Author Archives: Maria Langer

Random Thoughts, 9/11/11

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A few random thoughts that I don’t have the time — or perhaps desire — to blog more fully about.

It’s shameful the way the media has turned 9/11 into a day that requires viewers/listeners to relive every moment of 9/11/01. What’s even more shameful is the way advertisers are selling during this media circus. I’m not the only one who feels this way. There must be a better way to honor the people who died that day.

Not everyone who died on 9/11/01 was a “hero.” Some were victims. Think about it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The terrorists have won. They have changed our lifestyle, forced our government to take away many of our civil liberties (i.e., freedoms), and caused us to start costly wars that we simply cannot win. The only way we can defeat them is to restore our freedoms, abandon efforts in the Middle East, and protect our country from within, using smart intelligence tactics. Sadly, I don’t think we’re capable, as a people, of doing any of that.

Going Back to My Flying Roots: Stick Time in an R22

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Was it really that bad?

Last week, I wrote a blog post in my series about becoming a helicopter pilot. In it, I make an often-repeated statement:

They say that if you can fly an R22, you can fly any helicopter.

I’d heard the same thing said recently in the Rotorspace helicopter site I haunt regularly. And I agree with it. But it also got me thinking…was flying an R22 more difficult than flying the R44 I’ve been flying since January 2005?

So I decided to find out. I’d planned a trip to Seattle for this week anyway. I used the opportunity to book an hour or two of flight time with a CFI named Matt at Helicopters Northwest at Boeing Field.

Matt and the R22

Matt and the R22 we flew together.

Matt is a great guy. With 800 hours of flight time under his belt — including a few good, long cross-country flights — he has a good, positive attitude and likes to teach. He’s the kind of flight instructor the industry really needs: friendly, level-headed, sincerely interested in teaching and learning, not in any hurry to build his first 1,000 hours and move on. He showed amazing patience with me. Oddly enough, when I came out to the helicopter and sat inside it, I actually had some fear.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

N7139L

My old R22, parked out in the desert. I loved that little ship, but now I don’t remember why.

We went out to the helicopter and I was immediately reminded of how tiny R22s are. I owned one — N7139L — from October 2000 to October 2004 and built my first 1,000 hours on it (or R22s very much like it). I remember now how huge the R44 seemed to me when I first started flying it. But now, the R22 is just tiny.

We did a preflight, splitting the chore. I looked under the hood and checked the tail rotor and warning lights. He climbed up (one step!) and checked the rotor hub. Then we rolled the helicopter out from parking to the flight line on its tiny ground handling wheels. (To be fair, I use oversize wheels on my R44, making the stock R22 wheels seem even smaller than they really were.)

We climbed on board and buckled up. My hips are definitely wider than they were when I was 20 pounds lighter in my R22 days and I almost had trouble getting my hand between the seats to the collective. Sheesh. I used the checklist to start up and was so surprised at how quickly it started that I forgot to engage the clutch. That’s when I started wondering if I was making a mistake.

The helicopter’s cyclic friction did not work. I had to hold the stick as we warmed up.

They were doing taxiway construction about 100 feet from the flight line. Trucks and men were moving around. I started getting worried about picking up the helicopter. About what might happen if I screwed up. I realized — and this is hard to admit — that I was afraid to try.

So when the time came, I let Matt make the radio call, pick up, and take off. I felt like a first time student. It was a humbling experience.

But I took the controls as we climbed out, heading south toward Auburn. I immediately felt the stick push hard to the right. I remembered the trim knob and pulled it. That helped a little. But I knew my shoulder would be aching by the end of the flight. No hydraulics. I would be fighting the stick pressure the whole time.

When I released the collective, the manifold pressure immediately dropped from 20 inches to 15. Auto-land mode, one of the other instructors joked later.

Had my R22 been this much of a chore to fly? I don’t remember, but I don’t think so.

We came in for a landing on the taxiway at Auburn airport. I made a nice landing and set down. And a nice pickup. I was working hard to do it, though.

We did a few maneuvers. Standard takeoff, standard landing, steep approach, a few autos, two quick stops.

The autos weren’t anything like I remembered them and, after thinking about it for a while, I know why. When I learned back in the late 1990s, we’d start an autorotation by cutting the throttle first. We then had about 2 seconds to dump the collective. You could feel the drop in your gut. Nowadays, they start an autorotation by lowering the collective first and then rolling off the throttle. It’s a non-event — and not very realistic. I did the first one okay but set up for the second one badly and let airspeed drop too low for success. Got a low rotor horn on the power recovery. No big deal, but not very good, either. Sure wouldn’t pass a check ride.

The first quick stop sucked, but the second one was okay.

