August Aviation Letter from Madeline Patterson

Greetings aviation friends,

As July winds to a close and we all enter August, my favorite month of the year, it seems crazy how quickly the year has passed. We are already in the 8th month of 2021!

The last month I have been out of Sequim every weekend. We started July by going to Ross Lake Resort on our annual trip, then spent the week after that in the New England area for a family reunion. It was my plan to go flying while I was in Maine, and I had set up a checkout flight with an FBO to go flying in a C172. I wanted to explore this new area by air, as well as impress my more distant relatives with the sheer awesomeness of having a pilot’s license.

The weather had different plans.

Morning fog rolled in midday followed closely by fast-moving thunderstorms. On top of that, the FBO didn’t have the flexibility to accommodate a change in schedule. It was definitely disappointing not to have that opportunity this time, but I hope that in two years, at our next family reunion, we can work something out.

I have been trying to convince my parents that the solution to all our problems would be to buy a plane… but that hasn’t worked yet. I will keep you all updated.

I just recently was able to take my mother and her friend up to Bellingham to visit my sister, as she lives up there. It was a lovely flight, although the smoke from Blyn obstructed our views of any mountains. I was also able to get 1.9 hours of PIC/XC time so that was great! We also flew right over Whidbey NAS and got to share the sky with some F-18s. I currently rent out of Rite Brothers and rotate between their 172s.

On the UND front, Aerospace students got a major update just a few days ago. I will try and keep this brief and clear, but the FAA is involved so no promises. The FAA informed UND that our Instrument/Commercial/ Multi-Engine TCO (Training Course Outline, essentially the curriculum) was not up to standards and they were going to revoke our self-examining authority. That would mean that UND could no longer do our own checkrides, and they would have to be done by DPEs. Grand Forks ND has only one DPE. UND Aerospace has about 1,000 flight students.

Obviously this poses a serious issue for UND, so they applied for a one-year term to get their TCOs in compliance with the FAA standards in order to retain that self-examination authority. Under the new training curriculums, Instrument students will be able to get their instrument ratings once they complete their training, which was previously disallowed, but UND estimates that it will cost Commercial Aviation students about $4,000 more.

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I am lucky enough that I am in a flight course where my training shouldn’t be too upended by this change, but I feel for students who are in their multi-engine training and now face the time constraints of the FAA’s mandates.

To round out this letter, I have some statistics straight from UND. This last year, UND broke their record for “hours flow safely” and they published some statistics to go along with that:

1,364,326 gallons of fuel pumped by UND Aero Flight Line 25,289 maintenance man hours 400+ airport staff 1,400 flight students 245 flight instructors 126,772 hours flown safely Clear skies and tailwinds to you all.