My wife getting scared

As just a bit of food for thought, how conservative are you?

Are you conservative in that you limit the size of the box of aviation
activities and behaviors that you expose yourself to?

This is the normal definition that most pilots apply to
being conservative. The down side is that it can also limit your
abilities as a pilot. So the box of abilities that you carry with you
as a pilot can deteriorate down to size of the box of activities you
limit yourself to. I don't think this is being as conservative as most
people think it is.

How long should a conservative pilot go without doing any of the
following?
Stalls
Spin Recoveries
Slow Flight
Short Field Landings
Simulated Engine Failures
Simulated Control Failures
Flight by reference to the Instruments
An Instrument Approach
Reviewing specific aircraft emergency procedures.

The truly conservative pilot won't do these with passengers aboard or
maybe even by himself. He may insist on having an experienced
instructor with him while he practices these kinds of procedures
frequently. But if a pilot only does these things once every two
years for his flight review is he really being conservative? Is he
even safe if he hasn't done any of this for nearly two years? He may
be safe as long as nothing bad happens that puts him outside of his
"conservative" box.


To really be conservative you would be expanding your piloting
abilities rather than limiting them. The challenge here is to expand
you abilities without creating undue hazard doing so. So go get that
Instrument, Commercial or tail wheel rating. Go get a good instructor
and practice emergency procedures every few months. You don't need to
expand the box of activities you do normally, but you will be ensuring
that your abilities stay larger than the box you normally fly in.

This way when you are forced to inadvertently fly outside normal
personal limitations, there is a fair chance you will have the
abilities to deal with it.


Brian
CFIIG/ASEL
you carry with you as a pilot can deterioate down to size of the box
of activities you limit youself to.

My wife and I have an understanding, mostly unspoken but very real: I
don't twist her arm to go flying with me, she doesn't nag me to
stop. I don't take stupid risks, she doesn't stupidly question why I
like to fly. Maybe that's where you'll have to arrive.
--

Yep, pretty much where I am (but she does make a remark on flying from
time to time).

Dean

"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
...
Paul Tomblin wrote:
I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for
10.
Three years ago, the DE who passed me on my private and instrument
tickets
died in a stupid accident. My wife had met him a few times at flying
club
dinners and around the airport. A few weeks ago, a club member who she'd
also met several times died in his float plane, a plane that I'd flown in
a few weeks before that. He died with his best friend, a former club
member who I knew a bit but whom my wife didn't.

Now that two people she's met have died flying in a relatively short
period of time, she's getting less and less secure about my own flying.
Every time I head out to the airport, she gives me the talk. "Be
careful.
Don't die. If you have the slightest doubt, come back." Etc. And so
on.

I don't think she'll tell me to stop, because she knows I was a pilot
before we married. But what can I do to reassure her? The pilot
community is pretty small, and losing three people associated with our
little club is pretty scary for her.

At one time, I thought when the kids were finished college I'd finally
have enough money to buy a share in a float plane and we could have some
adventures together. Now I'm not even sure she'd come flying in a club
plane.


During the fifty odd years I've been involved in professional aviation;
most of that teaching in and flying high performance airplanes I've buried
32 of my friends and associates. My wife was with me through forty of
those years and knew many of these people personally.
I've dealt with this issue both in my own home and as an adviser to
others.
I can tell you this in all sincerity and honesty.
I realize you might not be involved in high risk aviation so what I am
about to say to you might even be easier for you in your personal
situation as a pleasure pilot.
I believe I have looked at this issue from enough directions and have
enough experience with it that you might want to give serious
consideration to my advice.
When it comes to handling something like this with a loved one, you can of
course attempt to convince your wife you will be safe based on the
favorable statistics you can go dig up that say general aviation is a safe
pastime.
But my advice is to use this approach but with a caveat.
Forget using the statistics alone without additional input from you as
that road to convince a loved one is filled with pot holes.


In order to reach your wife, don't down play the dangers involved with
flying, as she is already convinced of a potential danger and has seen
what can happen when things go wrong.

The best way to handle these issues is to start immediately to convince
her that rather than denying any danger exists, you are completely aware
of the potential for danger in flying and are capable of avoiding that
danger by the way you approach the issue of flying.

