At minimum, airline pilots have to attend recurrent simulator training annually to drill emergency procedures back into our heads. Most of us fly 700 to 900 hours a year, and it’s not very often that something goes wrong. Since catastrophic problems rarely arise in our day-to-day flying, our ability to perform emergency procedures tends to deteriorate.
At my airline we do a nine-month recurrent rotation, and it helps to keep us sharp. Engine failures and lots of single-engine work are always on the agenda, including precision and nonprecision approaches as well as go-arounds. The single-engine go-around in a multiengine airplane is a challenging maneuver because you go from a stable, high-drag (landing gear and flaps down) condition at reduced power to a max-power climb while reducing drag and dealing with an enormous amount of adverse yaw (in jets with wing-mounted engines) and an untrimmed configuration.
Naturally, this maneuver is a favorite to demonstrate a worst-case scenario. In reality, if you are in an engine-out condition and you have to go around, you’re having a really bad day! Because of its complexity, the single-engine missed approach exposes weak spots in pilot technique and procedure.
A few years back, I had a few training events that clearly demonstrated the risk of learned behaviors and the importance of type-specific training. I had recently completed my airline recurrent training cycle in the Boeing 737 I flew at the time. Having been in the airplane for several years and thousands of hours, recurrent training was largely a nonevent. The airplane was like an old shoe to me, and I felt very comfortable flying the simulator around with an engine caged. When flying on one engine, the pilot of a 737 simply steps on the appropriate rudder enough to center the yoke, and that’s just where it likes to be for max performance and lack of sideslip.
But soon after I became current for the 737, it came time to do my annual insurance checkride in my family’s twin-engine Beechcraft Baron—an airplane I’ve flown for decades but now fly fewer than 50 hours a year. I was under the hood in the Baron when I executed a missed approach. My instructor held the left engine’s throttle back to simulate a left engine failure. I dutifully added full power to the right engine and maintained wings level while getting the gear and flaps up. By the time I was done cleaning up, our heading had already sailed about 20 degrees off course to the left and our climb rate was nil.
“You got all the rudder in?” my instructor asked. I’m sure the wandering heading out the windshield alarmed him. I had the rudder floored. We still weren’t climbing and our speed was just below the blue line (VYSE). While I did the identify-verify-feather routine to get the beast to climb, my instructor said, “You’re forgetting one crucial thing.” I checked that the gear and flaps were up and otherwise came up empty. “Get that bank into the good engine!” he implored.
Ugh, it all came to me. I had a negative transfer of habits from my airline flying. I was doing the 737 engine-out technique in the Baron, and that simply won’t work. I popped 5 degrees of bank into the good engine and the airplane quickly responded with a climb.
Naturally, I was pretty embarrassed, given a logbook with 13,000 hours and four type ratings. My performance on that go-around would’ve led to a failure of a multiengine checkride, something I had passed with high marks 22 years ago. It was a humiliating lesson that I needed to learn. On my next try, I had it figured out with a textbook engine-out missed approach, allowing me to salvage some of my ego and satisfy my instructor to sign me off.
Flight Training’s mantra is: A good pilot is always learning. For me that statement packs a punch. No matter how many hours you have and how much you’ve seen and done, there’s always a lesson to be learned. In aviation, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, you get slapped back to reality. In my case, it was an eye-opening look at how a negative transfer of habits can get you in trouble.
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