"Max Trescott Part 2" Avstry #6b
Max Trescott, 2008's CFI of the Year talks continues his interview with discussing tellings us about winning CFI of the year, selecting an instructor, and EAA's Airventrue and we concludes with some thoughts about how pilots can look our for each other.
Published Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2012
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Harrison Ford, I've been right next to Harrison Ford when there were like only two guys standing next to him, nobody at the show realized that here he was, hanging out next to the Cessna caravan in the Cessna booth, and he was, for that day, he was just another pilot.
J.R. Warmkessel: And Harrison, wasn't he, obviously a famous movie star, but he was also the Young Eagles chairperson for many, many years.
Max Trescott: Yes, he was, yep, so a lot of good work there helping to organize flights for kids to get their first exposure to aviation. Harrison spoke a couple years ago and he was asked how many airplanes do you own, and I think he said more airplanes than anyone should own, or something like that.
J.R. Warmkessel: Than anyone ought to own.
Max Trescott: Yeah, exactly. He started ticking them off and he named about maybe nine or 10. Then later on in the presentation he mentioned some other airplane that he owned, and they said, oh, you didn't mention that one. This man truly loves aviation and has the airplanes to show it.
J.R. Warmkessel: We appreciate his effort towards the EAA, towards the Young Eagles, which is a very important program, I'm a big fan of that. And as Harrison said, force yourself.
Max Trescott: I'm sorry?
J.R. Warmkessel: Harrison would often be told "may the force be with you."
Max Trescott: Oh, right.
J.R. Warmkessel: And I heard an interview where Mr. Ford would always say, "You know, force yourself." Force yourself to do it. Force yourself to do better. And it was something that always stuck with me so I've always been very impressed by him.
One of the other things that I know about you is that you won an award.
Max Trescott: So, you're talking about the 2008 National Flight Instructor of the Year.
J.R. Warmkessel: That's a good award to win.
Max Trescott: I was quite, quite flattered by it. It's really, in my mind, quite an honor to be able to represent all the 92,000 flight instructors in the country. The reason that I'm really happy to help represent them is I think the flight instructors really are the backbone of our industry and I think that they generally don't get the amount of recognition that they deserve. And people really need to understand that these people are really knocking themselves out helping to keep other pilots safe. They're often not compensated well or given the kind of regard that they deserve. But if you think about it, where would we be if we didn't have a set of dedicated flight instructors? We'd have a lot more accidents going on in this country. We'd have a lot more people who are poorly trained. Flight instructors, I think, they just make a huge difference. Every pilot out there has had a flight instructor, usually more than one. And I think all of them can look to at least one or two that they felt really made a huge difference in terms of helping them get through it and get motivated and reach some level of achievement in their flying pursuits. So, yeah, it was quite an honor to be able to represent all of these men and women.
J.R. Warmkessel: So, now was this a surprise, or was this an application process that you applied to and won or both?
Max Trescott: Well, it's a combination of the both. The way it starts is there are about 70 FSDOs (Flight Standards District Offices) around the country. So, for example, the FAA has a headquarters that helps makes a lot of rules and things like that, but then they have offices scattered around the country which deal with regional issues in each particular region. And each of those 70 offices nominates a flight instructor to be the flight instructor of the year, and from there they send the names up to the regional offices. So I was first the San Jose flight instructor of the year, and then a few months later they said, "Oh, and you're also the West Coast Pacific division of the FAA Flight Instructor of the Year." And then from there it leaves the hands of the FAA and it goes to an industry committee which includes representatives from a number of different organizations within general aviation. For example, I know that there are representatives on their from AOPA, for example, and other organizations. And I honestly don't know who the people are or what the organizations are. It's just a coincidence I happen to know that one member of that is from AOPA. And they evaluate the 9 different FAA-selected regional winners and pick someone for the country.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well, congratulations, it's a real privilege to interview you.
Max Trescott: Well, thanks very much. I think the privilege is mine just to represent the flight instructors. And anytime I've talked about it I've usually told folks that if you like flying a lot and you work hard to be professional in your flying, consider becoming a flight instructor. I certainly never thought I was going to become a flight instructor. I was just content to be a pilot. And somewhere along the line a friend of mine was getting his CFI and he said, "Max, you should get your CFI, too." And I said, "You're right," and went off and did it. It's a perfect complement to many other things in life. You may have a career in technology like I was doing or any career for that matter, and you can be working on the side to get your flight instructor rating and to teach on weekends or evenings. There is, frankly, I think there's a huge need and opportunity for what I would call the Grey Eagles. You know, the folks who have been around aviation for a number of decades and have a lot of wisdom and a lot of experience. We need more of those people to become flight instructors so that they can pass on what they've learned, all of the secrets they've learned for staying alive all of these years, to the next generation.
J.R. Warmkessel: That's a really good point. You know, as we sit here talking about flight instructors, I remember many of my flight instructors. But the one that really comes to mind, he's not here with us anymore, his name was Uwe Lemke. And Uwe taught me how to land. Of all the things that my flight instructors did, Uwe taught me how to land. We sat in the pattern, around and around, until I could do it.
Max Trescott: He was a great guy.
J.R. Warmkessel: He was a great guy, and unfortunately he was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Max Trescott: Exactly, I was going to make sure that we let people know that it was not an aircraft accident.
J.R. Warmkessel: It was not an aircraft accident.
Max Trescott: And the sad thing is we lost another flight instructor here in Paolo Alto last summer to a motorcycle accident. A much younger guy, Giovanni.
J.R. Warmkessel: So, Uwe, if you're listening to this somewhere, this one's for you. And I remember it, and I appreciate it.
Max Trescott: Viel Spaß, Uwe. He was a Geman fella.
J.R. Warmkessel: He was a german fella, and not only did he teach me how to land, but he also taught my wife how to fly for a piece of her flying career.
Max Trescott: And I flew with him once or twice. I can't ever remember the circumstances, but knew him and yeah, he was a great guy. And I think you're right, everybody has one flight instructor who made a huge difference somewhere, at some point in their career.
J.R. Warmkessel: Really, really stands out. And not to diminish any of the other instructors who have taken me and helped me learn and whatnot. I have some great stories, good and bad, and left and right. But Uwe, really, I remember and I miss him.
Max Trescott: Well, so do you think you'll get your flight instructor rating some day?
