On The Flight Line Blog by Jason Miller

Hello Aviators, please enjoy these comments, pictures, thoughts and ramblings from the flight line. While primarily focused on training I suppose anything may find it’s way into this … my first written adventure. Be Safe and Fly Your Best!


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A Rag Is A Drag

One of the things I find consistently more difficult as I gain experience flying is maintaining the diligence I know is required to maintain safety. I believe in standard operating procedures. I practice them and I teach them. I’m a full time professional CFI, after all, so most of my flight time is in an instructional environment and yet I still find that my procedures continually need tweaking and improvement. I most often fly in the training environment, one in which we have the luxury of always choosing the safest option. There is no training mission that HAS to be flown ... there are very few external time pressures ... we follow protocol every single time (as a matter of training as much as maintaing safe operating procedures).

It’s beautiful really ... always flying the ideal. It makes it easy to know when you stray from the formula. None of us are perfect and we can only aspire to fly the ideal flight every time. Half the challenge is knowing what the ideal is. It’s satisfying (on some level) (but also humbling) when I find some of this diligence proving it’s worth. Just last weekend I found a rag in the cowling of an airplane during the preflight. There I was, checking out in a new make and model that had just returned from maintenance. I found it during the preflight ... barely. Now, every time I teach a student to preflight for the first time I say ... “make sure to look inside the cowling for rags ... or wrenches ... or anything else a mechanic might have accidentally left inside the cowling. ... yes, you’d be surprised, it can happen”

The humbling truth is ... if this wasn’t my first time in this make and model ... and it didn’t have retractable gear ... I probably would not have seen this oil soaked rag, wrapped like perfect kindling around a motor that was about to see temperatures in excess of 240 degrees.

It was only noticeable when you were flat on your back looking up through the open gear doors. You would have had to have been looking for it if the only access you had was through oil door or air intakes. After the cowling was removed the rag was clearly visible as you can see from the number 2 photo. How much time do you really spend looking through the oil door, or through the cooling air intakes? I learned last weekend that I will be spending more time from now on. Not just for mechanic’s error but also for birds nests or anything else one can think of. Then it’s time to behave like an airline. When they have an close call, accident or incident they evaluate their standard operating procedures to ensure mistakes are not made and caught when they are. It’s a call to action not just to a better preflight but to all of your SOP’s. It’s a shot across the bow. A warning to remember your training. As cliche as it is remember to ‘turn around and walk away ... live to fly another day’. Find your inner skeptic. Look for the reason you shouldn’t go flying. And the hardest part ... as I learned on Sunday ... don’t get slack! Your procedures, as rote and mundane as they might be, will be your safeguard and assurance that you are being safe and flying your best.

Train For The Test

I am firm believer in the effectiveness of scenario based training. It teaches things that are very difficult to teach. The ability to think critically. The ability to multi task and use good judgement. It’s effective to those ends but I believe it requires some thought on how it’s incorporated. To be sure that it’s done in such a way that will have the student be able to effectively demonstrate the TASKS on any given practical test. Scenarios teach a lot but they have little to do with passing an FAA check ride. Fortunately, we can plug in a great analogy here that most people can relate to: sports. Particularly, team sports ... but you can even use golf for lack of a better sport. All of us who have played sports know that on some days you show up to practice and you perform skill building exercises. Drills ... designed to enhance your understanding and ability of critical aspects of the game. Not the whole game itself but the building blocks that a good player will need in their toolkit to become a great player. For me Ice Hockey works well. It’s the sport I was most involved in. Some nights we’d work on our stick handling. Just stick handloing. All the players would line up at the red line except the goalie and two defenders. One by one the players would try to work their way in and penetrate the defense and score. You would very rarely have this opportunity in an actual game but that wasn’t the point. The point was to increase the players ability, warm up and build dexterity. Other drills included slap shots to the goalie ... or ‘sideboards’ where you skate back and forth across the width of the ring to build strength and endurance. You get the point. We do this in Soccer, Football, Basketball ... and even when you head to the driving range or putting green ... you are effectively doing the same thing. Other times we scrimmage. We plug these newly practiced skills into a mock game environment to see how it all turned out and where the next bit of work is required. I think this is the perfect instructional model. The CFI is the coach. The pilot is the athlete and flying is the sport. Some days are drill / task days and other days are scenarios designed to measure progress, teach judgement and provided a deeper training experience than with simple maneuver based training. You and your CFI should not be afraid of repeating the same scenario as many times as necessary. This is particularly true of the Instrument rating where the check ride really has little to do with actual IFR flying. So during the final 3rd of your training, as you begin to think about preparing for your check ride, you should become intimately familiar with the required practical test. You should read the practical test standards from cover to cover. They are available free at FAA.gov. You should know what Tasks you are being judged on to what specific criteria you are being judged.

