from the right seat

The sun is shining, the air is warming up and the snow is starting to melt a bit. I’ve been digging out all morning but taking breaks here and there to have some fun playing with M2. Standing in the driveway looking at the mounds of snow I’ve piled up in the yard, I noticed that the pristine, untouched surfaces of snow reminded me of a sandy beach. If I closed my eyes I could hear the soothing lap-lap of water on a dock and the hungry cries of gulls. Frostbite induced hallucination? Perhaps. But I couldn’t resist setting up and taking this shot, as a reminder to smile and enjoy the moment.

“When the fog horn blows, I want to hear it. I don’t have to fear it.”
– Van Morrison

Well, it’s another snow laden Saturday here in the Washington, D.C. area, but conditions are far worse than last weekend, when at least some people were apparently able to go fly while others were stuck behind snow banks. The developing situation today is what everyone’s calling Snowpalooza, worthy of maximum font size newspaper headlines. What’s a lonely pilot to do on a day like this? Think about flying, eat soup, pour a glass of wine, read a book and maybe clean the house. Not much else to do.

So here’s my flying thought for the day. (I have plenty of other flying related thoughts, actually, but I’ll keep them to myself, for now.) Looking at the weather radar, if I did not know that it was February and my car was covered with nearly two feet of snow, I would look at this radar picture and think that it’s just a moderate rain shower that might be passable on my way to a fun afternoon on the Eastern Shore. Sigh. I guess that will be my happy flying thought for the day.

And I do mean that in the most literal sense possible. The National Weather Service for the Baltimore/Washington area issued a winter storm warning at 2:10 p.m. suggesting that we are in store for more than a foot of wet snow to fall upon our homes and runways, starting tomorrow and continuing on through Saturday, with gusts building up to 30 miles per hour.

Lovely. I really should have moved to Florida when I had the chance.

I went for a walk with M2 this morning, fully expecting a salty, icy mess to which he would hold up a paw in pathetic protest, and we’d never make it around the block. About 5 inches of snow fell overnight, but the temperature is actually quite pleasant now. I can hear the melting snow dripping from the roof and running down the gutters. M2 seemed to enjoy himself out there, prancing through the fluffy piles. Personally I’d much rather be running with him on a warm sandy beach, but I guess this will have to do, for now.

Maybe one day someone will develop a reset button labeled LIFE. A do-over button for the whole damn thing. Wouldn’t that be nice? Sure it would. Right? But it would never work. Because we’d keep pressing it over and over, getting so fixated on the stupid button that we’d forget to fly the airplane in between reboots, and crash. All they’d find among the smoldering ashes is a calloused thumb.

You can never completely reset your life, because you cannot erase the past. The baggage compartment never gets emptied, just reorganized to meet weight and balance limitations. You land every now and then, refuel the plane, grab a cup of bad coffee and a bag of junk food from the vending machine in the FBO, and take off to join the next leg of the journey. I think these engineers got it right when they labeled this button LVL, which when pressed, will recover the airplane back to straight and level flight from whatever unusual attitude it was in.

Winter is a cruel tease. Saturday we got hammered with 5 inches of snow, leaving an icy mess on the airport. I was supposed to fly with a student yesterday but his hangar was plowed in, and the ramp was too slippery anyway. We met at Starbucks for a ground lesson instead, and made very good use of the time. Still, it was frustrating to stare out the window at a clear blue sky and long to be flying.

When you’re flying merrily along in the clouds, blinded from the outside world but comforted by the familiar hum of the warm engine, the only thing you have to guide you safely toward the runway is data, and the technology that makes the data meaningful. The instruments process the data to tell you where you are, where you are going and how you’re supposed to get there. The pilot’s job is to monitor the instruments and use the information they present to arrive safely at the destination.

But sometimes the instruments lie, either because they are broken, or because the data is bad, or maybe both. The attitude indicator may lure you into believing you are making a gentle turn toward the final approach course, when in fact you are spiraling toward the ground, toward certain death.

A good instrument pilot can prevent any such catastrophe from developing by learning to spot the early warning signs of instrument failure — a drop in vacuum pressure, or when two instruments that are supposed to be telling the same story, don’t quite agree, leaving you to turn to other sources for the truth. Unfortunately for the pilot this is much easier said than done. Sometimes you just don’t see the poop until it hits the prop, and at that point, all you can do is react.

But there’s hope for us hapless cloud hackers, and that hope lives inside our brains. While we can’t always trust the physical sensations we experience while flying, we can train our minds and our eyes (and if you will allow me some zen-like poetic license, also our mind’s eye) to scan for the truth, constantly and steadily.