Episode 4: The Teacher: Part 3 - Phase III Helicopter Flight Training and the Bell 206 and Bell 412 - Vic

Show Notes

What does it take to make it through Phase III Helicopter flight training in the RCAF?  Phase III Helo instructor Vic Weston shares his experiences with us and talks about what he thinks makes a great helicopter pilot.

Vic flew as a Bell 412 pilot in Combat Support role in Cold Lake, Alberta as well as in Goose Bay, Labrador.  He now teaches at 3 Canadian Forces Flight Training School.

Vic will talk about his passion for flying, why he loves to teach and what he thinks it takes to thrive in your flying career and life!

3CFFTS website (KF Aero, the contracted company)

What is The Pilot Project Podcast?

The Pilot Project Podcast is an aviation podcast that aims to help new pilots learn what it takes to succeed in the world of flight, to help people in the flight training system learn what they may want to fly, and to give Canadians and the world a peek into life on the flight deck in the RCAF. We want to help pilots succeed and thrive! We interview real RCAF pilots for their exciting stories as well as the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll learn their tips to develop resilience and the tools it takes to make it in flight training.

All right, we're ready for departure here at the Pilot Project Podcast, the best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF. I am your host, Bryan Morrison. With me tonight is Vic Weston. How are you doing, Vic?

I'm doing good. How are you doing?

Good. We are going to launch into it. This episode will probably air I think it'll be episode four or five, but it's actually the first one we're recording. So Vic has kindly volunteered to be my guinea pig as I figure out all the, uh, equipment and growing pains of recording. So thanks for that, buddy. Vic graduated from flight training in 2012 from here in Portage, and he was posted to 417 Combat Support Squadron in Cold Lake, Alberta. And he was flying the Ch 146 Griffin. He was posted in 2017 to 444 • • Combat Support Squadron in Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, and in 2018 to the Canadian Air Operations Center, or CAOC in Winnipeg. In 2020, he was posted to 3 CFFTS in Portage la Prairie, where he is still instructing Phase 3 Helo students on the Bell 412, which is the civvie version of the Ch 146 Griffin. So, first question, where did it start for you in terms of flying?

Oh, I'm so cliche when it comes to that. We had been over in Vancouver and, uh, we had just taken the ferry back to Victoria and we were driving down the Patricia Bay Highway, which is, uh, just as you come off the ferry, kind of rolling back into Victoria. And, uh, we were just going by the airport and we saw this big formation of aircraft roll over. I was like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool. And my dad was like, oh, that's the snowbirds. And, um, it turned out it was the Victoria Air Show. I had no idea. And we pulled over and kind of watched the display and then that definitely planted a seed where I was like, oh man, that seems worth exploring. Ended up joining cadets at twelve as soon as I was able to. I tried to join at ten, but they told me I had to wait a couple of years. So it was all just downhill from there. They have a flying scholarship program within cadets and, uh, I started doing the ground school when I was 13 for that, you know, had a few reps done of that and then got in when I was 16. Did my gliders course. That was an amazing summer. Gliding is it seems very basic, and it is basic, but it is the most purest form of flying.

Yeah, I agree. I went to Glider as well when I was 17 and one of the best summers of my life. I'll never forget the friends I made and the experiences I had and the feeling of being in an airplane and there's only the wind noise. I still remember my first solo take off. I know what runway it was in Picton, Ontario. I remember seeing my shadow on the ground of the glider as I took off and thinking like, holy cow, it's just me. So I totally get what you're saying.

Yeah, it was the same experience for me. I, uh, remember that summer just being one of my favorite memories growing up. The next year I actually ended up going to the EA Air Show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

And man, you were at the Oshkosh Air show? Yeah. Uh, that's still on my bucket list, dude.

I hear you. I want to go back. I want to take a • 412 • back and just camp out for a week.

Oh man, bring me. Yeah.

It was so amazing. There's just so much there. So that was kind of another foundational thing. And then I ended up enlisting in the military the next year.

So how old were you when you got in the military?

I was 17. 17, gusting 18.

You'll be • • be 42 when you're pensionable.

Yeah.

That's good, man. And you went to RMC, right? Yeah. And how was that?

I had a great time. I have a lot of really close friends still from there. That, uh, just going through the ringer like that always tends to make close friends, I find. So we still talk every day, pretty much, and uh, there's five or six of us and we just are always chatting about life and chirping each other, keeping each other honest. It's always great.

