I had an incident yesterday which, thankfully, ended harmlessly, but has got my grey cells going.
Scenario - instructing a lapsed PPL trying to get his licence back. Normal brief, taxi, checks, bit of a delay as the airfield was busy, then he flew the take-off. I had briefed that if there was an emergency, it'd be a real one (planned sortie was 15 minutes local GH then back into the circuit), I would allow him to handle it until I decided otherwise.
Normal take-off run (strong headwind that I'd not have sent him solo in, but was quite happy with me on board), and then started climb. Around 300ft we lost climb rate from an initial and normal 700ish FPM to a less normal 250fpm. Student and I simultaneously identified this and after a few microseconds of decision making time, I decided that a rusty lapsed PPL shouldn't be managing a possible incipient engine failure and took control - I'm pretty certain I heard him sigh with relief.
Rest of the sortie was short and thankfully relatively uneventful. I called a PAN, flew a tight non-standard circuit that kept landable fields in front of me all the time, landed safely. A bit of diagnostic work showed a left mag circuit failure. An engineer this morning found it was a failed plug on that circuit.
The interesting question is the extent to which I did, or should, involve the student in the emergency. In my case, what I did was provide him with a limited narrative of what I was doing, and then we had quite a lengthy debrief (previous sortie I'd been refreshing emergencies with him, conveniently enough, so we were able to baseline my own actions against my teaching!) Fortunately I actually did do pretty much everything, bar a really crap radio call - did I really say "Tower, please consider this a pan
" by the book so I could then also provide a good debrief against that baseline, including CRM aspects and things that I felt in retrospect I could have handled better myself. (That radio call, also I ended up using residual power to correct an inadvertently slightly low approach - thankfully enough power was still there; the low approach was probably my misjudging of the strong headwind.)
Relating this, I've been on two first aid courses in the last year, one for aviation purposes delivered by a CCM trainer, one was a hobby oriented first aid at work course delivered by an A&E nurse. All good fun, both courses we had an emergency during the course.
Course 1 (taught by an A&E nurse, most students martial artists) somebody fainted due to sight of blood on some of the instructional slides! The instructor calmly picked up the required kit, stepped over, and went straight into using the poor unconscious student as a teaching example.
Course 2 (taught by a CCM, most students airborne scientists) somebody managed to fire a live epipen through their own finger. The instructor stopped all teaching, took the incident out of the room, took no measures to inform or manage continued learning of the class. Picked things up again about 45 minutes later with no debrief.
It got me thinking - of course the first concern can only ever be safety actions - whether that's dealing with a possible incipient engine failure, or a first aid emergency. But insofar as there's spare capacity to do so (and certainly afterwards when all is made safe and there's mental and physical space to do so), to what extent has anybody else either engaged, or shut out, a student in the course of dealing with a real emergency. I'm broadly happy with what I did, including pointing out my own mistakes and side much more with my instructor on first aid course 1 than first aid course 2.
G