MULTI ENGINE TRAINING II

So far I've done 3hr in the twin engine seneca and I feel good !! except for the landings, feels a lot different from 172 or 152, visual reference is very different, still working on that. Powerful aircraft, retractable landing gear mean you have more to think about. need to control the manifold pressure and the propeller, that's also fine too, the plane feels a lot heavier but because it's heavy, it's more stable. 2 more flights and I will go on a long cross country ! looking forward to that.

PS : couldn't get Grant to be my multi instructor, too bad, but, it's ok !

MULTI ENGINE TRAINING

I"ve come to 215 hr of flight time, which means I should get started on my Multi-Engine training.. I want to train with the same instructor for my private and Instrument, he understands me well, and we work pretty good together. but I dont' know if he's able to instruct multi yet... he has to go throu standards and stuff, it's company policy, to put it in simple terms, he's not senior enough, I guess..
Why is multi engine better than single engine ? what's the difference ? safer ? faster ? there's the all time " two is better than one" debate. but, is it ? in my opinion, if you are trained well, yes, it is safer, but if an engine fails while a unexperienced pilot is flying, he might be better off with single engine. I'm studying Multi engine right now, hopefully to get a basic understanding of it before I start flying one. and hope Grant can be my multi instructor.

this was taken during my first flight! 

 

Piper seneca, I will do my training in this aircraft

landing light out at KOKM

Landing light is required for me and my buddy to fly at night, but when we arrived at KOKM, the landing light went out... we couldn't even see the taxiway light, Suddat had to jump out of the plane and I would follow him to the fuel pump. it's kind of dangerous. We called school and the duty officer, they said it was ok for us to fly back, but is it ? it's safe for us to fly back, but it's not "legal"..

... so we decided to take the courtesy car and talk about it at McDonalds.
I'm approaching the final stage of my training, I need to enjoy every minute from now. starting multi-engine soon.

About "TIME SHARING"

I've been pretty busy recently with time sharing, what is the difference between "time building" and "time sharing" ?? let me try to explain...
There are 2 ways to build flight hours during commercial phase of the training, 1st way is time building, where you fly solo, or with an instructor, you log PIC time and you pay for the whole flight. As you can already tell, this way is the expensive way. And then there's the "Time Sharing", where 2 pilots fly together and share the expense of the rental. One might ask.. " but you can only log half of the flight time as PIC (pilot in command)", ha, that's the beauty of Time Sharing.. BOTH pilots can legally log PIC, why ?? because during time sharing, 1 pilot should be "under the hood" and fly as "simulated instrument flying, and the other pilot should be the safety pilot, that way both pilots are acting as PIC. thus, we get the hour, and we only pay for half of the aircraft rental.
When I time share, normally the pilot on the left is the flying pilot, and the other pilot handles the navigation and radio communication, during a time share, we switch position so we get to practice both tasks..
sometimes we fly to uncontrolled airports, sometimes we fly to big class C airports, both are a lot of fun! uncontrolled airports we are responsible for communicating with other traffics, talking with other pilots so we don't run into each other. Big airports like San Antonio, we get the thrill by making parallel approaches with airline traffics, everything is pretty serious when we go to big airports... we need to try our best to show them our professionalism, it's a very good practice as it is as close to our future job as it gets, we can have a better idea of how the pros do it..
I have 160hr now, when I reach 240, I will start my multi-engine training. . I'm almost going home!