Thrilled with the chance to go flying again, I found my flight gear in the basement, grabbed my aviation headset, kissed my wife and kids good night, and hurried off to the airport to meet my friend.

As I would be a front-seat passenger on the flight, I intended to observe the goings-on and effectively get a reintroduction to the world of GA that I had missed over the last few years. From previous articles, you may recall that I am a vocal proponent for the use of home flight simulation, a believer that the benefits of a modest setup can engage the user in aviation decision-making, learning, and fun. However, having not flown a real-world flight in four years, it felt like sufficient time had passed where I could be reminded and maybe surprised about some facets of the experience I had forgotten.

• READ MORE: To Providence or Bust, in Simulated Flight

Driving to the Airport

I did not expect to enjoy it, but the drive to the airport provided some post-workday decompression and reflection time. I’d be joining my friend at Plymouth Municipal Airport (KPYM), located 30 miles south of Boston on Massachusetts’ southeastern coast. Usually, the 90-plus-minute drive from my home to the airport would be arduous and traffic-filled, but the relatively late departure gave me an unusually stress-free drive. It felt great to have my flight gear on the seat next to me again, a little stiff and dusty from lack of use, but ready to go.

I used some of the windshield time to think ahead about where I could try and be a helpful addition to the flight. Pulling off the highway to stop for fuel, I opened ForeFlight to check the weather. Clicking on the “Imagery” tab, I reviewed the “CONUS Weather” section and then read the Boston and New York area TAFs and METARs.

Although my friend had already reviewed the weather, it helped to get my head back in the game. Before arriving at the airport, I took some time to recall some favorite flights when I was PIC, flying friends and family on short flights around New England. Flipping through those memories in my logbook, I realized this would be my first flight since my grandfather passed back in December 2020.

As was our tradition in his final years, I would write him a complete account of every flight so he could enjoy it vicariously. It was a small token of my appreciation for the gift of heavily subsidized flight training he and my grandmother had provided me when I was in high school. I am fortunate he lived a long life in which he shared flying memories, such as taking the F4U Corsair on training flights in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Arriving at the airport, I had a few minutes to myself after parking at the hangar. Walking out to the airport fence, just as the sun sunk below the tree line, I reached into my jacket pocket to find a special artifact. I closed my hand around my grandfather’s pair of U.S. Navy wings he gave me for safekeeping. I looked out over the quiet evening of airplanes at rest in their tiedowns, a little bit of haze on the horizon lit up the sky in orange and dark pink. It was calm and peaceful, and I had forgotten how moving this scene could be at golden hour. In a few minutes, I would be on the fun side of the fence, getting to fly with a good friend in a gorgeous airplane on a near-perfect VFR evening.

The Preflight

Within a few minutes, my friend arrived, and I was trailing him through the ritual of the preflight and being reminded of how much I used to enjoy the process. Per the checklist, we started at the back of the leftwing, examining the aileron, flaps, and the assorted hardware. As we worked our way through the checklist to the right wing, I placed my hand on the leading edge and realized how much I missed the tactile connection with the airplane prior to flying it. The aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and X-Plane 12 are faithfully digital replicas, down to the finest visual details, but there was joy again in physically prepping the machine that would soon take us aloft. Following my friend, I contorted myself below the wing. Assuming a push-up position next to the right tire, he showed me how to check the brake condition and then used the fuel strainer to sump the fuel. Then, we checked the oil, engine cowl, propeller, and the rest of the checklist items.

Satisfied the aircraft was ready to fly, my friend offered me the left seat for the evening. Soon we were taxiing ahead into the calm darkness of the night. No other aircraft were moving at KPYM and the unicom frequency was quiet, save for our radio calls.

Takeoff was exciting. The vibration of the engine at full throttle and acceleration into the climb were physical sensations I definitely missed from my previous years of flight simulation. To address this, I recently added an HF8 Haptic Gaming Pad by Next Level Racing to my home flight sim. The pad sits on top of your flight sim seat and is used across the gaming and simulation world to bring additional sensation to your in-sim experience. Using tunable vibrations within eight different locations on the pad, it cleverly alerts the user to physical changes occurring to the airplane in different phases of flight.

For example, flying my Cape Air-liveried Beechcraft 58 Baron in MSFS2020, there is a satisfying thump felt in the seat pad when the landing gear fully retracts into the fuselage and the doors close. It reminded me of when the gear doors closed in the Piper Arrow I flew a few years ago. The pad also activates when the flaps are lowered into the slipstream and when the aircraft engines are idling below 1,000 rpm. Also, the pad vibrates when rapid pitch changes occur, alerting you to the buildup of G-forces. Without a haptic pad, the dynamic changes to the airplane during flight could only be experienced visually or audibly, leaving out the rest of the body.

