Stick & Rudder

The hangar conversation followed lines one expects on a gusty, blustery, bombastic-air day—with turbulence the topic of the moment. “As soon as Flight Service passed on that Pirep about moderate-to-heavy turbulence ahead, I slowed to VB,” explained the ATP cooling off with some colleagues after his heavy day flying a FAR 23 business jet. “Told the boss she we needed to live with slower or risk not outliving the air.”

It has been said that every approach to a landing—whether from the VFR traffic pattern or an ILS, and everything in between, should be treated as a a go-around situation. If conditions are conducive to actually, you know, landing, then by all means do so. But be prepared—spring-loaded, some advise—to execute a go-around balked landing or rejected landing, whatever the term du jour is. That’s all well and good, but there are two problems. The first is determining when to go around. The other and larger problem is what happens when pilots make that decision. Sadly, they often mishandle the maneuver and wind up in the weeds next to the runway or prang it onto the pavement just past the threshold.

One of the first few things primary students learn is the stall. More accurately, we learn how to enter them and recover from them, the idea being to avoid them and, when we can’t do that, to survive the event. At first, all these stalls are more or less straight ahead. But as we gain time and experience, our fiendish instructor will introduce other types of stalls, like the cross-controlled variety we might get into when botching a turn from base to final in the pattern. You probably mastered straight-ahead stalls early on—you wouldn’t have gotten very far in your training if you hadn’t—and were trained to avoid the cross-controlled variety by carefully planning and executing your turns when low and slow, like when in the traffic pattern.

Ever wonder why we often refer to an airport as a “field?” One reason involves the relatively poor handling characteristics of early airplanes. What little was known about aerodynamics back in the day meant most airplanes were fairly unpleasant to fly and handled like the powered kites they were. Takeoffs and landings had to be into the wind, thanks to those abysmal handling characteristics. The airports in use then were, in fact, large fields, always allowing pilots to point into the wind for takeoff and landing. Thankfully, those days are gone, although those airplanes still can be fun to fly. Meanwhile, progress in designing both airplanes and airports has resulted in beautifully engineered facilities and machines capable of using them.

Although winter flying can be some of the most rewarding available to an active pilot, not all of us can work out the timing, the short days and the weather enough to go aviate in the cold and damp. Along the way, we’re suddenly not as good at this flying “thing” as we were a few short months ago. But the coming spring promises longer days and warmer temperatures. It’s flying season again, time to unlimber your airplane, even as you ponder your atrophied skills. You don’t need a BFR, and you’re not ready for an IPC, even if you may need one. You just need to get back in the saddle after a few months away. Find your airplane keys, or schedule your favorite airplane at the club/FBO, then put together a plan for the upcoming flight.

Landings are typically the pilot’s biggest challenge, presenting great frustration when we screw them up even as recognition of doing it right is as rare as $2.00/gallon avgas. Apparently, the act of returning to terra firma is one we simply can’t seem to master consistently. One of the reasons is each day’s conditions are different from the previous flights, and applying what we remember from them—if anything—won’t always work. Another reason is the pilot may not have enough experience to know how to gauge conditions and modify the pattern and approach to compensate for today’s conditions.

One complication with which we pilots must always contend is wind. It can complicate a takeoff or landing, force heading changes while en route, mandate a fuel stop when stronger than forecast and make an otherwise smooth ride uncomfortable when blowing over uneven terrain. Learning to deal with the wind is one of the major lessons of primary training, yet the accident record demonstrates many of us still haven’t mastered the challenge.

When was the last time you flew a slip? Are slips a necessary maneuver belonging in every pilot’s skill set? Or are they an aerial anachronism, a holdover from earlier flying days, with little application to the modern world? Slips originated in aviation’s early days, when most, if not all, airplanes lacked wing flaps. They were and are used to increase the angle of descent on approach, and to get the airplane’s nose out of the way of the pilot (who often sat well aft) to better see the runway ahead when landing. Given the genesis of the art of slipping, should we still be expected to master it?

Among the concerns expressed by a brand-new student pilot I was talking with recently was what I took to be a strong fear of stalls. I didn’t have the opportunity to ask him where he learned stalls should be feared. I did, however, relate they were important but—at least when understood—weren’t anything to fear. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be respected. Key to understanding stalls, of course, is knowing why and how they occur, why we practice them and how we can use the knowledge and experience gained during that practice to prevent more dramatic behavior, like deep stalls or spins, especially when close to the ground.

I had just been hired to instruct in the manufacturer’s authorized pilot training program for the Beechcraft Bonanza. Part of my orientation was a check flight with Norm, the lead instructor of Bonanza training (whom I was replacing as he moved up the product line). We were in an older A36 about 4000 feet over Anthony, Kan., when he reached over and pulled the throttle, choking off the Bonanza’s tired, TBO-busting IO-520 engine. I immediately found the local airport, pointed the Bonanza toward it, and transitioned to a glide as I stepped through the emergency checklist from memory. Norm declared my restart efforts moot, so I pulled the vernier prop control to the low rpm position and committed to a glide.