AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2014 - 77

A DIVISION OF THE
AOPA FOUNDATION

AIRSHOW STAR and aerobatic instructor Greg
Koontz will gladly give you his one-flight

upset training course if you insist, but he
knows you probably won't remember it a
year later. That's why he tries to steer clients towards a four-flight basic aerobatics
course (see "Can Airshows Come Back?"
page 70).
"I don't really feel like someone is
going to walk away, and six months later
get in trouble, and do anything but say,
'What was that Greg said to do here?' It's
too late," Koontz said. "It's [for them] a
procedure they've got to call up, instead
of a way of thinking-a way of understanding. I feel like people need more to
understand what they're doing."
The point of aerobatic training is to fly
the aircraft precisely and under control in
exactly the attitudes most pilots fear.
Koontz, retired from a corporate pilot
career, is a full-time aerobatic instructor at his ranch in Ashville, Alabama, a
45-minute drive northeast of Birmingham.
Students are free to move into one of his
two extra bedrooms for longer courses.
"It's a three-dimensional world up
there, and we're two-dimensional people," Koontz said. "It's not natural to us.
We don't have feathers poking out
anywhere."
Today's flight training is taught as a
two-dimensional exercise. "Don't bank
too much. Don't pitch too much. Keep
your passengers comfortable," he said.
"Even the airlines have the windows real
low so you can't see the motion and get
airsick. They want the passengers to feel
like they're still on the ground."
If that two-dimensional world gets
upset, he said, pilots need to have threedimensional thinking in their toolbox.
"Our airplane flies along with 3,000
pounds of lift overcoming 3,000 pounds
of gravity. That keeps us in a world we're
very familiar with. As long as lift is going
up against gravity that is going down, we
can sip our tea and fly along and eat a
cracker, and everything's nice. As soon as
that world gets upset, and that lift points
another direction, all hell breaks loose.
"When you've got that 3,000 pounds
of lift pointing down, plus gravity, you've
www.aopa.org/pilot AOPA PILOT | 77

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2014
