One sunny afternoon –
Split second decisions to die for
It’s a bright sunny afternoon and you’ve been out flying, picking up a few more hours for the logbook. You’ve had a great day, made a few touch and goes, picked up a friend and flew over to your favorite hamburger stand. The heat of the day is starting to build and you’re hearing about some localized weather over the radio. After you drop your friend at the regional airport you are ready to start heading home to call it a day.
The winds are picking up and you remember that the wake turbulence has been getting rougher at this airfield. It’s growing, since it became a scheduled site for regional jet service. You radio your intentions and you’re on final approach, about 600 feet above the runway, running about 80 knots, everything checks out. You glance over to the passenger seat, noticing a slight commotion as your friend is feeling a little ill with the rough air. At the same time, localized crosswinds and the turbulence really picks up. With the blink of an eye your aircraft’s inverted, upside down with the ground approaching quickly. Your mind is racing through a thousand procedures; somewhere I read about how to handle this situation. Do I pull back on the stick, what’s my air speed? I need to roll but not stall, maybe I read that I should push the stick forward and go full on elevators, then roll out? Oh gosh, three seconds just ticked by, my passenger is screaming, soda is everywhere and I have to do something. Tick, tick…
This is one of the situations that a small number, maybe 15%, of the pilots who experience it as an unrehearsed flying experience live to tell about. Fifteen percent, that might be a nice rate of return for an investment but its pretty lousy odds that you’ll regain control and live to fly another day. What can you really do about preparing for an adverse situational encounter?
Some pilots tell me that they practice some situations that are not too dangerous and read to prepare for the more dangerous eventualities. Still fewer pilots have told me that they practice a maneuver that would put them in a dangerous attitude, inverted flight or a spin, thinking rather, “I’m a safe pilot, I’ve been around the block a few times why ask for trouble?” Unfortunately, accident statistics have proven that in situations where a pilot is pushed to the edge of their experience, the results are usually disastrous.
I talked with some professional pilots about flight safety from Tutima Academy, a west coast safety and aerobatic training facility (Mesa Del Rey airport (KKIC), in King City California.) The president of Tutima, Sean Tucker, has more than 20,000 flight hours and is a FAA designated ACE (Airshow Certification Evaluator) and spends countless hours counseling young air show performers on their routines. All of the pilots at Tutima make a practice of flying in traditionally uncomfortable attitudes making vertical rolls, inverted flight, tailslides, gyroscopics, inverted and upright spins as normal daily routine. They often fly at airshows themselves when they are not giving flight instructions.
Their flight team is well versed at flying in nontraditional flight attitudes, thousands of hours of practice and experience have given them the capability to teach others. Many pilots have found that, like paying a good personal trainer for results, they pay to join Tutima’s safety courses learning how to anticipate and control flying in uncomfortable situations. One of the youngest pilots of the Tutima group, Eric Tucker is 24. At 14, Eric soloed in gliders. He soloed in a Pitts S-2B at 16. Now he is one of the newest engineering test pilots for Columbia Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation, as well as a flight instructor at Tutima after working summers as a flight instructor teaching aerobatics, stall/spins and other unusual flight situations.
Eric explained how the academy’s experience has proven that developing a repeatable, methodical, exacting method of training gives any pilot a universal set of fundamentals that remain true allowing the pilot to anticipate and cope with any flight situation. One of three standard course offerings taught at Tutima is titled, Executive Pilot Awareness Training (E-PAT). The 3-day course is designed for the experienced pilot who understands that any flight is capable of encountering adverse situations and also understands that early recognition of a developing issue and knowing proven procedures and control techniques can make the difference in survival.
Any flight could experience a control system failure, suddenly sustain high G-loads or encounter a stall and spin causing dizzying rates of rotation. Eric explained how through a combination of ground school and in-flight training, pilots gain confidence by experiencing fully controlled unusual flight attitudes including rolls, spins, stalls and control system failures. “It doesn’t take long before recovering from a spin or a stall becomes second nature, not only can graduates of our 3 day course recognize and recover from any spin, they learn to love doing it, any of the courses raise a pilots situational awareness”, Eric Tucker said, about pilots who complete the training.
Students fly the Columbia 400, the only aircraft to meet FAA Utility Category certification requirements since 1968. It allows Tutima Academy students a realistic upset training aircraft that is one of the best in existence. Other aircraft included in their flight training include the EA-300L, the only certified unlimited-category aerobatic aircraft approved to plus/minus 10G’s plus an impressive collection of Pitts aircraft. And with a FAA waivered aerobatic practice area less than a quarter mile from their runway a student doesn’t spend much commute time to the practice airspace. Another effective benefit of their location is California’s notable sunshine, downtime is almost nonexistent.
Flying isn’t new. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone stated a few years after the Wright Brothers first flew that, “There are two critical points in every aerial flight—its beginning and its end.” I think every pilot colleague I know would agree with statement made over 100 years ago. Especially since many friends have told me for years that they have planned to take an aerobatic safety course to help ensure the end of the flight is what they planned. Interest in taking an aerobatic safety course extends beyond my friends, too. Reading various aviation blogs I see that interest in taking an aerobatic based safety course often is considered a high priority. Many of the comments also say that, yes, it’s a high priority but that taking a course remains unfulfilled for years because there just isn’t time.
After talking with Eric, I wonder why all of us have not taken a few days out of our schedule to extend our love of flying to a broader flight envelope. The E-PAT course provides an unparalleled exploration of the art of aircraft control that isn’t reproduced in a modern full-motion simulator. Professional and nonprofessional pilots from all over the world have attended the course including foreign military personal.
Oh, remember the cockpit situation we started talking about, unexpectedly rolling to an inverted attitude, 600 feet above the runway, soda everywhere, the passenger screaming and the pilot is remembering how to roll out? The base pilot instinct suggests to that they should pull back on the stick, keep the nose below the horizon and maintain minimum or slightly positive G force. If you followed that instinct the main problem is that pulling back when inverted brings the nose down and the airspeed increases dramatically and you lose a lot of altitude. If you try to pull the airplane all the way back around from inverted by pulling back on the controls you will over speed, over G and most likely either cause the airplane to break apart or hit the ground before the looping maneuver can be completed. If you thought much longer than the 3 or 4 seconds you would probably have heard the engine, starved for fuel stall because your fuel tanks are not pressurized.
If our pilot who was out for a nice day of flying had added the right flight safety course to their training regimen it would probably have helped avoid the situation entirely or if the turbulence was unavoidable you would know to quickly unload the stick, and with your ailerons roll out of the undesirable situation all within a fraction of the time that the pilot was trying to remember what to do.
Check out the spin videos at the Tutima Academy website, it’s worth the ride for the thrill seeker and gives you a feel for dizzy rotations: http://www.tutimaacademy.com/video_spin.html. There is no better time than now to learning how to anticipate, avoid or better control the potential situations that await your pilot experiences. Flight safety is always on top of a pilot agenda. Push the flight envelope on your terms so that you avoid experimenting in an uncomfortable situation.
John Cilio is a freelance writer, aviation historian and member of the Connecticut Lost Squadron Veterans Group. He lives in Sherman, CT. You can contact John at: questions@vintageflyer.com