So after RMC, you went for your flight training. Did you do flight training at all? Like between years or was it all after school?

No, it was all after school. I did two years in Victoria in Esquimalt • • at the joint rescue coordination center. I did my phase one during that period, did my land survival and my sea survival too.

And so phase one is primary flight training, or PFT, which is on the Grob here in Portage.

Yeah, it was my first experience in Portage. It was great. Three months kind of in the winter, but flew nice and consistently. Got done in three months. So pretty smooth. Yeah, it was great. No issues.

Uh, did you enjoy it?

Yeah, man. Doing the aeros was super sweet and going from really not having much experience at all, I had a couple of hours flying with buddies and Cessnas to an aircraft that can loop roll.

Yeah.

But it was really great. It was a great experience and just, uh, a really awesome machine for when you're used to just flying 172s • • • • • and not, uh, really having that greater performance.

Well, I never flew the Grob actually.

Oh, yeah, because you had your commercial license already.

So I think they gave me the option, and somebody made it pretty clear to me that PFT was very much still a selection course, and they were going to try to weed people out. And I was like, I would love to get some more experience, but at the same time, I am not anxious to potentially get weeded out. So I said, thanks, but no thanks. Listeners will recall from Dawn's interview in episode one that this has now changed, and Phase one is very much designed to help people succeed.

That's the one thing that I find, like, why I say guys should always keep trying to come back is because I've had some weird ones where guys who I thought were very eminently qualified get weeded out. One of my good friends, he ended up getting weeded out in the air crew selection, and he was very skilled as a pilot. I don't know how the sausage is made exactly.

They changed it. It's very different, I think, from the time we went through. But even back then, you would hear all kinds of rumors about how did they grade you based on, um, how quickly you learn and improve, or so some people would say, well, you got to do bad at first, and then you show really good improvement. I just did my best. I didn't try to game the system.

I had a momentary panic when I was doing that. We were doing that circuit one. So there was like that the fourth trip when kind of the rubber meets the road and you're doing the circuit, and my climbs were beautiful. My level off was great. And then I turned the wrong direction. I'm like, oh crap! I turned back.

And they still took you?

Yeah, they still took me.

So anyone can do it.

Yeah, pretty much.

So after PFT, then you did more OJT at, uh, JRCC. And which JRCC?

In Esquimalt. • •

Okay.

It was really cool. Uh, it was a great preamble for my future career in search and rescue.

Did you ever get a chance to go out with a squadron at all?

No, it was all very much just in the office. I got to do the SAR Mission Coordinators course, which is where they send the kind of more permanent folks to that's awesome. Just to get them more experience.

Is it search master that people get?

No, that's a different one. So that's more on the flying side. Searchmaster the Start mission Coordinators is much more for the guys who work in the rescue center. Just different skill sets, much more practical from a planning kind of C2 • standpoint.

So that makes sense. And C2 • is, uh, command and control. Yes. Then you went on to Phase Two, which you did at Moose Jaw.

Yeah, we started in April 11.

Okay.

That was such a slick course. I was done in five months.

How did you like the Harvard?

It's a super cool aircraft. It's the equivalent of a Spitfire, essentially. Maneuverability speed. I mean, it's slightly slower than in air speed, but very cool. Yeah, very cool.

I used to say almost exactly that flying the Harvard was like getting to fly like a modern world War II fighter. It was just so cool. I think I really loved flying the Aurora, but I think the Harvard might still be my favorite plane that I've flown.

It was certainly a lot of fun. I feel like when you're on course, you don't really get to enjoy it to its fullest potential. I think the guys who did the Bravo phase of phase two, the guys.

Were going fast yet. Yeah.

They got to have a little more fun with that aircraft before they kind of turned it off and moved on to something else. I feel like we got to a point where we just got comfortable with the aircraft and really had a certain level of mastery, and then okay. Onto the next thing, I got to do a solo where there was a significant amount of cloud, so we were kind of poking up and through. And another one of my buddies was out in a different, like, the next airspace over, and so I could see him doing aerobatics at the same time, and it was pretty all time.

Yeah. Ah, the solo flight where you get to go work on aerobatics is a really cool experience. Yeah, aeros are fun. That was really neat, for sure. I found it was a steep learning curve because I had not done PFT, and so there was a bunch of terms I had to learn, so it was challenging. And also, though, what really impressed me was I thought coming into it with a commercial multi, IFR I would have a big advantage. And I did to a point. But I was so amazed by how quickly people basically caught up to the level.

they closed that distance.

