I've finally made it through the first real chapter in the book. The first few pages cover statistics and give background/justification as to why 50-350 hours of flight time is the range dubbed "the killing zone."
I have to agree with whoever said it a few months back (IFR Pilot? Diary of a Private Pilot?) -- the lack of editing on this book is distracting! Seriously, people, a high school kid with a pen could have done wonders to improve the grammar and flow!
That aside, however, there's good information in there. The first "real" chapter, as I've called it, covers the first major reason why/how pilots die: VFR flight into IMC.
I have to be entirely truthful here. My meager three hours of under-the-hood training showed me that, while I can certainly fly by visual reference to horizon, I trust my instruments more than my own perception and am very comfortable with them. Given that, the idea of flying in clouds has not been intimidating. Before you go yelling and screaming that I'm exactly the kind of pilot who becomes an IMC statistic, my training dictates that clouds ahead warrant a 180 and that's what I'd do. (Hopefully; some of the cited NTSB reports and "survivor" stories describe get-there-itis and other judgment flaws that lead to problems and I assume they were all good and diligent pilots beforehand, too.) In the book, Paul Craig points his finger at me and says my attitude is the reason young (read: inexperienced) pilots die. I'm a young pilot. I don't want to die.
I gleaned several useful points from the chapter that tempered my fearlessness (again, fearless does not equate to disregard of common sense) with regards to flying solely by instrument reference. First, and worst, is the idea of instrument failures and how subtle they can be. The fact that gyros wind down slowly and feed you increasingly incorrect information but at a such an insidiously slow pace that you're willing to continue "correcting" your trajectory to level off or fly straight is terrifying to me. On our plane, the suction gauge is at the very far right of the instrument panel, and while it's part of the standard scan, I could see missing the cue that something was amiss based on its read-out in a time of extra stress. Our plane also has this hideously bright red protrusion from the middle of the instrument panel that lights up when suction is lost; I've seen that at engine startup when the attitude indicator was sad and dead, but with some added RPMs the vacuum system kicks right up. Would it come on promptly at the start of trouble?
I don't know airplane systems well enough to know how to recognize or troubleshoot every problem (or most problems, even). Carb ice, check. Loss of suction, kinda check. Blocked pitot tube or static port? Maybe, but it would take longer for me to catch on to that. This chapter spent several pages discussing how to recognize such failures and what to do about them.
The second item is the physical disorientation. My naivete' says it wouldn't be that bad since it's easy to read and rely on the instruments (barring failures). Husband described his IFR training and how very, very different it is to have foggles on and fake like there are no visual cues to overcome versus actually being in a white-out cloud situation where the body very loudly insists on assessments that just aren't right. To demonstrate, he encouraged me to try to keep reading the book while he stood a foot away yelling at me. The book goes into a little detail about how the ear participates in a sense of equilibrium and how motion affects your perceived sense of stability in three axes.
I'd love to do one of those test simulators, the ones where the statistics for VFR pilots are really bad, like the longest surviving pilot lasted 8 minutes but the average was 20 seconds. I'll take their word for it that it is that deadly; I'm not one to tempt fate. But that is just difficult to believe without firsthand experience. When we finally move up to a plane Husband feels comfortable with for IFR trips, he'll have to take me into the soup to demonstrate...
In my whopping 2.5 hours of actual IMC, I have noticed it is a lot harder than flying with foggles. Almost made me want to put them on!
ReplyDeleteYeah, that was me with the prior complaint about the poor (lack of?) a final proofread/edit of the text. I'm about half-way through, so I need to pick it up and finish it. But, these days I have so many choices. There's all the reading in my day job, the Commercial Pilot Oral Exam Guide, the Fundamentals of Instruction study guide, my Arrow's POH for system knowledge, etc. Geez, when do I get to get some sleep?
ReplyDeleteI second that emotion. From a grammatical standpoint, most aviation periodicals are so poorly written that I'm embarrassed to be a pilot. Periodicals from the Cessna Pilots Association, Cirrus Pilots Association, Belvoir, IAC/EAA chapter newsletters, and others fall into this category.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to the IMC issue, I believe the real danger is not from an accidental blunder into a well-defined cloud. As you intimated, it would be a fairly straightforward task to focus on the attitude indicator and perform a 180 degree turn. None of the primary students I've worked with ever had a problem doing that in a simulator or airplane.
The real danger comes from the insidious type of IMC. For example, the IMC which does not involve clouds at all. Think of JFK, Jr. You're flying along with 50 mile visibility and not a cloud in the sky. But there's no moon, so there's no horizon reference. You're not in a cloud, but you better be flying on instruments. Or, a more common scenario, an obscured horizon due to haze. This is quite common here in Southern California, where flying into the setting sun can result in virtual zero/zero conditions. Yet if you look behind you, the visibility can easily be 15 miles.
These are but a few examples of IMC with which a private pilot of your training and experience might have difficulty. But blundering directly into a puffy white cloud? CFIT and midair collision concerns notwithstanding, it's not that big a deal.
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ReplyDeleteHey, k,
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of the complaints about grammar and editing in aviation. I was an English major in college and it drives me up the wall to see an article with poor editing, much less gross spelling and grammar errors. Come on, guys, at least let MS Word check the darn thing before you send it in!
As I once wrote in a previous post, I find IMC training challenging enough. The idea of launching in marginal conditions and then trying to avoid VFR into IMC is not my idea of a good time.
I left a comment on your Checkride Part 2a entry. Sorry it took so long but I was at sea for Uncle Sam.
Cheers,
BC