I wrote this a few years back, it uses less oldeth English but tells what the ten best rules to handle an emergency are:
One – fly the aircraft, do not let it fly you. A crippled aircraft is still an aircraft and more than ever needs a pilot. Assess the situation take charge and choose the most favorable outcome. Taking charge of the aircraft means continuing to fly while your brain enters another zone to solve the mystery before your eyes. Doing to or three critical procedures at once might be necessary, but if you find yourself unable to multitask, then just do one thing well, fly your aircraft. A note on emergency procedure diagnostics: try to conduct your training to teach you to read emergencies from the bottom up, stating the symptoms and deducing the cause. Reading emergencies from the bottom up, from the indications to the root cause of the event is good training for your mind, and is the opposite of the way we normally discuss emergencies. When we discuss procedures with our friends, we normally say, “hydraulic system number one failure” and then proceed to explain what to do. In the real rough-and-tumble, our aircraft is much more insidious. It hands us vibrations, lurches, some caution lights, and from this disassociated set of indications we are expected to figure it all out. It is amazing how confusing a set of caution lights vibrations and wiggling controls can be, especially immediately after a shot of adrenaline enters your bloodstream. This is one of the reasons why simulators are so effective, but even hangar talk can be rearranged to be more effective. When you discuss emergencies, do so from the bottom up, listing the indications and deducing the problem. The best way is with the simulator or piloting software, another way is a set of flash cards that list the indications, and another way yet is to have a buddy quiz you. One time during an intensive training program in a large multi-engined helicopter, I prepared a stack drawings of the cockpit with the gauges, cautions and warnings penciled in. On each page I recorded the consistent readings for a single emergency. I had a clip installed the cockpit so that I could mount these pages individually, and surprise the trainees with a mini simulation that illustrated a budding emergency. It was amazing to see how trainee pilots who were wonderful at reciting flight manual emergency procedures suddenly come unglued when they had to figure it out for themselves. It took a few hours for them to settle down and learn to think about the clues that they saw while flying.
Two – always maintain rotor rpm. The collective pitch is the rotor rpm adjuster, and the rotor tachometer is your only best friend. It seems redundant to say that without rotor rpm nothing else in the cockpit is important. When rotor rpm begins to be untrustworthy is when there is too little or too much power. Both of these situations are cured by adjusting the collective pitch. So the first universal emergency procedure is to know whether the rotor rpm is going down or coming up and the first universal emergency cure is adjusting the collective to keep the rotor rpm in the green.
When an engine fails and power is lost the solution is simple, reduce the collective pitch to keep the rotor happy. If you've lost your only engine, putting the collective all the way down is probably a good start. For a twin, reducing collective a bit to keep rotor in the green is generally a good idea, if for no other reason than it prevents the remaining healthy engine from over-torquing. I would strongly suggest that you do not grab engine levers or throttles, at least not initially. Almost anything you do with the throttle at this point is wrong, or at least unnecessary. If the engine has quit, the throttle is not going to give you back power. In a twin, if you have the wrong throttle in your hands you are going to ruin the rest of your week. It is unfortunate that many times crews will hasten to perform the emergency cleanup checklist when airmanship is called for. Emergency checklists are often cleanup items after an engine failure has been satisfactorily handled. Initial actions such as adjusting the collective pitch to maintain rotor in the green are paramount. Then comes establishing a successful glide or, in a twin, establishing a solid climb on the remaining engine. After the pilot has successfully guided his aircraft into the new regime of flight, adjusting throttles and attempted restarts are fine procedures. A failed engine has taken itself out of the equation, and deserves no immediate attention until the rest of the aircraft is made happy.
For turbine helicopters, pilots train for and think about high side governor failures that pour power into the rotor. These events are relatively rare, and should be handled by pulling up collective to contain the RPM. A number of twin engined helicopters have been destroyed by crews who mistake a reduction of power in one engine for an increase in power in the other, that is they mistake an engine failure for a high side governor failure. For these unfortunates, shutting down the remaining healthy engine has led to extremely quiet cockpits, and autorotations. It is very embarrassing to shut down your remaining healthy engine and carry it, cold, to the scene of the accident.
How do we avoid confusion? The clues are right before our eyes: if the rotor rpm has gone up we have more power, and if the rotor rpm goes down we've lost power. Many times flight crews will become mesmerized by the torque split an attempt to diagnose without looking at the rotor rpm. Since the rotor rpm is our very best friend, look at it first.
Regarding high side governor failures, they are fairly rare and they present us with a unique situation – too much power. Just like being too rich or too thin, too much power is seldom a bad thing, so raise the collective pitch, absorb the power and climb, and for a few seconds don't worry very much about a transmission over torque. In the climb, study the situation, and identify the overpowering engine. When things have stabilized in the that climb, have your copilot grasp the offending engine control, confirm it is the correct one, reconfirm it, and then slowly pull it back while confirming that over torque is being cured. This can take many seconds, there is no reason to start snapping controls in the cockpit.