Yeah. And to get your commercial multi, IFR, like, you're barely qualified IFR right, like, you got your bare bones knowledge, you're ready to be a competent copilot and be walked through it.

So you got your license to learn effectively. Absolutely.

Especially mine was through a university program. You're getting the bare minimum hours to get your quals. But it was really cool to see how quickly people like by only, I would say less than ten trips. They were easily caught up. I thought that was really neat. So you get through phase two, and the pressure is off, but the suspense is on because now it's selection time.

I actually asked to go helicopters.

Okay. I was going to ask.

There was not any there was no suspense. Well, there was a little bit of panic stations because they were talking about, hey, we need more guys in the fighter.

more fighter guys.

And so there was talk that was the big narrative back then about sending me fighters. I'm like, Please no I had buddies who were going that direction. They really wanted it.

I had a similar experience, but, um, from what I understand, it is extremely rare for them to send somebody fighters who doesn't want it, because it just takes so much dedication.

I would have been happy in it, I think, if I hadn't done it, but I'm super happy with my career in the helicopter world, too.

You asked for helicopters, you got it. You come to Portage, and now we're on Phase Three, and you were going through in the Dark Ages, right?

Yeah.

I distinctly remember attending a graduation parade with one graduate with Gavin. That's right. Yeah. Uh, they had it in the mess because there was no reason to have a parade, and it was one guy.

To give a bit of background for the audience. I was checking in. There had been two courses before Gavin's course that had completely been failed.

For real?

Yeah.

Zero graduates.

Zero graduates. And that was two consecutive courses. And then Gavin's course, where he was the one of one that graduated, which.

Was the saddest grad I've ever seen. Yeah.

And so good, uh, for him. But you think about this. These were all the guys who were finishing up the Harvard course as I was just getting started, and they seemed like gods. They were so far ahead of us. They had so much knowledge. They go off to the helicopter course and then they fail. How am I going to get through this? It was a serious gut check that had to happen there, and but I didn't really have too much trouble on the Phase Three course either. The only hang up I had was, uh, actually on the 412 side. I had to redo my, uh, my pre final instrument test. And, uh, basically what happened was I botched a missed approach. The missed approach instructions was like, climb to this altitude, straight ahead, then turn to this heading, climb to this altitude, then turn this so it was like a triple header. And I just completely botched-

That kind of thing is enough to have an experienced pilot thinking at full capacity.

Yeah, your bucket is full when you're doing that. You definitely won't need to pre brief that.

That's the kind of missed that I would go over with my co pilot and make sure we're both does that make sense to you? Yeah. Okay. Is that how you understand it? Yeah. You're going to go back and forth, and that's or that you're both thoroughly aware of how this is going to go?

And also the fact that I didn't ask him to kind of hold my hand through it, which is what I would do in real life. In real life is I would say, okay, give me the play by play on the missed approach as we go through it.

Well, you're a student, right? You're trying to play the game, and.

You learn a lot of, like, really getting out of here. You just have a license to learn. I get on squadron, and there was a lot of very quick learning lessons. One example was I was going into a repeater, uh, station up in Cold Lake. They have all these repeater stations so that the fighters can talk a low level. And there was this confined area that we had to land in, and the winds of the day favored coming in over this giant tower. So I shot the approach over the tower and then came down 150ft. And my aircraft captain after was like, hey, you could have just taken this 20 or 30 degrees out of wind, which is perfectly safe, and you would have just been able to come right down to 4ft, which is our normal in ground effect hover height. So it was just like kind of that switch that had to be turned.

And well, yeah, there's so much airmanship stuff that comes with experience, and with experience comes some confidence to take more crosswind and do those things that are maybe, on the surface, seem a little more challenging, but they're actually the smarter, safer choice. Right. Uh, airmanship, it takes time.

Right. Wisdom comes from making mistakes.

You can't learn it in a book. You can partly learn it with situational discussions and that kind of stuff, but it just comes with time. Yeah, 100% comes with hours in the logbook. We're going to get into talking about Vick's time as an instructor. We're going to save his time as combat support for another episode. And today we're going to talk about him as a phase three helo instructor. So were you expecting this posting? Were you wanting this posting?

So I actually asked for this posting out of Cold Lake.

What made you want to do that?

I had kind of gone to aircraft captain. It either made sense to kind of.

