Preventing accidents

[Big Pistons Forever]

I have been following the Cirrus thread with interest. It has drifted a bit now and the latest posts talk about the desirability of the regular practicing of emergency manoevers, PFLs being one that was raised by several posters. I started a reply on that thread but thought it would be better to open a new thread.

I am all for skills maintenance but an equally important and rarely discussed element is the attention to the detail of preflight and inflight calculation/monitoring that prevents the bad thing from happening in the first place......and there would be one less pranged Pa 28 on the UK register.

I very glad that the pilot of the accident aircraft that started this thread used the CAP's to increase the probability of saving himself and his passegers but the reason the engine failed is because he ran out of gas, the most preventable cause of engine failures there is.

A few months ago there was an accident summary of a Pa 28 engine failure. The pilot executed a forced approach under difficult circumstances which resulted in a heavily damaged aircraft but no injuries. The pilot was quoted as saying that the fact that he frequently practiced forced approaches contributed to the successful outcome. The only problem was the probably cause of the engine failure was carburetor icing. So I have to think that if he had spent more time learning about carb icing and monitoring he engine inflight so that he detected the build up of ice before the engine stopped, there would have been no need to use all that PFL practice skills in the first place.

There is a place for all the "hero pilot" stick and rudder skills that Pace is always talking about but this IMO is not one of them. So in the context the Pa 28 accident, making a personal commitment to paying attention to the atmospheric condition and making a mental not that today's conditions are particularly conductive to carb icing and then dilligently monitoring the engine for the first signs of carb ice isn't as sexy as practicing forced approaches but is IMO an equally important part of maintaining safe flying skills. Yes by all means practice the forced approach but also ask yourself am I doing the best I can to reduce the risks of having the engine fail ?

The bottom line is simple. If nobody let the engine fail due to undetected carb ice or fuel exhaustion/mis-selection/contamination the majority of engine failures would be prevented.

Most airplanes get bent on landing accidents. If every pilot practiced landings enough so that they were always touching down in the landing attitude, at the selected touch down point, pointed straight down the runway and at the correct speed, the majority of accidents that bend GA airplanes would also be prevented.

Not very sexy or revolutionary but the accident record clearly shows where pilots are getting it wrong.......

[Genghis the Engineer]

Ah but.

A pilot displaying an appropriate level of professionalism, is surely doing all of these things.

I happened to talk about stalls and PFLs in the other thread, but equally practicing basic flight planning, doing W&CG regularly, putting effort into ensuring good landings, reviewing the POH periodically: all are part of the same thing - showing the sort of professionalism in your routine flying that ensures (hopefully) being able to deal with things when they get a bit hairy or, better still, ensuring that they never get hairy in the first place.

G

[007helicopter]

Prevention is of course better than cure.

The most vulnerable time is the first 400 hours where the pilot is no longer supervised and building up experience, some by trial and error and also learning by some of the mistakes made.

I suspect a lot of PPL's due to cost and attitude are not able to do much formal training after the PPL is completed and hopfully learn from their mistakes.

PS I promise I will not mention the C word in this thread.

[peterh337]

I am sure most planes that get bent get bent in landing accidents (those that get dented get dented during taxiing :) ) but very few people are injured or killed in landing accidents.

Fuel management practices are on the whole appalling and the PPL training business does little or nothing to improve matters.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Ah but.

A pilot displaying an appropriate level of professionalism, is surely doing all of these things.


G

Professionalism isn't something you are born with it takes two things

1) The inculcation of "professional" habits during your training

2) The personal commitment to sweat the details on every flight no matter how routine or simple

GA in general does not IMO do very well on either count. Using again the PFL as an example. In flight training there is very little emphasis about preventing engine failures it is all about after the engine fails and features ethereal strategies for choosing the "right" field, unrealistic multiple approaches to the same field and cook book procedures to pass the flight test (ie turn final over the red house and you will always make the field :rolleyes:). The first half of my preflight briefing for the forced appraoch exercise has nothing to do with flying the forced approach it is all about what you as a pilot can do to avoid having the engine fail in the first place. The next quarter deals with getting the engine going again if it does fail and only the last quarter talks about flying the forced approach.