If you’ve been using standard operating procedures during training (flow checks, check lists, GUMPS checks etc.) then the scenario work you have done will contribute to your success on the subjective aspect of the test. Taking some time to practice how you demonstrate the maneuvers will help you succeed on the objective, task oriented portion of the test. This distinction should be pointed out early in training so that the student understands the context and doesn’t internalize sloppy procedures due to lack of consistency. For example, students who fail to perform clearing turns before each and every maneuver often do so because during training when working intensely with their CFI they did not execute a clearing turn as a matter of procedure before each and every maneuver. More likely it went something like this: the student begins the maneuver ... makes some mistakes ... the CFI demonstrates some corrections ... the student is working on the new skill ... somebody says “we should probably do another clearing turn”. In practice it is the exceptional pilot who performs the clearing turn as part of the maneuver. Every maneuver. I think it’s natural for students to want to ‘play with it’ a bit. To experiment. As long as the context is set up that it’s a day of drills and exercises and not a mock demonstration scenario, the student will remain clear and consistent. Every few flights the students should be placed in a mock demonstration scenario where certain standard operating procedures apply, such as clearing turns before each demonstration (and I like to include a cruise checklist upon completion of the demonstration). So to recap there are skill building exercises days and there are scenario days. Some of those scenarios involve demonstrations of tasks appropriate to the rating. Rehearse the check ride. Train to exceptionally high standards and train for the test.

 

 

The Vg Diagram

When evaluating a students knowledge on different subject areas, CFI’s, check pilots and FAA examiners will likely choose a question that requires a comprehensive understanding of multiple elements.  The idea being, if the student can answer that question and explain all of the elements without digging themselves into a hole, they clearly have a grasp of the subject area.  This type of ‘sampling’ might include a few questions from each subject area and if no problems are observed things move fairly quickly.  Often, however, students start ‘digging their own grave’, so to speak, and things get interesting from there.  In an effort to test a students knowledge of aerodynamics, I like to ask them why maneuvering speed (Va) changes with weight. This topic is covered in depth on episode #170 of The Finer Points Aviation Podcast available now at www.TheFinerPoints.net.  In this post, however, we are looking at what protection we actually get from maneuvering speed and how we can see this visually on the Vg diagram.  For those of you not familiar with the Vg diagram take a moment to look over the image here.  Notice that the load factor is plotted on the Y axis and the aircraft speed on the X axis.  As the aircraft sits at the end of the runway and prepares to take off, the load on the wing is 0g’s.  Nothing.  As power is applied and the aircraft begins to roll you will follow the upward curving line along the X axis.  For this Vg diagram the aircraft is ready to support 1g (that is it’s own weight) at somewhere around 65 KTS.  From there continue straight along the X axis on the 1g line and you are seeing level flight.  The aircraft is supporting it’s own weight.  Or rather, the wings are supporting the aircraft’s weight. The Vg diagram allows you to see level flight at different speeds and most importantly, how they relate to the extreme regions of structural damage or structural failure.  Now, maneuvering speed is defined as “The maximum speed at which the pilot may make full and abrupt control inputs without damaging the airplane.”  So if you are flying along in this sample airplane on the 1g line at about 125 KTS and pull hard and fast on the yoke. The airplane will experience 3.8 g’s of acceleration force before it passes into the stall region.  That is, the wing stalls and partially releases any load it might have been carrying therefore diminishing the danger of over stressing.  That is Va for maximum gross weight.  The definition of Va is tied to the controls because the engineers know exactly how much control travel the pilot has available and can therefore accurately predict what would happen if the pilot did, in fact, use them ... fully ... and abruptly.  The purpose of this post is to point out that at that speed the airplane is only protected in the negative direction to -1.52g’s and after that moves into a region of structural damage.  The pilot might not have enough control travel available to induce more the -1.52 g’s ... but nature might.

For that reason, Va is not an optimal turbulent air penetration speed.  In general aviation, we often use Va for that purpose and it is, indeed, better than flying at normal cruise but there is a more appropriate speed for protection in turbulence.  It’s beyond the scope of this blog post to discuss what that speed is for any given airplane but I would like to open this up for comments in the forums.  More on this topic to come ...
until next time-

Be Safe and Fly Your Best,
Jason

Adventure Training 2012