General Aviation

This New Year’s eve I would like to introduce my readers to the World’s First Deaf Instrument Rated Pilot, Stephen Hopson. You might have read his post about his Flight Instructor who gave selflessly, if not please do so (pilots are from out of this world, just a different breed). Stephen, who is deaf since birth, is a Private Pilot with an Instrument Rating, a Charles Schwab Stock Broker and an Inspirational Speaker of great magnitude!

Adversity does not discriminate – Stephen Hopson

Becoming an airline pilot, is usually not an easy path (with some lucky exceptional cases). There are always a lot of obstacles on the way; and some give up, while the others keep pushing and trying, and never give up until they achieve that goal. I have the honor of knowing many such determined pilots, the pilots who never accepted the “fate” and the stronger the resistance, the stronger their desire became to make it.

Stephen is one of them. Do you know how a deaf person can hear an airplane takeoff? Well, I didn’t until I saw this video of Stephen explaining how. I am still amazed at the fact that a deaf since birth person can learn how to talk, and he shows us how he can hear the airplanes takeoff!

And then to top it off, he even became the first deaf pilot to get an Instrument Rating! For those who are not familiar with the term Instrument Rating; it means flying an airplane in the clouds by reference to only the airplane instruments. In my career as a flight instructor for over a decade, I know that instrument rating is in fact the hardest pilot rating to obtain. Stephen got it because he was told that he can not have it.

Now I can fly both Blind and Deaf – Stephen Hopson, upon getting his IR

His stock broker career also began on a similar note. The tougher the circumstances, more the determination. And this is what I wanted to share with all of us today – the year 2009 may not have been the best for a lot of us, but we need to get prepared for the 2010. Many pilots lost their jobs, or were put on furloughs, many recently certified Commercial Pilots who were hoping to get hired and all of a sudden found themselves with no job and a huge student loan to pay, many flight instructors ended up working for minimum wages as their flight schools shut down. But then, this is our adversity, and our chance to conquer the fate.

May 2010 be a better year for all. Happy New Year.

Stephen writes on his blog at http://adversityuniversityblog.com.

There are scholarships available for physically disabled or handicapped individuals who want to become pilots. There are other Scholarships, Grants and Student Loans available as well, and then there is Federal Aid for Flight Training.

Like I mentioned in one of my earlier articles, we pilots like to use a lot of acronyms and memory aids to help us remember things in an easy and organized manner. Not that we are low on RAM or something, it’s just a way of filing and organizing information in our brains so it is easily accessible, and gets carried out as a well rehearsed orchestra with no chance of forgetting anything. Planned actions is another way of describing the usage of these acronyms.

One of the most commonly used acronym in IFR, or instrument flying, if called the 5 Ts:

1. Turn – Turn to the Course Heading
2. Time – Start the Time
3. Twist – Tune the Radio (VOR etc) and/or Twist the CDI
4. Throttle – Reduce the throttle; Go Down (descent) or Slow Down
5. Talk – Talk to the ATC

The 5 Ts are to be carried out in the order or preference noted above. Note, that Talk is all the way down the list. In other words, if you remember the Aviate, Navigate, Communicate, Manage checklist, talking comes after we have the aircraft under proper control and it is going where it is supposed to go. A lot of novice pilots in training initially have the tendency to prioritize the talking part. No need to buddy. Talking is at the bottom of our list.

With practice, you’ll be able to carry out all these procedures as a second nature. And the key word here is practice. And this is where the chair flying or dry flying comes in very handy. We will talk about the chair flying in one of our future articles. Here, watch this video and see if this makes any sense. If not, watch it again, and again until it does. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below.