Best all around basic trainer?

[Colonel]

[quote]Any aircraft that defeats the flat feet syndrome[/quote]

Bingo.  The first 10 hours someone spends in an airplane
must be in something that demands they use their feet.

They will carry that skill with them for the rest of their
career.

I'm not a total prick, though - start in a taildragger in
grass, which despite the AvCan expert opinions, is more
forgiving than pavement.

The AvCan experts have never heard of Richard Bach,
but he described dry pavement as the most hostile
runway surface there was, for a taildragger.  He just
flew fighter jets and antique biplanes and everything
else inbetween including flying boats since 1953, so
what would Richard Bach know about flying, compared
to an AvCan Queen like Rui who lectures endlessly from
the safety of the ground?

[url=http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article ... chard-bach]http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article ... chard-bach[/url]

From 1960:

[quote]Richard’s first ever article, from the September, 1960, Air Facts, “Voice in the Dark.”

[b]Voice in the Dark[/b]

Some still night on the flight line

By Richard Bach

For a long time, ever since I first touched the starter switch of a flying machine, I’ve wanted to know what an airplane really is. A thousand hours of flying with them through good weather and not-so-good have taught me a little about airplanes, what they will do and what some of them won’t do. It’s taught me what goes together to make an airplane, and fairly well how it goes together. I’ve learned that skin is riveted to stringers which are in turn riveted to ribs and bulkheads. Mechanics have taught me that props are matched to engines and that turbine blades are fitted in balanced pairs. I’ve heard that some planes hold together with bailing wire and others need bolts torqued to the exact inch-pound.

Through all this, though, I’ve never understood what an airplane really is, or why it is different from any other machine..

A few nights ago, on the anniversary of my sixth year flying airplanes, I found the answer. I walked out on the flight line of a jet fighter base and leaned against the wing of an old friend. The night was very quiet, without a moon. Dim starlight and a pair of flashing red obstacle lights outlined a black hill at the side of the runway, and I breathed JP-4 and starlight and aluminum and still night air. In the quiet I talked to my friend, who happened to be a T-33, and asked pointblank the questions I could never answer.

“What are you, airplane? What is it about you and all your wide family that has made so many men leave all they know and come to you? Why do they waste good human love and concern on you who are nothing but so many pounds of steel and aluminum and gasoline and hydraulic fluid?”

A light breeze swirled by and whistled to itself in the landing gear. As clearly as a voice in the dark the T-bird’s answer came, as if she were telling me, patiently, something she’d been telling me since we first met. “What are you,” she asked, “but so many pounds of flesh and blood and air and water? Aren’t you more than that?”

“Of course,” I nodded in the darkness, and listened to the high lonely murmur of one of her sisters at altitude, cutting a gentle path in the quiet with her tiny airy roar.

“As you are more than your body, so I am more than my body,” she said, and she was quiet again. The trim sweep of her vertical stabilizer was an intermittent silhouette against the solemn split beam of the tower beacon turning its endless path around.

She was right. As the character and life of a man is not found between the covers of an anatomy book, so the character and life of an airplane is not found in the pages of a manual on aeronautical engineering. An airplane’s soul, which he can never see or touch, is something that her pilot senses: an eagerness to fly; a little bit of performance that according to the charts should not be there, but is; a spirit behind the bullet-holed mass of torn metal with three propellers feathered, touching down on an English airfield. Not the metal, but the soul of an airplane is what her pilot wants to fly, and the reason he paints the name on her cowling. And with that soul, airplanes have an immortality that you can feel when you walk onto any airport.

The air over the runways, slashed by propeller blades and burned in the Niagara-roar of a shimmering tailpipe, is part of the immortality of an airplane. The still blue lights along the taxiways at night are a part of it, and so is the anemometer at the top of the tower and the white paint that marks the runway numbers on the concrete. Even the empty sod strip at the end of a hundred miles of rolling plains lives with the calm expectancy of an engine’s advancing roar and black wheels touching grass.

We can throw a DC-8 into the sky instead of a Nieuport Vee-strutter, and we can throw it from a two-mile sheet of reinforced concrete instead of a muddy pasture, but the sky that the DC-8 whispers through is the same sky that held Glenn Curtiss and Mick Mannock and Wiley Post. We can blow islands out of the sea and change pioneer’s wagon trails to sixlane superhighways, but the sky is the same sky it has always been, with the same hazards and the same rewards for those who journey it.

Real flight, my friend taught me, is the spirit of an airplane lifting the spirit of its pilot into the high clean blue of the sky, where they join to share the freedom. Like trucks and trains, airplanes have become matter-of-fact and accepted workhorses, their soul and their character aren’t so easily seen as they once were. But they’re still there.

Even though you cannot find an industry that doesn’t benefit from flight and though there are thousands of reasons to fly airplanes, in the beginning men flew only for the sake of flying. Wilbur and Orville Wright didn’t bring the powered airplane into the world to move cargo or to fight battles in the sky. They invented it for the same selfish reason that Lillienthal held tightly to his cloth-and-bamboo wings and leaped from his pyramid: they wanted to be free of the ground. That is pure flight, followed for the joy of traveling through the air as an end in itself. And every once in awhile we ask, “What are you, airplane?”

