Over-emphasis on emergencies?

[Ascend Charlie]

Do we spend too much time training for emergencies and not enough time on other practical applications?

I would like to see some personal experiences and statistics comparing hours flown against real-life emergencies. It is now 34 years since I first went solo, and after 12,000 hours of flying, with 10.300 on helos and 9,500 of that in single engines, I have had the following emergencies:
Engine failures: None
Transmission emergencies: None
Hydraulics / electrics / queer bits: None

The worst thing that has gone wrong was an N2 governor high side runaway in a BK 117, and a few engine chip detectors in a B 206.

Yet over all these years, I have taught, and been taught, engine failures, autos, hydraulics off, hot lights, fire lights etc over and over. Sure, if the 5-h1-t ever hits the fan, a pilot needs to know the correct actions. But I have seen, and been involved in, many incidents during training for these emergencies, the cost of which would far outweigh the cost of a real prang every few years.

For example, we used to practice night touchdown autos in B 206 - this is similar to practicing bleeding, as the margin for error is exceedingly small and is easily used up by a ham-fisted Bloggs before the incredibly talented instructor can rectify the situation. Spread a skid here, chop off a tail there, but we must take these to touchdown instead of power terminating them, says Da Boss. Only way to be sure, he says.

What do you all say? Too much emphasis? Just enough? Not enough?

[Devil 49]

Brother-when IT happens-all the practice and instruction will be priceless. When the stuff is in the fan, you're all alone in that cockpit. Let me repeat that-you're all alone in that cockpit-you'd better know what to do and how to do it. If you're lucky, there's time for the radio-but in this age of instant and constant communication and even if the world knows your difficulty-they're just voices from far, far away...

Emergency training is life insurance for the pilot. How valuable are you?

[KENNYR]

AC, you can NEVER practice emergency procedures too many times. The pilot, especially in Helis, must react immediately to most emergency situations (unstable beasts). I have several thousand hours on helis and have had a governor malfunction and alternator failure in a Gazelle and a tail rotor chip in a B206.
However that is irrelevant......practice, practice, practice.....its the only way to get good and perhaps save your ass.

[Old Man Rotor]

Ascend Charlie

Sorry Old Chap.......can't disagree with you more.

Hope all your "Immeadiate Actions" are squared away......without the use of any Checklist or FRC's [and should anyone ask what FRC's are, my point is made].....because you will surely need them.

One thing the Military does well with Pilot Training is to drill into thick heads the repeated and repeated Emergency Procedures........and most progressive Civil Company's do the same.......you have to react first in any serious problem without thinking.......

A little exercise........."if your in cruise in a twin with max cruise power set.......and you hear that awful pooofff with gauges moving quickly, left yaw and reduced Nr.....!!!!"

If you have to think about your actions for one second......your in danger of yourself.

In another life........I can remember a very sincere and capable Captain suggesting the same question to me as we continually practiced an OEI departure from a simulated elevated helipad.....he persereved for an hour before he got it right.........so when one of his PT6's wheels broke up inside the "committed" call of an offshore approach..........it really was a walk in the park.........he teaches the same style now.

Practice practice and more practice.......our attitude is that a good Training Guy will set realistic scenerio's, without acting in a careless or dangerous manner, whilst allowing you to develop those skills that will save your butt.

[SASless]

Make me an outlaw here!

THINK! ANALYSE! ACT!

In that sequence......or you guys that are spring loaded to act without thinking just might make a serious goof and compound your problems. Take yourself back to the Super Puma that had the dual engine failure (imagined) due to the poor coordination of the crew and some bad diagnosis of the problem. After declaring a Mayday, performing a dual engine faillure procedure, finally figgered out one was working just fine....and recovered the machine and flew to a rig and landed after having scared the Bejesus out of themselves.

If you will step out of the box you have been put into all these years and ask yourself a simple question......exactly what malfunctions demand an almost automatic response.....you will see that only a very few do. Examples.....loss of tail rotor and attached bits......simultaneous dual engine failure (or main drive shaft for you 212/412) pilots.....or a transmission failure of some sort.

Practice certainly.....but far better to use the noggin some then reach for the checklist.....if your shoulder tucks or your hand reaches for the checklist immediately upon the Master Caution Light illuminating....you are goofing up!

[KENNYR]

Sasless, What you say is true for a large twin, 10,000Ft, with back-up systems for the back-up systems. In an R22 at 500Ft you would get as far as Think, Analyse........pick up all the broken pieces from the farmers field. Knowing emergency procedures has to be the number one priority for any pilot of any aircraft in any part of the world.