J.R. Warmkessel: Oh, I have my flight instructor rating.
Max Trescott: Oh, excellent! Oh, there we go! I didn't know that. Super!
J.R. Warmkessel: I don't actually have fantastic ratings like you have, but I do have my flight instructor rating. Not my insturment instructor. Although it's on the list, I've slowly been collecting ratings for a while. A good pitch, and well-received.
Max Trescott: Awesome. You know, I kind of thought, you're kind of like the perfect candidate. Somebody who's passionate about flying and very professional in their approach and building up their experience. Those are the kind of people we want to attract to the flight instructor corps.
J.R. Warmkessel: I've had the opportunity to teach a small number of students. For me, aviation is a hobby and a passion. I'm not so much looking at it as a profession at this point of my life and that may change. Taking a student who's never flown and teaching them how to take off and how to land and how to solo the aircraft and onwarrd is really something that's very rewarding. And in a strange way, personally satisfying.
Max Trescott: Satisfaction, that's the word I was thinking of as you were starting to run down this. Yeah, so for folks who are not instructors, when that moment of truth comes when you and your student agree that this is the time for them to go ahead and solo, you know the instructor is probably almost as excited as the student is, the client. Because, it's a shared, joint experience. You work on it together, and that relationship between the instructor and the student is so crucial and so important which probably leads us into the discussion of which instructors do you want to avoid when you're flying and learning to fly.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well, before we do that, and I think we should certainly talk about that, I was going to say that much like I remember my first flight, and I also remember my student's first solo. And Paolo Alto, where I learned to fly and where I instructed my first student solo, has a marginally famous bench.
Max Trescott: It's been written up in Flying Magazine so I would say it's already famous so...
J.R. Warmkessel: Okay. I didn't know that, but it's about maybe a third of the way down the runway, and, you know, as an instructor when you sit on the bench and your student takes off for that first time, and you know that he's doing that because you helped him, is something very special.
Max Trescott: Yeah, absolutely.
J.R. Warmkessel: Okay. How to pick a flight instructor to avoid.
Max Trescott: Well, let's flip it around the other way. You know, how do you pick a flight instructor? You know, I think that picking...a lot of folks I think will just kind of take the flight instructor assigned to them. For example, if you go to a, you know, flight school and it's one of the typical flight schools in the country where they have flight instructors who are on staff, they will probably assign a flight instructor to you, and it'll probably never even be obvious to you that you had any kind of choice. Often, some of these folks are folks who are teaching because it's a vehicle to build up the number of flight hours that they need so that they can then move on to what they really want to do, which is be in the airlines. So it's important, I think, to kind of figure out, is the person that, you know, you're going to be working with, you know, someone who is hopefully good at teaching? Hopefully enthusiastic about it. Hopefully focused on you and your goals and your objectives and helping you, you know, achieve them, and that could just as easily be somebody who, you know, is looking at flight training as a short-term job on their way to the airlines, or it could the case that it's someone not on that career path and is teaching because they absolutely love it and hope to continue teaching for the next 30 or 40 years. So got to find...you can find that person, that right person, you know, anywhere, but you're really looking for is the relationship. You know, it's probably almost like, you know, somebody trying to find a therapist, right? You need somebody you could trust and somebody you think he can help you, and those exactly the things that you're looking for in flight training. You know, you're spending many, many, many hours shoulder-to-shoulder. You know, literally you guys are as close as two people can get.
J.R. Warmkessel: Shoulder-to-shoulder.
Max Trescott: And, you know, if that's an unpleasant, or unhappy, or unsatisfying kind of relationship, and of all the instructors I had, there was one who fit that category. There was one where, man, if I'd realized I could've fired that person I would've done it, but, you know, I was early on in my career and kind of thought that, "Well, if I change instructors I'm going to lose a lot of time." This is for, not my private, but one of my ratings later on. In retrospect, it wouldn't have been the case, and I would've still had the same skills I had. There would have been almost no time at all lost switching to another instructor.
J.R. Warmkessel: You know, that brings an interesting question, you know, how would you tell a client of yours, or perhaps a client of someone like you, that, you know, you need to know that you could fire your instructor, or maybe fire's the wrong word, change instructors? How would you tell them to go about doing it in a way that would be comfortable for them or as comfortable as possible, and not be intimidated or not be afraid that you're going to lose something that you have? How do you do that?
Max Trescott: Boy, my wife would probably, you know, come up with a better description of, you know, how to do that, you know, in a nice, genteel way. I think I would come from a more direct fashion, which is to say, "Hey, it's your money, you know? And you might as well be getting, you know, the value from it," and it doesn't matter how you fire them or you don't. You know, what matters is that, you know, you get to the point where you realize something isn't quite working, and then you need to figure out, is it the instructor that's not quite working or is there some other element, you know, that's going on that's not quite working? And I think before I would change instructors, if I were kind of in the midst of something, I would probably do a flight with, you know, kind of an independent, you know, flight instructor just to say, "Hey, can you evaluate me and tell me, you know, where I'm at and how I'm doing," and I actually have a flight like that scheduled for about a week from now from someone who's called up and said, "Jeez, you know, got way too many hours, never soloed, and what's going on here? I need to have an assessment." And so from that assessment you can get kind of an independent third-party instructor to say, "You know what? You got a lot of great skills, and, sure, there's no reason why you shouldn't be, you know, soloed at this point."
J.R. Warmkessel: Or, "You need to work on these problem areas and figure out how to get there."
Max Trescott: And often I'm working as a diagnostician. You know, I'm looking to figure out, you know, what is it that's causing people to have problems? And I'm thinking of someone I worked with that, earlier this year, where, you know, just had a, you know, they were flying a very high-performance aircraft and they just had a great difficulty flaring and getting it to, you know, to land properly and just...
J.R. Warmkessel: Afraid of the ground?
Max Trescott: Yeah, but, you know, and I did a lot of diagnosis and finally what I determined was, they were looking at the wrong spot. You know, they were just not looking out, you know, far enough ahead of the airplane. Once we figured out that, it was remarkable how quickly things turned around. Suddenly we went from incredible bad landings to extremely good landings, and this was for a student pilot who was learning in a very complex aircraft.
J.R. Warmkessel: I remember when I was getting my glider rating, that I had an instructor who was a good instructor but in hindsight wasn't a good fit for me.
Max Trescott: Okay.