We climbed out and headed to my friend Don’s house. He lives on the outskirts of Auburn and has a helipad at his house. He’d suggested that morning, half joking, that we should try landing there. I knew we could land, but wasn’t convinced that we could take off. The place is surrounded by tall trees — a true confined space. I showed it to Matt. He was game to give it a try.

I’d landed there several times in my R44, so I knew the preferred approach. There was just about no wind. I came in low over the trees — even Matt didn’t see the LZ until I was ready to start my final descent. I lowered us into the area and hovered there for a moment. It hadn’t been difficult at all. But the real trick was to get out. I made a 180° pedal turn and pulled pitch, easing the cyclic forward to gain airspeed. (I hope I didn’t scare Matt with my soft chant: “Airspeed, airspeed, airspeed.”) We slipped through ETL when we were about 50-75 feet up, level with the tops of the trees quickly approaching. Then we were up and out.

I told Matt that I’d tell Don we’d managed it with full tanks of fuel. (A lie, of course; I really don’t think that would be possible.)

We headed back to Boeing field. I’d had enough. My shoulder was aching and I was tired of supporting the collective. I landed at the flight line. After shutting down and rolling the helicopter back to parking, I took a moment to whine a little to the owner/mechanic about the collective droop, cyclic friction, cyclic trim, and intercom static.

I really think my old R22 was in much better shape.

So yes, I can still fly an R22. But now I realize that I really don’t want to.

So You Want to Be a Helicopter Pilot, Part 9: Pay Your Dues

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There’s no automatic in, no fast track to the dream jobs.

The thing that bothered me most about the Silver State debacle was the way the company misled potential students in their sales seminars. Radio commercials would lure people in by claims that anyone could become a helicopter pilot earning $80,000 a year. The combination of cool job and big paycheck was enough to get dreamers in the door. The seminar, which often included helicopters on stage and pilots strutting about in flight suits, visualized the dreams, making them tangible. With bank representatives standing by to guarantee financing, is there any wonder so many people signed on the dotted line?

The trouble is, although Silver State (and some other organizations) made it sound as if all you need is a commercial helicopter certificate to qualify for a high-paying dream job as a pilot, in reality, you need a lot more than that. All your certificate gets you is a chance to get your foot in the door. You’ll need to pay your dues to earn a good job as a pilot.

Paying Dues

When I say “pay dues,” I mean that metaphorically. You’re not actually paying money — you’ve already done enough of that to get your certificates, haven’t you?

I mean working in one or likely more less desirable jobs in order to build the experience you need to qualify for better jobs. Like a recent college graduate climbing the corporate ladder, you can’t expect to get the CEO job while the ink is still wet on your diploma. Instead, you start at the bottom and work your way up.

The goal of paying dues is to build experience. In the world of flying, experience has several components I can think of: time, skills, aircraft, and confidence.

Building Time

At its lowest level, experience can be quantified by stick time: total time, total helicopter time, and PIC time. The vast majority of non-entry level employers won’t even look at your resume unless you have at least 1,000 hours of PIC time; that number varies depending on the job market and availability of pilots.

Most pilots build time as flight instructors — which is why it’s so common to get a CFI rating as part of pilot training. So the first job you’re likely to have is as a CFI, sitting in the same kind of helicopter you probably trained in while someone sits beside you, learning to fly.

I can make a valid argument about why time built as a flight instructor isn’t worth as much as time built actually flying missions. In fact, I made this argument in a blog post I wrote back in 2009. Unfortunately, unless you have access to a helicopter and an opportunity to fly real-life missions, you’re not likely to build much of your early time that way.

The point is, flight time builds experience. No matter how that time was built, a pilot with 1,000 hours PIC has more experience than one with 300 hours. Be prepared to take any job you can get to start building that time.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re interested in adding bulk time to your log book, don’t pay an organization for the privilege of doing so. There’s at least one company out there using low-time pilots to fly relatively dangerous missions. That company is not only getting the pilots to pay them $200/hour (or more) to fly but is also collecting money from clients for the missions being flown — a practice known as “double-dipping.” Legitimate employers don’t charge their pilots a fee to fly; they pay their pilots. They also don’t ignore manufacturers’ safety notices regarding qualifications for missions being flown.

Building Skills

You might think that building time leads to building skills. It does — but only to a certain point. Look at it this way: If you do the same thing over and over, you’ll likely get pretty good at it. But you won’t get very good at anything else.

Take, for example, a flight instructor job. You’ll get good at hovering and preventing student pilots from crashing while trying to hover. (I can still remember how good my CFI was at steading the helicopter when I was learning to hover.) You’ll get good at performing basic, advanced, and emergency maneuvers to private and commercial standards. You’ll get good at doing traffic patterns and planning the same cross country flights to the same handful of airports.

