New Pilot

It pays to know the territory.

The nice thing about simulators, the theory goes, is that you can create many flight scenarios in a lot less time than it would take to encounter them in an airplane. It's true, but some things can occur only in the aircraft.

Ever shoot an instrument approach using your nose to navigate? Fly a traffic pattern with a headwind on the base leg and on the final? Take a golf ball in the spinner during the flare? These are a few of the things that a pilot-in-training, and any other pilot, might experience while hopping from airport to airport on a nice spring afternoon.

From an instructor's point of view, knowing the territory and the quirks of its airports is tailor-made for teaching. For other pilots, knowing what to expect in a given location, under given conditions, improves safety and keeps things comfortable for passengers, most of whom do not like to see a surprised look on their pilot's face.

Wherever you journey by air, it is not a bad idea to quiz the locals about their home field.

When I was a student pilot just beginning to solo, I had my hands too full of Cessna 152 to spare any extra attention for surprises. On short final to the usually active runway at our airport was a flat-topped building with a hot black roof. When the sun was doing its job and the wind wasn't, this roof would send aloft a plume of warm air at precisely the point where a Cessna 152 commandant would be idling his throttle for touchdown. This was truly the school of hard knocks - and a few go-arounds - until I taught myself to remember the booby trap. Later, as an instructor, I watched other people grapple with the phenomenon. Sometimes I would warn them about it, but a lot of times I wouldn't. It depended on who it was and why we were there.

When I moved to my present address and began flying for food, I discovered that many airports have their own little gifts that keep on giving. When the wind blows 10 knots or more from the north, a nearby coastal airport has a perpetual downdraft on the final to Runway 35. This wind acts like a major-league breaking pitch. You get into the draft when you are still over the water, where it really gets your attention. At another airport up in mountain country, a ridge intervenes between the airport and the prevailing winds. The wind flow divides around the ends of the ridge and joins up on the downwind side, creating one direct headwind on the base leg and another on final, with interesting turbulence in between. Down below, in the intersection, the windsock bobs between the two directions - a good clue that the condition exists.

At another up-country airport the most notable physical characteristic is the huge paper-mill smokestack at the very boundary of the field. Paper mills have a distinct aroma. When the wind is right down the runway, a pilot executing a straight-in instrument approach may be warned by his nose, before his course deviation indicator, that he has strayed off course. (The rule here is that if the air is sweet, the approach stinks.) At another airport, we used to have an NDB approach that no one could do right. The best navigators and the worst all ended up a mile west of the field. Someone complained, and the FAA's flight check people showed up one day in a King Air to shoot the approach. The next thing we knew, the approach was gone. We never did find out where the iron mine responsible for the aircraft compass deviation was located.

One of our many grass strips is peaked in the middle and slopes down at both ends, and the north end stays wet all summer. Forget the last few hundred feet, even if the rest of the surface is dust-dry. Or walk down and inspect the deep ruts (and prop cuts?) made by people who didn't. At another airport, hacked out of the woods with very little cleared area around the runways, you can approach from four directions, but it's only when you land northeast that a vicious low-level wind shear regularly shows up. I made a "save" there one winter day, and the pilot has been forever grateful. But I was ready and he wasn't.

I mentioned getting pinged by a golf ball. One of our smallest airfields lies at the north end of a set of links. Several pails are filled with the golf balls that we pick up on the threshold, which lies just off one of the fairways. A duffer did manage to pick off a taildragger two years ago. But this airport (with its nonstandard traffic pattern altitude of 600 feet agl) has a much more unusual characteristic. Located two miles out on the ILS approach to a much bigger airport, this little field sits beneath the point on the glideslope where aircraft pass overhead at about 1,200 feet. About 30 seconds after a heavy jet passes overhead on the approach, if the air is still, you will hear what sounds like another aircraft passing over. But look up - there is nothing there. This noise is the wingtip vortices of the heavy jet, sinking into the trees. Not the kind of thing you will read about in an airport guide or be able to spot during a cursory inspection of the field, but definitely worth knowing. Maybe that's why they call such knowledge the "home field advantage."

Practice Area: Propeller Hazards

The "propper" method of starting an engine

BY WILLIAM K. KERSHNER

The advent of electrical systems helped to lower the accident rate caused by hand-propping airplanes. Today, as a result, there are pilots - particularly students - who don't believe that the propeller is a rotating meat cleaver, itching to get the unwary.