[Irlandés]

My most trained reaction is dump the collective, then think, analyse, act. Not to be adhered to religously but in low inertia rotor systems, it may not be a bad philosophy. If you've got the height to do it of course...

[IHL]

SASLESS; If I may also add "high side governor failure" to your list of examples that require a quick response.

[FJJP]

The opinions on this thread largely agree with my own experience (36 yrs) in military ME.

FIRST FLY THE AIRCRAFT. If that means automatically dumping the collective to retain rotor energy, then do it.

There are very,very few airborne emergencies that require instant action.

Then figure out what has or is going wrong.

Then carry out any appropriate vital actions.

You then examine the options open to you - anything from a controlled crash landing to a leisurely RTB.

But all of the above can only become instinctive with PRACTICE. OK, sim slots might be a pain in the butt; however, familiarity with emergency procedures enough to impress the trappers is a great confidence boost to not only yourself, but to the crewmen who fly with you. It's all part of teamwork.

[donut king]

high side gov. failure

Correct me if I'm wrong...

A high side gov. failure is not immediately catastrophic. Maybe a fuel control unit to the high side???

Nevertheless, training, training, training is very important to set the basics. Once that is ingrained, then we can concentrate on the rest of our flying environment.... to be cont'...

D.K

[SASless]

Blind obedience to printed checklists and the Pavlovian response some regimes demand "KILL" pilots. Have had the luxury to sit in the back of sims watching pilots in training do that very thing. One operator insists pilots perform an immediate landing if anything goes awkward while at a hover.....two of their senior TRE's demonstrated the wisdom of that in a 212 Sim ride.....failure was high side gov fail that does not respond to throttle. They lowered the collective and tried to sort the thing out on the ground.....needless to say...the N-r went bonkers....and while they fiddled around.....the sim finally elected to self destruct the engine......teaching point is that a printed checklist does not....and cannot cover all situations.

Fly....think....act.....

Lowering the collective in a Robbie or other low inertia machine is probably not a bad move.....but once again......you make a wrong guess and it all gets ugly quick!

[KENNYR]

SASless, I get a feeling that you fly or have flown mainly larger twin engined machines. As you know, if you delay lowering the collective lever in an engine failure situation, the RRPM decays at an alarming rate and in many cases will not recover. A single engine failure in a twin is a much more sedate affair where there is definately more time to sort things out. Again, from my military experience, any delay in reacting to an emergency can spoil your whole day. Having said that, Military flying is vastly different from civilian flying especially in regards to operations close to terra firma, over trees etc..

FJJP, your comments are noted. What you say is true, but you are used to multi-engine blocks of flats where one of the five or more crew can help you. Single pilot ops are totally different. Very rarely did I have time to get the flip cards out during an emergency, that is why we teach emergencies by rote.

Ascend Charlie, congratulations, this is an excellent, thought-provoking topic.

[FJJP]

A fair point, KENNYR, if you forget the Tiger Moth, Chipmunk, Jet Provost....

[t'aint natural]

SASless: Nr decay in the kind of aircraft you don't fly is too rapid to allow the luxury of thinking. A pilot should be conditioned to lower the lever and come back with the stick at the first inkling of trouble in such a machine. He can recover from autorotation if it was a false alarm.
In the case of the R22, I have been unable to find a single instance of a pilot being killed by an engine-off landing from an autorotation. Every fatality has resulted from a failure to get into autorotation before the blades clapped up over his head.
Autorotate first, think later.
And practise, practise, practise getting INTO autorotation.

[KENNYR]

FJJP, I had forgotten how long ago you started, Tigermoth!! My point is that in a fixed wing, properly trimmed out, you have a stable platform that is not going to deviate from flight path by that much, that quickly. The helicopter, being inherantly unstable, unless SAS or some other "auto-pilot" is fitted, will deviate quite quickly, necessitating hands-on flight at all times.
P.S. you forgot about the Piper Cub at Newtonards.

[IHL]

Donut King;

The governor controls/communicates {with} the FCU and can cause it to go high. The danger with a high side governor failure in a low power situation is overspeeding the rotor system with potential catastrophic results.

[Aesir]

I must say that I agree with "Ascend Charlieīs" original post!

What he is saying is that, if I understand right, that sometimes you can take the training just a bit to far.. and actually endanger the aircraft and peoples lives by by thinking more (riskier) is better.

Like heīs saying about the night touchdown autoīs, well thatīs just crazy. The chance of anything good coming out of that kind of training is minimal. Of course itīs cool beiing able to say that you did that if you survive it!! But sometimes things can be trained in a much safer way without risking lives. Because a lot of accidents happen during training. Thats a fact.

