PHILIP GREENSPUN:
All right, folks. Welcome back. So now we'll learn about the
process of learning to fly and some of the
regulations around it that will be on the test. All right, so when
you learn to fly, you'll pre-flight the
aircraft with the instructor. Learn about that-- how
to inspect everything. The first few lessons
are really about learning to see the aircraft
attitude, seeing whether you're pitched
up, pitched down, banked left or right. Most people have a
fairly easy time with. Then you learn to
take off and land. As I said earlier, that
takes about five or 10 hours. And in fact, people used
to solo after four hours of flight training,
especially young people. Now it takes a little
longer, because they want you to know
about more bureaucracy and how to talk to the
control tower and so forth. A good trainer airplane-- why not start with the
best and just learn how to fly your personal
Gulfstream or whatever. If it's a very heavy
airplane like a Gulfstream, which can weigh 100,000
pounds, then you have to think ahead
because of inertia. The airplane tends to keep
doing whatever it was doing five or 10 seconds earlier. At the same time, though,
a really tiny airplane like some of the little
two-seaters, they are unstable. And they just get kicked
around by the wind so much that you're not sure
if it's something you did or something that the
environment did to you. Also people have gotten heavier. The owner of East
Coast Aero Club says that when he started in
the '80s 85% of the customers and instructors could train in
the two-seat Piper Tomahawk. Now 85% require training in
the four-seat Piper Warrior. You don't want it to be
too powerful, actually. And that's because
when you go from-- on a go around, for example,
and you go from near idle power to full power, that's
a huge transition. And those left turning
tendencies that Tina mentioned mean that you need immediate
and significant rudder input and so forth. So an airplane
that has a narrower band of possible powers
is easier to learn on. You want something that
won't spin if it's abused. And also ideally an airplane
that if you just let go-- the Cessnas tend to
have this characteristic. They'll come out of
most bad situations if you just let go of the yoke. So the best trainers-- my personal favorite
is the Diamond DA-40. It's kind of physically
uncomfortable, which is why I don't use it
as a family airplane anymore. The Cessna 172 and Piper
Warrior are the most popular. You can check these out. The Cirrus SR20 is the
most popular personal-- or the 20 and the 22 together--
the most popular family and personal
airplane these days. They're OK trainers. And some airline training
programs and college training programs use them. But they're a little bit
more challenging to handle than the Cessnas,
Diamonds, and Pipers. The marginal operating
cost of all of these is about $100 to $150 an hour. So flight schools usually
have to mark that up a bit in order to stay in
business, because they have to cover the fixed costs, as
well, of owning the aircraft, hangering, and paying insurance. But that cost includes the
fuel and the engine overhaul and the prop overhaul. What about doing gliders? So we don't want to sell you
too hard on the idea of just starting in a single
engine land airplane. You can go out to
Sterling, Massachusetts, get towed up to
3,000 feet, and then on a handful of good
summer days stay up by soaring in the thermals. Ridge lifts-- people have soared
all the way down for, I think, about 1,000 miles-- tend to be the
record for soaring. That's usually on following
the edge of a mountain range where the wind blowing, let's
say, from the west generates a lift right on the Western
edge of the mountain range, right in the center. You can be a Captain Sully-style
hero on every landing, actually. Raise your hand if
you think that there was another pilot in the
aircraft with Captain Sully or if he was by himself. Who thinks that there was
a second pilot in there? OK, who knows the name
of the second pilot? Without going to your phone,
does anybody in this room know the name of
that second pilot? All right. AUDIENCE: Jeffrey Skiles. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Jeff
Skiles, all right. Hold on a sec. We've got to give
this guy his reward. [LAUGHTER] I'll pay out $20 to this
student for that answer. [APPLAUSE] I only brought a
handful of cash, because I knew I
wouldn't need most of it. [LAUGHTER] OK, a good trainer helicopter-- same issues. The really light helicopters--
the Robinson R-22 is very popular for
training, because it's inexpensive to operate. But it's so light that it's
unstable and gives people the impression that heroic
skills are required. Also you want reasonable
amount of rotor inertia for autorotations. And helicopters, a lot of the
training after those 10 hours-- after you've learned
to fly, you also need to learn to fly a
helicopter with no engine. And that requires
making some adjustments in the pitch of the rotating
