misconceptions held by the non-pilot community that flying is incredibly dangerous.  Being in control of the situation in the cockpit and making rational decisions when unplanned situations arise is one step in that direction.