The answer I found that night is not a new answer. Pilots have known for a long time that airplanes have a life and a soul of their own. The first time it dawns on every pilot, though, is like the first time he took the controls alone and watched the ground drop away.

To prove the answer for yourself you don’t have to turn back to the day you flew your first solo. Just go out onto a flight line one night and lean against the wing of an old friend…[/quote]

[Chuck Ellsworth]

It has now been three summers since I have flown an airplane.


I often get the urge to get another Cub or a Fleet Canuck and start a one airplane rental and airplane handling skills club.


For sure I will never bother with renewing my medical for my license even though my annual medicals show I am still about sixteen years old physically.....except I think I need cataract removal because my vision is a bit blurred at a distance.


I don't need a pilots license to give advice to licensed pilots period.


Have you sold your Grumman Barney?


Barney is my senior here he is older than me and started flying a year before me.


Anyhow for sure there is a market for a club kind of flying offering rental and skills upgrading training.


Us old guys don't even need a pilots license to do it...Fuck T.C.

[Colonel]

I have had student pilots that thought the same way ...

If you don't have a licence, they can't take it away from you  ;D

I remember I had one student pilot, he started flying
in the 1950's at Bradley's at Carp.  Built a gorgeous
cub.  Built another cub, this one on floats.  Using
electrical tape, he put the same letters on the side
of it as his first cub.

He said that he could only fly one airplane at a time,
so what difference did it make?

It's so funny.  TC thinks I am a [b]bad person[/b].  If they
only had a clue what really went on ...

[Chuck Ellsworth]

What possible difference would it make to anyone that I would give instruction / advice to to improve their flying skills if I had a valid pilots license?


Transport can not stop me from being a consultant to licensed pilots..period.


There is no way they would even consider approaching me anyhow because they have no legal power over me and they know I would just tell them to go fuck them self.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

What did you think of the Fleet Canuck Scudrunner?

[Colonel]

[quote]a whopping $100 fine[/quote]

I remember a woman - with a TC-issued PPL - who
landed accidentally at Pearson, without talking to
anyone, on a runway that was closed for maintenance,
with equipment and people on it.

Yup, same $100 fine.

A know of a PPL that tried to take off a loaded
Cherokee on a hot day from a short grass strip and
literally crashed and burned.  Fucked up his pax's
back.  Donny's never been the same since.  No
punishment at all.

An ultralight flight instructor, proudly tells everyone
about all of his forced landings.  He runs out of
gas regularly.  TC loves him.  No punishments.
He's the same guy that rolled up a Kitfox, pretending
to be a tailwheel instructor.  No punishment.

A TC Inspector, hand-propped a champ with the
brakes off, throttle pinned and no one inside.  He
did the "hold onto the strut" until it smashed into
an obstacle, destroying it and the airplane.  No
punishment.  Testified in court that he thinks I
am a bad person, despite the fact that he has
never seen me fly.

Two TC Inspectors, leave the gear up, bounce a
King Air off the runway at Gatineau, and instead
of landing immediately as a prudent pilot would,
carelessly and recklessly depart cross-country
back to CYOW, raining parts down on populated
Ottawa.  No punishment, of course.  TC Inspectors
can do no wrong.  Ever.

I am not making up any of the above.

Then, people with perfect safety records over 40
years that have been subjectively evaluated by TC
as [b]BAD PEOPLE[/b] are hounded and harassed endlessly.

Good job!

PS  When do I get my phone and laptop back?  It's
been over six months since they took them.

[Slick Goodlin]

[quote author=Colonel Sanders link=topic=3774.msg10171#msg10171 date=1469753817]
[quote]a really good instructor[/quote]

The problem is, that they don't exist.  Like
a unicorn, the odds of you finding one are
pretty slim.[/quote]
I was going to dispute this point but... I can't.  I wanted to say that a really good instructor should be able to inspire their student to always do better but on reflection, the guy I had was pretty 'meh' in that department.  The thing is, I [i]did[/i] want to get better and that drive really came from some flying role models of mine that I had growing up, and how I wanted to be able to impress them.  I guess the question now is can some stranger (because that's how most instructors start out to you) give any random person that same drive?  I don't know the answer to that but maybe someone here can chime in.  Maybe I'll find out myself if I ever bite the bullet and start that one-Champ flying club of my dreams.

[Slick Goodlin]

Shiny, I'm not talking about blowing sunshine.  I'm talking about telling your student everything they can do better every time it comes up, but keep them coming back.  I suppose you could call it I stilling that drive for perfection, which is exactly what the suggested taildraggers in this thread do except they do it in the form of "Screw up and you owe me a plane."

I picked the humble buck fifty because it's tough and forgiving but not so soulless as to hide your mistakes from you, so long as you pay attention.