blades or spinning wings. So if there is no
inertia in those blades, then it becomes a
little bit harder to control during
the autorotation. If you're a student, you may
not make the best landings-- so rugged skids. This ends up all pointing
towards the Robinson R-44. It's a four seat helicopter. And those extra two
empty seats in the back give you a lot of
performance margin. That's more
expensive to operate. And therefore, the prices that
flight schools have to charge are higher. Because all the
rotating components get thrown out
every 2,200 hours. The blades, the transmissions-- there's more that
gets overhauled. OK, you can get a pilot's
certificate from FAA by doing your pre-solo written
exam with an instructor on the characteristics of
the aircraft and anything that's important locally. Then you do some solo
flight after your training. You'll do some
flights by yourself. You will do cross-country trips. So you will go
with an instructor on some trips that are at least
50 nautical miles if you're in an airplane-- 25 in a helicopter. That's called cross-country. You don't have to go all the
way to California or Alaska. And then you'll do a bit of
solo cross-country flying. You will do a
checkride preparation. That has to be, I believe,
at least three hours in prep with an instructor
for your checkride. And once you take your
checkride with an FAA employee or a designated
pilot examiner, you get issued the
pilot certificate. It takes you about 40
hours of flight time. And I believe only 10
of that has to be solo. The other 30 is typically
with an instructor. 55 hours is probably
more typical, but young people like
yourselves who do it intensively can come and finish pretty
close to the 40 hours. There's my certificate. Notice it says airline
transport pilot there. Oh, let's use the
fancier feature. Airline transport pilot. So that's a different
level of certificate. There's private,
commercial, and ATP-- again, beyond the scope. Notice also there's
a hole punched in it. Because when you get
an additional rating, they issue a new certificate
and destroy the old one. OK. What can you do once
you have your private? You can go anywhere in the world
in a US registered airplane and carry friends and
family as long as you're not charging the money. You can fly at night. That's not true in
some other countries, but it is true in the US. You don't need any additional
rating to fly at night. You will have had three
hours of training in night flying with an instructor. And you will fly
what you learned in. So if your mom has a
hot air balloon and that was your first
aircraft, you will have a rating for flying
that hot air balloon. You don't have to start
with a Cessna or similar. So Congress passes kind of
loose laws about aviation. But really most of
the things that you might think of as
laws governing flying are actually
regulations that are drafted by the bureaucrats
in the FAA and the agency. A lot of the stuff is public. You can look up anybody
who claims to be a pilot in the airman registry. One reason it's
not called a pilot registry is that
there are actually other functions for which
certificates are issued-- for example, flight engineer. Maybe in the old days,
there was navigator. Similarly, airplanes. If you see an
interesting airplane, you can look up the
tail number and see to whom it's registered. Sometimes it's obscured
with a shell LLC somewhere. But it can be interesting. This is one of the worst
parts of the FAA and the exam. They use the words category and
classes in two different ways. One is for getting your pilot's
certificate, in which case a category is something
like airplane or rotorcraft. And then you have
this class, which could be multi engine C in
the case of this Grumman. I think it might be a
mallard there on the right-- 1940s Grumman seaplane. So that's a multi
engine C rating that you would have in
the airplane category. Here's your little matrix. You can study this
from the books. But you see these are
the different categories of aircraft here on the left. Some of the fun ones like
powered parachute, weight shift control. Fortunately, there
are no flight schools for those kind of aircraft
that I know of in the area. Wouldn't be much fun in
a New England February. Category, class. Very exciting. So just to give you an overview
of the pilot and instructor certification. On the left here, you
have your levels of pilot. We're concentrating
on private pilot. Recreational pilot is
extremely unpopular. Sport pilot-- it's
just a handful of schools for that as well. So really, it's
private, commercial, ATP are the three core levels
of a pilot certificate. To those, you add ratings. So airplane single engine land-- that lets you fly
the Icon A5 seaplane that you might have seen. And you also need type
ratings for heavier or turbo jet powered aircraft. That means you've had special
training for your DC 3, which is heavy,
or for your Boeing 737, which has turbo jets. The flight instructor has
a separate certificate. And that has its own set of