I would suggest that any check pilot and instructor do try to give students as much training as possible but stiil try to find safe wayīs to train, no horseplay, nothing good will ever come out of it.

Touchdown autoīs should only be practiced in good visbility after having checked out the planned landing area thoroughly. I for example always land first on the planned touchdown spot, even if I was training another student at the some spot only an hour before. I also never do touchdowns in rain. Itīs no good for your depth perception to have raindrops on the windshield and well I really dont think that any of my students are going to kill themselves because they never did a touchdown auto in rain!! I simply change my training methods in bad weather and for example in rain Iīll do a power recovery auto, which we continue tiīll landing. So itīll be like a slow motion engine (off) touchdown auto.

And by the way I have 4000 hrs in helicopters with no accidents or incidents, thereof 2100 hrs are as instructor. I have trained 80 people for the PPL or CPL licence and as far as I know all of them are alive and kicking.

[SASless]

The varied responses here , in my view, confirm what I am saying. Varied aircraft take varied techniques.....that in itself is thinking first....even if it is well before the actual emergency. In a Robbie....I fully agree the second best thing you can do is dump the collective immediately upon hearing any unusual sound....the best being leaving it on the bottom and not get airborne in the thing at all. I have flown single and twin engine low inertia machines as well as medium and large twin engine machines. I remain steadfast in my view that blindly acting to cope with an emergency (assuming one even gets the standard....vanilla type failure) is fraught with peril. Control of the aircraft is paramount...correctly assessing the exact nature of the malfunction is the secondary issue.....performing the correct procedure is the third function to be performed.

Single engine machines have their own set of failures that require an "immediate" response.....tandem rotor designs have a different set....each aircraft is different...systems are different....that is why in my view.....doing sometime quickly for pure form and not out of necessity is exactly the wrong thing to do. The anal retentive....spew forth whole procedures by rote method is exactly the wrong method to me.....that only gets you into trouble. What happens if the failure is not quite the standard failure.....how do you apply the etched in stone checklist?

Would you want to get wrapped up in rattling off the checklist...and all the while continue flying away from a landing site if you had an engine fire light come on.....or would you rather set up for a quick landing.....and perform only the minimum actions needed to cope with the emergency? If on final approach just above minimums on an ILS....do you get involved with the emegency procedure or merely continue the approach and deal with the problem on the ground? If you are in a VFR pattern at the airfield on downwind and an engine flames out.....do you really have to do much in the way of a checklist drill prior to landing the aircraft?

I can think of a laundry list of situations where doing nothing besides flying the aircraft is the exact right thing to do.....and ignoring the checklist has no effect upon the outcome. Switches unmoved....are incorrect switches unmoved as well. What you do not do...you cannot screw up. Get in a hurry....get excited....get your priorities wrong and you set yourself up for a real problem.

[Ascend Charlie]

In line with my original intention on this post, more aircraft are bent in practice for an emergency that are ever bent in a real emergency.

Talk to Frank Robinson about the extremely low number of R22 that have been damaged in a real engine failure in the hover, compared to the regular rolling up that happens in practicing for them - student fouls up and pulls up on lever instead of freezing, and crunch.

Others are so paranoid about having an engine failure when taxying, that they lower their taxy height so they won't spread a skid. Frank will tell you that he has never lost a Robbo from taxying too high, but there are hundreds of dents in the ground, surrounded by broken plexiglass and rotor slash marks, from taxying too low.

Taking every auto to touchdown may make the pilot and instructor very confident about landing on a firm airfield, but in real life the ground is not going to be level, grassed and capable of holding an aircraft. More likely it is some farmer's ploughed field, or a rocky hillside, or a forest. Time is better spent on power terminations - the aim of the game, after all, is to position the aircraft and manipulate the glide to put yourself in a position to touch down. If you can do this, you are 98% of the way home. The last 3 feet is in God's hands, depending on the surface condition. And in the practice, you are avoiding the likelihood of digging in a skid and scaring the cr@p out of all concerned. Been there, done that. Bought the T-shirt, and it has worn out.

[Bladestrike]

Lost a can in a 47, two on 206's, had one go back to idle on a 222, and shut down one on a 76, and recently lost one in a 61 in one hell of a snowstorm. Luckily the only thing I've pranged is my namesake, a bladestrike. I think the emergency training is excellent and should continue but perhaps we should concentrate on more statistically viable screw-ups; CFIT.

CRM, PDM and CFIT can be challenged quite realistically in a sim.