Think back to your own student days, and you’ll probably remember feeling that takeoffs—at least normal takeoffs—were the easiest part of each lesson (short- and soft-field work, maybe not so much). Once you got onto the runway and pushed the throttle forward, it was just a matter of nudging the rudder enough to keep from running off the sides until the wings caught enough air to start lifting.
Less-than-perfect takeoff technique is the second leading cause of accidents during primary instruction. To be sure, that’s a distant second after pranged landings; still, 164 airplanes got cracked up that way during the past 10 years. That’s about one out of every eight accidents in all phases of primary training.
Worse yet, in 63—more than a third—the instructor was on board.
So what went wrong? Not what you might expect. Some of the usual suspects can be ruled out almost entirely: Only three accidents were blamed on density altitude, four on contaminated runways, and five on delayed decisions to abort when aircraft performance seemed questionable. (These, by the way, were equally divided between solo and dual flights.)
A slightly larger number (13) were attributed to errors configuring the airplane, chiefly flap settings and carb heat. Just more than half of those were on dual lessons, too—though surprisingly enough, only four were specifically reported to have happened during touch and goes. The big problems were the same two things that initially seemed so simple: keeping it on the runway, then lifting off.
Two-thirds of those 164 accidents were losses of control while the airplane was still on the runway, or should have been; they included three-quarters of all takeoff accidents on student solos and almost half of those during dual instruction. Another 30—almost 20 percent of the total—were departure stalls, and two-thirds of those were on dual flights. That might not be so surprising—most students don’t try many of those short-and-softs on their own.
The conscientious CFI might see a familiar pattern here: Nothing in aviation can safely be taken for granted. That might be the most durable—and important—lesson you’ll ever teach your students.
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