ratings which are simpler. So single engine
airplane-- notice it doesn't say land or sea. So I have a commercial
seaplane rating. And I have an
instructor certificate for single engine airplane. So for anybody who wants
to die by drowning, I can offer you instruction
in a single engine seaplane or a multi engine
seaplane, for that matter. Although there aren't
too many of those. There is a totally
separate certificate. If you are also
passionate about drones, you'll end up with three
pieces of plastic-- one for the pilot certification,
one for the instructor, and one for being
a remote pilot. So aircraft, they
use the same words but to mean different things. We will have a normal
or utility category of aircraft or acrobatic. Those are the three
that you're going to see at your typical flight school. On the right there is the
GameBird, a very interesting plane that I just flew
in Bentonville, Arkansas. I would encourage you
guys to look that up. And then you have class. If you have a really
big helicopter, it's a transport category
and rotorcraft class. All right, there
on the right is-- I think that's a
Pitcairn autogyro. So that's a rotorcraft
autogyro from the 1930s. That's a replica
from Oshkosh, which we'll hear about at lunchtime. The bureaucracies. You have the NTSB, the
National Transportation Safety Board-- a little bit
separate from the FAA, which is part of the Department
of Transportation. The structure of regulations-- the Code of Federal
Regulations is huge. I think it's doubled in size
in the last 20 years or so. The FAA is part of
that in title 14. If you look up the FARs, the
Federal Aviation Regulations, oftentimes you'll be
directed to a site that has the entire electronic
code of federal regulations. The most relevant parts
for this class are 61-- what does it mean
to become a pilot? And part 91-- what can you do
if you're flying privately? If you want to have
fun extra knowledge, these are some of the other
FARs that are occasionally worth looking at. You can look at doing charter
and airline operations. Those have air
carrier certificates. And then you add something
for scheduled big airplanes, like FAR 121, or smaller
charter airplanes, 135. If you want to see what
kind of engineering you have to
demonstrate to the FAA to get your product certified,
you can look into, for example, FAR 27 to see what Robinson
had to do for the R-44 to show that it was safe. FAR 61 is about pilots,
flight instructors, and ground instructors. The standards are
actually reasonable. You have to do a flight
review with an instructor every two years in
order to continue to exercise the privileges
of your certificate. If you want to add, for
example, the capability to fly in the clouds,
that's the instrument rating that Tina was talking about. And that's in FAR 61.65. Some of these are
just sign-offs. For high performance
or complex you just need an endorsement from an
instructor that you did it. For the type ratings,
you'll actually get a new pilot certificate
after usually simulator training at a simulator center. All right, so these
are some of the things that you need to
know for the test. Until 9/11, the
pilot certificate was a piece of paper, I think. And the photo ID
was not required. So you could just go out and
fly with your piece of paper and your medical certificate. Now you don't need
that, actually, because of this thing
called BasicMed. You know, I guess, that-- you have to know, I think,
for some test question that they can be inspected
by these various agencies. All right, drugs and alcohol. This is actually
one of the worst parts of the FAA certification
projects for young people. People my age, we don't
get invited to parties. [LAUGHTER] So getting arrested for
DUI is not really an issue. But I know this guy,
really wonderful young guy, about 20-- very
enthusiastic, very smart. He was in college. He was drinking. And he got arrested for DUI. And the FAA treated
him like they would-- if I were arrested
for DUI, it would mean that I was an alcoholic. But he was not an alcoholic. But they don't have
different standards. So they can't just say,
well, he's in college. So of course, he's drinking. They said, well,
he's an alcoholic. So they wanted him to
do years of proving that he went to alcohol
treatment programs and all this other stuff. So really, you have
to report any time that you have an alcohol
related infraction with a motor vehicle. And that's how I would
say this is probably the number one reason that
pilots lose their certificates. Marijuana. I was just in Haiti actually. And the shaman was showing-- not the tourist part
of Haiti, of course, but the authentic Haiti. So the shaman was showing us the
50 different medicinal plants that they used to
treat various ailments. And I said, you guys
are so primitive. In Massachusetts,
we have one plant that people say will cure
almost any kind of problem. And that's medical marijuana. [LAUGHTER] So you can't really be
a stoner and honestly answer the questions on the-- despite the legality