Where do you go from here,

Where do you go from here? Where's the next gain? And there really wasn't any positions available to shift from the Griffin to the Cormorant. That's always the goal of every SAR pilot, is to fly the Cormorant. It is a cool it's a fantastic machine. And, uh, it was either kind of go to a ground job or go to a school. And I said, hey, I would love to teach I think that's great. You get to build lots of hours. You stay flying, which has always been my primary goal. You also get that next evolution of now you're instructing the next generation. Now you're an expert in flying, but you're also an expert in teaching people how to fly. So I ended up going up to Goose Bay for a year and then to the Div for two, but then I ended up managing to get myself uh, posted here in June 2020. So kind of between the first and second wave of COVID-19 was, uh, when I got posted here.

Did you have any delays in training or anything? Or was it like, pretty much Ops normal when you came back?

It, uh, wasn't Ops normal, but there was really no delays in the training. I plugged through pretty quickly. I got here in June, got qualified as a Cat C instructor. I had some really great mentorship, a lot of shout out to those guys who really took me by the hand and got me back flying after two years sitting on the bench.

Yeah. Were you nervous at all coming back?

I had taken a couple of baby leaves in the past of nine months, and so I kind of knew what was.

you knew what pain was waiting for you?

Yeah, I knew that I was going to suck for a while and that.

It is awful to come back to flying. I've been on parental leave twice. It's not a fun process to come back and be like, all right, let's begin the months of memorization and the weeks of pain in the SIM. But it makes a difference when you come back with guys who are good dudes to fly with, uh, good people to hold your hand through the process.

Uh, I had some real fantastic instructors here. They really helped me out, get back on the horse, and I even noticed it even coming back after a month of being off. You notice that you get yourself up to a pretty sharp blade when it comes to flying proficiency. And then you take that month off and you're like, oh, not as good as I was a month ago.

Well, we hear it all the time. It's a cliche, but it really is a perishable skill. There's no doubt that the hands and feet, the basics of it never leave. But I think the mental stuff is the hardest part, like just being ahead of the game. Anyone can get through, especially when you have experience. You can get through a flight hanging on by the skin of your teeth to the back of the plane and just barely being with what's going on. But what I think is the real mark of proficiency is when you feel like you're ten steps ahead. Uh, you know those lulls where you almost are like, what am I forgetting? What should I be doing right now? And those moments are less frequent.

Oh, for sure. And I always remember when I was a student here thinking that, oh, man, these instructors, they must have a superpower or something. But just with that level of experience that you get in the operational world, you just are so far ahead of the game of where you are as a student.

Oh, yeah.

Even the other day, the winds had shifted, and for us, starting downwind can be a bit of a risky business. We could get an overtemp situation on the engines when we're starting up.

Uh, when you say starting downwind, you mean with the wind from behind? Yeah.

If the winds are behind the helicopter, you're just not getting the air flow that you want through the turbine. So you could get a compressor stall or you could get some sort of situation where you over temp the engine. And I just pointed that out to one of the students and he thought that was a super power. But it's that experience, like you said, right. You have that time in and you get the experience, and then you just see these things.

Well, when you get a chance to fly operationally and you're flying, like, with a good regularity, there's so many things that you learn by being on the aircraft.

Having great mentors is another key thing.

Oh, yeah. The difference in the experience you will gain between good and poor mentorship are incredible. I would say that it may be the most critical piece of your training. Certainly as an Air Force pilot is the mentorship You receive uh, your hands and feet. You pretty much know by the end of flight training if you've got hands or feet, and you're either a bit ham fisted, but you can make it through, or you've got a bit of natural talent and it's not going to be a big deal for you. But the thing that makes a good military pilot is not, not just hands and feet, it's the decision making. It's the airmanship. Because you're using that aircraft to do a job. The job is not flying the aircraft. The job is the mission that you're using an aircraft to accomplish. And so the mentorship that you can receive, that will give you all the tricks of the trade, so to speak. I think that is a huge, huge piece of your development as a pilot. Yeah. Can you give me a fairly, uh, quick outline of what phase three involves on the helicopter?

Phase three on the helicopter is, uh, done on two aircraft. You have the Bell 206, and you have the Bell 412 • You do about a month of ground school for the 206, which is a Jet Ranger.

It's a small two seater,

Two front and then there's kind of three seats in the back.

I didn't know that. I thought it was a two seater.

Yeah. Uh, it's still a pretty small little turbine area.

can you put five Bryan Morrisons in there. Yeah. Okay.

Well, um, you'd be tight in the back. Uh, it would be uncomfortable in the back, but it could do it. You could do it. Yeah, in theory.

