Accident Analysis

Preparation Is The Key To Avoidance

On a recent visit to the airport, I listened as one of the local student pilots reported on the progress she was making toward her private pilot certificate. She was almost ready for the checkride, but it had recently become necessary for her to change flight instructors. Now she commented on the differences between Instructor A, with whom she had flown many hours, and Instructor B. It seems that Instructor B did things a bit differently than CFI A had. One of the things she had experienced for the first time with the new fellow was learning how to make no-flap landings in her Cessna trainer. Learning this new skill had added freshness to the training program and stimulated her desire to finish up and take a checkride.

I was happy for her. But I found the tale disconcerting. No-flap landings are routine for a pilot who has practiced them and knows what differences in technique will be required from landings with flaps deployed. But to a student pilot who has never performed one before, the first few no-flap landings are often sloppy affairs resulting in go-arounds - or at the least touchdowns well beyond the usual point on the runway, at speeds well above those required. The reason for the unfamiliarity is that the pitch attitude of an airplane landing without flaps will be higher - and the view out the windscreen considerably unfamiliar - compared to a landing with flaps deployed. That's because it is the power/pitch combination alone, without the drag induced by flap deployment, that must be used to slow down the airplane and descend for landing.

Students, as well as veteran pilots who have fallen into the rut of always using the same landing technique (typically partial flaps), are often reluctant to adopt the comparatively nose-high attitude required to slow down a flap-equipped airplane without using flaps. So they fly the approach much too fast, land long, and use up too much runway. And here was a student pilot who had soloed many hours, flown alone on cross-country flights, presumably practiced slow flight in various configurations, and satisfied all the flight-hour requirements for taking a checkride. Hadn't those long hours of takeoff-and-landing practice before solo provided an opportunity to sample a wide variety of landing techniques? Mishaps do sometimes occur in training, accounting for 13.4 percent of general aviation accidents in 1998 and 14.1 percent in 1997, according to the AOPA Air Safety Foundation's Nall Report on general aviation accident trends. Flight instructors need to compensate for the inexperience of students by arming them with the judgment and the flying skills to safely confront the unforeseen with confidence.

Porpoising is a good example. To someone who has experienced this painful series of bounces brought on by landing in an excessively nose-down attitude and then repeating the mistake during subsequent attempts to put the airplane onto the ground, the memory is intimately associated with lots of learning. There is also some sheepishness brought on by learning how simple the cure for a porpoise is - simply raise the nose to the proper, mains-first landing attitude, which will slow the airplane and halt the oscillations. Then either touch down correctly, or abort the attempt and go around. It is the same technique that is used to correct any bounced landing.

For one new pilot training in Hawaii on October 7, 2000, in a Cessna 172H, the introduction to the porpoise was rude indeed. The flight instructor could only look on as the student "touched down hard during the third landing on her first solo flight. Thereafter, the airplane porpoised several times," leading to "substantial damage" to the airplane, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident report. The student pilot was uninjured. Obviously a programmed response to the porpoise was lacking.

A week later, the same scenario of a student pilot in a Cessna 172 failing to recover from a hard landing was repeated in Poughkeepsie, New York. "After flying in the local area, the student pilot maneuvered the airplane to land on Runway 24. During the landing, the airplane touched down hard and then bounced about three (times). Each time the nosewheel struck the ground first, and the airplane contacted the runway progressively harder. On the last touchdown, the left main wheel broke, the propeller struck the ground, and the firewall was damaged," said the NTSB report.

If the above reports emphasize that flight instructors must be extremely certain that their students are capable of meeting adversity with the correct response in the cockpit, the following near-incident reported by a flight instructor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) shows how this concern must be balanced against the immediate demands of the flight at hand. This time the setting was a lesson on flying ground-reference maneuvers. Wisely, the CFI had emphasized to the student pilot aboard that when practicing ground-reference maneuvers, which are flown mainly at lower altitudes, it is vitally important to have an emergency landing spot picked out nearby, and head for it immediately if engine trouble should arise.

There is one sure way for an instructor to determine if the student has incorporated this notion into his thinking, and the CFI decided to find out, as all instructors should on occasion. While the 100-hour student pilot (who was seeking additional instruction to build up confidence for the private-pilot checkride) and the CFI were practicing S-turns across a road at 800 feet above ground level, the instructor simulated engine failure by idling the throttle. Based on several previous observations of the student, the CFI expected a good response. But instead, "as the aircraft descended, the student overemphasized his use of (the) emergency checklist at the expense of visual reference to the outside and careful planning of the descent."

By the time the instructor intervened, the flight had flown very low over a home, violating regulatory standards concerning flight near persons, vehicles, or structures. As so often happens in accident or incident causation, coping with one distraction - the simulated engine failure - had brought on another. The CFI commented in the ASRS report, "Had I not assumed that the 100-hour student, who in many respects showed PIC capability on the only two to three flights I had made with him, was going to fly the safe route toward the landing site, I may not have let him go so far without intervening. I, too, became overly focused on the cockpit interior as I watched him fumble with his decision making. I didn't think clearly about our proximity to the house until we were passing beyond it, having crossed it less than 500 feet away." The result was that "a woman, we were told by ATC, had called the tower to report hearing/seeing an airplane cross trees on her property at a low altitude with an apparent engine failure." This of course prompted the tower controller to query the CFI about the flight, which was being conducted in Class D airspace.

The CFI in this case reported that it was not clear whether the woman who called to report a low-flying airplane was filing a complaint or was simply concerned about seeing an airplane, seemingly in distress, passing low overhead. On various occasions I have heard such stories from groundlings and launched into an explanation of emergency training techniques. It invariably alters their views about the small airplanes they often see overhead, especially if the lay person involved happens to live in a designated practice area. This is not excuse for the low flyover. But I would predict that there is a wiser flight instructor, and a more capable student or private pilot, out there as a result of that flight.

The opposite is tragic indeed. On October 26, 2000, a mayday radio call was heard in Rockport, Texas. The student pilot of a Cessna 150 reported that the engine had quit. The wreckage of the fatal crash was found in two feet of water, nine miles from the point of departure. The NTSB ruled that the engine had quit for undetermined reasons, but added that the pilot's "failure to maintain control" during the forced landing was also a factor.

Not introducing enough reality into training must be balanced against the risk of making it too real, whether it is simulated engine failures, crosswind landings, stall recoveries, or other pilot skills that are being taught and learned. Training should seek to immunize pilots in much the way that a small amount of a disease agent may be used to immunize a patient. How well we carry off the task is the mark of the professional, on both the student and the instructor sides of the flight-training relationship.