Hahaha… our fleet used to be Piper based. We’d use the Warriors (with “steam gauges”) for your private and instrument training. Then for commercial you’d go to an Arrow (steam) and for multi you’d fly seminoles (also steam) and your CFI would be a combination of warriors, and arrows.
Then UND got a contract to teach all of the cirrus pilots how to fly (you need a special insurance waiver that says you’ve received the necessary training for a high performance aircraft) so a select group of UND instructors went up to Cirrus in duluth, and people would buy planes, they’d fly them to their owners and live the life while giving a weeks worth of training or so.
While this was going on, we crashed our research jet (Cessna Citation II) in alaska while doing some icing system research for sikhorski. Basically… the plane was flying ahead of their new helicopter “looking” for ice for the copter to pick up. So it was in the clouds. They forgot to select the proper mode for the deicing boots or something and blew lots of ice off at once instead of the proper amount and flamed out both engines. They deadsticked it into the bush IN IMC and everyone walked away. Shockingly… the jet was written off. haha.
So we needed a new jet. Cirrus “has” a new jet and they were like… buy this, we were like no it sucks. Went to Cessna and said hey we want another jet. They were like fine, but if you buy a bunch of 172’s we’ll give you a better deal. SO UND was like hell yeah! Stopped buying warriors, and arrows, and started buying 172’s to replace them (The warriors were all avidyne entegra by now). Cirrus found out and was like… well shit, if you aren’t going to buy our planes… fuck that, we’ll cancel the contracts. So they did and a bunch of CFIIs lost their jobs.
Since however, we’ve sold all the cirrus, we’ve sold almost all of the warriors, and all of the arrows are for sale. So for a new student (actually I think 2 years behind me) they’ll fly the 172 for private, instrument, commercial, and then go into the seminole after 2 years of flying a 172 with G1000. They’ll have no 6 pack time, and no complex time, so it’s going to be INSANE for them to catch up to that plane.
But since the 172’s were being used at such a “low level” of training, they opted to ditch the autopilot because they figured students would try and use it too much, or use it when they were soloing.
So now pilots will have roughly 170hrs of C172 time and go into a seminole which is crazy to me.
For our CFI training we do half in the arrow and half in the 172 (that was actually the first time I got to fly the 172) and the G1000 is way diff than avidynes stuff. But now that I’m in CFII its all in the 172. I like the pipers better personally.
That was a long post with no usable cycling info. Hahah… sorry.
How do you know there’s a pilot at the party? Just hang out and they’ll come and tell you they’re a pilot.
lol… pilots.