In other words, what you want to accomplish here is to convince your wife
that YOU PERSONALLY are an aware pilot with a professional attitude that
is highly tuned in to the avoidance of areas of danger when you fly.
What you want to do is steer your wife into thinking of you as a pilot
separated from other pilots. You need to have her consider you
INDIVIDUALLY as competent and professional instead of viewing you as just
another pilot among many. It's the thinking about a large group where some
get hurt or killed that frightens loved ones. Once she looks at you
individually, she will realize that you PERSONALLY are aware of danger and
competent enough to stay away from it.
She will feel better knowing that.

All this having been said, there is nothing cast in stone that will solve
these kinds of issues. Accidents happen and pilots get killed once in a
while. What it boils down to is that YOU are the only one who can address
this issue with a loved one. It takes tact and it takes understanding, but
most of all it means recognizing her fears as legitimate instead of down
playing them with safety statistics.
Bring her into your world as a pilot more than you have and let her know
that above all else, you are aware....and you are a SAFE pilot.
Hope this advice has been of some help.
DH


--
Dudley Henriques

Hello to all,

If you don't mind, Dudley, I would like to add my 2 cents worth to what you
said, and with which I totally agree.

I am a retired US Army Master Aviator. I have a wife, and two children. We
have been married for 51 years. I started flying in 1959, Fixed Wing, and
Rotary Wing. Spent two years of my Army career in Vietnam, flying gunships
and slicks.

My wife and I talked about my going to flight school at great length. She
understood the risks, and how much I wanted this, and stood by my decision
to go.

While she worried while I was deployed, she kept the home fires burning. She
supported me , and understood while there was danger, there was also danger
in driving a car on the highway and getting hit by some drunk driver. She
also put up with two tours (unaccompanied) in Korea during this time. What
can I say--she was an Army wife, God Bless them all.

I retired from the Army in 1978. I have not flown since. Not because she
wanted me to stop, my decision. Financial, with 2 kids in college, and then,
after final retirement, our desire to travel, flying was not economically
something I wanted to do that might prevent OUR enjoying retirement
activities

She is now an invalid, and I am her caregiver, a task I take on willingly
out of love. I can never repay her for the support she has given me all
these years, but I try.

My point with all this. As Dudley says, if you get your wife on board, all
will be well, If not, then I know many of my fellow Army aviators that have
gone through some bad times related to their flying and career choices.

Best wishes to you.

Paul

Paul Riley wrote:
"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
...
Paul Tomblin wrote:
I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for
10.
Three years ago, the DE who passed me on my private and instrument
tickets
died in a stupid accident. My wife had met him a few times at flying
club
dinners and around the airport. A few weeks ago, a club member who she'd
also met several times died in his float plane, a plane that I'd flown in
a few weeks before that. He died with his best friend, a former club
member who I knew a bit but whom my wife didn't.

Now that two people she's met have died flying in a relatively short
period of time, she's getting less and less secure about my own flying.
Every time I head out to the airport, she gives me the talk. "Be
careful.
Don't die. If you have the slightest doubt, come back." Etc. And so
on.

I don't think she'll tell me to stop, because she knows I was a pilot
before we married. But what can I do to reassure her? The pilot
community is pretty small, and losing three people associated with our
little club is pretty scary for her.

At one time, I thought when the kids were finished college I'd finally
have enough money to buy a share in a float plane and we could have some
adventures together. Now I'm not even sure she'd come flying in a club
plane.

During the fifty odd years I've been involved in professional aviation;
most of that teaching in and flying high performance airplanes I've buried
32 of my friends and associates. My wife was with me through forty of
those years and knew many of these people personally.
I've dealt with this issue both in my own home and as an adviser to
others.
I can tell you this in all sincerity and honesty.
I realize you might not be involved in high risk aviation so what I am
about to say to you might even be easier for you in your personal
situation as a pleasure pilot.
I believe I have looked at this issue from enough directions and have
enough experience with it that you might want to give serious
consideration to my advice.
When it comes to handling something like this with a loved one, you can of
course attempt to convince your wife you will be safe based on the
favorable statistics you can go dig up that say general aviation is a safe
pastime.
But my advice is to use this approach but with a caveat.
Forget using the statistics alone without additional input from you as
that road to convince a loved one is filled with pot holes.


In order to reach your wife, don't down play the dangers involved with
flying, as she is already convinced of a potential danger and has seen
what can happen when things go wrong.