There are two thoughts to the situation now: (1) Don't teach hand-propping, because it's a dangerous practice and (2) do teach hand-propping because there may be a time when this skill is needed in an emergency. While I discuss hand-propping in The Student Pilot's Flight Manual, there are caveats, and it was originally written when the ability to hand-crank or "prop" an airplane was as much a part of the student pilot's training as taxiing or tying down an airplane. (Most of the airplanes in those days were 65 horsepower and had wooden props.)

During the height of the G.I. Bill training in 1946 to 1949 at our school, we had flights of three to four trainers (Aeronca Champs and Piper J-5 Cub Cruisers) every 1.5 to two hours, and I got a lot of experience in cranking airplanes. I weighed about 115 pounds then and prided myself on getting two or three revolutions with one snap. There was a knack to it; some of our 200 plus-pound students could get only one or two prop blades per snap - it was a matter of weight control. I particularly enjoyed showing my great skill on Sunday afternoons when there were teenage girls parked near the flight line fence. Looking back on it, I guess I really looked like a 99-pound weakling in the process of killing snakes. I don't recall any of them asking for my telephone number.

The students' training for hand-propping was usually thorough, with demonstration and tutelage. When the throttle was set properly (closed or slightly cracked as required), the propper out front could hear a sucking sound indicating that the engine was being given the proper amount of fuel, but before all of this, there was a ritual to be followed:

Propper: "Brakes on, switch off, throttle cracked." (Even though the engine "couldn't start," it was a good idea to have the pilot hold the brakes from the beginning, in case the engine didn't know this.)

Pilot: "Brakes on, switch off, throttle cracked." After pulling the prop through the required number of times (it depended on the airplane, the engine temperature, and outside air temperature), the propper pushes against the prop hub to check whether brakes are being held, then:

Propper: "Brakes and contact!"

Pilot: "Brakes and contact!"

(Contact was used, rather than on, because on can sound like off, and vice versa.)

Swinging the prop through, the propper steps backward and to the side as that engine starts.

Some proppers would stick a leg out under the prop to "get a good swing," but I preferred to keep my body parts out of the prop arc.

If the airplane became loaded (flooded) during the propping process, the procedure was to have the pilot turn the ignition off, open the throttle fully, and hold the brakes. The propper would pull the prop forward through several revolutions to clear out excess fuel, keeping in mind all the time that through human or mechanical error, the ignition could be on, no matter what the person in the cockpit said. He would then have the pilot close the throttle - you could hear this - then, "brakes and contact" (note the priority of the propper), push on the prop hub to check the brakes, and then proceed with the start.

If the engine was loaded and I trusted the instructor, I'd say, "Throttle open, brakes, and contact" and snap the propeller through (realizing that it was "hot") until the engine started. You had to thoroughly trust the instructor to hold the brakes and pull the throttle back promptly, so this was not often done.

In three years as a lineboy and two years as a flight instructor of airplanes without starters, I never turned a propeller backwards to clear the loading. I always rotated it the way a starter would, in the normal direction. There are arguments pro and con, and I won't get into it here.

The most dangerous airplanes to hand-prop were (and are) the high-compression six-cylinder horizontally opposed engines. They are hard to pull through, making it easy to get off balance and, for the two-blade props, there was one particularly dangerous position of the propeller that required careful movement to get a blade in the proper position for a good snap. The propper tended to be off balance as he moved the prop to get it ready for the final swing.

I learned just how hazardous this situation was forty-plus years ago when I offered to help a guy in a Bonanza one cold winter morning when the airplane had a dead battery. The engine/throttle was set up for starting and after the "switch off, throttle cracked," etc., I was moving the propeller (gently) past the "bad" position after confirming with the pilot (again) "switch off."

It seemed that I had moved the propeller no more than half an inch at the midpoint of the blade when the engine started. (It sounded like about 2,000 rpm.) The propeller sharply rapped my knuckles on one hand, and I braced myself on the spinner with the other hand to keep from falling into the prop. Fortunately, the engine quit as my hand started slipping off the spinner. (The pilot thought that I had said "switch on," which is never used, for the reason cited earlier.)

I think that a couple of dislocations were the result, but thinking about falling into the prop caused a real post-action trauma.

I was stupid to crank a "large" airplane occupied by a guy I didn't know. By that time I had probably cranked airplanes several thousand times, but they were lower horsepower (115 or less) except for a few radials such as the Beech D-18, de Havilland Beaver, and North American T-6.

Those low-compression radials were pretty easy to hand-crank if properly set up, because they started slowly and gradually sped up. You generally had time to walk across the ramp, sit down, and read War and Peace as the engine gained speed.

