Illustrations by Luis Ruiz|
The accident statistics don’t lie, and they are chilling. Since the FAA began collecting records in the early 1980s on the number of fatalities, the number of deaths in general aviation accidents has topped 400 every year.
The good news is the number of accidents, fatal accidents and fatalities has dropped steadily over time, as have the accident and fatal accident rates. Since 1973, the rate of fatal accidents for every 100,000 hours of flying has been cut in half, from around 2.4 per 100,000 hours to about 1.2 per 100,000 hours. Since 1946, one of the deadliest years in U.S. aviation history, the fatal accident rate has been cut by 83 percent. These are great gains.
Still, the accident rate is unacceptably high. Compared with automobiles, GA airplanes are much riskier, though how much so depends on how you compare aviation apples to roadway oranges: per mile, per vehicle or per hour occupied. Motorcycles are, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 35 times more deadly than cars. Even so, motorcycles are still safer than airplanes.
The purpose of these safety discussions is not to delve into the statistics. Regardless of how you crunch the numbers, there’s clear risk involved in what we do. Instead, the plan is to formulate strategies to counter that risk.
So, what are the most hazardous scenarios in GA flying? It’s an easy thing to know but a surprisingly hard thing to quantify. Because of the way the National Transportation Safety Board categorizes probable and contributing causes of accidents in its official final reports, which are written by many different inspectors with their own perspectives on causal factors, it’s impossible to categorize accidents in any cohesive way.
The risk scenarios I’ll be discussing here might not be named as such by the NTSB or FAA, but they will be instantly recognizable to every one of our readers. The first subject will be accidents in cruise.
Cruise Mishaps
Cruise flight is generally when things are going smoothly, when the complications of the climb have been dealt with and the necessities of the descent — getting the ATIS, checking the arrivals or the approaches, and tidying up the airplane — don’t yet need to be addressed. Still, every year a number of airplanes come to harm, often with fatal results, during what is normally a benign phase of flight. With the power set, the airplane trimmed up and needles centered on the airway, what could go wrong? In truth, not many things. But when something does go wrong, it can be potentially lethal.
We should remember that the carefree cruise phase of flight is the point at which Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, went out of control over the Atlantic when its pitot static system iced up. Everything seemed fine until it wasn’t. By then, the crew, unprepared to deal with an emergency, was unable to save their own lives or those of their passengers, though doing so was well within their capability. In retrospect, the failure was both easily understandable, given the nature of the failure, and impossible to comprehend, given the potential simplicity of the resolution that never came.
Based on sheer accident numbers, the cruise phase of flight by itself is not a great risk area. Of fatal GA accidents, more than 20 percent occur during cruise flight, but of those, about 15 percent are directly related to the weather, which I’ll discuss in a separate piece. The remaining five percent or so are related to fuel problems, mechanical failures and other systems problems, according to the NTSB.
Mechanical Failures
Problems with the mechanical machine are hard to predict and difficult to prepare for. In any given year, just a handful of fatal accidents are directly attributable to mechanical causes, but they deserve our attention. From Trans World Airlines Flight 800 and its center fuel tank explosion (if you subscribe to the official cause) to Swissair Flight 111, which was taken out of the sky by an electrical fire that investigators say began in the entertainment system, it’s clear that danger from systems issues is both very real — if somewhat rare — and extremely fickle.
Engine failure is the biggest and most common offender. The loss of an engine poses a great risk to pilots of both singles and twins, as it frequently leads to off-airport landings or loss of control, as was the case with Sen. James Inhofe’s son, who died in a crash when his newly bought Mitsubishi MU-2 lost an engine and never made it to an airport.
Mechanical issues, such as engine failures, can turn a carefree flight into an instant emergency.|
In many if not most cases, an engine gives up the ghost without warning. In such a case, you need to know by heart what to do to try to restart the engine and at what altitude you would attempt to do that. Bear in mind, it may or may not be possible. In cruise, the decision to restart is a no-brainer, but you need to know what to do without reference to a checklist, unless you’ve got someone to read it to you quickly. In my airplane, and likely in yours, that means switching tanks to a different one with fuel in it, checking the boost pump and likely switching it to a different setting than it was on, and checking engine parameters, all while staying riveted on job No. 1, keeping the airplane under control. Depending on how much altitude you have to work with — remember, we are talking about the cruise phase of flight — you might try multiple restarts, though remember that while doing this, you need to head toward a good alternate airport and give up as little altitude as practical in the process. At some point, you might need to resign yourself to a power-out landing. Practice those with an instructor under controlled conditions. The practice could save your life.
Malfunctions of flight instruments are real dangers too. Situational awareness is critically important in cruise, which might come as a surprise to some pilots right up to the point where they unintentionally lose reference to the ground. Being aware of the airplane’s attitude, altitude, airspeed and position will help you keep the airplane under control while sorting things out. This can make all the difference between staying on top of a bad situation and letting it get the better of you. Again, Air France Flight 447 serves as a striking example of this, as the crew of a high-tech airliner essentially flew the airplane into the ocean because they were unable to figure out what the airplane was doing, nevermind why it was doing it.