J.R. Warmkessel: We just were going through it, and he had a very, let's call it loud style, and in a glider, you know, it doesn't take much, and finally I sat with another instructor and he and I went around a couple of times, and it all clicked. And it turned out that actually, even going back to the original instructor after I worked through a few of these problems, mostly regarding rudder and the amount of rudder it takes to fly in a glider is very different than most modern aircraft--It just takes a lot more--but once I had that one little pivotal skill, most of the other problems went away or were so minor not even to be mentioned.
Max Trescott: Exactly, and this kind of comes back to, you know, what I was saying, which is, it make not be the instructor that's the problem, so before you fire your instructor, you know, go ahead and try to diagnose and find out, is there something going on here which is contributing to the problem? And having a third party evaluate that is one way to do that, and then you may decide, "Gee, I'm going to change instructors," and if you do go ahead and do it.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well, and the other thing, you can always talk to your instructor and say, you know, "These areas I'm not comfortable with or I don't understand," or the one that I think people have a hard time is, "I'm afraid." "I'm afraid of something." "I'm afraid of the ground." "I'm afraid of these turns. They're too deep. I'm not comfortable. I don't understand."
Max Trescott: Right, and I agree with you on your point, which is, you can have a great instructor and they're not going to be the right instructor for every person.
J.R. Warmkessel: Right.
Max Trescott: You know, I think if we could come up with the definition of the perfect instructor, whatever that would be, you know, there would still be 10 percent of the population that would hate flying with that person.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah.
Max Trescott: And, you know, it's all chemistry. It's all about what you're looking for.
J.R. Warmkessel: The right personality. As you say, you're shoulder-to-shoulder in that airplane for, you know, potentially a long amount of time.
Max Trescott: Yeah, and if they do something that grates on you, man, oh man, it's going to be hard to enjoy the flying if the whole time you're thinking, "I want to throw you out the door."
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah, a solo can't come soon enough.
Max Trescott: Exactly, and I'm not letting you back in afterwards.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well, that being said, most instructors are of the utmost professionalism and rarely do you ever come across one that is just in it for the wrong reasons. You have to really want to be a flight instructor. You may be on your way to the airlines, but you at least want to have to learn to fly, or at least fly.
Max Trescott: Well, we hope so. You know, I talked about the case of somebody walking into a flight school where the CFIs are employees and where you're often just assigned a flight instructor. Even in those places, and you can ask and say, you know, "I'd like to take two demo flights with two different instructors," and you could do that on day one, and how do I know you can do that? Because if they won't let you do it, you just say, "Okay, thank you very much," walk slowly toward the front door and they will probably go, "Hey, wait. Yeah, you know what? You know, there may be a way we can do that."
J.R. Warmkessel: We'll figure this out.
Max Trescott: Again, it's your money and I think a lot of folks don't realize that it's their choice to, you know, take a demo flight with two different people, and after two flights you'll probably have a good idea that, yeah, one person is a much better fit than the other person.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well, and, you know, you don't even have to be at any one school. You know, you can use the power of the foot and travel to a couple different clubs and take a couple different flights.
Max Trescott: Depends on where you are, you know? In some parts of the country you may have to drive 50 miles to get to the closest flight school so it's a little tougher.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well, but taking instruction from an instructor who you don't fit with is not going to be successful for you in the long run.
Max Trescott: Well, and so, you know, speaking of those folks who are in the middle of nowhere, and having grown up in the middle of nowhere, I understand there are a lot of nice aspects about, you know, not living in the metro areas like we do here in the San Francisco area, but you can go to resources such as the safe pilots website and find a list of, you know, master instructors and things like that so...
J.R. Warmkessel: And EAA has a program too, don't they?
Max Trescott: They do, and that's shifted a little bit. Originally most of it was done through them. Now it's being done more through, boy, I want to say it's Master Instructors LLC. I believe that's the website that you go to, and there are about 400 master flight instructors in the U.S. and, you know, these folks are almost all independent and, you know, they're folks who are in it, you know, for the long run. These are folks who've decided to make it a career, and they often have more flexibility to teach than, for example, you know, a local flight school which has, you know, their kind of rigid process.
J.R. Warmkessel: And then also doesn't [XXXX} have a...I believe they have a forum as well that'll pair you up with an instructor.
Max Trescott: I don't recall. I mean, I do recall they had some type of, I think it was a mentor pilot program.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah, I think you're right.
Max Trescott: I think they were pairing, and that's a nice concept, and the whole idea there is that, if you know that you're interested in becoming a pilot, but you don't really know how to go about doing that, then EAA had a place where mentors could get matched up with potential student pilots, and the whole idea is that somebody you can go to breakfast with, you know, once a month or however frequently you want, just to kind of talk about, "Hey, how's it going? What are some of the things I should be thinking about, and what are the next steps?" And it's kind of like having a coach, a mentor, a friend to help you through the process.
J.R. Warmkessel: I think that that's a fantastic tool. You know, because, you know, asking the same question to a lot of different people and kind of getting their responses has always been something that I like to do and having a mentor guide you, maybe help you not make a mistake or at least help understand what happened or what's going on, if you're having some difficulty, always can help.
Max Trescott: As long as we're talking about the kind of the learn to fly aspect of things, let me just, you know, throw out a website. I put together, back in 2008, a learn to fly e-book. It's 37 pages. It's free, and the reason I put it together was I found that when people are contacting me about learning to fly, I was consistently answering the same questions over and over again, and there are a lot of them. It's not a five minute discussion. It's a much longer discussion than that, and so folks who are interested in learning to fly, if you want to download my learn to fly ebook, just go to my website, MaxTrescott.com, and you'll see a link. I think it's in the upper right-hand corner for the learn to fly ebook.
J.R. Warmkessel: Any listeners can also go to the show notes for this episode and we'll link to Max's website and the book as well.
Max Trescott: All right. Excellent.
J.R. Warmkessel: What else do we have on our list?
Max Trescott: Well, good question. We've talked about a lot of things that we were talking about. Let me just mention in passing, just to close out on the glass cockpit discussion, all the books and the CD courses are at G1000book.com, that's kind of the quick, short, easy way to find that, and later in the year 5th edition of the G1000 book will be out, and that, by the way, applies everything from a Cessna 172 all the way up to a Citation jet or a King Air because these high-end aircraft are now getting retrofitted with Garmin G1000s, and so it's all the same material including the Cirrus SR22 that has what's called a perspective, and the perspective, the software on the prospective is 95 percent overlap with the G1000. it's just some of the hardware is different so the button are in different locations. The displays are a little bit different. You've got fewer knobs, but any of the folks flying any of those kinds of aircraft, you know, will find all the details they want, you know, flying those glass panels.
