As I got to my hangar I saw a Cessna O-1 taxi by on the way to the fuel island. So, I plugged in my engine heater, closed up the hangar and headed off to meet our visitor.  The pilot’s name is Carl and he is from near Fort Bragg, CA. He flies from his own 1300’ grass strip on his property.  He had come to Stead today to drop off a computer for his daughter and to pick up his grand-daughter to fly her back to Ft. Bragg for a visit. He said his grand-daughter loves to fly. I imagine the view from the back seat with all that glass around her is really spectacular. After all, the “O” in O-1 stands for Observation. It’s what the plane was designed to do.

The Cessna O-1 Bird Dog started out as the Cessna 305A, a derivative of the venerable Cessna model 170. The model was submitted to the Army by Cessna in 1950 in response to a request for a new liaison aircraft made of metal rather than the tube and fabric models that had been used in WW II. The Army liked the model and ordered over 400 of them, giving the new aircraft the L-19 designation. The Department of Defense ended up buying almost 3200 of the aircraft and passed them out to virtually all of the military services. In 1962 the Army re-designated the model as the O-1. The Bird Dog name reputedly came about as the result of a naming contest among Cessna employees.

In addition to being used in Korea, the O-1 saw extensive use in Viet Nam. It was used both as a liaison aircraft and, more importantly, as a Forward Air Controller (FAC) aircraft. FACs directed air strikes on enemy troop positions by marking target locations with white phosphorus (“willy pete”) rockets carried on the underside of the wings. As the Viet Nam conflict progressed more and more of the Bird Dogs were turned over to the Vietnamese Air Force to be flown in support of their own forces.  In 1975 one South Vietnamese major reportedly loaded his family (wife and five children) into the pack of his O-1 took off and evaded ground fire long enough to fly past the South Vietnam coastline eventually coming upon a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.  The O-1 circled the carrier and dropped a written message requesting the deck be cleared so that he could land.  Several UH-1 helicopters were pushed into the water and the plane landed safely.

Carl said that he intended to enter the competition for restored aircraft that is held during the Reno Air Races each year. If you plan to attend the races you may see this plane on display in the competition area near where these photos were taken.

I left off Part I with a comment about an ‘unusual attitude’ I experienced during one of my spin training sessions.

Unlike some civilian flight schools where students are assigned to instructors in an effort to even the workload (and income), the student/instructor pairing at UPT is done by an analysis of the student’s performance in the previous phase of training. Stronger students were placed with the newer instructors and weaker students were placed with instructors with more experience. That meant that the longer that you were an instructor the worse your students became. The pilot screening process weeded out the really weak flyers, but there were always some individuals that took just a little bit longer or a needed little more help to see the big picture. By the time I had been instructing for three years, I was not being assigned the top members of the UPT class. I looked forward to the challenges but some days it was just plain frustrating. Then on this particular day one of the newer instructors in our flight called in sick and I filled in for a day instructing with one of the better students in the class. And it was spin training day.

We went through all the ground briefings and he seemed to have an entry-level understanding of the aerodynamics of the spin and a good handle on the entry and recovery procedures. With the ground training covered, we made our way to the equipment room to pick up our flight gear and headed for the airplane. The departure went fine and as we exited the airport area we contacted the controller to obtain a practice area assignment.  At that time the practice areas for the T-37 fanned out to the north of the airport. I don’t remember how many there were, but they were fairly large and were segmented into high and low areas with the bottom of the low area at 10,000′ MSL and the top of the high area at 25,000′ MSL.  You could be assigned just the low or high segments or you could get both, depending on the practice area traffic.

We were assigned a high area that day, called entering the area and proceeded to climb up to 22,000 ft to begin our spin training. I demonstrated the first spin and recovery, talking our way through the steps and pointing out the aircraft reactions to each step. The student seemed to be following along and responded to the occasional question. After the demonstration we worked our way back up to the top of the area. Now it was the student’s turn to give it a try. Since I had not flown with this student before and since it was his first attempt I was very alert to what may or may not happen. His spin entry went fine and the aircraft was reacting in a predictable manner as it stabilized in the spin. After a couple of turns I gave the ‘Recover’ command and the student performed the recovery almost perfectly. Great! It was going to be a really nice day of flying. Back up to the top of the area to try another one. I was relaxed. Boy was that the wrong thing to do…..