I am reasonable confident that no student of mine will miss the tell tail signs of a failing engine (eg reducing oil pressure and increasing oil temp) because I regularly cover the engine gauges in flight with my hand and demand that the student tell me exactly the needles are so they get into the automatic habit of regularly scanning the gauges.

I am reasonably confident that no student of mine will run out of gas because I make my students correlate the dipstick reading to what the fuel gauges are indicating during the pre flight inspection and before fill ups I want the student to tell me how much he/she thinks the aircraft is going to take and I want them to be able to tell me the aircrafts practical endurance with the fuel on board, with a mental estimate using a block fuel flow, before takeoff and at any point in the flight

I am reasonably confident that no student of mine will let the engine fail due to an accumulation of carb ice because I make a big deal about understanding the causes and symptoms of carb ice and want to see carb heat use correlated with the present existing atmospheric conditions


etc etc.

None of this is very revolutionary but in its totality it builds the "professional" habits that prevent accidents.

[foxmoth]

What you are saying can be summed up by a very old saying in aviation:-
* “The superior pilot is one who uses his superior knowledge to keep himself out of situations that require the use of his superior skills.”

[421C]

the reason the engine failed is because he ran out of gasErr, where did you get that from?

[dublinpilot]

I am reasonably confident that no student of mine will run out of gas because I make my students correlate the dipstick reading to what the fuel gauges are indicating during the pre flight inspection and before fill ups I want the student to tell me how much he/she thinks the aircraft is going to take and I want them to be able to tell me the aircrafts practical endurance with the fuel on board, with a mental estimate using a block fuel flow, before takeoff and at any point in the flight

BPF,

I am in no way critising what you are doing. You are doing far more than any instructor that I ever had, and I'm sure more than most instructors, so you are to be commended for that.

But could I respectfully suggest that you consider extending your fuel checks to getting the student to estimate the fuel remaining onboard after landing. I mean that they work this out afterwards taking into account any time difference from planned time, not that they try to estimate before the flight.

I say this becaues for me, this was when I really started to have confidence in fuel calculations. Leaning consistantly, flying consistant performance figures, I can not pretty much know how much fuel I have onboard to within 5 litres (from a 183ltr tank). This really improved my confidence in fuel planning.

I suppose the only downside is that someday it might encourage someone to push the limits of their fuel if they have too much confidence in the fuel level, but it's more likely to prevent someone pushing on hoping that they reserve they included lasts a bit longer.

dp

[AdamFrisch]

I think, if I may, that part of the problem is the renting of aircraft. Or flying individual aircraft that you rarely fly. You don't get to know them well enough to pick up any oddities. This is another reason why I think ownership or a small partnership is probably safer.

Sure, sometimes things come out of the blue like my two blown cylinders enroute. They happen instantly and with no warning. It subsided after much knob tweaking and elimination. Had I known then that two cylinders were not at all functioning, I would not have continued to my destination like I did. I would have landed at a closer airport with facilities. I'm just glad I didn't have to go around at the destination...

But the benefit of flying a machine that you know pretty well, is that you pick up faults almost subliminally. I was going in to Santa Paula - a very short airfield - and during the whole approach something felt a bit wrong with the left engine. I could hear a very faint pop pop once in awhile. I landed, taxied back, did runups, but found nothing amiss. But when I took off there they were again those random pops. Obviously something at full power was not happy. It was a bit concerning, as this was a short field takeoff at high temps. Had one quit there, it would have been a handful. I flew back uneventfully, but dropped her off my mechanic and sure enough the left mag was grounding and needed stuff replacing. This is different from how she behaves on the first flight of the day: left engine will run rough on one mag on the runup. No leaning will cure it. It's just how she is and it goes away after we've flown for 5 minutes at high power settings.

