PlasticPilot.net

Pilots have to keep track of their flight time in a logbook, which contains various columns for time spent in training, as pilot in command, co-pilot, in single engine or multi engine aircraft, by day, by night, flying visually or on instruments…

To me, the best column however is the last one: Remarks and Endorsments. During initial training, my instructor had me writing down the elements of the syllabus we trained by the end of each lesson.

Later, I used to note the route flown, and I always note the name of transported passengers, together with general remarks. When flying IFR, I write down the type of approach flown, and the weather conditions, and any special event is briefly described there.

Each time I fly to a new place, I also use this space to get an airport stamp. I did not logged thousands of hours, but I can no longer remember all of my flights. When I flip through the pages of my logbook, I always stumble upon a forgotten passenger or flight.

All the other columns reflect my flight experience, and are kind of a legal and technical record. The last column is somehow of social nature, and it is like a chronicle of my flying. Several names there remind me of friends, colleagues, fellow pilots, instructors and examiners.

Without them on board, the flights recorded in my logbook would not have been the same, so I’m happy that I started the habit of tracking more that departure - destination - aircraft and time. That might sound sentimental, particularly to commercial and airline pilots, but for me flying is a passion and a hobby.

All what remains by the end of the day is a couple of new entries in my logbook, so yes, I’m sentimentally attached to it… Am I the only one, or do you feel the same ?

Aviation is a good school of life, particularly when it comes to learning humility. I’ve no reason to be proud of what I will relate in this post: my worst landing ever !

It all started with an ILS approach to runway 09 in a Bonanza. The needles were well centered and quite stable. Everything was looking fine, and I was relatively relaxed. The wind was blowing from my left, and the correction angle I was applying worked fine.

The descent was smooth, no turbulence despite the wind. While flying down an ILS, the wind speed normally decrease, and the pilot reduces the correction angle to keep the localizer needle centered. But an excellent meteorolgy teacher told me once, all rules but one in meteorology have exceptions (i.e. pressure always decrease when altitude increase)…

On this particular day the exception was that wind speed was not changing at all during the descent… When passing 2 miles on final, the controller confirmed it: “HB-XXX, wind 360 degrees 15 knots, cleared to land runway 09 !”

Yiiiihaa ! A perfect 90 degrees crosswind of 15 knots ! I was glad the runway was 40 meters wide and 3 kilometers long. I mentally reharsed “Aileron to the left, rudder to the right”, and made my best to apply it.

I initiated the flare way to early, so I had to apply power to get the things within survivable limits. The subsequent landing was more than positive ! All pieces of the plane were still together, and I was probably able to walk away.

After that I swallowed once, and then turned towards the right seat, saying something like “Errrrr, not my best landing ever…”. The guy sitting there was looking more relaxed than I was, and just said “I’m not judging your landings today, only your IFR skills”.

Did I mentionned that this was the first leg of my initial IFR examination ?

A friend of mine told me he got slightly scared because he’s been welcomed on an airliner by a co-pilot looking like a teenager. I’m personally quite bad at guessing how old someone is, but I know the pilot’s licences rules quite well. I can promise that no teenager will ever act as an airline captain, the minimum age is 21.

No need to go deep in details of the rules here - there are more than 180 pages of legal documentation about this. Anyway experience is what counts, not age, so let’s see what practical experience is required being given a job in the right-seat of an airliner.

The first step is to get a private pilot license. This requires about 50 hours of flight. Then comes the multi-engine training, about 15 hours. At the same time, the training for instrument flying, 50 more hours - 40 of them can be in simulator.

A course for working in a multi-person crew environment is required, and then specific training for the type of aircraft to be flown. This is also mostly done in simulator. So yes, it is possible that your co-pilot has less than 200 hours of flight behind him. Is that safe ? Let’s see…

At first, young co-pilots to be start to fly as observers, with a crew of two. This allow for more familiarization with actual cockpit environment, and to have a first look at airports they will fly to.

After that comes the first flights as co-pilot. This is always under the supervision of so-called “training captains” which act as captain and instructor. Training captains have extensive experience, they hold instructor ratings, and coach the young co-pilots until they are experienced enough to fly with any captain.

Airlines also try to balance experience in a crew. Young co-pilots will fly with experienced captains, and when a co-pilot is promoted to captain, he flies with experienced co-pilots. The same thing happen when a captain is promoted to a different (usually larger) type of aircraft: he becomes a co-pilot again, flying with a captain experiences on the larger aircraft. This is what seniority system is about, but this is another story…

Given how regulated the training organisations are, I see no issue flying with a young co-pilot, nor a young captain. It even can be that a very young co-pilot has a fresher training on some aspicts than his captain, simply because he just came out of school.

Accident reports are full of stories about crews with various experience levels… The captain of a Jubolino that crashed in Zuerich years ago made critical mistakes that contributed to the accident. His total flight time was very close to 20′000 hours. He ignored important remarks from his co-pilot, whose flight time was about… 400 hours.

One can then argue about how and when the co-pilot made his remarks, but the result is here: the plane crashed on final approach - crew-collaboration breakdown is a factor.

As a final word, I can say that I don’t fear to fly with a young co-pilot, but rather to fly with a crew that can’t act as a team !