Second try. The spin entry was fine, the spin developed and I again gave the command to recover. He did a great job right up to step 6. If you remember from Part I, step 5 is when you apply full forward stick to break the stall and step 6 is when you recover from the vertical dive that resulted from step 5. Without step 6 the controls are positioned so that the throttles are at idle, the rudder is at the full limit opposite the spin direction and the control stick is full forward. If you leave the controls there the aircraft pitches down and through vertical and back up to the horizon to put you inverted and in an aerodynamic stall with full rudder applied. You now find yourself in an opposite direction inverted spin.

As an instructor, you really should not ever let a student surprise you this much. I came back to full alert and instinctively grabbed the throttles and the stick and said ‘I have the aircraft.’  First challenge. In the cockpit photo shown in Part I, you can see that both seats in the T-37 operate with right-handed stick and left-handed throttle. There is a difference between the students throttles and the instructors throttles. The instructor’s set has the cut-off feature that shuts down the engine, accomplished by lifting the throttles up and back over the idle stop. On the ground or in normal flight, there has to be a conscious effort to raise the throttles. However, when you are inverted and you grab the throttles the weight of your arm will very easily pull the throttles up (down?) and aft. So, now I found myself inverted, rotating and watching the engines spool down.

When faced with multiple, overlapping emergencies you have to be able to prioritize. One way to do that is to determine which of the problems will kill you first.  I knew that the airplane was not going to come out of the inverted spin by itself and I knew that it was only going to take about another minute and half to reach the ground, so that project seemed to jump out into the lead. As I said in the last episode, the first three steps of the spin recovery are designed to stabilize the spin so that the remaining steps are accomplished from the same point each time. I centered the rudder and abruptly applied full back stick. That caused the aircraft to flip right-side-up and continue it’s spin from there. Things were now looking a bit more familiar. I methodically accomplished the remainder of the recovery steps and the plane came out of the spin gliding happily toward the bottom of our assigned area.

The next situation  to consider was the possibility of running into traffic occupying the lower part of our practice area. I called the area controller and asked for the lower area in addition to our assigned upper area. We were about 1000′ from the bottom of our allotted airspace and would probably go into the lower area before we got an engine started. I managed to get the request out to the controller, but just after that the aircraft generators went off line due to the winding down of the engines. We no longer had radios to hear the reply and no longer had a working transponder that allowed the controller to see us. The only way to fix that was to restart the engines, our next project.

I had the student get out his checklist and read off the steps necessary to do an in-flight restart…twice.  Both of the engines restarted and as the engines spooled up the generators came back on line. Our headsets were filled with radio calls from the area controller looking for a response from us. The controller had replied to our lower area request, was getting no response from us and had lost our radar return.  They were starting to think about the possibility that they had lost an airplane. There was audible relief in the controllers voice when we finally responded. It turned out that the lower portion of our practice area was not being used and the controller assigned the airspace to us. We had descended about 1500′ into the lower area and were beginning to climb back up as fast as we could. Instead we leveled off and thought about what to do next.  Both the student and I were a little unsettled, so we leveled off and just flew around the practice area for a while to relax. Then I transferred the controls to the student and had him fly us back to the airport and enter the pattern for a full-stop landing. We called the lesson incomplete and rescheduled it the the next day.

What had I learned by the end of that day? First, as an instructor, don’t for a minute believe that just because a student shows strong capabilities one minute that they can’t have total brain fade the next and give you one of your worst nightmares. Second, at any level of your flying career,  if you find yourself facing multiple emergencies/failures/situations prioritize the individual problems and start methodically working through the list.  You will eventually reach a point where things look familiar, the problems have been resolved or you are able to live with what remains.

My second assignment as a USAF pilot (back in the mid 1970s) was as a T-37 instructor at Webb AFB, TX.  At that time all students attending USAF  Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) started with an orientation in the Cessna T-41 (Cessna 172 variant), then progressed to the T-37, side-by-side jet trainer and finished up with the tandem-seat, supersonic Northrop T-38. The T-37 was a fun plane to fly. It wasn’t a super-fast airplane, but in my opinion that made it much more fun to fly. Aerobatics took fewer g’s and less altitude to complete than the T-38. Then there were the spins. The training syllabus in the T-37 included spin entry and recovery while the T-38 training only included various types of stalls.

