Test Pilot

As a flight instructor, sometimes I get to test fly the flight school airplanes when they come out of their required scheduled maintenance.  I say I "get" to because I think it's a privilege to fly the planes without having to pay.  But more importantly, I get an overwhelming sense of connection to test pilots all over the world.  One might chuckle when I call myself a test pilot,  flying a plane that has withstood the test of time for longer than I've been alive to become the  most popular training aircraft in the world. But if I were to brush off such an event and treat it as routine I would be doing a great disservice to the people who trained me, and to a greater extent, the many men and women who died to learn what we know now.  Even as you read this there are aircraft larger than your city block being flown at thousands of feet, slower and slower and slower, until they begin to fall out of the sky.  It is done this way, as it has been for over 100 years, because there simply is no other way to find out.  We must find out what the machine we've created is capable of.  Not because the authorities say so, but because as pilots and engineers, if we are  to present our machine to the population in an attempt to better mankind, we must be able to say with the utmost confidence that this plane is safe, and this is how it works.  Test flying is not the final frontier.  It is not really a frontier anymore at all, rather, it is the accepted way to come to these conclusions.

As I run through the paces of starting the plane and taxiing to the runway for our test flight, I can't help but think about how much this simple act has changed in the past century.

Throwing men into experimental planes back in the 30s, 40s and 50s was barbaric at best by today's standards (although, if they were anything like me, it would not have taken much convincing to strap their asses to a plane who's model number started with an "X").  In the military it was commonplace to literally hurl bodies into the darkness attempting to understand the rules faster than the competition.  Pushing the envelope isn't just a saying, it is the only way to learn how to fly.  The learning curve was very steep.  On average, 1 man a week for many years died in the name of learning.  The lives of the pilots rested on the shoulders and slide rules of the engineers that designed the experimental planes that they used to probe the unknown.  There were no computers to calculate the airflow over a section of the wing, much less the whole aircraft.  The planes that rolled off the assembly line sometimes bared the result of lessons learned during testing.  "Stiffeners" would be added to the plane to strengthen a weak part that failed during the test flight.  Added  fairings corrected areas that created too much drag.  

Today, the Boeing 787 is 3 years late and perfect, and people are complaining.  But I digress.  There are no cameras or on-lookers for my cool-morning test flight.  The guy in the control tower doesn't even know the plane that I am flying was in a hundred pieces the night before.  Throttle response is good and we roll down a runway that is 7 times as long as we need it to be.  Up off the ground, no more usable runway, so we can't land on it if the engine fails now.  Higher, the fields near the airport property become usable and then further, higher, no longer an option in an emergency.  Finally through the dead zone and the original runway is again available, though in the opposite direction (a 180 degree turn can be performed safely at this altitude).  Free and clear for now.  The higher the better.

Learning how to push an aircraft through the sound barrier is like trying to eat one Pringle.  It can't be done.  However, there is a finite number of Pringles.  Back then, we knew there had to be a solution, we knew we had to find that last Pringle.  We needed to keep going faster, slamming these planes against that shock wave to see if we could get through it.  If we failed enough times, maybe we would give up and label it impossible.  Turning on 4 liquid-fueled rockets on the back of a test plane might work.  That was the way Chuck Yeager and others did it, though he was the first.  After many attempts and modifications, we finally succeeded.  For Yeager, the event was a horrendously violent experience followed by the smooth freedom that is the reward of supersonic flight.

My reward is the smooth freedom of normal operation.  The plane sounds and feels right.  Check the gauges, do the usual maneuvers, and back on the ground before breakfast.  This plane is safe, and this is how it works.