Aviation Safety

For the average owner/pilot, its not hard to stay knowledgeable about the systems and procedures of the airplane youre flying. You fly not only the same make, model, and year, but the very same airplane every time you fly.

If youre lucky, you have a panel equipped the way you want it, with the avionics you chose, laid out in the pattern you found most convenient. Switches fall easily to hand and, after you learn them once, you know exactly how to operate each piece of equipment. You know how it works, how to make it do what you want, what it can do and what it cant.

Airline pilots are in much the same situation. Even though they dont fly the same airplane, there is much consiste…

[IMGCAP(1)]Except for those who fly gliders, most pilots live in fear of an engine failure. Some are so wary they fly multi-engine airplanes for no reason other than to give them more options should an engine decide to imitate a brick. Pilots of singles, of course, have no choices. When the engine crumps, its time to hit the softest thing you can find as softly as you can manage.

But the fear of imminent engine failure is in some ways misguided. Annual inspections, preflights and runups are all designed to catch little problems before they become big ones. In addition, the relatively simple engine design helps make them more reliable.

On the other hand, there are forces at work agai…

[IMGCAP(1)]In singles and even light twins in some circumstances, an engine failure means the airplane is going down. The pilots job at that point is to pick the best spot to land and properly execute the forced landing.

Sounds simple, but its a procedure that pilots routinely botch, either because their skills are so rusty or because they dont know the right way to make a forced landing.

Glider pilots are sometimes smug about their ability to land without power, but in fact, an airplane with a windmilling prop is markedly different from a glider. For one thing, the lift/drag ratio is about three times higher in gliders than in powered airplanes. An airplane cant gain altitude in…

There are large parts of this country where the terrain can impede your climb-out after takeoff. Sometimes it can even be a factor during en route climbs.

It takes just a quick glance through the NTSB database to find dozens of accidents in which the aircraft was unable to outclimb rising terrain. Those accidents reveal a number of common factors involved with this type of accident, in addition to the rising terrain. High density altitude carries much of the blame, to be sure, but so does restricted maneuvering area, adverse winds, heavy aircraft weights and relatively low power-to-weight ratios.

When most people think of rising terrain, they picture mountain peaks that rise nearly 1…

[IMGCAP(1)]When the magnificent Concorde thundered down runway 26R at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in July 2000, it became one of the most scrutinized airplane accidents on record. After a spectacular display of flaming fuel, the aircraft climbed to about 200 feet agl, pitched up, rolled inverted and crashed. All 100 passengers, six flight attendants and three cockpit crew members were killed, along with five people on the ground.

Aircraft accident investigators often refer to the chain of errors, preventing any one of which would stop the accident from happening. The Concorde mishap is perhaps an all-time classic in this regard, since there was a clear indication that there were…

[IMGCAP(1)]On Valentines Day 2000, Indy racer Tony Bettenhausen went down in a Baron 58 that was approved for flight in known icing conditions. FAA records show that in mid-afternoon the day before his fatal accident, he called Nashville Automated Flight Service Station to file an IFR flight plan and get a standard weather briefing.

He was told that along his route of flight there was a convective Sigmet reporting a line of thunderstorms 30 miles wide, with tops to 30,000 feet. In addition, the forecast called for moderate rime and mixed icing from the freezing level to 24,000 feet, with moderate turbulence below 15,000 feet. He updated the weather later, then wisely decided to cancel…

[IMGCAP(1)]Heres a news flash: There is no such thing as a perfect flight. Every pilot is forced to examine the airplane he is about to fly, his own skills and the demands of the mission, and make judgment calls about the risks involved and how to minimize them.

Sometimes the calls are easy, with the intended flight well within the limitations of the airplane and pilot or so far outside those capabilities that a decision is black and white. Most times, however, the choice requires not so much a go/no-go decision as an analysis of where the pitfalls of the flight might be.

In those cases, a pilots experience leads to certain assumptions, for better or for worse. Just as you may expec…

I went flying one Friday out of Farmingdale, N.Y., with Matt, a fellow pilot, and my friend John, who we picked up at White Plains. We had planned to go to Nantucket, Mass., for the day, but a front was moving in. Matt and I decided to meet at the airport and discuss it. When I got to FRG at 7:15 am he had already pre-flighted the airplane.

I didnt really want to go to Nantucket because I thought it would be difficult to beat the storms back. We talked it over and decided to pick up my friend at HPN, go to East Hampton to have lunch and return before the storms hit Long Island. The visibility was poor at FRG and it was IMC almost everywhere, so we filed IFR for the trip. Matt flew to HP…

Elaine, my 21-year-old-daughter, was a senior in college and was to get married in less than two months. She and I have shared that special close bond that is unique to dads and daughters, so we planned one more father-daughter adventure before she tied the knot.

She had one day open on her busy pre-wedding summer schedule, so I cleared my schedule too. I just hoped the weather would be VFR for our planned flight to Ocean City, N.J., a place that holds many great memories for my wife and Elaine.

The evening before the flight I checked the weather forecasts on the AOPA website and filed a flight plan as well. We planned to lift off at 5:45 a.m. to arrive at Ocean City by 7 a.m. Breakfa…

It was time to introduce a non-pilot friend to aerobatics. He had been expressing interest for some time, and finally our schedules meshed and we headed out to the airport to strap on some unusual attitudes.

He had flown in the Citabria once before, on a flight where we did some spirited maneuvering, but no aerobatics. I like to introduce neophytes this way because it allows them to get used to the motion and I can avoid having to wash out the interior of the airplane afterward.

Before that first flight, we were waiting for the fuel truck and I asked him how much he weighed. A buck eighty. I ran the weight and balance and found we could carry full fuel and still be comfortably within…