Okay.

I mean, it's like any helicopter. When it's light, it's a little race car. When it's loaded up, when you're at gross weight, the thing is an absolute slug.

It's a pig. Yeah.

I mean, the Griffin is the same way. Uh, the way we fly it here at the school, we fly at about 1000 pounds under gross weight. Typically, generally speaking, in the wintertime, when it's cool out, flies great too. It's really when you're at altitude, when it's hot, or when you're very loaded up, that the aircraft really becomes sluggish and underperforming. So, yeah, you start on the 206 and basically the way I would break it down is that the Bell 206 is really introducing you to helicopter flying. You've been flying fixed wing up until this point. Now we're teaching you how to fly a helicopter. So we do that and then we go on to a navigation phase where we're introducing crew concept. You've been flying single pilot up until that point. Now we're introducing you working as a crew on the 412 side. We take all of those things that you've learned on the 206 side and we now start adding the bigger machine with more systems and automation. So, uh, we go through a clear hood phase, we add confined areas and then we move on to the instrument phase, where we're now teaching that automation. We're teaching the flight management system, we're teaching crew concept. Those are the key elements of the instrument phase. And then we're on to night, it's a quick four trips in the aircraft. Uh, adaptation to night vision goggles. A lot of the time we teach things on the clear hood side that are more difficult techniques when we're flying clearhood. But they really help when you're flying night vision goggles.

Translate better into night flying.

Exactly. And uh, just because you have that smaller field, uh, of view. And then once we wrap that, we do a uh, couple, uh, composite missions and that's the end of the course.

And when you say composite, that's like.

Uh, we give them a scenario and uh, they roll with it.

So what's a typical scenario • •

Be like moving fuel, uh, from point A to point B. And then there will be a kind of a snowball scenario from that.

Some kind of complication.

Yeah, there'll be complications. They'll run into weather, they'll get retask for maybe a medevac or something like that.

Putting them into a typical day on the line in a line squadron.

Yeah, for instance, when I was up in Gold Lake, we would do utility missions and then we were also our main tasking though, was search and rescue. To get retasked at any point 100% it's happened. So, uh, you got to be prepared.

And so after composite, that's it.

Yeah, that's it. That's wings.

Uh, that's the big day.

We promote them and then we do the grad parade. And then we have a mess dinner that night.

And hopefully it's not one guy.

Hopefully it's not one guy. We've been doing good so far.

So, right on. Here you are, you're an instructor at Portage. You've completed your training and, uh, you start instructing. What did you find was challenging about that?

At first, I found for myself. It was really taking good notes so.

That you could debrief and write the cards after.

Exactly. Yeah. That was something that I was not very diligent at, but I kind of had a good error trap for that in that I would write the cards right away.

Well, then you're avoiding the error of delayed grading.

Yeah, exactly. You've read the manual.

I once wrote a test. Yeah.

Well, that's it. That error of delay grading is, uh, a real thing. And even I find now I'll typically do two trips sometimes. If you don't take those diligent notes, sometimes the trips will blend into each other, especially if it's the same trip. I'm not very original. I'll tend to do the first trip, and then the second trip will be an exact repeat of, um, the trip before. It's been really good. I really enjoy teaching. I mean, the students are much better than we were when we were students.

Really?

I think so. They're more prepared.

Do you think that that is a result of better gen or better students?

I think it's a better training system, yeah.

I'll break this down for a second. Gen is essentially a word for, like, crib notes that people pass down from course to course, essentially basically helping the next course to be prepared for what might be coming their way.

The way I think about it is that you are not going to make every mistake yourself.

Yeah. Gen is not a bad thing. Gen can be a bad thing. Gen is G E N and it's, uh what does it stand for? Like, general knowledge, general tips?

I don't know.

We've always called a good gen, bad gen, like all that kind of it's an expression. Do you think that basically you're getting stronger students now as a result of a stronger training system?

Yeah, I think it's a better training system. We're building a better pilot now than what we have in the past, just due to the way we train guys. We don't work on a fear based system.

Do you think that the mental performance coaching and stuff that they do is a factor?

Definitely it is, yeah.

Obviously with my experiences with mental health, I think that's like a huge frontier on the future of aviation training.

Knowing how to kind of hack your mind a little bit, it really helps. A lot of the skills that I have now I wish I had when I was a student.

Oh, dude. Being a strong student and being mentally resilient are two separate skills. That is absolutely true, and they're both.