Night VFR

Back in the real world, we were cruising through night VFR conditions that couldn’t have been much better. The first major landmark below us was the yellow-lighted outline of the Newport Bridge in Rhode Island, pointing like an arrow due west toward the Connecticut coastline. From the air, we followed the glowing path of vehicle headlights traveling on Interstate Highway 95 South. The lights from cars, neighborhoods, and nearby towns flowed forward, ahead of the airplane, all the way to Manhattan, just barely visible on the horizon. We crossed over Westerly, and my friend confirmed that a small patch of lights off the left wing was Montauk on the most easterly tip of Long Island. Between us and that thin sliver of land were the waters of Long Island Sound, which seemed to reflect almost no light and were the deepest black, exactly like the night sky above. Looking beyond Montauk, the only lights were a few stars and distant airliners making their way to and from the New York City airspace.

Next, we flew over the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and were soon turning back toward KPYM, picking up Boston Approach on com 1 and passing over the Class Charlie airspace of nearby Providence, Rhode Island (KPVD). Twelve miles west of KPYM, we started looking for the airport, leaning forward in our belts and peering out into the murky darkness ahead. With only a crescent moon above us, there was just enough haze to make it slightly challenging to find the horizon. The Cirrus SR20’s MFD indicated exactly where the airport should be, so my friend dialed up the correct frequency, hit the push-to-talk switch seven times, and a dazzling blue jewel, made up of hundreds of individual airport lights, burst from the darkness, giving shape to the airport a few miles ahead. Looking out over the nose, I watched how the perspective of the runway changed as we descended to the touchdown point.

Comparing both the real-world landing with some recent night landings from the left seat in my sim, I was very impressed by MSFS2020’s faithful digital representation of that critical phase of flight. On your own home simulator, you can easily adjust and tune your field of view to work best for your specific monitor and hardware setup. A majority of the work can be done through simple adjustments of the slider bars. Tuning the field-of-view and camera settings in your simis time well spent since being able to look around your virtual cockpit easily is critical to improving immersion and having an enjoyable experience.

After landing, we taxied back, shut down, and began the postflight activities of putting the aircraft back in the hangar for the evening. I was grateful for my friend’s invitation to join him and the subsequent reintroduction to GA and night VFR flying. All of my flight sim experiences at home are solo, except for the live communication with volunteer controllers, and a highlight of this flight was getting to catch up with my friend in person. It was all the more special knowing his departure to airline training would be coming this summer, making opportunities to fly together more scarce. After four years away from GA, I realized how much of the flight experience I had missed, both the familiar and unexpected. But being back at the airport, I felt like I was home again—and it felt great.

Hardware Recommendations

Gaming PC: This article was written during my switchover to a new Doghouse Systems gaming PC. John Pryor, Doghouse Systems owner and founder, specifically built the PC to tackle the graphic demands of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, significantly shortening the load time and allowing its highest graphics settings to be utilized. I have been busy tuning the graphics and switching over the flight controls and avionics. Having been an X-Plane user since 2015, I am learning the finer points of MSFS2020. If you’re in the market for a home flight simulator, look at Doghouse Systems custom-built gaming PCs.

HF8 Haptic Gaming Pad: I am really enjoying the recent addition of this upgrade to my flight sim seat. After installing the driver required to make it run with MSFS2020, I plan to use it on every flight. Even a Class D level simulator can’t replace the physical sensations of flying, but that isn’t the point of the pad. When I add new hardware to my sim, I do so hoping it will provide incremental improvements in the form of additional fun, greater immersion, or a new challenge—and the sensor pad checks those boxes.

This article first appeared in the August 2023/Issue 940 print edition of FLYING.

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The RPS, which runs about 3.5 hours, is a PowerPoint-driven interactive lecture that uses scenarios to refresh a pilot’s knowledge and decision-making skills. AOPA provides a scenario guide and reference materials for the participants. The seminars are often sponsored by aviation organizations or flight schools. The latter often have CFIs in attendance because the RPS can fulfill the ground requirement for a flight review—leaving the CFIs to handle the flying portion.

Teaching ground school or a seminar can be very challenging because the class is made up of learners with varying levels of interest, learning styles, and capabilities. The instructor’s job is to keep the pace of the class so no one is left behind. That can be difficult when you have a finite number of hours for the course, such as 40 hours in one month. How you present is very important. The good instructors use the slides as jumping-off points for teaching. The bad ones just read the slides off the screen, and it is so boring it could put fish to sleep.

This is probably why some folks walk into the seminar with an expression of pure dread on their faces. Perhaps they have suffered through boring ground schools taught by a CFI who didn’t either didn’t really know the material or thought reading out of the book verbatim was teaching.

The Two Types of CFIs

If you choose to become a CFI, you will look back on your training and realize you had two kinds of CFIs: those who taught you to teach, and those who taught you what not to be. You can learn to fly from both, but only one will teach you how to teach.

