Summer School

Project runway

By Laurie Mona

I’m nervous about taking flying lessons.
My first—and last—time in a private plane had been on a flight piloted by my brother, when I learned the game of “make your sister scream” just doesn’t get old. I figure this assignment is a golden opportunity to just get over it already.
I also wonder if I’ve inherited anything more than dimples from my Grandpa Lee. A lifelong pilot and flight instructor during World War II, he trained women pilots who ferried bombers to England. Yet all these years later, only 6 percent of the 600,000 U.S. pilots are female, a stat which floors me. What’s up with that?
“I don’t know,” says Legacy Aviation owner and flight instructor Chris Crosby. “Women can be better pilots than men; they’re gentler, a little smoother with the controls. I personally don’t see any reason why they don’t—I wish more did.”
Crosby’s students generally begin with a 30-minute interactive computer program that introduces basic flight fundamentals. Then it’s up into the sky for a “Discovery Flight,” a hands-on experience under the guidance of the co-piloting instructor.
We are training in a Cessna Skyhawk 172, a four-seat, single-engine aircraft. Crosby walks me through the pre-flight inspection. Checklist in hand, he goes over the plane from nose to tail (or ‘empanage,’ if you want to sound like a pilot), then back up the other side. After inspection, we climb up into the cockpit.
I sit in the pilot’s seat, Crosby in the co-pilot seat to my right; his control yoke is linked to my own, each side has a pair of floor rudder pedals. Once we’re strapped in, we pull on the miked headphones we’ll use to talk to each other during the flight and to the Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower.
I turn the ignition key to start the propeller. Crosby points out a half dozen dials in the instrument panel to reference during flight, and pushes in the throttle for power. The floor pedals connected to the tail rudder steer and brake the plane on the ground—left rudder pedal turns left, right pedal turns right, brakes on top of each. Though the control yoke is front and center like a car’s steering wheel, it does nothing on the ground.
“Go ahead and taxi us out to the runway,” says Crosby, but I have a hard time coordinating the turns and can’t for the life of me follow the center line. I find myself grabbing for the yoke, and he reminds me, “That’s not going to do anything.” I’m fighting habits from driving a car, one of the first hurdles people need to get over.
As Crosby corrects the steering with his own pedals, we talk about the imminent liftoff. Once the throttle is pushed in to full power, we’ll taxi down the runway, and when at sufficient speed, pull back on the yoke to begin to climb. I’ve already lost track of what dial I’m supposed to reference, so I wait for him to tell me, “Start pulling back now ... back ... back ...” and we’re in the air. Liftoff is smooth and quick; it doesn’t seem possible it was that easy to get airborne.
Once we reach our flying altitude, I push in the yoke to lower the nose and straighten out. Crosby tells me to notice how my view of the nose through the windshield looks in relation to the horizon when we’re flying level. Since beginning pilots are taught to fly by visual flight rules (VFR), “You don’t want to be focused on the dials as much as have an awareness of the relation of the plane to outside horizons.” We practice banking left and right, returning to level. The controls are swiftly responsive, the necessary adjustments to air currents slight but constant. Unlike how I often drive, it’s clearly not something you can daydream your way through.
We’ve been flying in grayish skies, but eventually the clouds move lower. We hear ATC warn that a plane is approaching for landing, watch for it. We’re suddenly in the midst of an opaque sky, and Crosby smirks, “Yeah right,” noting that this has become instrument flight rules conditions—we can’t see anything. “But our flight plan is VFR,” which means lesson over.
As we head back to the runway and descend, I brace for an impact that doesn’t come—I don’t even feel the touchdown. What exactly was there to be afraid of again?
Legacy Aviation opened in October of ’07, offering flight instruction and plane rental next to the Rochester International Airport. A native of the Twin Cities, Crosby got hooked on flying when he took a Discovery Flight, started taking flying lessons, and eventually got his pilot’s license and flight instructor certification. Why ‘Legacy?’ “My uncle said to me, we don’t have generations of a family business to hand down, but after I got my pilot’s license, my uncle got his, then his son did, and so did my dad—this could be our legacy. It also refers to the fact that a private pilot certificate is good for life.”
If you want to learn, Crosby recommends taking lessons twice a week or more so you build a familiarity with the unique sensations and perspectives of flight. “The more frequently you can train, the higher your learning curve can be. Ultimately you can get your license sooner, and have less cost for lessons.”
The FAA requires a minimum of 40 hours of flight time to get a private pilot certificate. “If you’re able to fly a minimum of two times a week consistently, it’s possible you’ll be done and get your license in three and a half months.”
During our next lesson, Crosby performs maneuvers to demo the capabilities of the plane, including a steep turn which instantly triggers vertigo in me, and climbs and dives that create positive and negative G-forces. Though he’s warned me, my stomach drops like on a roller-coaster, then nearly rises up with my lunch. Now I remember what scares me.
I’m relieved when we return to regular flying, but I get nervous when we hit turbulence. When I question why it doesn’t faze Crosby, he says, “What’s going to happen? It’s not going to pull the plane apart, we’re not going to fly into anybody else up here ...” I realize I’m still referencing losing control when driving, when you worry about going off the road, or hitting other cars. “There’s very little I’m afraid of when it comes to flying,” says Crosby. “If you look at hours driven compared to hours flown, flying is way safer.”
I’m beginning to remember what flying straight looks like, learning which instruments to reference and to notice when I’m doing something wrong and need to make a correction. I’m starting to catch on. It’s a challenge, one of the reasons Crosby loves flying. “Every day is different, no two days are the same. I like the fact that you can’t take anything for granted, you have to be on your game.” As Curtis Rykal, another of his students, puts it, “It’s the ultimate multi-task.” And you can’t beat the views.