More than engine emergencies
Still, the Private Pilot Practical Test Standards (PTS) take the issue of systems failures so much further than the sudden chuffing stillness and lazing tachometer that become so familiar to you. And life aloft can hold much more than the PTS. But it often seems that we in the training business have you focus on simulated engine failures nearly to the exclusion of all other potential system riddles. Let us step beyond the engine.
In Area of Operation X, task B, the PTS (available online) exhorts flight instructors to teach-and students to study-beyond uncontained engine failures, by specifying that pilot examiners test in at least three simulated systems emergencies from a list of 14. One of the situations is somewhat unlikely for a competent private pilot to encounter while maintaining visual flight rules (VFR) flight; but nothing is entirely impossible. The remaining listed items are possible under VFR and instrument flight rules (IFR) as well. Your pilot examiner will have experienced many of these and should ask you some pointed scenario questions.
One of this writer's personal favorites is item (i), "landing gear or flap malfunction." You, preparing for your private pilot checkride in a simple airplane, may snicker that your airplane's landing gear is down and bolted, so what can possibly go wrong? The flaps are as reliable as sunrise; besides, you check them each preflight and during the before-takeoff check. So did the pilot in this first case.
One particularly beautiful autumn day, following an absolutely by-the-book pretakeoff check, a student and I coerced our little two-seater off the concrete and toward the southeast practice area. At an appropriate point in his maneuvers, I did what flight instructors have done with every student from the beginning of time-I massaged the throttle to idle and announced, "Simulated engine failure."
My applicant did what flight students have done from shortly after the beginning of time: He performed an engine failure/emergency landing routine every bit as by-the-book as his pretakeoff check had been. Airspeed. Landing field. Flow pattern. Airspeed. Checklist. Airspeed. Mayday. Field and airspeed and partial flaps and approach angle and full flaps and airspeed and slip and airspeed and.... I declared his success, then "Go around, go around, go around." He performed each required element of the go-around by the book-almost.
Our tiny two-seater growled at the sky, but it refused to climb. It was very unsettling for my student, as his airplane continued to sag very slowly earthward. Through all that, the engine at first tempered our descent rate appreciably. The earthward jaunt stopped, but there simply was no climb. My applicant scrutinized every item on the instrument panel, searching for the cause of his growing discomfort, including touching the flap handle and reciting "flaps up." He did not look outside the cockpit to verify compliance with his command until I asked him to.
The flaps were fully lowered. He checked the circuit breaker; he gave the flap handle a handshake like that of an anxious politician-but nothing would convince the flaps to retract. His aircraft control was acceptable, so next came the aeronautical decision-making that sometimes becomes the stuff of legend or laughs. I asked him, "What shall we do now?"
Eyes wide in incredulity, he exclaimed, "You're the senior airman here." It is at such a point as this that pilot examiners usually say, "I'm just a passenger. You are pilot in command." I spoke similarly. He had, meanwhile, found the airspeed that allowed our flap-draggy lightplane to climb slightly, slowly, granting him time to evaluate our distance from home base and other potential havens. The nearest airport had no services, tall trees on each end, and a very narrow runway on which he had never landed. Home was only slightly farther away and had full facilities including a tower. He opted for home.
Contacting the tower, my applicant would have been wise to declare "pan-pan" as outlined in Paragraph 6.3.1(c) of the Aeronautical Information Manual (AIM), but he rendered the air traffic controller no hint of our problem until they asked us to increase speed, and my student had to reply "Unable." The landing presented my pilot with enough of a challenge that I had to take the flight controls and complete it. As absorbing as I found the entire event, it was during the debriefing that things became truly interesting.
Postflight, this pilot's primary concern centered not on his systems knowledge, nor the safety considerations when the aircraft's flaps have stuck in the deployed position, but whether or not he should have to pay for the aircraft time! Absolutely lost on him was the lesson he had just had the opportunity to learn, and the myriad ways that he could insert that impromptu lesson into his bag of skills and knowledge by targeting his study to the broad ramifications of systems failures.
Let us now take advantage of his long-ago surprise. The Airplane Flying Handbook, FAA-H-8083-3, offers slightly more than two-and-one-half pages of information touching eight potential situations, one of which is not in itself a system failure. Regarding flap malfunctions, the Handbook discusses split-flap conditions, but nothing more. This can give flight students a false impression that they should study only that one contingency. Pilot examiners disagree with that assumption. Ask your local pilot examiners if they have ever encountered flap discrepancies. Most will not only say yes, but may elaborate to the point that you must politely excuse yourself before your supper grows cold! (See "Losing Control: Compensating for failed flight controls," June 2002 AOPA Flight Training.)
One of the strangest situations that I have experienced involved a commercial pilot applicant in a complex airplane who seemed determined to make a farce of his attempts at smoothness. Straight-and-level flight eluded him because the flaps, without any command from the flap lever, crept from being nestled in the wing at 0 degrees of deployment to about 5 degrees, then back to 0 degrees, then perhaps 7 degrees, then 0, then rapidly to about 3 degrees, and then back home into the wing. All this time, the flap lever remained untouched at the full-up position.
The pilot focused his attention first on the horizon and altimeter, then airspeed and power, agog at this familiar old mare of an airplane that suddenly hinted at a streak of bronco. Ultimately, his attention collapsed fully into the cockpit (remember, even with a systems failure, collision avoidance is a primary duty), and he never noticed that the flaps were waving "bye bye" to his success on this particular flight.
It was not that he did not consider their recalcitrance as at least one possibility. He took careful note of the flap lever's position as his analysis of the airplane's behavior expanded beyond yoke and throttle. Regarding the flaps, all of this pilot's dissection of potential causes targeted his experience with the flap system and omitted the basics of what operates or powers them. Some airplanes have manual flaps. With such a system, behavior of this sort without a living hand to move the flap lever would be so remote a possibility as to be dismissed. In fact, this pilot asked me if I were surreptitiously causing the aircraft to behave as it was. (I was not.) Some flap systems are pneumatically operated. If their pneumatic charging requires a crewmember to pump a handle to inflate the system, even slight recurrent flap extensions and retractions would be less likely than a slow retraction stemming from a pinhole leak in the system.
An airplane equipped with hydraulic flaps would be largely subject to behavior similar to those with pneumatic flaps. Those systems using electric motors can have malfunctions that either extend or retract the flaps without warning, and with certain microswitch defects, can do both. Or they can leave the flaps in an unwanted position, as occurred in our first case study.
The pilot must analyze pertinent facts-not to repair the hardware, but to employ aeronautical decision making that keeps the aircraft's occupants safe. This includes collision avoidance. This includes analyzing the terrain over which one flies a stricken airplane. This includes determining whether one is in a situation of urgency (pan-pan) or distress (mayday), and acting appropriately. Flaps, like fire, are wonderful servants but distressing masters. Therefore, pilot examiners expect more than rote knowledge.
Dave Wilkerson is a designated pilot examiner, a writer/photographer, and a historian. He has been a certificated flight instructor for 22 years with approximately 2,000 hours of dual given, and is a single- and multiengine commercial pilot.
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