With the coming age of very light jets (or whatever you want to call them) just around the corner, the question has been repeatedly raised but never really answered: How will pilots fare when transitioning from piston-powered airplanes to this new breed of little jets?
It's a much more complicated question than it at first appears, so to come up with an answer, or at least to understand the question much better, we decided to conduct an experiment. Instead of wildly speculating (as much fun as that can be), we decided to take a typical very light jet pilot candidate and go out and do some actual flying.
As luck would have it, I was the guinea pig for this assignment. In terms of my aviation experience and habits, I'm exactly the kind of pilot that safety experts have in mind when they worriedly bring up the issue of newbies flying VLJs into the flight levels. I'm a 1,200-hour non-multi-engine rated pilot who has quite a few hours in the latest high-performance technologically advanced singles.
And my typical mission profile is strikingly similar to this new breed of pilots who will be transitioning en masse to VLJs, in that I fly almost solely for transportation, I file IFR on just about every trip, and I'm not only comfortable with new technology, I actively embrace it.
Like a lot of our readers, I've also been dreaming about flying jets since I was a kid.
Using me as the test subject, the specific question we looked to answer was this: Can a regular piston-single type pilot who flies IFR in the system and is reasonably proficient on instruments transition to jets? We'd find out.
Of course, there aren't any VLJs yet. So we did the next best thing (actually, it wound up being even better than that) by picking a jet that emphasizes all of the challenges pilots will find when transitioning to turbofans.
To conduct the test, we got together with John and Martha King, owners of King Schools and operators of a Falcon 10 business jet. At first blush, the Falcon 10 may seem like exactly the wrong jet for our purposes. Unlike VLJs, the Falcon 10 is very fast (.87 Mach), plus it weighs around three times as much as most of the VLJs (nearly 20,000 pounds full of fuel and people). And with its sweptback wings and leading edge slats, it has more in common aerodynamically with a Boeing 747 than with an Eclipse 500. But it's precisely because of these big-jet characteristics that the 10 is a perfect candidate for the job. If there's a challenge in flying jets, it's to be found in the Falcon 10.
Before we got started, I spoke with John and Martha about the program, and we formulated what sounded like a reasonable plan. Before arriving in their hometown of San Diego, I'd prepare by studying up on the Falcon 10-I used SimuFlite's excellent flight manual for the airplane-and by going through a trio of online courses taught by King Schools: Jet Transition; High Altitude Flight; and Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums (RVSM). Then once I was in California, we'd spend an afternoon going over systems and getting to know the actual airplane before going flying the next day.
The modest goal of the flying, as John King defined it, was to get to the point where I felt I would be able to "fly a jet comfortably with further training." I took that to mean, getting to the point that I would no longer be completely demoralized by the experience.
Now, to be fair, I had a bit of a head start on my jet training. I've had the chance on a couple of occasions to fly in Level D jet simulators, so the jet experience wasn't completely foreign to me. I knew the feeling of handling the controls and watching the displays. But on those occasions, I was never doing any official training, and the instructor/pilots were always very helpful with the visiting journalist, so my official duties in the "cockpit" were limited. The instructor could even control the weather. The game plan with the Kings was to fly in a real jet in the real world.