There are CFIs who are little more than self-loading ballast, or who cancel at the last minute because they have an opportunity to go fly the twin, or are so insulting and unkind you are reasonably certain you know what happened to Rosemary’s baby.

We all have them. We might even be them on an off day.

On the other side of the coin, there are the CFIs who are fun to fly with, who are remembered fondly, and are recommended by former clients because learning has taken place. These are the CFIs you learn best from and pick up techniques that you will eventually use with your learners. In short, they are your mentors.

I saw three of my mentors at the NWAC.

The first was Kevin Henderson, who in 2004 hired me at a Seattle-area flight school. Kevin was in the RPS as part of his flight review. I told him it was his fault I was there because he was the one who persuaded me to try teaching the flight school seminars and ground schools as a way to perfect the craft. Once I got my instructional legs under me, I found I enjoyed the classroom as much as the cockpit. And when the instructor enjoys teaching, often the learners enjoy learning.

The second mentor I encountered was Shauna Clements, one of the CFIs who trained me for my initial CFI. What I remember most about Shauna, who now flies Boeing 737s for Alaska Airlines, is her compassion and communication skills. There was one day—a particularly bad day for me in the airplane—that made me wish I had pursued a more traditional hobby, like needlepoint or collecting snow globes.

In hindsight, I see that it was overtraining. I was frustrated and angry at myself when we landed. We shut down the airplane, and there was a tense moment of silence in the cockpit, neither one of us moving, then Shauna softly uttered, “Talk to me, Goose.” For the unfamiliar, the line is from the original Top Gun, and I submit it is one of the most formidable tools in the CFI arsenal to reach a frustrated learner. I have used it many times with great success.

Last but not least was the encounter with CFI extraordinaire Dennis Cunneen, who was there with his adult son, Sean, who is also a CFI. I have known Dennis and his lovely wife Judith for more than 25 years. She is in my Ninety-Nines group. Dennis has been a flight instructor since before there was color television. I have learned much from him. For example, when working with a teenage learner, insist that the teenager, not their parents, make the appointments for flight lessons.

“Flying is a grown-up activity, they have to be responsible enough to make the appointments and keep them,” Dennis told me after I was stood up by a 17-year-old who decided it would be more fun to hang out with his buddies than keep his flight training appointment.

For many years Dennis was the man in charge of a local flying club. He was meticulous and careful about how many members could be in the club so that it didn’t become too difficult to schedule an airplane. The reason people join the club, he told me, was because they can’t rent an airplane from the local FBO for fun, and the FBO only rents to active students. The ratio of club members to aircraft is critical.

We flew together several times. Dennis was an instructor in the U.S. Air Force, and we spoke the same language. I will never forget the smile on his face when I briefed the ILS 17 into Tacoma Narrows Airport (KTIW) out loud using the USAF-issued acronym MARTHA. (Missed approach, Approach type and weather, Radio frequencies and radials needed, Time, Heading when on final, and Altitude on final.) 

• Read More: Knocking the Rust Off Your IFR Skills

He recommended me to learners, and I helped him get one of his clients up to speed on a Garmin G1000, as the flight school I was working at had a Redbird FMX with a G1000 panel.

The last time I flew with Dennis was in 2019. He needed a flight review. Mine was coming up as well, so we planned a day when we could do two flights—one for him, and one for me, and switch off CFI duties. I had never done a flight review for another CFI before, especially not one with more time than I had. Although it was not required, we switched seats when it was my turn to fly because it had been so long since either one of us was in the left seat. 

We did a lot of landings, as Dennis noted CFIs don’t land very often, because their learners do the flying. When he flew I asked him to talk through the maneuvers so I could pick up some pointers. I did the same, and I asked for a critique to help me improve.

When a learner is presenting me with a challenge, Dennis is one of the first people I call on. I often address him as “Sensei” or “Obi Wan,” and he addresses me as “Grasshopper.” There is often a respectful bow involved.

He has a sense of humor too. A few years back we encountered each other at Pierce County Thun Field (KPLU), a non-towered airport in Pierce County, Washington. Dennis had come in to get a case of oil for the club airplanes from the pilot supply shop. I was working with an instrument candidate in a Cessna 172. He loaded the oil into his airplane and taxied out ahead of us. We finished our runups at about the same time. He radioed, asking if he could go ahead of us. I said yes, as there was still one thing my learner had to do. Dennis lined up on the runway, and just before he added power, he got on the radio and intoned, “Stay strong to the Force, young one.”

This impressed my learner, who thought it very cool that his teacher had a teacher. I explained that it takes a village to raise a pilot. Start building your village now.

The post The Importance of Mentors appeared first on FLYING Magazine.