Down Memory Lane

If you want to reminisce a little, watch this video that I rediscovered while searching the EAA Video Player archive.

You will see interviews with Rodney Swanson, Bill Palone and Rick Kitsworth. I had a link to that video on our original website in 2008 but the link to EAA video stopped working. It is now back.

To watch the video (3:16), click on the image above, click on the 2006 tab of the EAA Video Player and select the third video from the top.

I think that we should get a list going of things that C2O needs for the Base Camp Tent. I can make a trip to the storage unit in early June.

1 Shelving unit

Wisconsin Clinic Details Finalized

After several months of phone tag and chasing, I finally have something finalized for a clinic in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin clinic will be at Wittman Regional Airport (KOSH) in Oshkosh. The meeting will be in the Batten Board Room at EAA Headquarters. Ramp operations will be at the Kermit Weeks Hangar on the north side of the airport. This is the where EAA maintains their aircraft and where the airshow performers park their aircraft during Airventure. Transportation between the ramp and the meeting place will be provided.

This is a great opportunity to bring the whole family. While dad (or mom) is attending the clinic, the rest of the family can visit the EAA Airventure Museum when it isn't nearly as crowded as it is during Airventure.

Lodging is especially convenient at KOSH. The Best Western Garden Inn is a through the fence facility. They have their own ramp on the northwest corner of the airport. There are many other lodging choices within a mile or two of the airport.

Click here to register for the Oshkosh Clinic if your are already registered to fly the mass arrival or click here to register to fly the mass arrival and sign up for the clinic using the registration form.

Please note, this clinic was initially listed as the Waukesha Clinic. That's because my home airport, Waukesha, was the backup location. I had always been working to have it at EAA - Oshkosh, and now is final. I will need some experienced C2O pilots to serve as safety pilots, so if you can make it, please let me know.

Dothan Formation Flight Training Clinic

Our first Dothan Formation Flight Training Clinic in preparation for our mass arrival on July 24th, will take place on April 3rd at Dothan Regional Airport (KDHN) in Dothan, Alabama. The clinic will start at 9:00 AM CDT. Participants will meet at FlightLine of Dothan. Please mark your calendar, if you haven’t done so yet. Rodney Swanson, our Director of Training and Operations will be the host and lead pilot for the clinic.

Register to participate in the Dothan Formation Flight Training Clinic as soon as possible. Among other things, we need to have a precise head count to plan the practice flights and pair each first-time pilot with an experienced safety pilot.

If you have already registered to fly the arrival this year, register to attend the clinic by following this link: Clinic Registration. If you have not registered to fly the arrival yet, you may register for the arrival and the clinic at the same time by following this link: Mass Arrival Registration.

To prepare for the clinic and save ground “classroom” time, review the Formation Flight Slide Presentation prepared by Rodney Swanson, our Director of Training and Operations, available on our website, or by following this link: Rodney's Slide Presentation. As questions come to mind, make a written or mental note of it, and bring your questions to the clinic. We’ll make the ground presentation an interactive one. In addition, download the Formation Flight and Practice Waiver and the Formation Briefing Card which you may find on our website or by following this link: Formation Flight and Practice Waiver and the Formation Briefing Card. You should bring these documents with you to the clinic. Bring one formation waiver for you and one for each passenger flying the practice flights. Bring as many formation briefing cards as you want.

Please try to be on the ground at FlightLine of Dothan by 8:30 AM CDT for coffee and donuts, and get acquainted with your fellow pilots. The clinic will start on time at 9:00 AM CDT. Following is a preliminary program for the day. Rodney will send each registered pilot the final program for the day within 7 to 10 days.

09:00 - 10:30   Ground (“classroom”) Slide Presentation
10:30 - 10:45   Coffee Break
10:45 - 11:15   Ramp Exercise
11:15 - 11:45   Questions and Answers
11:45 - 12:30   Practice Flight Briefing
12:30 - 13:00   Lunch Break
13:00 - 13:45   First Practice Flight
13:45 - 14:30   Second Practice Flight
14:30 - 15:00   Practice Flights Debriefing
15:00 - 15:15   Wrap-up & Good By

Don’t miss this opportunity to enjoy a fun-filled flying day, sharpen your pilot skills, and meet one of the requirements to fly the Cessnas 2 Oshkosh Mass Arrival.

Cessnas 2 Oshkosh Training Post 1

Mike’s 03/20/10 post about training was excellent and brought to the table some very important practical points. I would like to emphasize some of these points and add a couple of my own, if I may. Due to time constraints, I’ll break it in several posts.

The Classroom
I couldn’t agree more. Although sometimes the geographic location of the airport is so good that it trumps the reality of the suboptimal facilities, an extra effort should be made in selection of optimal classroom/conference room facilities. The room should be comfortable, with sitting and writing space for every attendee. The room should have a decent screen installed or space to deploy a portable screen. If nothing else, at least a good, light-colored wall surface on which to project the slide presentation. If there are windows, they should have shades or curtain to darken the room for the projected images to be viewable to the audience. There is no question that in a crunch, we can do without these facilities. But it is always nice to have the best we can get; besides good classroom facilities enhance the learning process.

