If you boarded a flight and saw two reporters in the cockpit, it would probably scare the heck out of you — and rightly so. They don’t teach much aeronautics in journalism school.
But to settle a longstanding debate, FFP reporter Destiny Herbers and I endeavored to learn about airplanes and how to land them. Our semester-long journey through the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s aviation program made stopovers in high-tech flight simulators and highly technical theory classes.
Originally, our unlikely voyage unfolded in special sections of the weekly FFP Omaha newsletter, but now you can read them all in one place. Come fly away with us, and we’ll try to get you back down to the ground safely.
FFP Omaha newsletter
Oct. 23
It started with a frivolous debate among friends at a holiday party nearly two years ago.
Two sides quickly formed: those who believed they could safely land a plane in an emergency and those who thought they were full of hot air.
The untrained but undeterred pilots, led by indomitable FFP reporter Destiny Herbers, laid out a series of unlikely hypotheticals.
Let’s say you’re on a flight and the pilot becomes incapacitated. You have to take the yoke and land the plane, but an air traffic controller is coaching you through it on the radio. The conditions are clear with no wind. It doesn’t have to be a perfect landing — just good enough that nobody dies …
Surely, a first-time flyer could put a plane down safely under those circumstances, they claimed.
The naysayers, myself included, argued it doesn’t matter who’s giving you directions or how good the weather is: There’s no damn way any of us could land a plane.
Do you know how many buttons and gauges there are in a cockpit? You couldn’t just “figure it out” during the scariest moments of your life. None of you can even drive a stick shift!
It went on like this for a while. The following week, we revisited the subject in the light of day at the office, but none of the combatants budged.
Greater Nebraska reporter Natalia Alamdari asked her pilot friend to weigh in. He said if you were calm during the landing “you could put it down pretty hard and still walk away,” but added that “taking off and landing are the most dangerous times.”
That didn’t change any minds, but we figured it was the closest we’d get to answering the question.
An unsatisfying agreement to disagree held until a few months ago when I ran into Sam Peshek at a lecture.
The mustachioed media relations boss for the University of Nebraska at Omaha mentioned in passing that his next appointment was at the Aviation Institute’s state-of-the-art flight simulators.
My ears perked up. I told him about the unresolved argument that had engulfed our newsroom, and to my delight, he graciously invited us to try the simulator.
After back-and-forth emails, we devised a plan. First, Destiny and I would try to land a plane in the simulator under the conditions specified during our debate. Then, we would sit in on a semester of private pilot theory at UNO. Finally, we would get another go at the simulator to see if we improved.
It was time to settle the score — and go back to school.
So, fasten your seatbelts and keep them buckled throughout the flight because you’re in for a bumpy ride.
Tune in to our new special section “Learning to Fly” next week when we’ll tell you about the first simulator test, UNO’s ace aviation teachers and our introduction to pilot humor.
Oct. 30
I should have been laser-focused on our mission as Scott Vlasek introduced us to the flight simulator, but all I could think about was the upside-down rubber chicken staring back at me.
FFP reporter Destiny Herbers and I had come to UNO’s Aviation Institute to settle a long-debated question: Could we, a pair of non-pilots, safely land a plane?
The simulator, a replica small-plane cockpit contained in a metal box, looked about as you’d expect. Two seats for the pilots, a yoke and foot pedals for steering and a dashboard of gauges, switches and buttons for God knows what.
The black rubber chicken hanging from the machine’s exterior, however, was unexpected.
Vlasek, the institute’s director, explained: Southwest Airlines has a tradition of attaching rubber chickens to their simulators for good luck. As the story goes, a manager once demanded they be taken off, but the machines started malfunctioning. Now, every simulator Southwest orders comes with a chicken.
UNO, which educates future Southwest pilots, adopted the superstition, Vlasek said.
It eased my nerves to have the poultry charm there. If Destiny or I were to land a (simulated) plane, we’d need all the help we could get.
Destiny, self-confident in her plane-landing abilities, climbed into the cockpit first. Instructor Patrick Ryan turned on the simulator’s screens, revealing a bird’s-eye view of Omaha.
Patrick talked Destiny through steering with the yoke, using the rudder pedals and reading the gauges. He also controlled the throttle on a tablet.
Finally, we arrived at the moment of truth. Patrick cut the engine, and Destiny began descending toward Eppley Airfield.
“Looking good,” Patrick said reassuringly as she glided closer to the virtual runway.
Then, just a few hundred feet from the ground, the simulator’s screens suddenly turned white.
A malfunction — the kind rubber chickens are meant to prevent — had sabotaged Destiny.
Patrick said she was right on track for a smooth landing, but it was impossible to know for sure what would have happened.
I tried the simulator too and encountered a similar blank screen while attempting a loop.
We resolved to come back another day. Even though the answer to our question had eluded us, being at the controls of an aircraft for the first time was truly exhilarating. Patrick, who previously taught aviation to Burke High School students, was a great instructor.
