Emergencies brief

[Centaurus]

Well there is such a thing as overloading a student

I hate to pour water on the need to brief your student (or have him brief you) on emergecies. I learned to fly a Tiger Moth at a small flying school in Sydney, Australia in 1951. Emergency briefs simply did not exist. It was all done as part of the ground course. I then flew in the RAAF for 18 years and during out training for the pilot's bevet or Wings, again there was no such thing as a before take off brief. Of course we had ground lectures on what was called Airmanship and that covered such things as actions to be taken in event of engine failure before and after take off.

The same principle applied when we flew multi-engined aircraft like the Dakota and Lincoln bomber. There was no before take off brief. There was certainly no briefing prior to conducting an instrument approach in those days. In later years when I flew airliners we seemed to brief for everything including fuel reserves for diversion.

I recall when I was a copilot on the Boeing 737 as my first airline job. We were going to Hong Kong and I was the PF. I started to read the approach plate details to the captain who told me to stop there. He said he had the same chart in front of him and he knew how to read the chart and there was little point wasting his time listening to me rattle off all the chart details,missed approach etc as it was all in front of him. He had a good point I thought. The same captain said there was no point in briefing engine failure on take off. For example he said, where do we stop with emergency briefings? Do we brief loss of hydraulics on take off, loss of a generator, tyre failure before V1, failure of flaps to retract after take off, failure to pressurise after take off - and so on.

I recall being a jump seat observer on a Fokker F28 with an Australian airline. One of their SOP's was that on levelling at cruise height the captain would be required to go through the emergency descent procedure in case there was a depressurisation at cruise altitude.
The captain had done the same SOP brief hundreds of time and knew it off by heart word for word. He also knew the CVR was big brother. On this occasion he turned his head towards the left and looking out of his side window said in a bored voice the words "In event of an emergency descent, l will close the throttles and extend the speed brake while you (the copilot) will close the outflow valve and advise ATC (and so on).

The copilot had heard all this before and knowing the captain always looked out of the left hand window while giving his briefing, the copilot winked at me and while the captain was talking the copilot stuck up his middle finger at the captain, made faces and stuck his tongue out at the captain meanwhile timing it to perfection so when the captain turned his head forward on completion of his emergency briefing the copilot was looking straight ahead with a stony face. I had to stifle a giggle.

Nowadays, briefings are the big deal and many a pilot has been castigated by check pilots or simulator instructors for making his briefing too brief or having items left out, It begs the question how does one define "too brief?" It reminds me of the old adage " One man's meat is another man's poison.". . If you have never heard of that saying the explanation is as follows: The adage "One man's meat is another man's poison" means that what one person finds beneficial or enjoyable, another person may find harmful or distasteful, highlighting the subjective nature of preferences and tolerances. The expression serves to emphasize that tastes and what is good for one individual is not necessarily so for someone else.