AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - July 2020 - 22

FLYING LIFE

True test

BY NATALIE BINGHAM HOOVER

Do you have what it takes when things go wrong?

NATALIE BINGHAM
HOOVER is an
FAA designated
pilot examiner and a
corporate pilot with
a type rating in the
Beechjet.

22 | AOPA PILOT July 2020

DURING MY FIRST WEEK on the job at the regional airline, our instructor walked us out to the airplane so we
could all get a look at the cockpit of the new Bombardier
CRJ-200 we'd be flying. It looked like a spaceship, with
more buttons and lights than I'd ever seen in a cockpit.
Are they really going to let us fly this thing? I wondered.
Actually-yes, as soon as we got a certain number of
training hours and jumped through various testing
hoops, they were going to put 50 passengers behind us
and turn us loose. I just couldn't believe it. How could
passing a checkride possibly make me qualified to hold
the lives of so many people in my hands?
Maybe you've felt that way when you loaded your
family for the first time in an airplane and felt the weight
of that responsibility. Just because you passed a checkride, can you trust you have the skills you need to handle
anything that may come your way in the sky? In other
words, are the FAA airman certification standards an
accurate measure of what makes us safe out there in
our day-to-day operations as pilots?
In order to answer this question, I turned to the
extensive accident studies conducted by the FAA's
General Aviation Joint Steering Committee. They concluded that most accidents are caused by "loss of control."
In layman's terms, that's stalls and spins. However, on the
checkrides I give as a designated examiner, applicants
rarely fail on the stall task. Furthermore, the GAJSC concluded that most fatal loss-of-control accidents occur
during maneuvering flight, including takeoff and landing.
But I test my stalls at cruise altitude without a runway
in sight, and the applicant knows exactly what's coming
because they are stalling on purpose. If people rarely die
from stalls they induce intentionally, does that mean the
checkride is irrelevant?
I don't think so. While that task may only be able
to test an applicant's ability to recover from a stall, I
believe the other tasks test our ability to avoid stalls in
the first place. Let's take the steep turn maneuver. The
standards are plus or minus 100 feet and plus or minus
10 knots. Most applicants can hold their altitude or at
least make a correction back to it when they deviate.
One common mistake, however, is a failure to notice
airspeed as it degrades during the turn. We know this
weakness causes crashes when pilots fail to recognize a
slowing airspeed during an uncoordinated base-to-final
turn. So, if you were able to perform a steep turn to standards on your checkride, chances are you understand

the relationship between bank angle and load factor/
increasing stall speed. Hopefully, if you ever feel that
telltale buffet or hear the stall horn as you attempt to
maintain altitude in a turn onto final, you will recognize the approaching stall and recover without further
incident.
The same goes for the landing tasks. The standard
says you must touch down relatively close to the point
of intended landing or else make the decision to go
around. The accident books are full of pilots who crash
when they fail to go around after an unstable or unacceptably long approach. In that way, the checkride is
a good measure of the thing that's important: a pilot's
decision-making skills.
Another reason people commonly fail checkrides-
and have accidents-is because of task saturation. I cannot
tell you how many times I've seen pilots fail to retract
their landing gear after an emergency descent maneuver
because their minds are so busy keeping up with the high
workload of a complex aircraft. People also do silly things
on instrument checkrides, such as loading an approach
for the wrong airport or failing to notice their CDI is
deflected. They are so busy flying the airplane in instrument conditions or with a simulated engine failure that
they simply can't handle one more thing. If you ever feel
yourself getting to that level of overwhelming task saturation, because of weather or inoperative equipment or
just being in over your head with an unfamiliar airplane,
do whatever you can to shed your workload.
I should note there is one thing the checkride cannot
test for, and consequently one of the things the GAJSC
mentioned as an underlying factor in several of the lossof-control accidents: recency. A pilot can be perfectly
competent on checkride day, and then fly so rarely that
those skills degrade to another level entirely. Don't let
that happen to you.
On the worst day, when your engine quits or
you're dealing with challenging weather, can you
trust that you have what it takes to handle that situation safely? Yes, because the standards you passed
on your checkride are a valid measure of your skills,
as well as your ability to handle several tasks at once.
Combine that passing test with some recency of experience in a familiar airplane, and you should feel
pretty darn confident in your abilities to get yourself
safely back on the ground.
AOPA
myaviation101.com

http://www.myaviation101.com

AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - July 2020

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