"Real" Emergencies

Many pilots with whom I talk about emergencies have thought quite a bit about how they would handle this or that situation. This is an excellent practice as any good pilot should do, but I have noticed something of a disconnect between words and actions. Occasionally, I even find areas which a pilot has not seriously considered. In that case, the normal answer to my "What would you do if…" question gets a lot of "ah, well… I’d probably…" lead-ins. This tells me the pilot really hasn’t considered such a situation at all.

Sometimes it’s difficult for an instructor to accurately describe the mental situation of a pilot in an emergency situation. It’s even harder for us to make it as real as we wish we could because that would often mean letting things get so far out of hand that they really would become dangerous (particularly in the case of an unprepared or inexperienced pilot). This is one of the things that I love about the simulator: We’re able to pull out the safety stops, remove the instructor cues that are always present (you know something’s coming when we get quiet, right?), and let the situation progress to its natural conclusion. Pilots often discover things about themselves and their flying in such a situation that nothing less than that very experience could deliver.

Two of the things that I’ve noted, in particular, are in the category of those short reaction time type emergencies. The first involves the CAPS: people will fail to pull it in a situation that would it seem like an obvious conclusion to an outside observer. I have watched at least half of my simulator participants take a situation all the way to the ground with a questionable impact where they had ample time, to the tune of a couple minutes, to decide the parachute was a better option. Most of those pilots will tell me after that they recognize the parachute would have been the best choice and are a little unsure about why they didn’t do it.

The second situation I like to put people into is the dreaded tail stall scenario. This is one of those occasions where a pilot really needs to be looking for it to happen or to have experienced it once to react in time. My main reason for demoing this very dramatic emergency is to convince people that they shouldn’t ever try to fly in conditions that could lead to such a thing. On average, it takes all of six seconds for the airspeed to go past the red line from a normal cruise setup. A climbing aircraft has a bit more time, maybe 10 seconds, but it’s still so close that the aircraft will surely exceed Vpd in virtually no time at all.

Neither of these could be done in a real airplane, of course, and thus the sim proves useful. I could write pages upon pages of scenarios, emergencies, and conditions that can only be done in the sim but we don’t have much room for that. Instead, I’d invite people to come visit one of our simulators and spend a day or three learning some of the most valuable skills that we’d all hope you’ll never use for real.

Safe flying,

-John Fiscus

Chief Pilot, The Flight Academy

www.theflightacademy.com