Flight Training - October 2012 - 37

to put the airplane on a given spot on the runway because of the speed-induced float. In fact, you have no idea where it’s going to land. It’ll come down when it feels like it. Coming over the threshold fast could be considered annoying, if not dangerous, for a number of reasons: • It takes away your ability to land the airplane accurately. • Getting it to slow down enough to land without ballooning is difficult. • If we lose patience and put it on prematurely, it’ll likely be nosewheel first—and we’ll have a lot more energy to ablate than we need or want. • The wind has that much more time to mess with you. Three or four knots fast isn’t the end of the world, but anything approaching 10 knots will just give you heartburn. The practical test standards (PTS) say that it’s FAA-acceptable to be 10 knots fast and five knots slow, but neither should be considered OK. If you think being five knots slow is OK, then you’ll soon think seven knots is OK. Then eight. You’ll lose both the incentive and the skill to control speed and there’s the possibility that at some point you’ll be working in a dangerous area as your judgment and skills deteriorate. Same thing with being fast: If you are in the habit of zooming over the threshold, the day will come when it’s critical that you land shorter than usual and you’ll find that you can’t do it. Extra speed works very much against you in those situations.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH FUEL. The 45-minutereserve concept is a good one, but it’s critical that on each trip we ask ourselves a simple question: Is 45 minutes actually enough? Geographic region and weather conditions affect the answer. In the eastern half of the country—especially near the coast, where you can spit in any direction and hit an airport of some kind—45 minutes lets us cover a lot of escape routes. At the same time, in the East, a pilot is more likely to be trying to outfly questionable weather as visibility comes down. So, is 45 minutes enough? Maybe each leg should be shortened enough to make that an hour reserve. In the western half of the country, airports can be spread out so far that 45 minutes might not even get you to another airport. Plus, aircraft based in the West seem to come equipped with at least a 20-knot headwind at altitude, so they are almost never able to go as far on a tank of avgas as they hope they will. This is when an hour reserve is almost mandatory, depending on the specific trip. Also, in the West, thunderstorms are more likely to pop up, forcing big detours. When turning off course on a detour, peace of mind is looking down and seeing that a lot of fuel is left. Every pilot approaches his flying with a built-in way of thinking that is unique to him. But at no point should we forget how hostile the environment in which we’re operating can be. Margins keep us safe.
Budd Davisson is an aviation writer/photographer and magazine editor who has flown more than 300 different types of aircraft. A CFI since 1967, he teaches about 30 hours a month in his Pitts S-2A Special. Visit his website (www.airbum.com).

WEATHER: NOT TONIGHT, DEAR
Is anything dumber than scud-running? Well, maybe one thing: Doing it in the dark. We don’t know why the pilot of a Piper Comanche felt he had to get home to Omaha from Chamberlain, South Carolina, that Sunday night in November—or, for that matter, why he didn’t decide to leave earlier. We do know that he took off just before sunset on a 210-nm trip even though it was only marginal visual meteorological conditions at both his departure point and his destination—and instrument meteorological conditions at several stations in between, where ceilings had remained below 900 feet all day and the temperature was within two degrees of the dew point. Of course, it’s possible he didn’t know; he didn’t file a flight plan, and there’s no record that he ever got a weather briefing. The terrain in eastern Nebraska is gently rolling, not flat. Shallow declines separate low hills topped by radio towers, wind turbines, and trees. In the end it was a tree that got the Comanche, shearing the right wing from the fuselage and scattering airplane parts and personal effects for 800 feet until the final impact snapped the cabin back to the tail. The pilot and his passenger died on the spot. If he really did have to get home that night, the crucial failure of his flight planning took place long before he launched into the setting sun under a 1,700foot overcast. Passing up earlier opportunities to get home in better weather left him depending on luck, not foresight—never a reliable flight plan.

FUEL: DON’T MAKE ME PULL OVER
Running out of gas is a nuisance any time, but at least in a car you can pull off the side of the road. In an airplane, it’s almost never that convenient—even when you have the advantage of being able to put it into a farm field rather than a forest. After a total loss of engine power, a Piper Cherokee 180 made a forced landing in an Iowa cornfield on September 23, 2009. The airplane touched down under control, and its landing gear cut tracks through the corn for about 100 feet before the nosegear dropped into a ditch, flipping the airplane onto its back. Blunt force trauma killed all three men on board. They’d left Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, about three hours earlier on the first leg of a hunting trip to Winner, South Dakota. Investigators found one cup of fuel in the left tank, two and a half cups in the right, and none in the carburetor. They also established that the pilot and his friends knew they’d need to stop for fuel; back at Fort Atkinson, a witness had heard them agree that “filling the tanks to the tabs” wouldn’t give them enough fuel to make it all the way to Winner, and a relative recalled hearing that they’d planned to leave with partial fuel in to improve takeoff performance in warm weather with a high density altitude. In the last half hour of the flight, they passed up at least five airports where fuel was available. The crash site was just three nautical miles from a sixth, the field at Sheldon, Iowa. Sheldon’s page from the Airport/Facilities Directory was clipped to a kneeboard found in the wreckage. Just a little more margin for error would have been enough to avert this tragedy.
David Jack Kenny is manager of aviation safety analysis for the AOPA Air Safety Institute.

OCTOBER 2012 FLIGHT TRAINING

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Flight Training - October 2012

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