in Massachusetts, you can't be a stoner and
hold your pilot certificate. Because you're supposed to tell
the FAA about your glaucoma and how you're treating
it with medical marijuana. So the certificate
duration is two years for flight instructors. They want us to do
recurrent training or sign off so many students
that we don't need it. For remote pilot, they want you
to pass a test every two years. The pilot certificate
never expires. Here's a couple
pictures from last week. I was out in Sonoma, California. And I stumbled on
this airport where one pilot was flying this
1940s Howard airplane that you see on the left. And another pilot was
flying this P-51 Mustang-- which on a 2,500 foot runway,
that's a pretty short runway. And it's very windy, nasty
wind patterns off the bay. So that's kind of a short runway
for a $3 million airplane. Those were $1,500, by the way,
when the government sold them as surplus at the
end of World War II. But anyway, those pilot
certificates never expire. Somebody could not
fly for 30 years, go out and do a little
bit of recurrent training, and get signed off by an
instructor for a flight review, and fly again, assuming-- I guess he or she would
need to get a renewed medical certificate. For you all, you're going to
have a third class medical that'll be valid for five years. Everything's based
on calendar month. So if you get it
on the 1st of June, it will expire at the end
of June five years later. Airline pilots need
first class medicals. The captain needs a first
class medical by regulation. Might be true of the
first officer too. Just ordinary charter use or
doing helicopter sightseeing or whatever, that's a second
class medical operation. One reason that people like
sport pilot and glider flying is that these medicals
are not required. So if they think that they
might not pass a medical, then they'll transition
to one of those. I think they say that you have
to have a current driver's license. And it's a little bit
of self reporting. You have to basically consider
yourself to be healthy. BasicMed, you start
with the third class during your training. And then you'll go every four
years to a regular doctor. You can see in FAR 61.113 that
there's a limit to what you can do under BasicMed. You can't fly a
heavy fast airplane with a lot of people in it. OK, for most tests you need an
endorsement from an instructor. For the checkride
you can pass it. It can be discontinued--
maybe the weather turned bad. You can fail, usually
on one or two maneuvers. You can retake the failed
test, which might only be on those one or two maneuvers
at the examiner's discretion. You have to log sufficient
to prove to the FAA that you meet currency
requirements-- like you've done three takeoffs and
landings within the last 90 days if you're carrying passengers,
or that you had a flight review within two years. That's from a-- I have a
nephew in medical school. So you're supposed to ground
yourself if you get sick. So you've got a medical
certificate five years ago. But if you're not fit to fly,
then you ground yourself. There's a regulation about that. The flight review
requires an hour of ground and an hour of
flight at a minimum-- whatever the instructor thinks
that you need to be safe. Or if you get a new
pilot's certificate, for example, because you
got an instrument rating, then the flight review
is not required. So oftentimes, people are
enthusiastic about it. They won't have a flight
review for the first five or 10 years of their aviation
journey, because they keep getting new certificates
for this or that. The insurance requirements
for more complex aircraft usually require training
every 12 months. So they essentially are
more stringent than the FAA requirements. So as I mentioned, you need to
have done some recent flying by yourself or with
passengers before you can take additional passengers. And if you're going
to carry passengers at night, which is defined
for this currency as one hour after sunset to one
hour before sunrise, you have to have done
three takeoffs and landings to a full stop before you can
carry passengers at night. This is the one
where people often have trouble maintaining
their currency and have to make a special
trip to the airport to build currency. This has to be in category,
class, and type, if applicable. So if it's a jet, you
have to-- if you're typed in a Boeing 737, you have
to have done the three takeoffs and landings at night
in your Boeing 737 to be current to take
more passengers at night. It's not enough to do
it just in a Cessna 172. The flight review, oddly
enough, doesn't work that way. You can do it in any of the
aircraft for which you're rated. Again, the insurance company
might be stricter about that. Tell the FAA if you move. This is packing up for a
recent trip to Florida. So it sure looked
like we were moving. Let me tell you, once you have
a light aircraft and a family, every trip becomes just like
that movie Sophie's Choice. You have to decide who or what