I must also admit that sometimes one can bee almost too anxiously receptive. Just last week flew to Santa Barbara with a friend and last part of the way there I had a feeling the right engine wasn't happy. It felt like the plane micro-yawed to the right, as if it was having fuel troubles or something. Nothing supported it - oil, temp, EGT, manifold, RPM - all was good as gold. Landed and we had a bite to eat and by the time we started back, it was night. I dreaded that late turn out over the ocean departing Rwy 25, should anything happen. But she climbed on up and soon we were back around over terra firma. Ran like butter all the way home. Must have been some sudden microbursts or wake turbulence that tricked me into thinking it was an engine problem.

[Big Pistons Forever]

BPF,

I am in no way critising what you are doing. You are doing far more than any instructor that I ever had, and I'm sure more than most instructors, so you are to be commended for that.

But could I respectfully suggest that you consider extending your fuel checks to getting the student to estimate the fuel remaining onboard after landing. I mean that they work this out afterwards taking into account any time difference from planned time, not that they try to estimate before the flight.

I say this becaues for me, this was when I really started to have confidence in fuel calculations. Leaning consistantly, flying consistant performance figures, I can not pretty much know how much fuel I have onboard to within 5 litres (from a 183ltr tank). This really improved my confidence in fuel planning.

I suppose the only downside is that someday it might encourage someone to push the limits of their fuel if they have too much confidence in the fuel level, but it's more likely to prevent someone pushing on hoping that they reserve they included lasts a bit longer.

dp

I did not express myself very well in the quote above. My comment that the student estimate the fuel before fill ups was meant to be exactly what you are talking about but in the context of fueling the aircraft. This may be hard to do in the flight school environment but anytime the airplane will be filled after our flight I make a point of having the student make an estimate of what it will take based on what we started with and how long we flew, and then compare that estimate to the actual uplift.
To carry that further one could dip the tanks after every flight. I have never really considered this as a regular practice but your point has got me thinking and I am now reconsidering how/when to incorporate this idea into flying training.

Thanks for the feedback. :ok:

On a similar vein one pet peeve of mine is flight schools mindless passing on of the mantra that light aircraft fuel gauges are useless so they should just be ignored. My personal experience is that many of the Piper Cessna gauges are not particularly accurate at higher values but once they get down to a third or below they are usually quite close to the true value and low fuel indications on the fuel gauge should always be respected. But here again if you regularly fly the same 2 or 3 rental airplanes it is easy to make a note of where the gauges sit in comparison to the dip stick readings and get a good feel for what the fuel gauges are actually saying for all level levels not just low quantities.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Foxmouth

It is really easy to trot out the old bromide about using superior judgement but the bigger question is how to address the obvious lack of superior judgement that is manifest in so many GA incidents and accidents ?

[foxmoth]

It is really easy to trot out the old bromide about using superior judgement but the bigger question is how to address the obvious lack of superior judgement that is manifest in so many GA incidents and accidents ?

It may be that it is easy to trot it out, but IMHO it DOES summarise things - the solution is really, as has been said, training, both initial and continuation, yes, you can go into further detail, but that is the essence. One problem I have seen though, certainly in the UK, is instructors that are lacking in experience and the basics, if they do not have that then how can they pass it on?

[peterh337]

DP is spot on.

There is a ~30% difference in MPG between flying full rich and flying leaned to peak EGT.

The aircraft speed varies little between the two; most renters would not even notice.

[Rod1]

The LAA coaching scheme exists to improve this sort of thing and based on people who I know it works very well. Anybody else care to comment?

Rod1

[Pilot DAR]

Big Piston's thoughts resonate well with me. It's pilot's typical nature to stretch things a bit. A bit is usually okay, but you have to know your limit. I was once flying a 182RG back to Toronto from Montreal (watched the F1 races). As I contemplated my final destinationon the far side of Toronto, and fuel remaining. I decided to land at the airport on the near side of Toronto to fuel up. In making the decision to delay our arrival, and inconvenience my pax, I asked myself: "would I take a half hour detour, to prevent really sweating the final few miles at night?". Yep, I would. Pax understood.

