Wife's Solo!
Solo'd 6/26/2009
Over the past few years, Andrea has always said she wanted to
learn how to land the plane in case I was incapacitated in
flight. Of course, you do the obligatory "lets go show you how
landings work", and people walk away thinking that they might be
semi-competent to actually land the plane without the pilot's
help. Finally earlier this spring, Andrea finally got bit hard
enough by the bug that she decided she wanted to get her pilots
license. I think she was additionally motivated by the idea that
if I unexpectedly died, the airplane would have to be sold, and she
fell in love with our Airplane from the moment they met, so rather than
allow it to be sold to someone else, she wanted to be able to keep it
for herself. Interestingly, ever since starting this flight
instruction, she has been trying to get me to eat more cheeseburgers
and chocolate shakes, and fries...and has been asking me to please just
lay back and watch TV instead of going out to get exercise. I'm
not quite sure what's going on here.
At any rate, the RV-10 is just too much airplane for a trainer, in many
respects. It's sleek, it's powerful, and it's fast....not to
mention expensive. As it turns out, there are currently no
insurance companies that will insure a student pilot in the RV-10, and
only a single, or maybe if you searched long and hard...a couple,
underwriters that will write a policy on a pilot with less than 100
hours. In fact, when I queried my own agent at NationAir, I was
told that currently Global Aerospace requires 300hrs to
insure a pilot in the RV-10, and AIG requires 250hrs
PLUS an instrument rating. This isn't surprising, considering the
hull values that are common on RV-10's. Additionally, in checking
with the agent, if I were to even obtain a quote for insurance on a 100
hour private pilot, I could easily expect to pay at least $1000/yr more
for just adding that pilot.
From a flying perspective, the RV-10 just simply has too much
performance to be conducive to easy flight instruction. For a
certified pilot, the RV-10 is commonly understood to be very easy to
land, and very comfortable to fly. But I have numerous examples
from my own early days of flying that just show that it's easy to get
behind an airplane, and the RV-10 would be as equally challenging as
the complex retracts that I flew back when I was in my first couple
hundred hours. Just slowing down in the pattern takes more
pre-planning in the RV-10. So, we started out by putting her in
the common Cessna 152, which she flew for a while. The major
downside was the very high rental rate that we had to pay for such a
meager machine...at the local flight training center a 152 rents for
about $76/hr and a Cessna 172 rents for near $120! That's DOUBLE
what I was paying to rent planes back just a few years ago. These
FBO's raised their rates when fuel prices went up, but never lowered
them once the price came back down.
After training for a while in the 152 and knowing that it was something
she wanted to continue, we made a big jump. We have another very
good friend who was also learning to fly at the same time, and she had
been paying the same sky high rates, and after attempting but failing
at negotiating a better block rate, we decided to check out other
options. We almost bought into a partnership, but then digging
back into my memory I remembered I knew an aircraft leasing company and
decided to check them out. Well sure enough!!! We were able to
lease a wonderful Piper Cherokee 140 Cruiser (160HP) for under $35/hr
dry. Considering that the fuel prices we pay are $3.70 or less,
and the Cherokee sips around 6-7gph for our average flights, this ended
up being a great way to not only save some money, but guarantee
airplane availability. The minimum lease is 10hrs/mo, which is
not at all substantial. The only requirements are that we A)
hangar the plane, and B) we purchase insurance. Well, I have a
good friend with hangar space, so that was simple, and insuring a
Cherokee 140 for 3 pilots plus an open policy for additional pilots
ended up being under $915/yr. So here we had a significantly
cheaper way to rent, fly, and insure an aircraft for use for flight
training by 2 people, and general flying by more, and guarantee much
better aircraft availability!
With the Cherokee 140 in hand, we decided to also switch instructors to
a more experienced instructor who also is a Cirrus approved flight
trainer, knowing that she'd have the knowledge and experience to help
guide Andrea along a path that could help prepare her for a future of
RV-10 flying. I queried the new instructor about doing initial
flight training for students who want to actually learn in a plane like
a Cirrus SR-22 and basically she confirmed my own thoughts...if you
want to actually LEARN to fly in a Cirrus or an RV-10 for that matter,
you should expect to add many more hours of dual to your flight
training time, and cost. Figure maybe 40 hours to first solo, and
maybe a total of 80 or 100 before you're really fully ready to get the
private cert. Basically, my take on it is, if you go into
training in a more normal "trainer" aircraft, you'll probably finish in
just over 1/2 the time, and from that point on you'd take some
additional "transition" training to prepare you for more high
performance aircraft....learning about things like constant-speed
propellers and things that get left out when flying more simple
aircraft. It's all about time and experience, and preparing to
learn to fly in an RV-10 will involve probably more cost than preparing
in a trainer and transitioning to the RV-10. We had some
interesting experiences after Andrea did some initial training and then
we tried to go out and fly the pattern in the RV-10. She found it
climbed so fast on takeoff that it was just too easy to get behind the
plane, and everything you did just came at you faster than you were
ready for.
So on July 26th, on a sunny afternoon, we took the Cherokee up to KUBE
for Andrea's flight lesson and after the typical 3 landings with the
instructor, it was time for her first solo. I watched from the
grass as she lifted off, and came around for her first landing, and it
went off without a hitch! So now Andrea can move along at an even
quicker pace and get her private pilot certificate, and we'll still
keep the little Cherokee for the rest of the summer (and maybe even
lease it again next season), so that even after her certification she
can build some more time and work towards one day being able to fly the
RV-10. Our other friend also just passed her Checkride, so we're
growing new women pilots up here in NorthWest Wisconsin!
Here are some photos of the event