While there’s nothing wrong with those skills, there are a lot more skills that a commercial pilot needs in his bag of tricks. Landing direct to fuel at an unfamiliar airport, avoiding the flow of fixed wing traffic — in other words, stay out of the traffic pattern. Planning cross country flights over unfamiliar areas with multiple stops at unfamiliar airports. Landing off-airport someplace other than at the same handful off practice areas. Calculating weight and balance and performance for a wide range of flight profiles. Dealing with demanding passengers, unreasonable air traffic controllers, obnoxious airplane pilots. Making changes to a flight due to weather or other unforeseen circumstances. These are the kinds of skills you build by flying real missions.

And then there are the specialized skills. Landing in snow or on water. Conducting photo and video flights. High altitude operations. Sling loading, long line work. Fire suppression by bucket or snorkel/tank setup. Spraying crops, drying cherries, preventing frost damage. Search and rescue. Flying with night vision goggles. These are the skills that are hard to build because they’re part of jobs that require experience. But these are also the skills that lead to high-paying pilot jobs.

If you have an opportunity to get real training in one of these skill areas, it might be worthwhile to pay for it. For example, if a flight school offers a long-line course and you want to get into fire suppression work, having that course on your resume might help you get your foot in the door for a job that’ll get you the experience you need to move in that direction. But again, don’t get suckered into a “job” where you pay to sit beside someone who is “training” you while actual work is being done for clients. Instead, look for a course that combines ground school with flight time where you manipulate the controls beside a flight instructor. In other words, real training.

Learning Aircraft

Your stick time in different aircraft is also an important part of experience. You’ll likely start out in a small piston (reciprocating engine) helicopter, like a Robinson or Schweizer or Enstrom, but the real jobs — the ones that come with big paychecks — are usually in far more impressive aircraft.

They say that if you can fly an R22, you can fly any helicopter. I think that’s true — to a certain extent. Small helicopters with their limited control systems and squirrelly flight characteristics offer challenges you won’t find in larger helicopters. They also can offer opportunities to learn how to deal with limited performance in challenging conditions. But, at the same time, larger, more complex aircraft have their own challenges to learn through experience.

The biggest aircraft distinction is piston vs. turbine engine. That engine difference leads to two major concerns:

  • Start-Up. If you screw up while starting a piston helicopter, it won’t start. If you screw up while starting a turbine helicopter, you could have a hot start that melts the turbine, leaving the helicopter disabled (or dangerous to fly).
  • Power. If you pull too much power in a piston helicopter, you’ll likely get a low rotor warning. If you pull too much power (torque) in a turbine helicopter, you’ll over-torque and damage the transmission. (Either way, if this happens in flight you could have some serious problems.)

Beyond that, the only differences are in the systems you need to learn to understand how the helicopter works, do a preflight/postflight, and troubleshoot problems. Still, the differences are considerable.

Another example might be hydraulics. An R22 doesn’t have a hydraulic system, so there’s no worries about hydraulic failures. A larger aircraft does. But not all aircraft hydraulic systems are equal. I’ve been trained to deal with hydraulic failures in Robinson R44 and Bell 206L helicopters and can confirm that a lot of upper body strength is required to control the helicopter and land safely without hydraulics. I’ve also heard that even more strength — possibly more than I possess? — is required to deal with a hydraulics failure in a Eurocopter AS350 (AStar).

Obviously, the more aircraft you’ve flown, the more prepared you are to deal with issues that might come up in flight. For that reason, the more aircraft types a pilot has flown, the more marketable he is.

There are opportunities to pay to fly specific aircraft models. For example, there’s a guy in the Los Angeles area who does ENG work and will let you fly his turbine helicopter on assignment with him for a fee. And even I offer long cross-country flights twice a year to pilots interested in building 10-12 hours of R44 time over two days. Is this worth it? It depends on your need. If you just want to get familiar with an aircraft or you only need a few hours of flight time to qualify for something else, it might not be a bad idea. But if you need 50 or 100 or 500 hours of experience in an aircraft make and model, do you really want to pay for it? Wouldn’t it be better to take a less attractive job and get paid to fly that aircraft instead?

Building Confidence

I hesitated to include this because I don’t want readers to confuse confidence with over-confidence. There’s a fine line between them and being on the wrong side of that line can kill you.

Simply stated, the more you do anything, the more confident you should be that you can do it successfully.

Example. Do one autorotation. Do you feel confident you can do one perfectly every time you try? Probably not. Do 150 autorotations in a month. How do you feel about it now?