Nov. 6
As I pulled into a parking spot outside 6320 Maverick Plaza, a feeling came over me that I thought had been permanently extinguished years ago: first-day-of-school jitters.
FFP reporter Destiny Herbers and I had just been cast in the unlikely role of UNO aviation students after a speculative debate about landing planes turned into a very real plan to audit Larry Morgan’s private pilot theory class.
Larry, a man of many talents, holds a unique hybrid position at UNO. By day, the longtime engineer oversees the campus’ physical well-being as the university’s assistant vice chancellor of facilities management, but on Wednesday evenings, he teaches freshmen the basics of aviation.
We met him before attending our first lecture and laid out the argument that had delivered us to his classroom: Destiny believed she could land a plane — perhaps not perfectly but without killing anyone on board — and I believed she couldn’t.
Larry grinned and imparted a bit of old pilot wisdom.
“A good landing is one you can walk away from,” he said. “A great landing is when you can reuse the plane.”
As we took our seats at the back of the class, Larry launched into a highly technical lesson on aircraft engines.
I frantically typed notes into my laptop as he explained the four-stroke engine cycle running under the hood — or rather, the cowling — of small planes. Most of it bounced right off my thick skull until he gave us a mnemonic device: “Suck, squeeze, bang, blow.”
We have since attended lessons on flight instruments (those confusing gauges in the cockpit), aerodynamics, airport operations and navigation fundamentals.
Last week, Larry introduced us to the E6B flight computer, an analog slide-rule calculator that helps pilots work out equations involving time, speed, distance, fuel burn and wind correction. Invented by a U.S. Navy man in the 1930s, the ingenious “whiz wheel” aided flyers in World War II, featured in the original Star Trek and remains in use today.
After our initial technical snafu in the flight simulator, Destiny and I are still looking forward to settling our original argument. But we agree that sitting in on Larry’s class has been a wonderfully enlightening experience — regardless of whether it helps us land a plane when we get another shot at the simulator.
Nov. 20
Before I started auditing an aviation class at UNO earlier this year, I had never really thought about how pilots are made. I guess I figured some babies were born with Aviators on their faces and deep, droning voices to tell passengers “We’re beginning our descent into Dallas, 74 degrees, partly cloudy …”
In fact, becoming a professional pilot is an arduous and costly endeavor that chews up and spits out most people who attempt it.
Recently, I caught up with two of UNO’s ace students, Tyler Thieman and Thomas Reid, to learn what it takes to earn one’s wings.
Tyler’s introduction to the profession came in fifth grade, when he researched and made a presentation on becoming a pilot for a school assignment. But for the Malcolm native, it felt more like a faraway dream than an attainable goal, he said.
At 17, his dad offered to let him take a discovery flight with an instructor in Beatrice, and it changed the course of his life.
“That was a mindset-altering thing,” Tyler said. “Everything else just fades away, and your sole purpose is flying the plane.”
Thomas, the son of an Omaha pizzeria owner, picked up an interest in flying from an unlikely source: the YouTube algorithm.
As a youngster, Thomas got hooked on videos of mid-air disasters, and the algorithm just kept feeding him more airplane videos. He took his first discovery flight at 12 and got hooked on flying a real plane.
Thomas chose to attend Burke High School because of its unique Air and Space Academy, where he studied under Patrick Ryan, the same instructor who taught us to use the flight simulator in Part Two of this series. During his senior year, Thomas joined an elite group of the program’s alumni to get his private pilot license before graduation.
When asked to describe the life of an aviation major, they both landed on the same word: “Busy.”
UNO’s pilots-in-training must complete 120 credits like other students, but they also have to earn certifications that require time behind the yoke.
After the private pilot license, you still need an instrument rating (for flying in bad visibility), a commercial license, a flight instructor rating and a certification for flying multi-engine planes.
Just to get the commercial license that allows them to make money, students need 120 hours of flight training, and they don’t come cheap. The going hourly rate for renting a Cessna 172 around Omaha is $178, plus $55 an hour for an instructor, Tyler said.
The high costs and rigorous coursework cause many students to drop out, but for those who make it through, getting paid to fly is finally within reach. After working as an instructor and then at a regional airline, pilots can move up to the “majors” — big airlines like Delta and United.
Tyler said he might like to fly corporate one day and take executives from a private company wherever they need to go. Thomas dreams of flying a hulking “wide body” to international destinations.
“Mainly, I’m just looking at staying at the airlines, building seniority and eventually flying overseas like three times a month,” Thomas said. “I want my Biscoff, flying at 35,000 feet to Europe.”
Despite the hurdles to becoming a pro pilot, Tyler and Thomas said they feel lucky to be UNO aviation students. A reminder of that came for Tyler last week when he rented a plane and got a bird’s eye view of the Northern Lights.
“That’s something you can’t do if you’re another major,” Tyler said. “We get awarded opportunities that wouldn’t be possible if we weren’t doing this program.”