Important, but I think one leads to the other being I think one AIDS the other.

But I think being a strong student does not necessarily lead you to be mentally prepared, but being mentally prepared will help you be a strong student.

Whenever I did have a hiccup in my flight training, it was always kind of, uh, a woe is me. Pity party for a day, and then you kind of pick yourself, dust yourself off.

Um, you saw that so much back then with anyone who had failed, you're just as likely to run into them, like, eight beers deep in the mess, rather than figuring out how to learn from this kind of thing. Right.

Yeah, there was a lot of bad coping that happened.

So taking it back a little, we said that the thing that you found challenging at first was basically having the brain space to take notes while you were teaching.

Yeah, well, I think there was also a lot of learning that happens, uh, when you first get qualified. Little things. I remember my first trip, so I get qualified, and I go immediately onto nights, which is kind of one of the end trips of the course. We had had our journey logs in the aircraft. During the day, they just sit in the aircraft because of COVID at night, uh, we would have the books would be an ops, and I totally forgot about that. And so I get out to the aircraft, I flash it up, and we're checking in with dispatch, and I say, hey, uh, Outlaw 62, it's lifting in one. The girl in dispatch comes back, negative. Uh, you haven't signed out the book yet. And so I have to wind down the aircraft, tell my student, hey, you have control. Sit tight, and I have to run all the way back to dispatch. It was like, a lot of little learning curves like that right. Like little idiosyncrasies. Up until the time you get qualified, you are always flying with another very eminently qualified instructor.

Nothing can simulate being on your own the same as it feels to just be on your own.

Yeah, I felt like I really came into my own after 300 hours of instruction.

which is crazy, because, uh, I assume that a lot of people who listen to this will be pilots or people who want to be pilots. And I remember when I was a private pilot student, I thought of the 200 hours benchmark to get your commercial license as, like, quite a bit of experience, and it's really not. And even though I think I have about 2000 hours now, I still don't think I have a ton of experience now. We speak about chunks of time, like 300 hours of instructing. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time in a plane. That's a lot of time to do a job that's so technical. And it's interesting to think that a chunk of time, time that is so much larger than what we used to think of as, like, a lot of flying time as, like a little building block to what it takes to kind of start figuring things out.

Well, now I'm kind of at that point where I got about 440 hours of instructional time, and now I'm looking at taking that next leap where training to be a tester or generating the next flight instructors. Getting the A category is, uh, okay. And that's 500 hours is what you need for that.

So I think overall we've said kind of that the most challenging parts of starting the job as a Phase Three Helo instructor was either the brain space to write things down and then there's just the rest of it is just like the same as any new flying position where there's just so much to know and you don't know it. Yeah. What was the best part?

Seeing your guys graduate is the best part. And they jump into the 412 where it's a lot of switches and a lot of instrumentation and just, uh, seeing them go from that point where they're really just struggling to start the aircraft to by the end, they're very good. You're ready to basically take them out on a mission in challenging conditions and you'd still be able to know what to do, be a good first officer and be able to take direction and fly and do all the things I asked you to do.

We've talked about kind of the nuts and bolts of what the course involves. So what's your coolest thing you've gotten to do as an instructor?

I think the cross countries with the students are the most fun thing that I do. I thoroughly enjoy them. You've been in the South Port box for the last 100 hours of your flight training. You get to do small cross countries on the previous Phase Two course, but you really don't get to do like a three day VFR IFR type thing. And I tend to do a lot of hybrid flight plans where I'll go VFR for a while and then I'll transition up to IFR.

So VFR is visual flight rules and IFR is instrument flight rules. And so basically one is flying with visual reference to the ground and the other is flying with your instruments. Exactly. Go on.

I tend to take off out of Yorkton and then I go over to Big Quill Lake and, uh, I tend to teach my students about flying over the water. We never go over the water because it would be unsafe. They're untrained in how to escape the helicopter. And what we tend to do is just hover over the shoreline and they can't see the ground. All they see is water. You don't want to look at the waves. That's like the worst thing you can do because the waves are so dynamic.

Right.

You want to look at all the foam and all the wind lines that are on the lake. And one of the things I always talk to my students about, you want to maintain a stable platform with a helicopter. That is the key element to helicopter flying because we're going to be putting in my past job, a search and rescue technician out on the hook

and by the hook you mean the winch, right?

