Search Results for: maintaining your airplane

Its probably a fair bet that every person who has flown an airplane more than about 20 hours has made at least five landings he or she not only considers personally embarrassing but remains convinced to this day could be measured on the Richter scale. So, lets be honest with ourselves from the very beginning: As active pilots, we are going to make ugly landings from time to time. Further, Murphys Law says we will probably make them when a lot of people are watching. Therefore, lets recognize that a little humility (and perhaps humiliation) is the price of acquiring and maintaining the skills necessary to cause a rapidly moving flying machine to return to the planet in a condition to be reused immediately. As a result, once we firmly accept that from time to time were going to make runway arrivals of the sort to make cement contractors rub their hands in financial glee, we are going to be less likely to try to force the airplane onto the ground due to embarrassment after we have bounced telephone pole high, and more likely to think rationally about the attitude, speed and altitude of the airplane and proceed to coolly evaluate whether to try to salvage the landing or go around.

Perhaps youve heard the riddle, “What do you call the person who graduates at the bottom of the class in medical school?” The answer: Doctor. The maxim being conveyed applies equally well to aviation: What do you call the pilot who has met the minimum standards set forth in FAR 61.183-187? Answer: Certificated Flight Instructor. Yet whether acting in the capacity of doctor or flight instructor, that individual is directly responsible for another persons well being. Others literally may live or die based directly on the doctors and the flight instructors knowledge and skills. The path to becoming a practicing doctor evolved to include a rigorous course of study and years of apprenticeship: college, med school, internship, residency, fellowship. The tradition in aviation, on the other hand, has been to treat flight instructing as the bullpen for corporate and airline flying. Still clinging to this model, many instructors teach largely for their own benefit and not the benefit of their students. Instructing, after all, is supposed to be a transient phase; building time, the primary goal; low pay and high turnover at flight schools, expected.

A few years ago, as a relatively low-time private pilot with a brand-new instrument rating, flying a normally aspirated piston single in northern New Mexico, I decided that before I venture into the mountains on my own, I should take a mountain flying course offered by a local CFII. The three-day program was extraordinarily valuable, particularly to a low-time lowlander like myself. One thing we did made a huge impression on me; Id like to pass it along under the general heading of hypoxic stupidity. After taking off from Telluride, we headed back to Taos “over the ridge,” taking us to approximately 14,000 feet. About the time we actually got that high, the instructor told me to shed the oxygen, start the panel timer and give him reciprocals to headings hed give me. Normally, I can do that in my sleep, and for the first 1 minutes, I complied.

According to the AOPA Air Safety Foundations 2007 Nall Report, you have a 57.4 percent chance of dying if you lose control while maneuvering an airplane, up from 50.5 percent in the reports 2005 edition. Maneuvering describes a host of flight operations including aggressive turns from base to final, confined-area course reversals and retreats to the runway following an engine failure. In other words, turns. Why cant Johnny turn safely? One reason might be losing understanding of and appreciation for the dynamics of a turn, regardless of bank angle, airspeed or pitch. Lets take a look

Its an interesting phenomenon: As student pilots, we master VFR traffic patterns in just a few hours. After earning the private, we work on our instrument rating. Initially, nothing is quite so nerve wracking as a difficult approach. Then, our careers progress and we land that big job. IFR becomes old hat-we can shoot that approach without a second thought. In fact, we get so used to “vectors to final” that we get the shakes flying a VFR traffic pattern at a small airport on a nice day-something we mastered thousands of hours ago. What causes this odd reversal and what can we do about it?

There has been a great deal of discussion about the difficulty, or lack of it, of transitioning from conventional flight instruments to flat-panel primary flight displays (PFD). Many also worry that new instrument pilots who learn on a PFD will find it very difficult to fly safely with a conventional round dial set of gyros […]

It was a nice VFR Friday afternoon in early summer when I was returning home to Westchester County Airport just north of New York City. In other words, it was just about as bad as air traffic – or ground traffic, for that matter – gets in the Northeast. Summer and a Friday add up […]

Mishaps happen for a number of reasons, but all too often theres a “what were they thinking?” element to an NTSB accident report. In the calm, clear skies of retrospect-or a motionless easy chair-its easy to condemn a bad decision and move on. But its not usually a single bad decision that causes tragedy. Pilots dont take off intentionally choosing to put themselves in a no-win situation; they dont mean to kill themselves, their families and friends.

You are a skilled, proficient and responsible pilot. You do everything in your power to avoid dangerous situations but there are a few unavoidable moments during each flight where, if the unthinkable happened, youd be left with few options. Flying is, after all, an exercise in risk management, not risk elimination.Imagine that youre departing from Mega City Municipal. With a healthy climb rate established, you tuck away the landing gear, set climb power and prepare to enter the soup. Just as the airport fence slides underneath the belly, your sole engine shivers and goes silent. Youre only 500 feet above the ground, so turning back to the runway is not a reasonable option. You look out the window and all you see is a patchwork of gray and black boxes. Can you land on that stuff?

The old saying about gear-up landings-“There are those who have and those who will”-applies to all of us flying retractables. Perhaps a fatalistic outlook, its also an admonition to perform those pre-landing checklists at least once each flight. Beyond that, the saying also admits few, if any, have died or were even seriously injured in a gear-up landing. Depending on the circumstances of such misfortune, the airplane might be only minimally damaged. While few of us fly DC-3s, that airplane and others like it are quite capable of landing without the gear extended, likely damaging only the props. Check the engines, hang new props, jack the airplane and its good to go.