is going to be left behind. It's pretty painful. OK, student pilot. Before you can solo, you
pass a little written test that's kind of chosen
and given by the CFI. You have to receive training on
specific listed maneuvers that are in this FAR 61.87. You get signed off
for solo flight. And that has to be
renewed every 90 days. You can't take passengers or
go above a broken or overcast layer. So as unwise as it may sound,
if you're only visually rated you can take off, fly over
clouds with the expectation that when you get
to your airport, the weather is
forecast to be clear, or at least you're
hoping it will be clear. They won't let you do that
if you're a student pilot. The CFI may also add
other limitations like a maximum
wind, for example. Each cross-country flight--
so if you're going from, for example, Hanscom
Field up to Portland, Maine as a solo cross-country
or to Keene, New Hampshire, that requires that you do the
flight plan and review it with the CFI-- doesn't have to
be a regular CFI. And have the CFI sign off that
your planning is adequate. You can, actually,
fly in Bravo airspace. We'll get into that
a little bit later. The most controlled airspace
in the US, basically-- right around the biggest airports. However, you have to have
a sign-off from the flight instructor. You can actually land at
a class Brave airport. Salt Lake City has
a flight school. So they obviously
have people who are soloing at a huge
commercial airport. However, in the
FARs, appendix D, some airports are
excluded from student use of the actual runways as
opposed to the airspace. Logan happens to be one of them. So once you get your
private pilot certificate, what can you do? This is what I like to do. Fly over Boston. I've got the family in the back. We start in the Cirrus. We end up at Provincetown. We find the whales by-- after careful study
of marine biology, I've learned that
the best way to find whales is to look for
a whale watching boat. [LAUGHTER] They're just off shore. It saves, actually,
a lot of time. It's about 20 minutes to P-town. And the whale watch cruises
that leave from P-town, those are three or four hours. So this is a very efficient
way to see the whales. Who is eligible? A lot of people solo
on their 16th birthday. And they get a pilot certificate
on their 17th birthday. You can do it even a little
bit younger, a year younger, in gliders and balloons. You must have that CFI sign-off
to take the practical test, pass the knowledge test that's
kind of the end of this course, and meet the experience
requirements. That means at least 40
hours of total time, three hours of night, and so forth-- 10 hours of solo. Flight proficiency. So this is the stuff that's
in the airman certification standards that we talked about. So it says you've got to be
able to fly, power off landing. You've got to be able to
demonstrate a soft field take-off, like how you
would take off if you were on grass and so forth. Everything's in there, including
some basic instrument training, actually. The FAA has three
hours of training. And they want you to
demonstrate that you can fly by reference to
instruments, at least well enough to get back
out of the cloud that you inadvertently
flew into. So as I noted, you need
20 hours of training from a CFI minimum,
10 hours solo minimum. The other 10 hours is
at your discretion. Almost all people would choose
to do that with an instructor, because it's not a big added
cost compared to the airplane rental. The training from the CFI will
include one long cross-country. That's kind of the
interesting part. 100 nautical mile cross-country. I think it has to stop at
three different airports. So the one you took
off from and two more, like a triangle flight. And those three hours
of instrument training I told you about and the
three hours of test prep within two calendar months. Oh, yeah. So actually-- sorry, I was
mistaken about this one. 100 nautical mile
cross-country flight at night does not require three legs. But your solo-- you have to
do one solo 150 nautical mile trip, three legs of about
50 nautical miles each-- one at least 50 nautical. So that's the one
where the FAA thinks, OK, this person is really
good to go and start taking his or her friends. Which, as I said earlier, you
might think that that might not be what the friends want. You might say, no, I'd rather be
in a five-seat Cirrus with you and the more experienced
pilot in the front. And we'll sit in
the back and party. All right, so this is
a little bit tricky. But basically, you can fly if
it's part of your business. So if your company requires
you to get to a meeting, you can do that with a
private pilot certificate. Generally, though, you have to
be paying for most of the stuff that you do. You can't let your friends
pay the full cost of renting the airplane, for example. You can tow a glider. There's kind of elaborate rules
that have gotten more complex every year about how
to do charity flights. But it can be done. Regulation versus insurance. So here's a question for you. What if, hypothetically