Three – maintain your altitude, it is your second best friend. There will be many times when the loss of a few hundred feet is not meaningful, but these times are overshadowed by the few times where the loss of altitude is irreparable and the ability to clear a mountain pass was squandered in the first few seconds of the emergency. It is an old test pilots saying that the only time can have too much altitude is when you're on fire. This also means that struggling to maintain altitude, or minimizing your rate of descent is a big deal once you have the rotor under control. Since altitude is your friend it's quite possible that best rate of climb speed is a great place to be, so in an emergency establishing a climb and reducing speed to somewhere below the Max might help maintain altitude. One circumstance where reducing altitude might be wise is when preparing to make an immediate landing. Under such circumstances descending down to a few hundred feet above the water or terrain and prepare yourself for landing should the situation get worse can be a very wise move.
Four – maintain your airspeed. Avoid slowing down below best climb speed unless absolutely necessary. Airspeed and altitude go hand-in-hand, so that in an emergency is often a good idea to slow to somewhere between best range and best rate of climb speed while you sort things out. This will mean that any altitude losses are minimized and also that you're in the best position to make an autorotation should be necessary. Many times pilots will wisely trade airspeed for altitude while they sort things out. It might be wise to hold some power while you decelerate and get a few hundred feet of altitude as you cash in the difference between cruise speed and best rate of climb. This extra altitude can be important in maintaining your visibility for selecting landing sites, extending your glide should you need to autorotate, and maintaining a longer radio range should you need to contact authorities in that last emergency call.
Five – keep your hands away from throttles, fuel, and hydraulics, until the situation is so stable you are getting bored. If your copilot goes near these controls, take charge. The first few seconds of an emergency are the time to stabilize the aircraft and its flight situation and begin the diagnostics. It is the wrong time to start performing hasty operations on critical systems. The ghostly silence that fills the cockpit when an engine failure is followed by a mistaken engine shutdown is straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It's doubly damning when you realize that there is no reason to grab an engine lever immediately after an engine failure. The lever you should eventually want to grab is connected to a dead engine and is a really no use you at all. The lever next to it is connected to the running engine, and is your life's blood. It would be wise to stay away from it while you sort out the rest of the aircraft. The only time when throttles should be rapidly closed is to cure a tail rotor failure, and those occur so infrequently that they hardly need to be discussed.
Adjusting fuel, hydraulics, electricals, and the like should be done deliberately and after consultation and cross check with your copilot.
Six – plan your landing carefully. You might not get a second chance. As you settle down after the emergency procedure cleanup, consider where and when to land. Extended flight is hardly recommended after serious emergencies, but flying a few more miles past the golf course to an airport with fire and rescue services might be a wise investment in time. In any case the three segments of your emergency the initial reaction, the diagnosis, and the flight home should all be carefully considered.
Seven – use your checklist as a tool, but beware of nonstandard or compound emergencies. Use checklists wisely, they are quality control items to be sure you don't leave something out but they do not replace thinking. It is usually best to avoid opening the checklist on till you've finished the diagnostic stage and know where to look for the detailed procedure. Checklists can block cockpit decisions, because the checklist can fill your workload at a time when you should be thinking. It is interesting to note that many of the airline emergencies that fail are the result of the crew applying a checklist procedure to a very nonstandard emergency. For example, the DC 10 accident in Chicago a few decades ago resulted when an engine fell off, and the crew lost control of the aircraft. By following the checklist, they slowed to best rate of climb speed while climbing at several thousands per minute. In post accident simulations, the crews who survived this emergency were those who noted that slowing down corresponded with a loss of lateral control, and they survived when they stopped following the checklist and simply flew their aircraft. The second example is an airliner that took off from Washington DC with iced engine probes that caused their power gauges to read very high. Their sluggish aircraft, which was actually at half power, barely climbed and ended up striking the bridge a short way past the runway. What would the cost have been to have advanced the throttles enough to climb decently, risked engine over boost but climb successfully? Here as well the crew obeyed procedures, and failed to cure the problem.
This is not advocating ignoring the checklists, it is advocating using all your senses and your head at all times.
Eight – know your emergency procedures cold. This goes without saying, there is nothing worse than the confusion of trying to figure out what you should know while you're trying to figure out what is happening to your aircraft! Practice, simulation, memorization, and hangar talk always to prepare your brain so that confusion is not an issue. A strong suggestion is to be able to sketch the aircraft system you are reconfiguring from memory as you recite the emergency procedure.
Nine – use your crew, and their extra eyes, hands and brains. Crew resource management is the buzzword, but the concept is wonderful valid. Your copilot eyes and brain are your tools to be used to multiply the cockpit IQ. While diagnosing ask and confirm before you decide. A well-trained crew can be seen when the copilot begins to volunteer information, and then starts to make suggestions. If you've trained your copilot to sit down, shut up, and follow orders, you might as well be solo. Note how Capt. Sullenberger asks his copilot, “Got any Ideas?” before he plants the aircraft into the river. His copilot says, “Actually, not,” and they together take their aircraft into the ditching.
Ten – recognize that the most dangerous problem your aircraft can face is your own poor judgment. A high percentage of aircraft accidents are the result of the judgments made minutes earlier, usually involving weather, fuel, or darkness. We train rigorously to fix our broken aircraft, and we spend virtually all of our practice time learning how to cure an aircraft that has insidiously conspired against us. It is a sad fact of aviation life that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all accidents involve a crew taking a healthy aircraft into the ground. Think of the ways to practice your judgments, especially with darkness and fuel. Set up scenarios and discuss them with your friends, fly them in simulators, or stay awake at night thinking about them. It is axiomatic that we practice the emergency procedures that we can, while we experience the emergencies that actually occur, and that are, all too often, of our own making.