I have no idea whether spin training is still part of the Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) syllabus. I see now that the T-37 will be officially retired from the USAF inventory at the end of the month ( 31 July 2009). It has been replaced by the turboprop Raytheon/Beechcraft T-6 Texan II.  The end of an era, for sure. The T-37 began training USAF pilot training students in 1957.

In order to instruct at one of the Air Force’s primary training facilities it was necessary to graduate from the Pilot Instructor Training Course (PIT) conducted at Randolph AFB, San Antonio, TX.  The courses were aircraft-specific and if you were going to be a T-37 instructor the course included enough spin training to insure that you could adequately explain the aerodynamics of a spin and, while spinning the aircraft, talk through the recovery process describing the aircraft’s reactions to each step of the recovery. After about a week of training in spins we were fairly confident of our ability to get into and out of one in the training environment and how to avoid experiencing one inadvertently.

When we practiced spins we first had to climb to at least 20,000’ AGL. In west Texas where I was an instructor that meant climbing to about 23,000 feet MSL. Since the T-37 is an unpressurized aircraft, our maximum altitude was 25,000’ MSL, so we were pushing our limits. The reason we had to be that high to enter a spin was that once the spin was fully stabilized the T-37 descended vertically at about 10,000 fpm. That gave you about 2 minutes to exit the spin or it would stop rotating on it’s own when it hit the ground. It was quite the ride.

Here is an excerpt from Bud Davisson’s article on his AirBum web site.that describes his T-37 spin experience for an Air Progress article:

So, we did a few spins. Ron [the instructor flying with Bud] declined demonstrating even one. He just cautioned me about doing the recovery exactly right and away we went. At our weight, the stall happened at about 75 knots and I stomped rudder and sucked the stick back as it broke. The outside wing snapped over the top and we twisted down into the first several turns. In the first turn the nose went down and then came back up almost to the horizon and then went down again. It oscillated like that several times before it settled down into a surprisingly flat attitude (compared to a C-150 or Cub). The recovery is something right out of a NASA handbook. You bang the opposite rudder to the floor, wait one turn (which ain’t long) then nail the stick to the forward stop-ALL the way forward. For a second, the spin appears to speed up. It whips through about a turn and a half and suddenly bangs to a stop. At that point, you’ve got to be on your toes …

Bud doesn’t relate the actual spin recovery steps. It’s amazing that after 35 years I can still recite the recovery steps. They were:

1. Throttles – Idle
2. Rudder and Ailerons – Neutral
3. Stick – Abruptly Full Aft and Hold
4. Rudder – Abruptly apply Full Rudder Opposite the Direction of the Spin and Hold
5. One Turn After Applying Opposite Rudder – Stick Abruptly Full Forward
6. Controls Neutral and recover from the Dive

The first three steps were designed to get the aircraft in the same starting point for each recovery attempt. They establish the aircraft a more or less stabilized spin condition. Between steps 3 and 4 you had to figure out which direction you were spinning. In theory you should know the spin direction since you’re the one who started the spin in the first place, but as a student in the heat of battle, that might just slip your mind, especially when the aircraft starts whipping around. The intent was to provide a sequence of steps in case a spin was entered inadvertently. As I remember, in a stabilized spin the T-37 rotated at about 3 seconds per turn with the nose dropping to about 30 degrees down once it stabilized. The spin axis was on a vertical line that passed through the cockpit between the two seats. If you referenced the turn needle you could determine the direction of rotation, but if you looked at the slip/skid ball the instrument on the left side of the cockpit would have the ball to the left and the instrument on the right side of the cockpit would have it’s ball to the right. One thing that you needed to do at step 4 was to pick some point on the horizon or on the ground when you slammed in full rudder travel opposite the spin direction. The next step was to patiently(?) wait as the aircraft rotated until that point reappeared in front of you. This was an excellent way to experience time slowing to a crawl with an adrenaline rush. When your point finally reappeared you would  immediately try to push  the stick forward through the instrument panel, the nose would pitch down toward vertical and you would recover from the dive.