Of course, it’s not enough to perform a maneuver or task multiple times to feel confident about your ability. You have to perform it successfully. The higher the percentage of times you successfully perform a maneuver, the more confident you should become about being able to perform it successfully in the future. You can do 150 practice autorotations in a month and if more than half of them are bad — wrong airspeed, miss the spot, etc. — you shouldn’t be nearly as confident as if you nail it 90% of the time.

Off-airport landings is a good example from my own flying. I do a lot of off-airport landings — in fact, in the work I do each summer, I’d estimate that 95% of my landings are off-airport. Years ago, I was a nervous wreck when landing on anything that wasn’t paved and level. But now, after so many landings on all kinds of terrain and surfaces, I’m pretty confident in my ability to find and land on a suitable landing zone where I need one. But that doesn’t mean I’ll try to set it down anywhere. I still go for the smoothest, most level surface I can find. I set it down slowly and I fly it all the way down to the ground. If I don’t like the way it feels, I’ll pick it back up and move it — sometimes only a foot in one direction — until I feel good about where I’m parked. I’ve done this solo and with a ship full of passengers, front-heavy or side-heavy. I’m confident I can do it.

Over-confidence occurs when you think you can do something better than you actually can. Instead of putting real effort into it, instead of concentrating to complete the task with all of your attention, you become complacent and go through the motions without thinking. That’s when things go wrong and accidents happen.

Work Your Way Up

The better a job is, the more experience you need to get it. That’s why you’ll need to work at possibly low-paying, low-interest jobs before you can qualify for more interesting or lucrative ones.

This is normal in any industry or career path. You should not expect it to be different for a flying career.

A career conscious pilot will keep this in mind with every job he gets. I remember a fellow pilot at the Grand Canyon when I worked there in 2004. He told us, from day one, that his goal was to build 500 hours of turbine time in that job. While the goal was achievable, he put himself on the fast track to make it happen. If he was idle and another pilot wanted to give up a flight, he’d take it. If he had a day off and another pilot who was scheduled to work wanted the day off, he’d swap. As early as July, he’d built the 500 hours he wanted — most other guys were lucky to reach that milestone by the end of the season. He stuck around, of course — we were under contract for the full season — but was the first pilot to leave for a better job when we were released.

The point is, it’s not enough to just get a job and go through the motions. You need to use each job as a stepping stone for your ultimate goal. Look for jobs that’ll get you the experience you need; work hard to put yourself at the front of the pack to get that experience. Yes, you might wind up doing a job you hate or working in a place you’d rather not be. But the quicker you do it and get it over with, the quicker you can qualify for the job you really want in the place you want to be.

Next up: why the learning should never end.

LinkedIn Phishing Scam

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Another day, another scam.

Just a quick note about yet another phishing scam, this one purportedly coming from the social networking service, LinkedIn. In this example, you’ll get an email message telling you that “your LinkedIn account was blocked due to inactivity.” As you might imagine, they provide a handy link to fix the problem.

Linked In Scam Email

Trouble is, the link does not go to LinkedIn. Instead, it opens a page designed to gather information about your account and send it back to the scammers.

The best way to avoid phishing attempts — even ones that look like real communications from a social networking service, bank, or other organization you might have an account with — is to never click a link in an email message.

If I thought this message might be real, I’d check by using my Web browser — not the link in the email message — to go to LinkedIn, log in, and check the situation for myself.

Don’t get scammed.

Why I Canceled My Netflix Account

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Goodbye NetflixDamaged discs and idiotic customer service.

Last night, I canceled my Netflix account. I hadn’t intended on doing so when I called customer service, but it’s the bullshit I encountered on the phone that made the decision easy for me.

My Netflix Account

I had a Netflix DVD-only account. Well, until recently, I had a Netflix unlimited three DVD plus streaming account. But when Netflix decided to split the two types of service and charge customers for each of them separately, I did away with streaming. After all, I’m living in an RV and get all my Internet access via a MyFi wireless device with a 10GB per month cap. Streaming video with my setup is not only impractical, but stupid and costly.

Of course, since I’m parked on the edge of a cliff overlooking a valley, I don’t have cable TV. And I don’t have a satellite dish. And my antenna picks up about 6 television stations. My inability to get live television doesn’t bother me much since I simply cannot tolerate commercials. At home, any TV I watch is via DVR with the remote in my hand. Here, I catch up on television series — normally a few years after the show has aired — via DVD. Hence, the Netflix account.