J.R. Warmkessel: And I guess the advantage of that is, if you learn on glass panel 172, then you can fly all the way up to the Citation and essentially fly the same equipment.
Max Trescott: Yeah, that's absolutely it. I mean, it's remarkable. A lot of folks are actually learning to fly these days in 172 G1000s. I had a call from somebody just the other day, young guy, just graduated from college and he's now flying a King Air. Same Garmin G1000 in the King Air.
J.R. Warmkessel: Wow. That's amazing. Let me pose you this question. You know, you have two airplanes that are essentially similar in every way, but, you know, one is a glass cockpit and the other one is a steam gauge.
Max Trescott: One will be cheaper to rent.
J.R. Warmkessel: And one will be cheaper to rent, and that's the nature of my question. Is it better, for the same amount of money, to fly more hours in a steam gauge or is it better to fly less hours, maybe 10 percent less, but get the advantage of the G1000? Or a little of both?
Max Trescott: Well, it turns out that those aircraft are being used differently, the same airplane. So the NTSB did a study on glass cockpits and they compared same model year aircraft with glass versus round gauges and what they found was that for the glass aircraft, they're going on longer trips and they tend to be doing, you know, IFR kinds of things. So, for example, a glass panel 172 they found on average was doing 100 miles trip and it was more likely to be flown IFR, versus the same airplane with round gauges was typically only flying 25 miles on trips and was more likely to be used for primary training. So you're going to find very different uses for those airplanes, and it's interesting. That particular study, I think is a little bit controversial. The conclusion that they reached was that, since the accident rates were the same for the two types of airplane that of course there's no gain in safety with glass panel, and I think that's ludicrous. You know, if you have an airplane which is flying longer distances, more likely to encounter worse weather, more terrain, well of course it's safer. You know, it's got the same accident rate and it's being required to do a lot more.
J.R. Warmkessel: As opposed to the airplane that's sitting 10 miles from the airport going in circles.
Max Trescott: Exactly, which is inherently going to be a safer set of scenarios to put it in. So I think they drew the wrong conclusion. They correctly highlighted that the glass is being used for the more complicated trips, but what they didn't correctly infer was, therefore these things must be safer because they're doing longer, harder trips and have the same accident rate.
J.R. Warmkessel: That's a really interesting observation, and I think, as you mentioned, and I think I agree with you, that it sounds like, not going the study that they did, possibly come to the wrong conclusion.
Max Trescott: So to go back to your question, for example, if you were doing mostly 100 dollar hamburger runs and you're only flying, you know, 30, or 40, or 50 miles, you may not find as much benefit from flying glass panel as if you were flying longer trips, 100 miles or more or flying IFR, for example. So the safety benefits that you find in the glass panel aircraft, and let me just tick some of those off real quickly, all of those are going to have traffic information of some sort in them.
J.R. Warmkessel: What does that mean?
Max Trescott: Well, it means that you're going to be able to see aircraft nearby you displayed on the computer screen, so when you look on the computer screen you go, "Oh, I see there's an airplane at my altitude, two miles in front of me. I better start looking real hard for it otherwise I might hit it." So having traffic information is a huge enhancer to safety. We've got weather information. Much of it is similar to the same kinds of weather you'd find on the internet broadcast view satellite into the cockpit so now you can actually see, almost in realtime, where the rain is located, where the thunderstorms are located, where to be avoiding the clouds, and so on. You've got terrain information so you can find out instantaneously, "Hey, is that hill in front of me above me or below me?" and all these things you find a multifunction display which is what I consider cable. That's channel two. That's the screen on the right-hand side, and so all of these safety benefits, you know, if you're flying in an environment where those will help you, yeah. It's definitely worth going and paying a few extra buck per hour to go with a glass cockpit panel. If you're flying very short trips where the weather's always perfect and it's flat because you're in Kansas and there's no terrain, you know, and there's not traffic, well then maybe you're not going to get much of the value of the glass cockpit aircraft.
J.R. Warmkessel: The argument I would pose to you would be, well, look, I have 10 percent more experience for the same dollar out of pocket.
Max Trescott: Sure.
J.R. Warmkessel: That experience is obviously a different experience than a glass cockpit, but there's certainly an argument to be made that 10 percent more time in an airplane is of some value.
Max Trescott: Well it depends, you know. Is it the same hours that you flew in the prior 90 percent? You know, we often talk about pilot's experience. You know, one pilot has 10,000 hours but if it's the same 10,000 hours over and over again flying traffic watch, for example, you know, is that pilot as skilled as the guy that has 2,000 hours of experience who's been bush flying in Alaska and also has done some airline flying and things like that. It's not just total number of hours. It's also the diversity, you know, in the hours that I think are valuable.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well what else do we have on our list?
Max Trescott: Well, let's see. You were asking me about aviation stories. Oh, let me tell you something. I was thinking about writing something on in my blog, but let's just talk about it right now, which is, you know, I think that pilots really can help other pilots a lot just by speaking up, and I've got a couple of examples that have occurred just in the last few weeks where I spoke up and the pilots appeared to be grateful, and some of these are really just kind of interesting. So, for example, this one goes back a ways. I was at the Reid-Hillview Airport five, six years ago. It was a Sunday morning. it had been very cold overnight and there was ice on the airplanes. Typically, you know, here in the San Francisco area that happens a couple times a year.
J.R. Warmkessel: And usually gone an hour after sunrise.
Max Trescott: Exactly. It melts off really fast, and so people just aren't used to icing issues. I was at the airport early on a Sunday morning, and there was a guy who had a plane he was renting. He pulled it out and he was getting ready to take off and it was still, you know, covered in ice, and you could just see around him pilots who were just kind of standing watching, like, "Woah, is this guy really going to take off?"
J.R. Warmkessel: Now, before we get too much further, can you maybe talk about the dangers that the ice poses in this case.