The application of the rudder opposite to the spin direction would start the recovery and, in some cases, could actually stop the spin rotation. Unfortunately, the students rarely noticed the rotation coming to a stop. On those planes, instead of accomplishing step 5 you could just move the stick to a slightly nose down position, the stall would be broken and the plane would recover. Again, in the heat of the battle, the student would be focused only on waiting for that rudder application point to reappear and wouldn’t sense the spin rotation slowing. I remember one myopic student getting to step 5 just as the rotation stopped. I tried yelling “NO!” but I doubt if he heard me. He slammed the stick to the forward stop just as the aircraft had regained  almost full control effectiveness. I had to check my helmet when we got back to the base to make sure I hadn’t cracked it when my head hit the canopy.  The average T-37 would merely slow it’s rotation slightly with the opposite rudder applied and then step 5 would pitch the nose down to vertical, breaking the stall. The requirement for step 6 would then be quickly obvious as the airspeed would build quickly if the nose wasn’t immediately raised to the horizon.

In the T-37, if a student froze at the controls during a spin recovery we had two or three options for regaining their attention. We wore helmets and oxygen masks with an intercom system connecting the two headsets and sat side-by-side in the cockpit. If yelling as loud as you could didn’t bring the student back to reality we could slap the student a few times on the side of the helmet. The half-inch thick aircraft checklist with it’s metal rings worked well. If that wasn’t enough, our next-to-last resort was to grab the oxygen hose that lead to their mask and kink the hose. The inability to breathe would usually get their attention or transfer the student’s fixation from the ground rushing up at them to finding air to breathe. The last resort was ‘Handles-Raise, Triggers – Squeeze’, the ejection sequence.

In part two we’ll find out how I found myself in an inverted spin with both engines shut off.

Part II of Spin Training in the Cessna T-37

In the civilian world instead of additional duties you have life. I had a little over a week off between trips this time and never did make it out to the airport. The first couple of days I wasn’t worth much good to anybody since I was still in the time-zone fog generated by the last trip. Then a project in the back yard popped up on the to-do list.  A picket fence with gate needed to be built around a new vegetable garden.  Two days and four bags of concrete and that project was completed. The next day I was going to go to the airport.

Not so fast. My truck, which the day before had run just fine, was barely making enough power to get up our driveway. That’s not a good sign for a diesel F-350. I spent a day troubleshooting. Nothing I could find was causing the problem. These days if you don’t have a device that plugs into the vehicle’s computer the troubleshooting process is mainly looking at the engine and scratching your head. Oh for the days when you could open the hood of your vehicle and see around the engine and all the way down to the ground. There was an engine block symbol lit up on the dashboard display that led me to the owner’s manual.  Yes, the truck had fuel in the tank and yes, the cap was on the fuel filler.  That left three items on their list. One was the emissions system which I was neither qualified nor capable of checking. The other possibilities were that the fuel in the tank was bad or there was water in the fuel filter.  The fuel tank had just been filled a couple of days prior, so water in the fuel was a possibility. I did more research and found the process for draining the fuel filter and checking the fluid that was drained. It didn’t look like any water was present in the drained fluid and an attempt to run the engine showed no change in the dismal performance. Time to call in the experts.

I limped the truck down to our friendly neighborhood mechanic and said to call when they came up with a solution. I got the call. It seems that there is an acknowledged but ignored problem with the wiring harness in the engine compartment. Since everything that goes on with the engine is passed to the computer, a problem with the wiring harness passing the information can manifest itself in all sorts of problems. In this case, three of the fuel injectors were not getting the word that they were supposed to be supplying fuel to the engine.  A day and a half later I had a new set of wiring harnesses, a beautifully running truck and an emptier bank account. On the drive back home the engine ran great but I found a different problem.  I didn’t have an operational cruise control. I hate it when that happens. The truck went back into the shop two days later so that they could try to find where all the necessary electrons are having their party rather than visiting the cruise control module. It took them about 2 hours to find a bad connection in one of the new wiring harnesses. The mechanic ‘adjusted’ the pins in the connector, but it back together and gave it a test drive.  All fixed.