I always try to envision those Swiss Cheese holes moving around, and lining up in a bad way, so I fall through. Among many things, fuel awareness keeps one Swiss Cheese hole from lining up.

but IMHO it DOES summarise things - the solution is really, as has been said, training, both initial and continuation, yes, you can go into further detail, but that is the essence.

Yes, but, so many pilots you ask (including me), will tell you that they are using their superior skills to prevent an accident. But, after the accident, you ask how it happened with the assumed application of superior skill, and you get a face down to the left response.

Your superior skills are only as good as taught and practiced - appropriate to the aircraft type. Which obviously takes us to:

instructors that are lacking in experience and the basics, if they do not have that then how can they pass it on?

It's unkind to generalize, but yes. I know few instructors who fly so much in the non training environment to fresh on real world flying aspects - beyond the curriculum...

Knowing I had to train forced approaches in a highly modified Caravan last week, I practiced first. That would sound good in a debrief, but I assumed too much skill of myself, and got to the edge of where I could safely be. The plane was fine, but the mod suffered a small amount of damage at my hand, which should not have happened. A few hours had it repaired, but I wore it. It did have a use though, as I reminded the chief pilot I was training that it could be done, so when he was training, be extra sharp. He appreciated that I had done it, so he could learn from my mistake, rather than his! The fourth Swiss Cheese hole was only a small one, but I lined them all up, and scraped paint, where I never had before!

[Crash one]

I think a lot of this is down to an attitude of mind. Getting careless after the PPL, renting an a/c & thinking it's someone else's job to fill it up/make sure it's safe etc. I own mine outright partly because i wanted to get away from the coddled situation of numerous instructors to make me feel ok (go--nogo).
I made a dipstick marked off in 20litre steps. At 18 lph a full tank up front =4 hrs, anything in the rear tank is a bonus. I spend a lot of time watching for carb ice conditions. in fact I have only once felt the effect & that was on the ground after taxiing 600metres over wet grass. I wish I had more access to taildragging instructors to learn a lot more (leaning for a start). This is down to a sense of self preservation, when I read of a/c running out of fuel I can only think, How the bloody hell can anyone be so stupid! One day I may find out!!
A few days ago I went for a bimble with a non pilot pax, I knew, (dipstick) that I only had 1.5hrs fuel & should have topped off first. I spent the 45mins one eye glued to the fuel gauge the other on home base direction/distance.
I do not consider that I have either superior judgement or superior skills. I do think I "think".

[Pilot DAR]

When sensing that I was getting complacent ('cause I always flew the same few types for a while) I decided to challenge myself to improve my piloting skills - so I trained for my helicopter license. Boy, that sure worked. In addition to all of the common stupid mistakes one could make just being off the ground, there are a whole lot of new ones unique to helicopters! Feeling meek and inadequate as I did my second first solo really humbled me, and took me back to my first first solo more than 30 years earlier. Other students in my group flew helicopters much better than I did, with many thousands of fewer hours in the air than I. But, I still flew with more total air experience, so some things came naturally (I never got lost!).

Now, as I fly this, that, and the other, I remind myself that I am way too experienced to have an excuse for a stupid accident. If I have one, it better be really bizarre, or I'll never be able to justify myself to the regulator, the insurer, and all you picky Prooners! So I devote more of myself to an accident prevention attitude. Yes, I still miss things, and omit a step every now again, but at least starting from a place of thorough behaviour. Stop and think about what you are about to do - is it what you planned? Is it within all the limitations? Is there anyone else in the way? Are the procedures (both normal and emergency) fresh in my mind?

It is obviously at least a little noticeable, as when I retracted the landing gear the other day, my 8 year old daughter watched, turned to me, and said "wheels are up for landing on water". She's been listening - to me practicing accident prevention!

It's an attitude, I'm trying to make mine better, and then mentor it in the other pilots I influence (hence posts here). In return, I like to receive the mentoring back. Yes, I still do ask for flying advice, though I don't trouble Prooners too much, as it tends to be pretty type and system specific these days.....