Sunny times will return to our local grass strip, but this day was clearly not that day. Cold winds, low clouds, and scurfy ice accumulations on the few hangars there indicated that not only would the groundhog see his shadow on his official day, but he would probably find himself frozen with a coating of light rime ice on his fur.
My mission was to bring a box of hot coffee from a popular donut joint and another pilot friend, Henry, to help Tom change the oil on his 7ac Champ.
Tom is one of the lucky few around here who has an insulated and heated hangar. This hangar has more wintertime pilot bull sessions per square inch than any other in the tri-state area.
Today was no different, although his idea led our hearty little group of balding aeronauts to seriously consider buying into and carrying out his notion—a very basic flight school for pre-solo students only.
Like me, Tom has instructed for a long time—more than fifty years. He taught students in all kinds of aircraft, from Cubs to fighters, and is the guy I go to for advice when I am stumped by a student or a procedure.
“Here is my idea,” said Tom. “I want to take this Champ, or maybe get a Cub, and teach four or five students a year when the weather gets warm and nicer.”
“These students will be taught the stick and rudder and taildragger basics but only up to their solo. After that, they can go on to get their private or other ratings if they want, but not from me.”
I caught on to Tom’s idea quickly, as did Henry, because we had been talking about this very thing at our weekly lunches with the group of old guys at the big airport in Lexington.
I like it, I said. If we keep things simple and basic, it will not only give the students a firm grounding in actual VFR flight, but it will also give them a firm grounding in the fundamentals of flying without the fog of confusion caused by a too-early emphasis on satellite signals, transponders, light gun flashes, and other learning distractions.
Tom did not seem to be interested in what I thought about it. It became clear to me that he invited us out to his hangar to be a sounding board, not a group of cheerleaders.
Plato, who was never a pilot, once said: “A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool speaks because he has to say something.” This quote applied to me, and I realized my role here was to keep quiet (for once) and listen.
Henry and I sat back, sipped our coffees, and gave Tom the floor.
“Here’s the thing,” Tom began. We all know that flying is increasingly an exercise in systems management, rule memorization, and finger-pointing. During our lifetimes, it has gone from being a fun and rewarding adventure to a day at an almost windowless office where we are relegated to monitoring a group of computers.
Almost everybody in aviation ‘tut-tuts’ about how important ‘stick and rudder’ flying is, but these same people have likely never been exposed to the real thing, or it has been so long they have forgotten what it was like.
What I want to do is create a place, an oasis, if you will, that is truly and solely about teaching newcomers to our craft to fly with the most basic equipment in the most rustic of environments.
I propose establishing a tiny, Part 61 operation that teaches students the fundamentals of flight from their first hour to their first solo. I plan to do this in a Champ or, better yet, a Cub with no electrical system. This means no starter, radio, transponder, ADSb, iPad, or flight instruments other than an airspeed, compass, and slip-skid ball.
We will operate out of this grass strip out in the country, away from all the classes of airspace that other students spend hours and hours obsessing about violating.
No radio means no control towers, no Unicoms, and no having to listen to the chatter of other pilots. I know that it sounds like a radical and perhaps unsafe practice, but you can bet your ass that my students will begin their early learning by looking out of the windows for traffic instead of talking about it.
The Cub and the Champ are both light sport aircraft meaning our students don’t have to get sucked into the mire of the aeromedical world.
About ten hours of yanking and banking, along with the usual stalls, landings, spin demonstrations, and ground reference maneuvers, will be enough. Then, the students should be ready to do their five solo landings to a full stop and leave my nest for that big bad world of aviation rules and regulations.
There is no guarantee that they will solo, but most will, and some will decide that flying is something they want to keep doing. They can then go to any flight school in the world to finish their rating, and I bet most of my students will fly a better airplane than their new Part 141 low-time CFI instructors.”
Henry and I immediately signed on to Tom’s idea, and we hope to launch “Solo-Air” this summer.
You might think that we are planning to do this to save aviation or restore stick and rudder to the flying world.
Heck, no. We are doing it because it will be fun, which is why we, and probably you, began this whole flying thing in the first place.
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