I couldn’t leave the truck in the shop for them to continue their work the day I that found the cruise control problem because the next day I had an appointment to get my latest FAA medical exam.  Even though my position is First Officer (copilot),  I hold a full type rating in the 747-400 and I often find myself sitting in the left seat acting as the captain while the ‘real’ captain takes his/her break. For that reason I am required to maintain a Class I FAA medical, renewed every six months.  The exam doesn’t take long, you just can’t phone  it in yet. Maybe someday we’ll have one of those Tricorders that Dr. McCoy had, but I doubt I’ll still be flying then. The AME that I use is a great guy. He’s an ex-AF flight surgeon and an outstanding photographer. The walls of his office are lined with aircraft photos he has taken. He is also the medical representative for the Reno Air Races and a member of the Reno Air Racing Association board of directors. My biggest concern with passing the medical exam is usually centered around the eye exam. Some day I’ll learn which of those lines near the bottom of the chart is the one that is the pass or fail point. I wear glasses for both near and far vision and probably should go get a new prescription since it has been two years since my last prescription was filled, but I am also a world-class procrastinator.  I passed the eyesight part of the exam this time with just a little squinting and procrastination has again set in concerning the trip to the optometrist.

The rest of the time I have been home that hasn’t been filled with miscellaneous small projects and throwing the frisbee for the dogs has been spent trying to prepare for my airline’s annual recurrent training. April is the month that my training is due and I am scheduled to visit the training center in about two weeks, very shortly after my next trip. So far, my study emphasis has been on the systems part of the training.

Each year the training session reviews half of the systems on the aircraft and we are evaluated on our knowledge with a computer-generated multiple-choice test. This year we only have to cover: Warning Systems, the APU, Engines, Navigation, Flight Instruments, Autoflight, Pneumatics, Ice and Rain protection, Air Conditioning, Pressurization and Emergency Equipment. We have three manuals for our aircraft. Two are called the Aircraft Operating Manual (AOM), Volumes I and II and the third is the Cockpit Operating Manual (COM). Volume II of the AOM covers the mechanical systems of the aircraft. It is a 3″ thick binder of letter-sized pages, light reading for those cold, stormy nights. The COM covers emergency and abnormal operations. So far I have managed to read the AOM volume II chapters associated with the appropriate systems, their associated chapters in the COM and have waded through the online question bank. There is another question bank in booklet form with different questions that I am taking with me on my next trip. I’m also carrying volume one of the AOM to read through. that volume is only about 1.5″ thick. It contains expanded explanations of all our checklists, flow patterns and preflight inspections along with the approved methods for accomplishing flight maneuvers, such as instrument approaches, engine-out approaches, GPWS and traffic warning maneuvers.

My next trip has a 68-hour layover in Nagoya, Japan, so now I’ll have plenty to do on the layover. And here I was afraid I’d get bored…

I spent most of my last four years in the Air Force teaching or evaluating pilots while air refueling.  Most of the missions were fairly routine, but every once in a while we’d have an interesting time trying to complete a training mission.

Shortly after they first started painting the C-5 in the dark camouflage colors (mottled dark greens and blacks) I was on a night air refueling training flight. It was a dark night with no moon and we were flying over a lower cloud deck, so the ground lights were not visible. All our checklists we completed and we had been cleared into position. We were nearing the contact position, but were a little low compared to the normal line of approach so I told the student to move up a little. He was making a nice correction when suddenly the boom operator called a breakaway. We started our descent and the tanker started pulling away in a climb when a different voice came on the radio and said to terminate the breakaway. We stopped our descent at 500′ low and the tanker slowly descended back to the air refueling altitude while we maintained visual separation. The new voice came back on the radio and apologized for the breakaway call. It was the boom operator instructor talking. He explained that the student had never refueled a C-5 and with the dark paint and dark night, he did not see the aircraft until we were almost into the contact position and it looked so big in his refueling window that he thought it was about to hit the tanker.  A huge black aircraft had just appeared out of the darkness and startled him. He did exactly what he should have, I could not fault him for that. After the end of our training session he would have much more experience and would know what to look for on future flights. We talked to the boom instructor a little more as we progressed down the refueling track and learned that this wasn’t an isolated incident, especially for night refueling.

