Why emergency descents should still be practiced
Decades ago I crisscrossed my Nebraska homeland flying photo missions, doing airborne observation for the state's wildlife authorities, serving as my sheriff's air wing, working as a charter pilot, and more. And flight instructing, of course! The airplanes I flew included singles and twins from Grumman, Piper, Beechcraft, and the ubiquitous Cessna stable. Occasionally pilot service rendered flights in Maule, Citabria, Taylorcraft, and other cloth-clad classics. All of these types and each mission chained me to mundane altitudes. Still, regardless of the flight's purpose I was as thankful then as now for each moment aloft - with rare exceptions.
In those pre-PTS days of Flight Test Guides, flight instructors were almost free to center their teachings on what they considered important - and skim over those things that they considered less so. Formal ground training followed a similar format, so it became easy to anticipate certain oral questions: "When would you perform an emergency descent?" for example. The standard response, "If I had an engine fire in flight," usually satisfied the examiner, and that kept instructors and applicants alike from digging any deeper into such subjects. We aspiring pilots have many other things to occupy our studies. After we pass our checkrides and accrue flight time (whether or not we garner experience) and land our entry-level flying jobs, then we truly begin to learn. So it was with me.
Flying air-to-ground photo missions was one of my first assignments. Altitudes had to be strictly maintained, high enough to permit one 35mm frame to capture one square mile, and no higher. The aircraft had to be positioned exactly in the center of each square mile, and no clouds could interfere. To the ground-bound, the Great Plains' springtime sky is a wonderland of cloudbirth. Too often my observer and photographer teams would terminate the mission in disgust as friendly baby clouds appeared below us, often reaching adolescence before we returned to base. Sometimes my aircrews saw firsthand exactly what John Gillespie Magee Jr. meant by the term footless halls of air in his immortal poem "High Flight." More than once I struggled to maintain legal cloud clearance as I gently descended through the cotton canyons of clouds. Air-filing an instrument flight plan was not always an option, and I remained keenly aware that our remoteness made radar service questionable. At any time these cloud cliffs could disgorge an airplane obeying its instrument clearance, directly in our path. When the situation was right, I would spiral down to reduce our risk. Still, these otherwise benign clouds held a captivating beauty - although they occasionally would attain a portentous nimbus adulthood even before our wheels touched the runway.
I was the pilot among a crew of three in an aging early Skyhawk, one with a smooth engine and flaps that could be extended to 40 degrees - an endearing Dutch uncle of an airplane, in which this day we had cruised back and forth for more than three hours. Maintaining our altitude at about 10,000 feet, I worried quietly for the photographer, whose prone working position nixed any chance for him to stretch or encourage blood circulation. Mile after mile, image after image he toiled uncomplaining as he photographed Nebraska's desolation through a camera-friendly hole in the belly. Because of his awkward position and distance from the center of gravity, he was the most affected of all of us by any change in pitch attitude. This became one more reason for me to note the nature of any clouds that might develop below us. This day, the forming clouds at first had little vertical development; they merely cast image-destroying shadows on the farmland far below.
The observer controlled the mission proper, and he directed me to continue as planned: "Hopefully, the clouds won't get much thicker than little summer puffs," he said. I was still new enough to flying that the nature of airmass movements had not quite registered in my mind. We continued. The photographer's job was in the viewfinder. Nobody could blame him for not looking behind us as we flew away from the colder air overrunning the moist but stable warm air that we had taken for granted.
The observer's job was to monitor the sector being photographed, recording the particulars of each image, of each square mile, and ensure that all prerequisites were met. My job was to keep the airplane in exactly the position required for each photograph, scan for traffic, and monitor the aircraft and its environment. For about 15 minutes, I did not look at the airspace we had just vacated until I turned around to line up for the next row of photos. Then, I saw the challenge. There existed an unexpected, thickening deck of clouds below us, where minutes ago runty hints of pygmy puffs dotted a chamber-of-commerce sky that would have soon allowed us a playful descent to our distant base.
Now a white roiling cold steam had swallowed the world, with only occasional breaks shredding its gauziness to confirm that the Earth truly remained below us. Our photographer's face quickly joined two incredulous mugs astounded by the speed with which their world had changed. One of those faces furrowed slightly more in worry, as the barrier between airplane and airport had just rendered the fuel issue one of immense importance. The slight glimpses of prairie so far had been rendered in tiny gaps scarcely the size of our airplane. But we happened upon one that was somewhat larger, though still marginal - a hole through which I might, mouselike, scamper. It did not simply chimney upward; rather, it sloped at an angle, like a tubular slide-type fire escape, but much steeper. I took the opportunity. Quickly I told my crew what I was about to do. The photographer had fastened but not yet tightened his seatbelt when the airplane pitched nose-down as the flaps simultaneously snapped to their most effective deployment. At least the photographer's head was not over the camera!
Clouds whooshed by. The observer's eyes, seemingly as wide as the tunnel through which we plummeted, spoke for the scream he could not utter. The cloud-dimmed light made the chalky pallor of his face unworldly. The photographer punctuated his thoughts with curses directed to the Wright brothers, toward the hiring agency, and toward the pilot until the airplane dropped from the belly of a graying overcast into a 2,000-foot gap of clear air separating the ground from the clouds. Color returned to the observer's face and departed the photographer's language. We were safe.
One might argue that a steep spiral can replace the emergency descent in conditions similar to those that I encountered, but only if one ignores that the gap in the thickening clouds was an angle, not a vertical shaft. The steep spiral's obvious benefit is visual clearing beneath the descending airplane. The not-so-obvious disadvantage is that if pilots do not maintain proficiency in steep spirals, the stress of an actual situation requiring the maneuver can force the unpracticed pilot into corkscrewing ever tighter to the point of exceeding an airplane's structural limitations.
On your checkride you need not concern yourself with the niceties of the emergency descent. It is not in the PTS, and your pilot examiner should not ask about it. Life, though, has not read the PTS. It may someday present to you a situation for which you have neither trained nor tested. You and your flight instructor should consider practicing the emergency descent at least once, because life is far broader than the most exhaustive practical test.
Dave Wilkerson is a designated pilot examiner, a writer/photographer, and an historian. He has been a certificated flight instructor for 22 years with approximately 2,000 hours of dual given, and is a single- and multi-engine commercial-rated pilot.
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