The Ramp, Taxiway and Runway
Whether we train in a non-towered airport or one with full ATC facilities, I believe the important point is the ground and air visibility from the airport surface. What I mean is that the visibility from the cockpit, starting from the ramp and all the way to the takeoff threshold, should be enough to allow the pilots, trainee and safety, to clearly visualize enough distance ahead to move in a safe way and to interfere as little as possible with other traffic on the ramp, the taxi surfaces, and the pattern. The ramp area should allow for before-takeoff run-up without throwing the propwash onto other aircraft on the ramp. The idea is to leave the ramp ready for takeoff. If enough run-up space is not available on the ramp, then there should be enough space available at the takeoff end of the runway in use for two to four aircraft, which is the size of most training sorties. At the hold-short point, there should be enough space for the lead PIC of the first element to do a 360° turn to scan for traffic in the pattern. For runways less than 100 feet wide, the full-length surface should be as level as possible, without bumps and dips. It should allow the PIC of each aircraft to see all the way to the end of the runway, or at least, all the way to the liftoff point of the aircraft taking off ahead. If this is not possible due to runway imperfections, then precautionary measures during the takeoff run, and contingencies for takeoff aborts should be discussed during the pre-flight briefing. These precautionary measures should include at a minimum, a procedure to avoid a collision on the runway or having to exit the runway, in case the aircraft taking off ahead has an emergency and needs to stop on the runway, i.e. a blown tire. Pilots should not start the takeoff run until the aircraft in front has lifted off the runway and a positive rate of climb is established. This would apply to narrow runways, less than 100 feet. The wingspan of most of our aircraft is about 36 to 38 feet. These wingspans would preclude closely-spaced takeoff on runways less than 100 feet for lack of wingtip-to-wingtip clearance. On runways 100 feet wide or more, closely-spaced takeoff, like the one we do at Juneau, are safe and should be practiced.

More to follow…

Canadian Participation

How do we get more Canadians involved in C2O? With $ at par it should be more inviting for the Canucks.

C2O Training

So, it sounds like we're all here... And, as I have a particular interest in making sure everybody's up to speed on this, please allow me to insert myself into the training stuff...

We had a great training session last Sunday here in California! You've seen this written about in the newsletter, and in a couple forum entries around CPA, CPS, AOPA, Yahoo:182, etc...

Here's a few things that I'm happy we did right:
1) Decent classroom. Much better than our last year effort. An enclosed space, with a screen and plenty of chairs for participant pilots. I could have made it a bit darker so the screen was more visible, but I forgot about that. Strange thing, 'cause I'm often told (by one person anyway...) that I do my best work in the dark!

2) Lots of clear airspace nearby. I'm always worried about this, and probably more than I need to be worried. Non-tower airport was kind of handy, 'cause I didn't need to worry about runway clearances, etc., but the bad news was that it required a little more heads-up time, especially from my safety pilots, to make sure we were clear of traffic. I finally figured out how to capture a screenshot of a local sectional chart, and overlay on that the practice areas. I highly recommend that this be included in future clinics.

3) Decent food. First year: John Frank flipping burgers in his hangar. Second year: cheesy restaurant, small, crowded, slow. This year: awesome food, reasonably priced. Bad news: I didn't tell my elements to order food before they started their debriefs. Two elements waited until they were done with their debriefs before they ordered food. This made the flight debrief run late.

4) Training sortie pairing. I consciously planned on having high time safety pilots paired with low time pilots, formed up with with higher time pilots and slightly lesser-experienced safeties. I started with matching similar type airplanes. From there, I tried to get a read on experience levels. I figured that high time pilots with high time safeties was not the best use of time. I've since heard from a few that this worked out really well, so I recommend it as a standard practice.

Things I did wrong:
1) Don't pick the Daylight Savings Time weekend. Second year I did that. I should know by now! Time zones don't mean much to me, but I should be aware of this for others.

2) Saturdays may be better. This is the first time I did it on a Sunday, and the result was the same as the last two times I've done it on a Saturday. But, timing was an issue.

3) I thought I drove the classroom session as fast as I could. I'd like to think I'm pretty decent at keeping things going, but still it dragged on a bit. Worst thing was that I had to have element assignments done before I could brief the training sorties. Can't do that until I know who is there. Training staff needs to have a handle on who should be paired with whom, because I'd like to have that sorted out by the end of the classroom portion.

For the flight debrief at the end, plan on discussing at length how the training scenario is different from the OSH flight. Start with the fact that nobody will be changing position. Continue with the fact that more experienced pilots will tend to be slotted in lead positions. Talk about the inter-element spacing, and that the PIC of the lead elements of each faster type will need to be aware of the extra gap at takeoff.

We probably need to discuss the landing situation in much more detail. In particular: If there is room between you and the airplane in front of you, "hover taxi" or fly down the runway before you land. Make sure everybody knows there is another airplane right behind you that needs the runway, and if you're comfortable continuing down the runway in the air before you chop and drop, then do that. Don't dirty up on final and slow down to your slowest speed. We all know that we can fly slower and land shorter, but again, this is a team sport. Cooperate and graduate. Leave space for the umpteen airplanes right on your tail. At my clinic, everybody seemed to understand this fact, and it worked well for us. I think this point needs to be underlined during the OSH brief.

Undoubtedly, more to follow, and I'm happy to hear comments from others who lead clinics about how to get these points across, and from participant pilots about what makes them feel uncomfortable. We all need to come to agreement on what we feel we can do, and we need to be comfortable in telling each other when something doesn't feel right. Even more important (and a major point I tried to drive home at my clinic) is that you have to listen up during the preflight brief, and if you don't like something that is specified, either speak up and get your point addressed, or man up and drop out.

Welcome to the Cessnas 2 Oshkosh's Blog

The idea behind this blog is providing a communication tool between the pilots participating in the Cessnas 2 Oshkosh mass arrival. Here we can share news, pictures and answers to common questions. If you feel that this format is too new for you, don't worry, we feel the same way.