On another flight, this time a daylight trainer, I was paired with two fairly good students, late in their training program. We were on an east-west air refueling track that ran through the center of Kansas with one end just north of Kansas City.  I can’t remember the altitude that were using, but it was usually somewhere in the low 20′s. We were in the contact position, headed east, near the end of the track. I could see a huge thunderstorm off to the south of us with the top of the anvil extending north and crossing the refueling track just a little above our altitude. I made a comment to the tanker pilot, that it wasn’t necessary to go all the way to the end of the track before he made the turn. (We often run up and down the track a couple of times during a training mission, staying in the contact position during the 180-degree turn for practice.) Apparently the tanker crew didn’t think the overhang would cause a problem because they continued on the track centerline. As a precaution, I took control of the aircraft just before we reached the anvil extension. I disconnected from the boom and told the boom operator that I was just going to back out a few feet as a precaution. We were sitting there just aft of boom with the boom sitting about even with the top of our cockpit. As we entered the bottom of the anvil’s whispy clouds I could see static electricity starting to build up around our cockpit window frame. Little blue discharges were dancing around the corners of the windows. Just then a standing static discharge  formed and connected the bottom of the air refueling boom with the center post of our windshield. It was a really beautiful sight, but I could almost hear the boom operator yelling to his tanker pilot. They immediately added power and rolled into a 30-degree banked turn to the left. I fell a little farther aft as they added power and the static discharge dissipated, not having enough energy to bridge the larger space between the planes. We rolled out on the track heading west and continued the mission. Neither crew mentioned it again, but the next time we got to the east end of the track, the tanker pilot made the turn well short of the overhanging cloud.

The last ‘fun’ experience I’ll relate also involved thunderstorms. This time we were on a north-south track, I don’t remember the exact location. It was a night air refueling training mission and the flight had been going fairly smoothly. Once the air refueling rendezvous is completed, the receiver sets the aircraft radar system in the standby mode so that it does not radiate energy toward the tanker. It then becomes the tanker crew’s responsibility to provide weather avoidance. I knew from the weather briefing we received before our flight that thunderstorms were forecast at the northern end of our track but that they should be widely scattered. As we got farther north I could see lightning flashes in my peripheral vision while we were in the contact position and assumed that the storms were far enough away to not be a factor since the tanker was continuing down the track. I asked the tanker how the track looked farther north with reference to the storms and mentioned that we could just shorten the track if they were going to be a problem. I didn’t get a response and figured that they were taking a closer look at their weather radar before making a decision.

Suddenly the boom operator called a breakaway and the tanker pushed in the power, climbed, turned and disappeared. I was forced to reduce power and descend, radar off, into a nest of storms. The tanker had taken us into what appeared to be a blind alley between storms, decided they couldn’t continue and elected to exit the area as quickly as they could. We turned on our radar and waited what seemed like forever for it to make a couple of sweeps and to give us a picture of where we were and how we could exit the area. There appeared to be a small opening between storms about 45 degrees to our right, so I headed that way, lightning all around us. I’m not sure why we didn’t take at least one strike somewhere on the plane. We were bounced around and found moderate rain, but eventually made it back to the track. I had a very short conversation with the tanker and decided that by the time we got together again we would be at the opposite end of the track. This mission was planned with two different tankers. We had been working with the first one for one trip back and forth on the track, then were to rendezvous with the second tanker for another circuit. I said not-so-fond farewells to the first tanker and headed for the ARIP to begin the second rendezvous. We briefed the second tanker crew on the weather on the north end of the track and made sure they understood to turn well short of the weather.

When you are the leader of a formation, whether it is an air refueling, a tactical formation or just out having fun with your friends, your primary job is to insure the safety of the other planes with you. You must plan much farther ahead than you normally do because it is going to take longer to move a formation than a single plane. If you see traffic or some other hazard you can’t just roll into a 45 degree bank and dive or climb to avoid the hazard because the other planes in the formation will not be able to follow you. Being a formation lead is as much mental work as flying on the wing or boom is hand-eye work.

Air Refueling the C-5, Part 1

Air Refueling the C-5, Part 2