The best way to handle these issues is to start immediately to convince
her that rather than denying any danger exists, you are completely aware
of the potential for danger in flying and are capable of avoiding that
danger by the way you approach the issue of flying.

In other words, what you want to accomplish here is to convince your wife
that YOU PERSONALLY are an aware pilot with a professional attitude that
is highly tuned in to the avoidance of areas of danger when you fly.
What you want to do is steer your wife into thinking of you as a pilot
separated from other pilots. You need to have her consider you
INDIVIDUALLY as competent and professional instead of viewing you as just
another pilot among many. It's the thinking about a large group where some
get hurt or killed that frightens loved ones. Once she looks at you
individually, she will realize that you PERSONALLY are aware of danger and
competent enough to stay away from it.
She will feel better knowing that.

All this having been said, there is nothing cast in stone that will solve
these kinds of issues. Accidents happen and pilots get killed once in a
while. What it boils down to is that YOU are the only one who can address
this issue with a loved one. It takes tact and it takes understanding, but
most of all it means recognizing her fears as legitimate instead of down
playing them with safety statistics.
Bring her into your world as a pilot more than you have and let her know
that above all else, you are aware....and you are a SAFE pilot.
Hope this advice has been of some help.
DH


--
Dudley Henriques

Hello to all,

If you don't mind, Dudley, I would like to add my 2 cents worth to what you
said, and with which I totally agree.

I am a retired US Army Master Aviator. I have a wife, and two children. We
have been married for 51 years. I started flying in 1959, Fixed Wing, and
Rotary Wing. Spent two years of my Army career in Vietnam, flying gunships
and slicks.

My wife and I talked about my going to flight school at great length. She
understood the risks, and how much I wanted this, and stood by my decision
to go.

While she worried while I was deployed, she kept the home fires burning. She
supported me , and understood while there was danger, there was also danger
in driving a car on the highway and getting hit by some drunk driver. She
also put up with two tours (unaccompanied) in Korea during this time. What
can I say--she was an Army wife, God Bless them all.

I retired from the Army in 1978. I have not flown since. Not because she
wanted me to stop, my decision. Financial, with 2 kids in college, and then,
after final retirement, our desire to travel, flying was not economically
something I wanted to do that might prevent OUR enjoying retirement
activities

She is now an invalid, and I am her caregiver, a task I take on willingly
out of love. I can never repay her for the support she has given me all
these years, but I try.

My point with all this. As Dudley says, if you get your wife on board, all
will be well, If not, then I know many of my fellow Army aviators that have
gone through some bad times related to their flying and career choices.

Best wishes to you.

Paul


I wish you and your wife all the best Paul.

--
Dudley Henriques

"Dudley Henriques" wrote:

I should add here as well that there are indeed some wives out there who
will never lose their fear when it comes to flying.

And why should they? GA flying is quite dangerous compared to driving. Their
fear is only rational.

This is the exact reason that I have encouraged EVERY student I have ever
taught to fly who had a family to sit down early and involve the family in
the decision.

Good advice.

Informed wives are better prepared to handle aviation than uninformed wives.

Indeed. Alas, many are misinformed, deliberately or otherwise. They may be
told that the drive to the airport is more dangerous than the flight. True
for driving vs. scheduled airline travel; profoundly untrue for driving vs.
private flying.

--
Dan
T-182T at BFM

Jay's wrote:
"Sadly, I have to admit that our fear of harming our engine
has far outweighed our fear of an engine-out landing. There
is simply nothing you can do to your engine (in normal use)
that is worse than simulated engine-out landings, so we do
them very rarely."

I called the overhaul shop that just did a major engine overhaul on my
Lycoming O-320. First, these guys have been there for years and came
highly recommended by several independent sources in my search for a
reputable place to take the engine. I posed the question -- "How harmful
to a healthy engine is simulated engine failure practice?" I told him
that it was said that simulated engine-out practice is the worst thing
you can do to your engine.

He said he disagrees and assumed your concern was probably about shock
cooling, but said that while everyone needs to be aware of that, it is
of much greater concern with high-performance, turbo-charged engines
where people chop power and dive for the ground. With the 0-320, he said
in colder areas (I'm in AZ), you would use carb heat, and of course he
recommended what all CFIs I've ever flown with have done -- "clear" the
engine by adding some power for a few seconds one or two times during
the power-off glide/descent. Yes, that takes a little of the "reality"
out of the drill, but it is, in fact, practice/simulated.