Yeah, the winch. And they need a stable platform in order to be able to hoist them into a very tight area. Because the only reason we use the hoist is because we can't land. Typically, these areas are very small, and if you're not stable, you're going to be dragging this poor guy through the trees. So it's very, very important.

So, for you, the coolest part is just getting a chance to get outside of the area and get on the road, go to some new places, show the students a place that is not just their training area.

We don't necessarily teach it in the training plan here, but it is very useful knowledge. Try to give them a few skill sets and just try to plant some seeds in their mind for what's next for you. What can I get excited about? And that's not just necessarily for search and rescue. That's for tactical flying. We'll tend to talk about a lot of tactics, especially given what's happening in the world right now with the Ukraine Russia conflict.

There's definitely a lot of lessons learned to be captured, uh, seeing a modern conflict with helicopters and modern anti, uh, aircraft and MANPADS. MANPADS being

Man-Portable air defense systems.

Oh, yeah. You know, your stuff, which is basically a shoulder fired rocket launcher intended to take out, uh, aircraft. There's so much to see there and to learn from what's gone on in that conflict.

The big thing that I find so crazy is the Russians are just rolling through Ukraine at 200ft. I think that's insane.

Too high.

Way too high.

4Ft, which is like, to any airplane pilot out there, is very, very low.

Well, and the reason you want to be as near as possible or nap of the earth is that if you have an enemy in the treeline with a man pad or some sort of stinger, it gives them less time to react to you, and they can't see you through multiple tree lines. But if you're at 200, 300ft, you're a target for a much broader area.

And that's a lot of what we're seeing is helicopters that seem to be cruising as if they were unopposed at several hundred feet in the air, and they're just cruising along and

Mr Stinger reaches out and touches them.

Yeah. What seems to be like one of the bigger challenges that students face on phase • 3 Helo?

We actually have been very fortunate lately. We haven't had many failures. We haven't ceased trained anybody since I've been an instructor here. I would say that the tendency for people to have hiccups in any phase tends to be towards the end of the phase, because over each phase, we tend to demand more and more excellence. And so it's very easy to make one mistake on a trip and then that kind of snowballs into two or three more. You get what's called an unsatisfactory flight. The biggest thing for students, I think, is to be able to make a mistake, learn from it, put it behind you, have a short memory on the flight. We can relive it afterwards and find all the nuances of how to make it better. But on the trip, you've got to be able to put it behind you. Don't dwell on it because the next maneuvers in front of you and you got to perform well on that.

And it kind of strikes me that that's true of both a mistake during the flight and a flight that you don't pass. They're both important to just sort of have a short memory on. Right. You make a mistake during the flight, you got to just keep pressing on and do your best for the rest of the flight. It's not a reason to torpedo the flight. And if you have a setback, you don't pass the flight, you get a marginal. Then again, it's important to you got to learn from it, but you got to move on, because if you let that dog you, you're done well.

One thing I find too, is if guys are able to move on from that bad thing, they'll get a marginal. And that still means, like, yeah, you, you failed one item, but you can fail two items on every flight other than a test and a pretest and still carry on to the next flight. It's really when you have that bad thing happen and then you let it snowball on you and then you fail multiple items, that's when you really have the problem. So it's a very important thing to be able to realize, hey, yeah, I screwed that up. I'm going to learn from it. We're going to move on. And oftentimes if somebody screws something up, we can always repeat it at the end if we got a little extra time and if they do well on it, well, hey, we'll use the terminal level, which means, like, hey, you managed to upgrade it by the end of the flight, so good to go. And there is some debate about whether we use kind of the average throughout the trip or if we use like, hey, how did they do in the end of the trip as the grade. But I'm a big believer of, hey, if you can learn from your mistakes and improve, hey, I'm going to give you that bonus.

What do you think is the most important thing you do to keep yourself ready for the job?

I think getting enough sleep.

Yeah.

My family situation. I have three kids and, uh, pretty busy life. Right. Lots of extracurriculars and a foster child. And a foster child. We do foster as well. But getting uh, a good sleep habit is so vital. If you are not well rested, your mind is not working where it needs to be. And, uh, I notice the degraded performance. I notice it more and more as I get more experienced if I am tired, I am not as alert and I can still teach a trip, but am I giving the best instructional performance that I can? No. It's something I have to be very cognizant of and make sure that hey, I'm getting to bed at a decent hour, not getting sucked into some great Netflix show or something like that. So being disciplined in that domain is very vital.

It's a stress reducer too, right. To know you're going in well rested versus being kind of stressed out because you know you didn't sleep well, you know you're supposed to and all that kind of mind games that can go on with sleep. Right.

