PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Sharing an emergency
View Single Post
Old 5th Jan 2019, 03:38
  #28 (permalink)  
flensr
 
Join Date: Dec 2018
Location: Earth
Posts: 19
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
BPF has a great point, as does your (Genghis) comment about identifying the initial problem via lower than expected climb performance. On my ATP checkride, we were on a normal climbout (in a Baron) and I noticed that I just wasn't getting the climb performance I expected. At that point I had a grand total of 4.5 hours in that aircraft so I was by no means an expert, but still, I noticed it. Turns out that the sun was shining right on the landing gear indicator lights and when I raised the landing gear handle I simply couldn't tell that the 3 green lights never went out and I assumed that they did because they always had in the past. Turns out we had a stuck weight on wheels switch and the gear was stuck down. My check airman let me handle everything and we landed uneventfully. That entire event goes back to basic airmanship. Did we repeat the after takeoff tasks by rote memory or did we actually confirm that the gear came up? During our climb check, did we compare actual vs. expected climb performance? Before landing, did we use every available resource to confirm the condition of the landing gear before actually landing? A break in basic airmanship with the erroneous gear-up confirmation was caught later on by noticing the climb performance discrepancy. If I hadn't noticed that, we could potentially have completed the entire first half of the checkride with the gear hanging, most likely with a gear overspeed in there somewhere. Because the sun was shining right on the gear lights and I was a bit complacent when calling/confirming gear up after takeoff.

100% correct on foundational flying skills being key to not only handling an inflight emergency, but also in noticing the problem in the first place.
flensr is offline