He went on to say that if it were THAT easy to damage the engine by
pulling the power back to idle, how about when you pull the power abeam
the numbers and the hot engine is at idle through the rest of the
approach, landing and taxi and then is shut down completely (standard
practice every time for some)? He commented that it would be tricky to
just shut down a hot engine without damaging it if pulling power back to
idle is all it would take to do so.

You may not agree, and maybe your mechanic doesn't agree ... but as said
in an earlier post, if you think about all the airplanes in flight
schools that are doing simulated engine failures far more frequently
than we would (some much more powerful than an 0-320 ... I can't
remember what engine you have), there would be many more engine problems
in rental/school airplanes than there are if there's nothing worse for
an engine than simulated engine-outs.

I'm just the messenger on this one, not a mechanic, and being a girl, I
did not grow up tinkering with engines. But I dealt regularly with the
mechanics when I worked at the flight school, and I never heard them or
any that have worked on my airplane(s) say anything about simulated
engine failures being potentially dangerous to the engines.

Shirl

"Dudley Henriques" wrote:

Any pilot, no matter how experienced, can suffer a "brain fart" for lack of
a better term.

Quite so. And the consequences of a pilot's BF are much more likely to be
fatal than a driver's.

Yet we often see posts in these groups from pilots who imagine that their
superior judgent and skill have made them sufficiently immune from these
lapses that they are safer flying than driving. This rather juvenile illusion
of superiority contributes to the distressing fatal accident rate of private
GA flying, I believe.


--
Dan
T-182T at BFM

"Jay Honeck" wrote:

There is simply nothing
you can do to your engine (in normal use) that is worse than simulated
engine-out landings,

How so?

--
Dan
T-182T at BFM

Dan Luke wrote:
"Dudley Henriques" wrote:

Any pilot, no matter how experienced, can suffer a "brain fart" for lack of
a better term.

Quite so. And the consequences of a pilot's BF are much more likely to be
fatal than a driver's.

Yet we often see posts in these groups from pilots who imagine that their
superior judgent and skill have made them sufficiently immune from these
lapses that they are safer flying than driving. This rather juvenile illusion
of superiority contributes to the distressing fatal accident rate of private
GA flying, I believe.



Pilots have to learn early on that there is a difference between
confidence and over confidence. They also have to learn that being a so
called "conservative" pilot doesn't mean that when aggressive action is
required NOW that they will have the option of thinking out the problem.
Flying is not unlike many other endeavors where preparation, practice,
training, and the ability to think on your feet are absolute essentials
to survival.
Pilots who concentrate on only one of the many aspects required of the
flying venue are the ones prone to accidents.
It's fine to have superior skill. In fact, for a pilot, it's a
requirement. Where the problem arises isn't in thinking you have
superior skill. The problem arises when you think you have superior
skill and actually don't have it. :-)

--
Dudley Henriques

Jay Honeck wrote:
Question: how often do you practice simulated engine failures over
places you aren't used to flying patterns?

Sadly, I have to admit that our fear of harming our engine has far
outweighed our fear of an engine-out landing. There is simply nothing
you can do to your engine (in normal use) that is worse than simulated
engine-out landings, so we do them very rarely.

I personally think that is a myth. I've read about shock cooling until
I'm blue in the face and I simply don't buy it. However, the main
reason is that my primary flight instructor, who is also an A&P and was
an airport manager for many years, always flew all of his airplanes on
power-off gliding approaches. He operated 2 C-150s, 1 C-172 and 2 C-182
for probably two decades and several other airplanes for the two
decades prior to when I met him.

He operated N38 for something like 45 years and flew scenic tours over
the PA Grand Canyon in his 182s and 172. These flights lasted 10-15
minutes and he glided power-off from pattern altitude to landing and
shut-down between runs. His airplanes were started, stopped and "shock
cooled" literally dozens of times every Saturday and Sunday. His 150s
trained students to also fly the way he flew (I'm one of them).

He never had a engine failure in these airplanes to my knowledge and
they routinely ran to TBO. He often groused how the FAA made him
rebuild a perfectly good engine just because he was a commercial operator!

So, I've seen scads of real-life experience that says that shock cooling
is just not real. The real part is people who don't practice engine-out
landings and then crumple an airplane botching the real thing.

Let the games begin! :-)

Matt