Accident Probes

I was flying my Cessna T210R Turbo Centurion from the Westchester County Airport (KHPN) in White Plains, N.Y., to the Dekalb-Peachtree Airport (KPDK) in Atlanta, Ga., on a dark night. I departed KHPN IFR but encountered unlimited visibility over North Carolina and cancelled. Before takeoff, I observed line personnel fill both fuel tanks. I had planned to have an hours fuel reserve on landing at PDK, and there hadnt been any unforecast headwinds. However, as I passed over Greenville, S.C., at 12,500 feet, both fuel gauges showed the tanks nearly empty.

While wildfire TFRs dont usually come with the threat of a pair of F-16s, the red circles depicting wildfire TFRs pop up every summer on aviation charts like weeds. While they can and are created any time special flight operations need to be protected from typical civilian traffic, theyre especially pernicious in the western U.S. Staying safe should be simple, right? Just load the TFRs onto your moving map and skirt their boundaries, right? It isn’t that simple: Skirting the boundary is perfectly legal but it may not provide much of a safety margin. In fact, skirting them actually could increase your risk. To truly reduce the flight safety risks related to wildfire TFRs, we need to understand their implications.

By the time you read this, itll be late September or early October. In some regions of the U.S., that means leaves changing color, frost on the pumpkin and winterizing the house, the vehicles and the airplane. In other regions, like where I am, it means shutting off the air conditioning, opening the windows and putting a final close cut on the yard. Cooler, better flying weather, along with some seasonal challenges, likely will confront us all soon.

I appreciate David Jack Kennys take on the value of keeping up with performance and ground-reference maneuvers after the checkride (Maneuvers, September 2018). Ive found that they definitely help me to build confidence when Ive been out of the left seat for a while, and can quickly restore the feel of the airplane. The same is true when confronting an unfamiliar type or when assessing skills of a new pilot-acquaintance.

If there were some way I could make a series of trips back in time to change things, one of the stops on my itinerary would be to somehow infiltrate the small cadre of early pilots and airplane designers to convince them to use a word other than stall to describe what happens when a wing exceeds its critical angle of attack. The word obviously has numerous other applications, and using it for this purpose has confounded student pilots and television news anchors ever since. That said, Im not sure what should replace it, and remain open to suggestions.

True, it wont tell you how far youll have to go to find good barbecue, or even whether theres a courtesy car. It will, however, give you the hours at which someone should be there, the kinds of fuel available and whether theres 24-hour self-service, phone numbers for the airport manager or to request after-hours services (if available), the dimensions and pattern orientations of all runways…plus latitude and longitude, bearings and distances to the nearest navaids, frequencies for approach control, weather, and the CTAF or tower and descriptions of possible conflicts such as banner tows or skydiving. It even details what repair services are available, though you might have to look up the codes. (S4 means major airframe and powerplant.) Thats a lot of information for seven bucks-and the batteries never run down.

• Maneuvers
• Safety Policy
• IMC Emergencies
• Backcountry Culture
• High-Lift Devices

The right-hand diagram on page 32 (July 2018) depicting an alternate midfield entry when approaching from the side opposite the traffic pattern was (and I believe still is) the standard approach taught across Canada when I began flying over 50 years ago. When approaching from the same side of the traffic pattern, we were taught to enter downwind parallel to, slightly wider and slightly further upwind than usual, rather than the 45-degree entry in the U.S. The preferred entry (left-hand diagram) involves a short period where you are blind to everything that may be happening in the pattern and thus may pose unnecessary risk.

Many of todays workplaces seek to create a formalized safety culture, an environment where employees practice behaviors that minimize accidents, look out for their co-workers and where reporting unsafe conditions is encouraged, not subject to retaliation, and frequently rewarded. It can be a great goal, but it often creates an exaggerated sense of safety where people need safety training to use a power strip and posters about how to get out of a car without tripping. The goal of creating a safety culture often ends up a corporate farce, since the best safety cultures are not created by artifice, but happen naturally because people really care.

But if you struggled to get the knack of flight maneuver exercises that often seemed far removed from the realities of coaxing an aircraft between Points A and B, you have our sympathy. Training for the private and commercial certificates in particular requires learning to master maneuvers whose relation to practical aviation is, to put it charitably, not obvious. (If you can envision a situation in which your life depends on being able to fly lazy eights to airman certification standards, by all means write in to describe it, as we cant.) This raises the question: Having once done them well enough to persuade an examiner to issue a certificate, is there any reason to go on spending flight time and the money it represents maintaining those elusive skills?