Max Trescott: Sure. The airplane will crash. The key problem with ice is not so much the additional weight that it may add to the aircraft, but it changes the shape of the wing, and the shape of the wing and the airfoil is crucial for being able to get lift, and, you know, a lot of small aircraft are pretty marginal in the climb capability anyway so you need all the lift you can get on takeoff.
J.R. Warmkessel: Okay, so they were all standing around.
Max Trescott: So there were three to four pilots, including, you know, the gas guy who was a pilot sitting in his fuel truck. Everybody was just watching this guy going, "Wow, is he really going to take off with the ice on the airplane?" Nobody walked up and said anything to him, and so I was the one who just kind of walked up, poked my head and said, "Hey, you're going to knock the ice off this airplane before you go, right?" And he kind of looked at me and goes, "Yeah, yeah. Exactly," and he realized that he had no clue, you know, that he was in a potentially dangerous situation, and worse yet, the crowd was sitting watching to see if he was going to crash, which to me was almost unconscionable. So, anyway, I think pilots need to learn to speak up. I think we have a culture of not wanting to step on each other's toes and not wanting to make anybody look bad, but if people are going to die that's kind of silly.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah, I think that it's also very difficult to know the other person's experience level, and sometimes, you know, the ink is still moist on the pilot's license and they need a senior pilot or an instructor to say, "hey, you know, I've seen you do this," or "I think I see you do this" or "You're going to do this, and you probably shouldn't and here are the reasons why" or "here's what you might think about."
Max Trescott: Yeah, you definitely want to at least make the attempt. I think it's rare that a pilots going to rebuff you for kind of bringing up something and even if they do, far better that at least they've heard it than they go off and crash and you know that you could've said something. I saw one that was not nearly that ambiguous. It was very clear-cut the other day. It was with a gentleman, and I'd never seen this before. I was so stunned. We landed at Merced, California and as we were rolling out on the runway, I looked out to the right and I saw bonanza that was taxing on the taxi way, and we were separated by, it was fairly wide, they were probably 100 feet, but right in front of the aircraft I could see his tow bar was still attached to the nose wheel.
J.R. Warmkessel: Oh, my.
Max Trescott: So this poor gentleman had pulled the airplane out of the hangar probably and had left the tow bar attached to the front wheels.
J.R. Warmkessel: What's the risk here?
Max Trescott: Well this is a retractable gear aircraft, so it's even worse than a fixed gear aircraft. In the worst case, if it were fixed gear, the tow bar would possibly hang down lower than the wheel and when it went to land the first thing to touchdown would be the tow bar rather than the wheel, and it could possibly kick the tow bar up into the prop or, you know, you can imagine all kinds of possible scenarios where...
J.R. Warmkessel: Collapse the gear, or...
Max Trescott: Right. No one was going to get killed, but it was going to get expensive. Right, that's probably what it was. Here, now you're looking at a retractable aircraft where, once the guy went to retract the gear, it wasn't going to retract fully and properly and the tow bar might then cause it to hang up so that it wouldn't come back down again. So I couldn't resist just kind of keying the microphone and, you know, I couldn't resist and I said, "Hey, Beachcraft So and so. You're on frequency." He said, "Yeah," and I said, "Do you remember removing the tow bar after you pulled the aircraft out today?" Anyway, he stopped the aircraft and went out and got the tow bar and I was going to pick on him a little bit more as we taxied by him and we went to take off, I saw his wife sitting in the right front of the seat and I thought, "Nope, I don't need to say anything more. He's going to hear enough of it."
J.R. Warmkessel: I think he got very lucky that he didn't hit the tow bar with his propellor on start, which is a very common thing to do.
Max Trescott: Yeah, well it does happen. I'll pass along this little tip, something I heard from someone, which I really think is valuable. Any time you have the tow bar attached, it should be in your hand. If it's not going to be in your hand, disconnect it from the aircraft. The worst case is that the toebar will be left on the ground and you will drive away without it. In the same week that I saw the tow bar, what do you call the pilot with the tow bar, by the way?
J.R. Warmkessel: What do you call him?
Max Trescott: Doctor.
J.R. Warmkessel: Oh, be nice to doctors. They finance the whole fleet.
Max Trescott: I know. I'm kidding. Anyway, the same I ran into a similar kind of thing where I spoke up and I was coming into Palo Alto in on the Aproach control frequency as we were approaching here, I heard the controller calling another pilot and he told the other pilot, "Hey, I've lost your transponder," and the pilot said, "Oh, I'm having some trouble here with my GPS as well," and so a couple seconds went by and I though, "Okay, I think I know what's going on here." So I spoke up and I said, "Norcal approach you know blah, blah, blah. You know, I just want to pass along a suggestion to the other pilot." "Oh, sure. Go ahead. What is it?" "Ask him to check is alternator," and he said, "Roger," and he said, "other aircraft, did you hear?" And the guy said, "No." He goes, "Check your alternator," and the guy goes, "Oh, oh, oh. That's it. I've got to divert to another airport." So, you know, something's that very common, I find, is that one of the very first indictors you'll have that your alternator has gone offline and that your battery has been dying for a number of minutes is that the transponder goes away first because it uses a higher pulse of energy for the transmissions, and so the first warning you'll get is when the transponder goes away.
J.R. Warmkessel: That's a really good piece of advice.
Max Trescott: And apparently a lot of controllers don't know that and a lot of pilots don't know that, so just to let you know, if the transponder isn't being picked up, you might want to check your alternator and make sure that's still online as well, and then the other kind of speak-up thing was just a week ago. I was at a splash in at Lake Isabella which is down near Bakersfield. It's kind of located behind the 6,000 foot mountain in the foothills of the Sierras. We went into the Kern Valley Airport, which is right next to Lake Isabella, and it was a very hot day. It was in the 90s and the field elevation was about 2,200 feet as I recall.
J.R. Warmkessel: Uh-oh.
Max Trescott: Yeah, uh-oh, so you're already starting to figure out what this is about, right?
J.R. Warmkessel: I have a sneaky suspision, my spider sense is tingling.