Well then you're sucking back on three or four coffees, trying to get yourself perked up. 4 hours of paying attention. And not just like what you normally do day to day. You have to be watching constantly. I've had instances where you have to grab the controls within a split second or you're going to be balling an aircraft up. You cannot afford to be

You just have to be alert.

You have to be alert. Yeah.

What do you think are the attributes that make a good pilot?

I think somebody who can think outside the box.

Like problem solving.

Problem solving is a huge thing. It doesn't necessarily play so much where we are in the training mill. But I think that is what really distinguishes a good mission commander that's that.

Ability to sort of deal with new situations.

Uh, the combat situation is always evolving and you have to be willing to adapt to those scenarios.

And that's very challenging. That's way harder than it sounds.

Yeah, absolutely. And not only that, but you have to be a good contingency planner. A good plan never survives first contact with the enemy.

Half of aviation is if this happens, I'll do this, if this happens, I'll do this. And that will help you to a certain amount. But then you also have to have that reactive ability to react and adapt.

And that's a hard thing to teach too. We always say that those sorts of soft skills that are kind of more.

Intangible, those are more like experience based skills. Yeah.

They have to be taught through experience or through war gaming things.

And uh, that is though, where sitting down as a group of pilots and sharing your experiences. What would you do with this? What would you do with that tabletopping? It we call it on the Aurora. Doing a bunch of tabletop exercises does pay off. It gets your mind thinking. And as silly as it sounds, doing those dry run scenarios in your head does pay dividends down the road 100%.

Because if this is the first time you're thinking about it, you haven't captured all the possible contingencies and you're one person. If you're sitting in a room with a whole bunch of other people, they may have a better way of doing it.

Part of what we want to do here is we want to try to help new pilots. We want to try to help aspiring pilots. So what would your advice be to someone who wants to join the Air Force as a pilot?

I think from a flying perspective, to make you a better aviator right now, in the immediate time that we're talking to you and something you could pick up no matter where you're at, is just go out and learn about flying. Go attend a ground school at, uh, your local flying club.

Get yourself a copy of from the ground up.

From the ground up. Yeah, all those little things that we learn about, like, for instance, adiobatic lapse rate, I employ that every time I go flying. Just going out and getting basic meteorology, just understanding this, going through, learning how to VFR fly, all these skill sets are building blocks that you will use in your future career.

And really one of the best ways you can do that is either if you are younger, you can join air cadets and go to ground school and they're going to teach you all this stuff. And if you are older, 18, 19, whatever it is that you age out, like you said, go to ground school, buy a copy from the ground up. Read it a bunch of times till it makes sense.

Just go out and put the reps in. Right. That is the biggest thing is just the more you can learn about flying and aviation and how everything kind of ties together. All of the concepts that I teach my students who are just about to graduate when I'm about to slap wings on their chest, is all a series of very simple things going out and getting a basic understanding of all these things, how all these things kind of piece together. There's nothing that is really difficult to wrap your head around. It's about just getting out there and putting that first rep in.

I like that expression, get the reps in because it's the truth. It's not sexy. It's like that Olympic weightlifter that's competing. They've done that same lift thousands of times. And it's that one time on stage. Those are the exciting times. But before you can do that, you need to have done the groundwork thousands of times. Okay, that's going to wrap it up on our episode on Phase Three. helo, we want to thank Vic again for taking the time to chat with us today. Our next episode will feature my good friend Dan Conway, who has flown both the Buffalo and currently The Hercules. And we'll be talking about phase three multi engine so you can learn all about what it takes to become a multi engine pilot in the RCAF this week. I'd especially like to thank you, the listeners we just passed 1000 listens, and honestly, I could not be more thrilled. What can you do to help us continue to succeed I'm glad you asked. There are three things you can do. First, subscribe on whatever service you use to listen to podcasts. Second, tell your friends about the show. We rely almost entirely on word of mouth for the show to spread. And third, you can leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. As we get close to wrapping up our series on the training system, it's time to think about what's ahead. We'll be hearing from pilots on all different platforms about what it's like to fly around the world in areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali and many more. We'll also have a chance to chat about that final frontier space as we sit down with the commander of three Canadian Space Division, brigadier General Mike Adamson. There's lots to get excited about in the coming episodes, so get ready. As always, you can follow us on all social medias at @podpilotproject, and you can reach us by email at [e-mail]. That's all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up, See ya.