speaking, somebody shut down the government and
there was no FAA? [LAUGHTER] Could this work? And I think actually it could. You would just say, it's illegal
to fly without insurance. Because let's think about it. The FAA says that you can
go to East Coast Aero Club, fly around in a Piper
Warrior, get your certificate, and then just get a couple of
sign-offs from an instructor for complex, high performance--
actually, I guess it's three-- high altitude. And then at 43 hours
of flight time, you get yourself into this
$5 million Pilatus PC-12. You've got the entire family. You pitch your tent at Oshkosh. Everybody's happy. Well, that's legal from
the FAA's point of view. But the insurance
company says, you know, we don't really want to
buy you a new Pilatus after you go sideways off
the runway at Oshkosh. So we're not going
to let you do that. You don't have
enough experience. You're going to need specific
training for the airplane. Again, this is the single
engine land airplane. It's not over 12,500 pounds, so
you don't need a type rating. And therefore, you
could just get in there. And most people
don't lock the doors. So just jump in, push
the start button, and go. FAA is happy. Well, again, the
insurance company wouldn't have let you
do that to begin with. So if this complex
regulatory environment didn't exist but
insurance were required, I think you'd end
up with something that was substantially similar
and basically the same. The FAA system, I will
say in favor of it, it's kind of motivational. It's sort of like the bad
system that the Boy Scouts-- I guess they're not
Boy Scouts anymore. The Scouts and the Girl Scouts-- they're still the Girl Scouts-- that the Scouts run. And it motivates people
to get the next one. Everything except the drones
is hanging off either the pilot or the CFI certificate. And just remember that you're
going to stay FAA current by flying every quarter and with
an instructor every two years. A lot of people in New
England, though, they don't fly much
during the winter. So they go up and do a currency
flight in the springtime before the flying season starts. So while you're thinking
about your questions, about the regulatory
framework or learning to fly, I'll just show you
a flight that you could do with just a private. There is an entangled
whale in New York Harbor with fishing gear all over him. And the people that
could untangle him were in Provincetown. So Noah asked me to volunteer,
because they had my email from the sea turtle flights. They said, hey, would you
mind flying over Boston, picking these guys
up in Provincetown, going over New York Harbor in
the area just outside of it to look for the whale, land
them on the New Jersey Shore, so they can get
into a zodiac boat and chase after the whales? They didn't tell me to go
visit my parents in D.C. but I did while they were
out chasing the whale. [LAUGHTER] And then come back. And I dropped them off,
I think, right-- just after sunset I landed at
Provincetown after sunset. And then I did a night
flight over water in a single engine
plane that's about to-- it's just reached its 2,000
hour overhaul for the engine. So maybe that wasn't
the wisest thing to do. But I do have a life
jacket and a raft. So that was an entire day
of flying from about 7:00 AM to about-- I don't know-- 9:00 PM when
I landed back in Hanscom. And I think that
didn't require more than a private certificate,
because it's all volunteer. People say, have you
ever been scared? Philip, you've
flown 4,000 hours. What's the scariest thing
that's ever happened to you? And I think actually
it was on this flight. Because if you see,
there's that IFR. That's an IFR intersection
that the FAA came up with. So for those of you who
are familiar with Judaism, you will know that is not
something you ever want to see. [LAUGHTER] All right, so who has a
question about that material? Or should we zip into systems? AUDIENCE: Are there
any medical conditions that would prohibit you
from flying altogether? PHILIP GREENSPUN:
The question is, are there any medical
conditions that really preclude a person from getting
a pilot's certificate or getting the medical to
go with a pilot certificate? I guess you need the
medical to get it, because you need to solo. The FAA-- they have
an exemption process. And they have their
own physicians in Oklahoma City that review. So usually you can work with
an aviation medical examiner and get some kind of exception. Diabetics, they're kind
of concerned about. But if the person has a long
history of controlling it well, they'll usually
give an exemption. People have heart bypasses. And then they have to go through
some rehabilitation process that makes the FAA happy. So it's all laid out. There's a lot of stuff
online about the standards that they use. And it's complicated. But the doctors-- there's a
lot of good local aviation examiners. One of them works right
at Cambridge hospital. So that's a fairly easy
question to get answered.
