By Eric Simons
"OK, now just push the yoke all the way forward."
I take flight instructor Pamela de Castro's advice and push. Our two-seat Cessna 152 lurches, the nose falls out of the sky, the brown grass of Mt. Diablo rushes up to fill our view and the needle on the vertical speed indicator rattles down to show us losing more than 1,000 feet of altitude per minute.
A few seconds into what feels like a free-fall, de Castro gently pulls back, and levels off the plane with a pleased air. "Airplanes don't just fall out of the sky," she says, returning to the theme of our brief lesson. She's right. Airplanes do not just fall out of the sky, even when the power goes out, the engine fails, the yoke is pulled all the way back or forward, or the student pilot is unable to meet the challenges of multi-tasking at 3,500 feet. On a smooth day the plane seems to fly itself, leaving the pilot to point it in the right direction, watch for other planes and make sure nothing bad happens.
Sound like fun? Then flying lessons might be for you.
The first thing you'll need is money. Add up plane rental, instructors' costs and fuel, throw in some miscellaneous costs for equipment and charts, and you're looking at about $7,000 for a license. Of course, that's just a license to fly on clear days with at least three miles of visibility. If you want to fly in bad weather, using the instruments to navigate, it's another couple of thousand dollars. Want to fly multi-engine planes? Another couple of thousand dollars. Want to be an instructor? Fly a jet?
It adds up quickly.
Pilots seem to take an almost perverse pride in the costs. Consider aviators' "$100 hamburger," named for the price of the plane rental and gas just to find a burger in an airport diner in another part of the state.
And it's not just a matter of having the money. The reference book with the FAA regulations has brick-like heft. "You can't do it for kicks because there's so much studying, air time and financial commitment," says de Castro, who got her license 10 years ago and has been working as an instructor for the past seven. "It's not like learning to drive a car."
To get your license, you have to pass a rough written examination that asks questions on everything flight-related, including cloud names (cumulonimbus vs. cumulostratus, for example), how carburetor heat affects RPM and how to interpret flight charts -- which, for the busy Bay Area, look like sample problems from a vector calculus class.
And there's an oral exam unlike any test most people have taken, in which you sit, one on one, and get grilled on your knowledge of light airplanes.
Of course, you can't do it without the motor skills required to pass a flight test - a three-hour ordeal legendary for examiners' attempts to catch students by surprise. Although the examiners are usually sympathetic and straightforward, "people get in a rut," says Shane Sentz, an instructor and designated examiner with Diamond Air in San Carlos. Student pilots do the same thing, over and over, trying to drill the important procedures into their heads.
Examiners like to check to make sure the student pilot can react when his routine is broken. The test requires students to prove they can handle stalls, power outages, takeoffs and landings. They have to read their charts - instructors can say, for example, that they want to eat, forcing the pilot to consult his chart for the nearest airport with a diner, change course and land. Instructors can suddenly change the direction of the flight, abort landings at the last minute -- by yelling, if they so choose, to "watch out for the cows on the runway" - or casually reach over and turn off the power without mentioning it.
But most people end up with their license, and most people don't regret it.
Pilots put in thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours and get in return a view of the world to share with the birds: Clouds blanketing the coast like fresh snow, the sun dancing on skyscrapers in three Bay Area cities at once, the magenta-and-navy salt ponds in the South Bay and the tops of the region's tallest mountains.
And if you study real hard, put in all the hours and get the right licenses, you can even get the rare thrill: sightseeing around the auburn-speckled hills of Mt. Diablo as your student, grasping the yoke with clammy palms, turns a lovely shade of green.