Flight Training - September 2019 - 46

10,467. The number
of RV aircraft completed
and flown, as of May 9.

TRANSITION TRAINING

EXPERIMENTAL EXPERIENCE
Brushing up and noting differences

7-inch GRT screens and a Garmin 496 portable GPS. But the
pace of improvement in avionics is so rapid that the panel
seemed quite dated. AOPA has since upgraded to a digital
panel by Advanced Flight Systems with instrument flight
rules capability, and will complete a full refurbishment of the
aircraft before giving it away in 2020.
Outside the heated hangar, the morning sun had climbed
well above the horizon.
"Let's push it out and fly before the wind comes up," Benning suggested. "We've got a nice day to fly, and that's kind of
rare this time of year."
WINNING THE LOTTERY
I buckle into the four-point harness in the right seat while
Benning uses a tow bar on the free-castering nosewheel to
pull the airplane outside over the crunchy, dry snow. He opens
the gull door on the left side and climbs into the roomy cockpit. Even with his broad shoulders, the 48-inch-wide cockpit
is roomy enough to keep us from bumping.
We taxi to Runway 26 at the nontowered airfield and
"backtrack," as the Canadians say, to use the full length.
Despite the airfield elevation of 2,000 feet msl, the cold, dry
air lowers the density altitude to a negative number: minus
1,300 feet.

46 FLIGHT TRAINING SEPTEMBER 2019

Mike Seager is the dean of flight training in Experimental aircraft, having provided many thousands
of hours of dual instruction in the Van's Aircraft RV
series.
The low-key pilot and aircraft builder has
logged more than 12,000 flight hours teaching in
RVs during the past 20 years-and the training looks
and feels much like what you'd expect in any other
fixed-wing aircraft. Take off from his home airstrip,
a turf field at Vernonia, Oregon, (05S) or the Van's
Aircraft factory at nearby Aurora (UAO), climb to
a safe altitude, and practice slow flight and stalls.
Then return to the airport and spend the majority of
your time and effort on takeoffs and landings.
The vast majority of Seager's transition students
are builders or buyers of Van's Aircraft RVs. If
they're going to fly a side-by-side RV, Seager puts
them in the left seat of the training aircraft. If they're
preparing to fly a tandem RV with front and rear
seats, Seager puts them on the right side so they'll
have the stick in their right hand and the throttle in
the left just as they will in an RV-3, -4, or -8. (Van's
only uses side-by-side airplanes for training.)
Seager says flying RVs doesn't require exceptional skill-but many builders become so focused
on aircraft construction during the months or years
it takes to build an aircraft that their stick-and-rudder skills suffer. Pilots seeking transition training
range from new private pilots to airline transport
pilots.
"As long as they're current and proficient, transition training tends to go well," he said. "Transition
training is really differences training for pilots who
already have solid fundamental skills."
-Dave Hirschman

Flight Training - September 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - September 2019