Max Trescott: There you go, and so the same red flags that, you know, went for me, went for you don't always go for all other pilots, and so what I was doing was calculating my density altitude. I wanted to see, gee, it's a really hot day and the air pressure is a little lower than standard and we're fairly high up in the hills to begin with, what altitude does the plane think it's going to be at when I take off and what's the performance of the aircraft going to be? And so I calculated the density altitude is about 5,400 feet, so it was a couple thousand feet higher than we actually were and parked next to me was a gentleman in a 172 with two other guys. So to me it looked like it was probably going to be loaded pretty close to max gross, and the fellow flying was young enough that I knew that he hadn't been flying for more than a few years at the very, very most. The guy probably in his early 20s. So I wandered over and I said, "Hey, by the way, I just calculated the density altitude. Thought you might want to know." He said, "You know, I was thinking about that but I didn't have any way to calculate it," and I thought, "Oh, okay," and so I told him what it was and he was able to then kind of check his performance and see what he was going to get, but then he asked me, he said, "And what app do you have, smart guy," he figured that everything these days Is an app, and I said, "Oh, well you're right." I here on my iPhone I have an E6b calculator. It turns out that it's one from Sporty's that's about five bucks and it does many different functions, including the calculation of density altitude. The nice thing about all these apps is that now it's very easy for us to do all these things that in the past required going through the manual and, you know, laborious calculation and now there's not reason not to do it because it's fast and quick and easy. Anyway, I think the key message for other pilots is, "Hey, if you see somebody doing something that maybe they shouldn't be doing or that maybe they need some help or some additional information, just speak up." You know, we need to get beyond this macho culture of pilots don't suggest, that of course other pilots know everything and they don't need any help. You know, so what if you're wrong occasionally, but, you know, I found that all these folks were extremely grateful that I spoke up and, you know, helped them in all these cases.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah, I'm always of the opinion that any time someone offers me a piece of advice, need it or not, I always appreciate them stopping and coming and talking to me. It is an important thing that we watch out for each other. It's kind of a special, small circles that we fly in, you know, pardon the bad pun there, but there's not that many pilots in the proportions.
Max Trescott: We need them all.
J.R. Warmkessel: We need them all, and we don't need any bad reputations that can be avoided for the simplest things.
Max Trescott: Yeah. One of the big areas that I think that is a problem for new pilots, so they don't really truly understand, is the dangers of night flying, and I think that flight instructors in general, you know, they teach the basics on the regulations of night, but I don't think that they tell them about the differences in the accident rate. For example, what is it? Probably less than five percent of all general aviation flying is done after dark, and yet 21 percent of all the fatal accidents occur after dark. Here in the San Francisco Bay area it's worse than that. Fully 55 percent of all the fatal accidents occur at night here in the San Francisco Bay area, and we've got a unique mix of fog and mountains which combine to, you know, make it very dangerous, but we've had cases of folks, and I can think of two just in the last couple of years, where a private pilot had his license for just a matter of a few months, took off at night and ended up crashing because they just weren't aware of how dark it can be and how poorly trained a private pilot is to deal with inky blackness.
J.R. Warmkessel: It can be very dark. There's nothing out there and if you don't know where you are and how high you need to be and, you know, high enough to see the airport you're trying to land to it can be very, very dangerous. So I defintely hear that.
Max Trescott: Well and it goes even more beyond that because you may not have the skills to fly the airplane when it's totally black. You know as a private pilot, we teach people to fly with reference to the horizon. Which means you look outside and you can tell blue side is up and the brown side is down. And at night when it's totally black and you can't see that line, you have the three hours of instrument training that we give pilots is not enough to successfully fly in pitch blackness for sometimes more than a matter of a minute or two. So these pilots, it's like the JFK accident, right? John F. Kennedy Jr. was in just that kind of situation. he was a private pilot, he was flying out over the water. It was very dark. You know you had a few stars and you had a few lights on the water and the sky and the water blended together. In that situation you can't tell which way is up. So I think it's important for private pilots to realize they shouldn't immediately jump in the airplane and go flying at night as if there were no difference in flying at night than the day time. There's a huge difference. Not to the airplane, but to the pilot. Yeah, exactly.
J.R. Warmkessel: There's also the aspect of an oxygen system can really provide more benefit to the pilots vision. That's something that also should be considered.
Max Trescott: Yep. Exactly. So just a lot of different things to think about. I always tell folks when they get their private license, it's a license to learn. And it really is.
J.R. Warmkessel: That's exactly what I was told.
Max Trescott: You should be learning your entire career and your entire life and anytime any of us thinks that we have it all figured out, boy. [Laughter] There's an accident waiting to happen I think.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well but I think, at the same time, you know, we have to keep trying new things and getting more instruction. And you don't want to be afraid. You don't want to stop. I'm not gonna fly at night because I'm afraid. And you never know when you're going to need a skill so getting additional instruction. Getting additional experience can really serve you in the long run.
Max Trescott: Yeah. And that goes along the line of gradually expanding the envelope where you're comfortable to fly. You know, just because you have a private pilots license which means you can now fly in inky blackness through the mountains at night, doesn't mean that should be the first flight you should do.
J.R. Warmkessel: Right.
Max Trescott: You probably ought to be gradually building your experience closer to home. Possibly getting some additional training from time to time. For sure start working on that instrument rating so that you are gonna be capable of keeping the wings level when you find yourself without a horizon. Which could happen both at night or if you were to accidentally fly into a cloud.
J.R. Warmkessel: And it's amazing how fast it happens. One minute everything's going along and then the next minute someone turned the lights out, or you're in a cloud that you ought not to have been in but yet here you are.
Max trescott: Oh-Oh. Have you been into a cloud?
J.R. Warmkessel: I've been in many a cloud.
[Laughter]
Max Trescott: Accidentally?
J.R. Warmkessel: I wouldn't say accidentally. What I would say was I had intended not to fly into a cloud and found myself into a cloud. And at the time I had an instrument rating. So it wasn't as critical.
Max Trescott: It helps.
J.R. Warmkessel: It helps a lot. But you think that you're going to make a short flight from one airport top another, and then you find out that the conditions that have deteriorated or they're a little worse than you thought. Luckily I was able to talk to the controllers and say hey, I need clearance. I need a little help here. And they were immediately on it and they were immediately helpful and there were never any recriminations or accusations. They were just there to help me making sure that I was gonna be safe.
Max trescott: Oh so in your case you actually had a viable plan B.
J.R. Warmkessel: I did.
