What’s a better idea: Teaching a student pilot how to take off or land an aircraft while rattling off a list of the typical mistakes pilots make—or demonstrating the correct technique and letting trainees find their way to proficiency without spotlighting the many ways it can be done wrong?
Many instructors would argue that if a pilot demonstrates skill at timing the roundout and landing flare and touching down consistently at the proper airspeed, there is no good reason to enter into protracted discussion of balloons, bounces, and porpoises—as long as the risks and remedies are understood.
There can be a fine line between making a necessary mention of the common errors pilots make, and distracting a learning pilot by introducing needless worry into the practice of training maneuvers.
The goal of preempting accident and injury is one justification for making presentations to ground school classes, or individual students, about the common causes of aircraft accidents that persist year after year.
Here’s a short list, and avoidability is what they have most in common. They include running out of fuel; failing to handle the proverbial “gust of wind” on takeoff or landing; taking off with a control wheel lock (often homemade) still in place; losing directional control in a crosswind; and that old favorite, failure of the airspeed indicator during the takeoff run.
It’s an irony that as onboard technology evolves, pilots are finding new ways to make the same old errors. Failure to perform a thorough preflight inspection or follow a pretakeoff checklist has been the probable cause of numerous accidents, such as those that occurred when pilots unknowingly took off with a control-wheel lock still in place. Standard control-wheel locks often are designed to be difficult to miss when installed properly; many pilots are familiar with a popular design that prevents the pilot from putting a key into the ignition without first removing the control lock.
When a substitute form of control lock is used—a nail is a particularly hazardous choice for an alternative—the design safety factor vanishes. But even then, thorough preflight checks should reveal the locked condition of the control wheel, and head off mishap.
On August 2, 2014, a pilot selected a “straight pin” as a substitute control lock when coming across it in the cabin during a search for the regular control lock, forging the first link in an accident chain. One flight leg later, after landing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the pilot prepared for a return flight—and the accident chain acquired a second link.
“He taxied to the run-up area of Runway 34 where he performed the before-takeoff checklist, but did not check that the flight controls were free and clear for fear of having his tablet knocked off the yoke mount,” said a summary of the ensuing accident by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The pilot “applied power, noting the airspeed increased normally. After the airplane rotated it climbed to an altitude of about three feet and settled back down on the runway and bounced. Confused as to what was occurring, he added nose up trim to assist in the climb. At this point the airplane climbed to about 10 feet, then the nose pitched downward and the nosewheel struck the runway. After coming to a stop he switched the headlamp he was wearing from red to white and noticed the pin used to secure the flight controls was in the control lock hole. He removed the pin and retained possession of it.”
The NTSB assigned the probable cause of the accident as “the pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection, resulting in his failure to remove the pin he used to lock the flight controls in place of the approved control lock.”
How many links did this accident chain have? Using the substitute control lock was one; forgetting that it was being used was another; skipping the check of controls free and correct (to protect the tablet!) before takeoff was the last straw.
Even as the causes evolve, taking off with a control lock still in place remains a common error deserving of mention to any pilot who has begun to learn about how to make safe preflight preparations.
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