Automation Danger
The autopilot is an excellent safety tool for pilots, but it can be a source of confusion and risk when things go wrong. My rule is whenever I have any doubt about what the autopilot is doing or whether it’s working properly, I quickly ensure the trim is set within normal parameters and disconnect the autopilot. When you hand-fly the airplane, you immediately eliminate a good number of potential complex, interrelated issues that you’d otherwise need to troubleshoot. Then, IFR or VFR, you go to the gauges, ensure that the airplane is under control, and then, and only then, proceed to figure out what the problem is. Often, the problem is the autopilot itself. More often, it’s faulty instructions the pilot is giving it.
One real risk factor is the autopilot stall, a danger to pilots of light GA airplanes and crews of turbine airplanes as well. The crew of a military-designated King Air in Afghanistan lost control of the airplane after it slowed and stalled on autopilot. If your airplane has an indicated airspeed mode, the solution is to use only that mode and not vertical speed for climbs. That way the autopilot won’t keep trying to maintain a certain climb rate by continually raising the nose, which will bleed off airspeed, sometimes to a dangerous degree, before anyone notices.
Another risk is the level-off stall. In descent with the power pulled back to keep the airspeed in the yellow or green and an altitude selected, everything is fine. Then when the autopilot levels the airplane at the preselected altitude, the airplane will start to slow, slow some more and yet some more, until the pilot adds back in the power that was reduced for the descent. It is a mistake that happens all the time and that can lead to a loss of control.
All of this underscores another danger of the cruise phase: complacency. When things start going wrong, having to spool back up to focus mode is a bad place to be. It not only takes extra time, but it also adds an additional layer of anxiety, or even fright, to what might be an already nerve-racking situation. When complex problem solving is involved, adrenaline is not our friend.
The solution is to maintain a good level of attentiveness during cruise, even when there’s seemingly nothing going on. I’m not suggesting we maintain a laser focus for the hours we spend on cross-country legs, but we need to be ready if a problem arises. To counter complacency, I maintain a routine that re-engages my brain periodically. When on an IFR flight plan, this is pretty easy to do. For the most part, the controllers will keep you hopping from one frequency to the next as you transition through sectors. In some parts of the country, re-routes are a constant reminder to keep alert. My strategy is to use the ATC communications as a reminder to scan the systems.
Fuel mismanagement can lead to off-airport landings with potentially dangerous outcomes.|
Fuel Management Risk
Timers can work wonders too. In the Cirrus, I need to switch fuel tanks about every 20 minutes in cruise. A timer set on the PFD reminds me to do this, though my internal clock usually has me checking the fuel levels moments before the message light illuminates. Though you do need to switch tanks regularly throughout the flight, overall fuel management in the SR22 is dirt simple. The same might not be true for your airplane. Sadly, running out of fuel is the biggest cause of GA airplane accidents in the cruise phase of flight.
Fuel exhaustion — running completely out of fuel — is a real danger and entirely avoidable. I know why pilots run their airplanes out of fuel, usually passing several good airports with available fuel in the process, because I’ve been tempted in the past to do the very same thing. The solution is easy. Give yourself a hard and fast reserve. For me, it’s an hour of flying time, which can safely get me 150 nm of additional tanks-nearly-dry range in a dire emergency.
As I wrote about in a recent blog, the other key to avoiding fuel exhaustion is to learn how to just “land the damn airplane.” Know how to immediately find a good close-by alternative, and go land there to get fuel, or if need be, fly to and land at one even if it doesn’t have fuel. Better to be on the ground with a little fuel than in the air with empty tanks. We have so much information available at our fingertips with great iPad apps and MFD databases that there’s no excuse for not finding an alternate
airport if fuel becomes an issue.
Fuel starvation, which is when there’s fuel onboard but it’s not getting to the engine for some reason, is a real danger too, especially in airplanes with ill-designed fuel systems. With an airplane you know well, develop a regular plan and stick with it. Manufacturers of older airplanes, most notably some legacy cabin twins, would sometimes add fuel capacity whichever way they could without a great deal of thought given to how that fuel would be managed. It should be pointed out that today’s airplanes have much better fuel systems, which is a good argument for buying a new, or at least newer, airplane.
The Cherokee Six I partnered in a few years ago had tip tanks and required a very deliberate approach to fuel management, as you need to take off and land on the main tanks, per the POH. I’d take off on the mains, switch to the tips for cruise, then back to the mains for the arrival. Still, it was easy to screw up the management of the tanks if you weren’t paying careful attention. With some airplanes, fuel management is even more complicated than that.
The key is to know your airplane’s fuel system and requirements. If you’re renting an airplane, know how to operate its fuel system by heart, something many pilots neglect to learn when checking out in a new ride. Making sure the engine is getting fuel is absolutely critical. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.
There are numerous strategies that you can employ to stay on top of systems status, including fuel data, as you fly along in cruise. In addition to radio calls and timer alerts, I use a flow check that runs from the tank selector on the console to the engine page of my MFD. I then check fuel, fuel pump status, engine temps, engine power, the electrical status, de-icing fluid (if icing is at all a possibility) and oxygen (if I’m flying high). It takes just a few seconds, keeps me apprised of the status of every system every few minutes and keeps me focused on flying. In only a few instances, it’s kept me out of trouble, as I’ve been able to spot engine issues early and take the appropriate action to divert and keep a minor problem from developing into a major one.
Nonweather-related cruise mishaps are not the most common kind of airplane accident, but they are disproportionately dangerous. Tragically, they are often preventable given sufficient proficiency, knowledge of the airplane’s systems and focus on the job at hand, which is, let’s all remember, to fly the airplane.
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