Max Trescott: For you plan B was oops, if the weather gets bad and I find myself you know, surrounded by clouds, I can go IFR. And of course that's not gonna work for folks who just have their private license. They're gonna have to have other outs then that. Which I tell all of my folks, do not fly into a cloud under penalty of death. And that's really literally what it is. So you need to take every possible precaution to avoid flying into that cloud. Because the three hours of instrument training we give private pilots, totally inadequate. If you look at the fatality rate of what they call VFR and IMC. Folks who are flying along the VFR but accidentally fly into a cloud. If you have one of those accidents after you go into a cloud, 90% chance there are gonna be dead people and on the airplane. Pretty high fatality rate.
J.R. Warmkessel: yeah. It's a lesson to learn and going on and continuing your education, getting that instrument rating is probably one of the most valuable things you can do for many aspects. More than just getting there, or getting there in at worse conditions. It gives you the ability to make a choice or gives you an out in y case that hey, I need a little assistance here, let me do something. And it certainly is. One of the things that you can do as a pilot t increase your odds of successfully survive your encounter is to be able to be trained.
Max Trescott: Yeah. And the think about the instrument rating is you want to getit as early in your career as you can afford to and hopefully not have to wait too many years if you're gonna be flying in conditions where you may encounter some weather. That being said, if you get it, you need to be able to keep that instrument rating current, which requires more flying, under the hood flying, at least six practice instrument approaches every six months. And if you're not gonna be able to do that, you might decide not to get the instrument rating and only fly on very clear days. And I know a very well known magazine pilot author who has chosen that route. That pilot basically said, you know, I'm just not gonna be able to fly enough to keep my instrument rating current, so IU'm not gonna get one. I'm only gonna fly on really good days. And that's a viable alternative as well.
J.R. Warmkessel: Absolutely. I would counter that having an opportunity to go out and practice instrument approaches is the great opportunity for you and another pilot to get together where you don't have to have an instructor on board. You don't have to be paying another person.
Max Trescott: Right.
J.R. Warmkessel: And you can go out and you can practice and swap the hood and let the other pilot have a turn and really get out there and exercise these skills that really have got to be kept sharp. It's important.
Max Trescott: Yeah. Indeed. Well I'm just trying to think in terms of people who want to find out more information about where to learn to fly. Probably one of the best sources AOPA.org I would imagine.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah. AOPA is a fantastic resource for learning to get your license and trying to figure out where to start.
Max Trescott: And of course the start is to find an airport that has a flight school or a flight instructor nearby and that's a very good place to go to. Just walk in the door and ask and say hey.
J.R. Warmkessel: I wanna do it.
Max Trescott: Exactly.
J.R. Warmkessel: I wanna get off the couch, get in my car.
Max Trescott: This is my moment, this is my time. I'm gonna do it. Yeah. I had one of those gentleman contact me just this week. he was very enthusiastic. He has three things that he wants to do. he just finished up scuba diving. He's also wanting to sail and he says I want to learn to fly. So, we'll get him started in about a week.
J.R. Warmkessel: Oh that's great. That's just absolutely amazing. Now when I come to the airport and I'm interested in getting that first lesson, how long does it take? Is it something that takes a week? I have to schedule long out, or?
Max Trescott: Oh it depends you could for example just do what a lot of flight schools would call a demo flight. Which is a very quick, we take you up in the airplane for 30, 40 minutes. we kind of let you touch the controls a little and let you see what it's like to see the world from up here. But there's not a whole lot of flight training going on. Those you can often schedule the same day. What I typically do is schedule a real first lesson with somebody. So we'll spend three, four hours together. I'll spend an hour in the classroom just talking about what we're going to be doing. And I'll spend ten, twenty plus minutes brief-lighting the aircraft and we'll go fly for about 1.2 hours or so and then come back and debrief. And that's a real first lesson where they've come back with some skills that they can use.
What might you be able to put in your log book? What could you take home with you?
Max Trescott: Yeah, so typically the first lesson we'd practice on what we call the four fundamentals. So, it's flying straight and level, doing turns,doing climbs, doing descents. And usually I'll do a couple simulated landings at altitude. So we'll be up to 4500 feet and we'll say, all right, lets imagine that highway down there is the run way. and we're just gonna go through the entire sequence of what we would do as if we were paralleling an airport. And make those turns, put in the flaps and reduce the power and descend. Show them how well they can vary their air speed by pushing and pulling on the yoke, pull the nose up a little bit if they want to go slower. Push the nose down more if they want to go faster. So yeah, we'll pack a lot in on a first lesson. Now, for folks who are not citizens, we've got an additional wrinkle that we have had since about 2003, 2004 and that is they have to get an application approved by the TSA before we can give them a second flight. So they're allowed to do one demo flight without TSA approval. But if they're not a US citizen, they have to get TSA approval which probably takes a week to ten days. I think the fee is $130 and requires getting fingerprints.
J.R. Warmkessel: But certainly something that you could do if you wanted to.
Max Trescott: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I haven't heard of anybody who'd not done it because they have to get TSA approval. That's just one extra little delay in the process.
J.R. Warmkessel: That sounds imminently doable.
Max Trescott: Yeah. Absolutely. In fact I think a lot of people have this impression that to become a pilot requires super human skills and quick lightening reflexes and that only somebody of fire-pilot type skill could ever get their private pilot license. Personally I try to continue that myth because I want people to think that's the kind of person I am.
[Laughter]
J.R. Warmkessel: I was gonna say, I'm not buying it.
[Laughter]
Max Trescott: Yeah. That's right. Now that you know me that's not.
J.R. Warmkessel: I know you, yeah.
Max Trescott: And so that's my key message to folks. That anybody of average intelligence and skills and capabilities can get a pilots license. you don't have to be this superhuman that we see in the movies. you don't have to be the top gun kind of pilot. You know, average persons can get a pilots license. So, it's doable. You just have to want it and to stay focused on it and to stick to it.
J.R. Warmkessel: I've always told people who've asked me there's no one part of flying that's really very hard there's things that you may find more challenging. But you know, flying the airplane maybe take you 20 hours, maybe 30 hours to figure out how to make the airplane do what you wan it to do. But there's a lot of things that you have to do. You have to be able to fly the airplane, you have to be able to talk on the radio. You have to be able to manage the process to figure out where you're going, navigate, so it just takes a little bit of time to learn how to do all of those skills, and that's what a lot of learning how to fly is, is to do all of those things.
Max Trescott: Yeah, and I think you raise an interesting point which is a lot things that you need to do. None of them is complex, but there are many of them.
J.R. Warmkessel: And all of them are important.