When I was corporate flying, a bad starter on a D-18 in Tulsa made hand-propping experience useful when it was necessary to get both engines started to get to another airport for maintenance.

I was giving aerobatic instruction in a T-6 out of Sewanee, Tennessee. On a climbout, the smell of hot metal and sight of some light smoke made it a good idea to land pretty soon at nearby Winchester Municipal Airport. Mechanics there confirmed the problem and secured the starter. The trainee, who was the owner of the T-6, wondered how to get the 120 miles back to his home base. I hand cranked it, and it started with a chuugg…chug…chug…chug…chug, etc. (I get paid for articles by the word but decided to eliminate the extra 25 chugs I started with here.)

In the earlier days of my hand-propping, the Meyers OTW with its big five-cylinder Kinner engine had vibration problems that resulted in the magneto ground wires jarring loose on occasion, making the magneto or magnetos "hot." (The ignition for that engine was on, even if the switch said Off.) The engine would start while it was still being pulled through in preparation for that start. The irate propper would stalk around to discuss the situation with the pilot, who would, in embarrassment, point to the Off mag switch. This happened to me both as a propper and as a pilot. After a couple of incidents, ground wires were subject to much scrutiny during the preflight checks. I like the term ground wires better than P-leads (primary leads), as it is more descriptive of what's happening.

The Ercoupe had an electrical system, but people in those days sometimes left the master switch on, or maybe the battery got old and gave up. This meant that a brave person would hand-prop the airplane. Now the Ercoupe, being a tricycle gear airplane, and a low one at that, required that the propper get on his knees for the most comfortable cranking position. This made it awkward to get out of the way if the pilot wasn't holding brakes and/or had the throttle set up too far. One method was to have a helper hold the tail down while propping was being done. (The helper could also help to hold the airplane back should the pilot be recalcitrant in brake and throttle handling.)

When I was a lineboy, an Ercoupe owner at the local airport had the bad habit of cranking the airplane by himself when the battery was dead. (He didn't need any help.) I was at college on the fateful day when he cranked it and the throttle crept open, but eyewitnesses reported that after the exciting start, he managed to grab a wing so that the airplane completed one circle before heading for the hummock where the tetrahedron was located. Fortunately, the airplane was headed away from the hangar.

The Ercoupe was not high enough to clear it and proved shortly that a hummock was tougher than an airplane. If there had been more nose-up trim, it might have made it to Nashville or beyond. The story is that the owner had tracks on the front of his seersucker mackinaw.

There are horror stories of the pilot's taking a passenger for that first ride, hand-propping the airplane, and its becoming airborne with the nonpilot on board.

The FAA has in its files a movie of a guy in a Cessna 120 (or it could have been a 140 with a dead battery) just after he propped the airplane with his girlfriend aboard for her first flight. The movie caught him as he was hanging onto the strut, trying to "stop" the airplane but succeeding only in making the airplane go around in circles because the throttle had crept and had taken command after the start. This seemed to go on for 20 minutes but was much less than that. The airplane finally slung him off onto the concrete apron and crashed into another airplane, coming to a stop. The commentator said that the girlfriend was hospitalized for shock. He didn't indicate whether she came back later to complete the ride.

Another prop hazard is the airplane in the hangar with an unknown "hot prop." Attendants may inadvertently move the prop and visitors cannot resist twisting it. Granted, a cold engine probably would not start, but every time before I shut down after a flight in the Cessna Aerobat, I pull the throttle back to idle, cut the ignition off temporarily to see if the engine starts to quit, and then I turn it back on, run the engine up to several hundred rpm (look behind you), and then secure the engine normally with the mixture control. Some bigger engines may not enjoy this treatment, and I make sure that my engine is at idle to avoid a backfire.

In one case I gave a flight review to a local pilot in his airplane, and after the flight I suggested that the preshutdown ignition check be done. With the ignition switch Off, the engine purred like a kitten. It apparently had been in the hangar for several months in this condition. It was immediately fixed that day.

One of the most stupid moves I have seen occurred when I was presented a local magazine with a cover showing a 3-year-old girl pulling on the prop blade of my airplane. The caption was, "Sometimes it's hard to get started in our business." I didn't know that the picture had been taken, and my only comment was "I guess you are lucky that she's pulling on that particular prop."

With several thousand hand-prop experiences under my belt, I'll crank your Champ, Cub, or other less-than-100 hp airplane if you need it, but I've decided that the big horizontally opposed engines are too dangerous for me, so if your battery is dead, get a booster or buy a new battery. Don't call me.