The trouble is, it’s gotten to the point where more than half the discs I receive from Netflix are damaged. Although I’ve had a few cracked discs, more often, the damage is scratches that cause the video to lock up, skip, and do other annoying things. While I’m willing to accept an occasional annoyance — perhaps once every month or so — when every second disc that arrives is screwed up, I run out of patience.

Last night, it came to a head. I received my third damaged disc in a row and I wasn’t satisfied with checking a few boxes on the Netflix Web site. It was pretty obvious that they were ignoring the check boxes. It was time to make some noise, to vent.

The Call that Ended it All

Calling Netflix customer service works like this:

  1. Log into your Netflix account.
  2. Navigate to the Contact Us link.
  3. Find and click the link for calling customer service. A toll-free phone number appears onscreen along with a six-digit code to expedite your call. This code is evidently unique to each account or call you make.
  4. Call the phone number.
  5. When prompted, enter the code.
  6. Wait, on hold, for a human to pick up while crappy hold music plays in your ear. Yesterday, this took about 5 minutes.

Of course, the longer I wait on hold, the more annoyed I get. So even the calming voice of the guy answering the phone at Netflix customer service at 10 PM on a Monday night wasn’t enough to cool me off. I immediately went into a rant about the number of damaged discs I was getting and how completely unreasonable it was. I wanted them to note my complaint on my customer record and tell me what they could do for me about it.

He made various sympathetic noises and told me how sorry he was. And then he did something that pushed me over the edge: he asked for my name.

“I just entered a six-digit number that appeared onscreen for my account while logged into Netflix. Doesn’t it pull up my name?”

“Yes, it does,” he confirmed. “But I need you to verify it.”

This made no sense to me. “But I’m logged into my account. My name appears at the top of the screen. Even if I wasn’t the account holder, I could easily read that name off the screen.”

“I need you to verify your name before I can help you.”

“But I verified my name when I punched in those six digits.”

“No, that just brought up your account. I need you to verify your name.”

“But the only way I could get those six digits was to be logged into my account.”

“I need you to verify your name before I can help you.”

“You’re reading off a script.”

“No, I’m not,” he said. He must have been lying. Then he repeated, “I need you to verify your name before I can help you.”

I cannot begin to explain how angry this conversation was making me. “I refuse to play this game,” I told him. “I have proven who I am by entering that code. I will not allow you to drag me into your game.”

“It’s not a game,” he said. “I need you to verify your name before I can help you.”

“I want to talk to a supervisor.”

A pause. I guess he punched the button to bring up the screen that tells him what to say when a customer asks to speak to a supervisor. “I can see if a supervisor is available, but I’m sure I can help you.”

“But you won’t.”

“I need you to verify your name before I can help you.”

“I want a supervisor.”

“I’ll see if one is available. I need to put you on hold.”

“Fine.”

He put me on hold. More of the same crappy hold music. Each minute that ticked by made me angrier. I was so sick of playing bullshit customer service games. I’m not an idiot. I don’t like being treated like one. By this point, I was already beginning to think that my Netflix account wasn’t worth the headache it was giving me that night.

About three minutes later, he came back on the phone. “I have a supervisor on the line. I’ll conference you in.”

“Fine.”

The supervisor came on the phone. He introduced himself as Daniel — I think; do I really care? He came right to the point: “Can you tell me your name?”

“Sure,” I said. “I can tell you my name. But I won’t.”

“I need you to verify your name before I can help you.”

“You have my name on the screen right in front of you. I typed in a code so that screen would appear. I don’t see any reason to tell you my name when I’ve already verified my identity by entering that code, which could only appear for my account.”

“I can’t help you unless you verify your name.”

He made the decision for me: “Then cancel my account,” I said.

“I’d be happy to cancel your account if you’d give me your name.”

Maybe he thought he was being funny. I didn’t think so.

“Well, since I’m already logged into my account, I’ll just cancel it myself.”

I hung up and clicked the Cancel Membership link. I then filled in the survey to indicate that the reason I was canceling was that there were too many damaged discs and I had a problem with customer service.

Netflix Doesn’t Care

Does Netflix care that it lost a customer due to its bullshit customer service scripts? I’m sure it doesn’t. And I think that’s part of the problem.

Companies don’t care about their customers anymore. All they care about is collecting our fees and providing the minimal service they can for what we pay. They make us jump through hoops when we want to contact them — get online, log in, navigate to a screen, dial a number, enter a secret code, wait, and then repeat information they don’t need. I’m tired of it, I’m tired of paying for inferior service and then facing aggravation when I want to complain.

So I’m done with Netflix.

I’m probably better off without Netflix. I certainly will save some money. And the time I don’t spend staring at the idiot box is time better spent reading or writing or even doing crossword puzzles. Stuff that might actually improve my brain instead of sedating it.