Max Trescott: Exactly. You don't want to overlook, like, cross wind landings or something like that, and then probably the other aspect of it is that, I think as an industry we do a great job of teaching people, you know, how to fly the maneuvers and how to, you know, fly the airplane and how to land it. We probably don't do as good a job as we could in terms of trying to teach the judgment skills and the decision making skills to keep pilots safe. If you look at the accident statistics, probably around 80 percent of the accidents are, you know, pilot error, pilot judgment issues, and when I first started flying I thought, "Oh, that's terrible. They're blaming all these pilots for all those accidents." The more I've met pilots while teaching them more I realize, "Yeah, it's the pilots that are making these mistakes." I see a lot of gaps in the cockpit where, you know, people know 99 percent of what they need to know but there's that, you know, one thing.
J.R. Warmkessel: Thing that they have yet to get.
Max Trescott: Exactly, and so anyone can kind of miss one thing. It's just very important to constantly be working on your skills.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah, you know, oftentimes I've also told people that it's generally not any one mistake that kills people.
Max Trescott: Agreed.
J.R. Warmkessel: It's a series of what's called "questionable decisions" or bad decisions that could've stopped here. You could've done something there. You could've made a different decision, but you didn't stop.
Max Trescott: Well and I use the rule of two. This is my own personal rule of two, which is when I get to the second thing which is not quite right, I just quit. You know, either I don't do that flight or I return. I terminate the flight, you know, I land. I just don't want to get to the third thing that's not quite right. So, yes, you're right. Usually there are links in the chain and there are multiple events that have occurred that lead you into a bad decision, and so if you can kind of break that chain early in the process where the first one or two things that were not quite right, you know, happen, you know, you don't go to the end.
J.R. Warmkessel: And it's hard. It's hard to have the ability to continue when your better judgment says, "stop."
Max Trescott: And I think that's because we're also goal oriented. You know, we jump in the airplane and our goal is to get from point A to point B.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yes.
Max Trescott: Our goal is not to turn around and come back.
J.R. Warmkessel: Or land somewhere in between.
Max Trescott: Exaclty, and, you know, a lot of pilots have been very successful in the business world by being very goal oriented and kind of bending the world to their wishes. You know, Steve Jobs is probably the classic example of that when you read about how he would kind of bend the world to his point of view. Unfortunately, aviation doesn't lend itself to that. You know, you may be incredibly successful at forcing everybody around you to comply with you. Trust me, the weather and the airplane and the physics of flying will not alter themselves just because you have to get to point B today, and so it's important for, you know, the type A personality to realize, "Yup. Type a works in the office, it's not going to work in the airplane."
J.R. Warmkessel: Unfortunately, the ground has been littered with airplanes.
Max Trescott: Well, there are what? About 300 accidents, maybe 250 fatal accidents a year, and we've got what? 230,000 airplanes, so it's really a tiny fraction of all the airplanes which are flying, which is good, but unfortunately every single one of those is kind of broadcast on television so it makes it seem much worse than it really is.
J.R. Warmkessel: Certainly there's risk, as with anything.
Max Trescott: Yeah, like us driving down the highway 101 tonight.
J.R. Warmkessel: Or any other freeway. Take your pick.
Max Trescott: Exactly. I feel safer in the airplane, frankly, than in the freeway.
J.R. Warmkessel: You got a lot more freedom. You know, one of the things that I tell people a lot is that, you know, you'll never be free like you are when you are in an air lane, but that freedom has a responsibility that comes with it and you have to know that sometimes you're not going to make that flight, you're not going to make that meeting, you're just going to have to stop and doing that, as you said, rule of two--that's a good rule--doing it before it becomes an emergency is what you need to do.
Max Trescott: Sure.
J.R. Warmkessel: That being said, if you fail to do that, there still are a lot of resources out there to help you. You know, talk on the radio. Get a hold of ATC, declare you have a problem, and try to bring those resources to bear on whatever the problem is. It is amazing what they can do to help you if you really are in trouble.
Max Trescott: Yeah, I think that's the one thing we all learn at some point in life is, "Hey, you gotta ask for help sometime," and that's true in aviation as well. You don't want to be shy, and you just really don't want to get kind of caught up in, you know, an ego issue where you're embarrassed. To me there's zero room for embarrassment in flying. You know, nobody knows everything, so at some time everybody's going to have to ask for help on something, but just get used to it. Don't be embarrassed about what you don't know. Feel free to admit it. Just ask questions and that's the only way to learn and stay safe.
J.R. Warmkessel: And, you know, there's just no shame in it. I've never had a controller come back and had any comment other than, you know, I'm glad you had a successful flight.
Max Trescott: Well we're all in it together.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah.
Max Trescott: And I could it's a joint team effort. The controllers are there to make us successful and we're there to keep them employed.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well they do a fantastic job and I've always been appreciative to all of the controllers from the towers, aproach control, the center. They've always done a fantastic job. Every interaction I've ever had has been a fantastic one.
Max Trescott: Yeah, I agree. They're a huge asset and part of the reason that air traffic system is as safe as it is in this country. I mean, if you look at commercial aviation, we haven't had one fatal accident in like three years or something like that.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah.
Max Trescott: I mean, it's just remarkable. General aviation can only hope to get, you know, as safe as commercial aviation.
J.R. Warmkessel: Well they, and they do a lot of things to keep themselves safe.
Max Trescott: Well, and if we have the benefit of turbine aircraft that flew above the weather with two pilot crews, yeah. We would certainly be safer.
J.R. Warmkessel: Do better.
Max Trescott: Exactly.
J.R. Warmkessel: You know, we always should strive to do better, whether we can succeed at every field or not, we strive to do better and that's how we get better.
Max Trescott: Yeah.
J.R. Warmkessel: Yeah, I think we've done pretty good here. I really want to thank you for the time you spent and those great stories.
Max Trescott: My pleasure.
J.R. Warmkessel: I hope to see you at Oshkosh, if not, this coming year. Certainly at one in the future.
Max Trescott: Well if you look for a guy in a golf cart, followed by a golf cart with a guy and a camera and a microphone boom, that's me zipping around the show.
J.R. Warmkessel: That's you. Well you have a fantastic show. Look to see you in the future.
Max Trescott: Thank you so much. Take care.
J.R. Warmkessel: Bye, bye.
Max Trescott: Bye, bye.
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