Accident Report: Avoid ‘Scenario C’
Teachable moments outside the lesson plan
All pilots looking back on their primary training can recall instances when a maneuver, or a landing, or a navigational chore didn’t work out as expected. Fortunately there was a certificated flight instructor sitting alongside whose mandate was to extract the educational essence from the student’s flying while keeping occupants and aircraft intact to fly another day.
CFIs approach this responsibility based on their instructing experience, their time in the aircraft type, and their personalities and those of their students. The challenge is to strike that delicate balance between creating “Scenario A” of being overly interventional—which smothers learning and disillusions the student—and “Scenario B,” which is to let things get too far without restoring order. (Come to think of it, that scenario smothers learning and disillusions the student, too.)
To be fair, the CFI must make the individual decisions that shape the learning experience on a split-second timetable, as when a student pilot begins losing the battle with a crosswind, or flares too high above the runway, or has overshot a reasonable touchdown point but is showing no sign of going around—just to name a few common training scenarios.
Moment to moment, a CFI considers whether to make the save or let the event unfold another second or so to give the student pilot every chance to fly out of trouble.oment to moment a CFI considers whether to make the save or let the event unfold another second or so to give the student pilot every chance to fly out of trouble. The factors that establish the instructor’s comfort level determine the outcome—and to share a trade secret (just between you and me), many training missteps that seemed to arise all of a sudden were things the instructor saw coming long before they became evident to the student pilot.
What a CFI must not do is allow Scenario C: a mishap in which a student pilot’s error is initiated by an instructor’s bad call, and/or compounded by instructor action or inaction afterward. (For accounts about this kind of situation, just search the NTSB aviation accident database for reports using the search term “inadequate supervision.”)
Like many other accident types, Scenario C occurrences contain familiar elements: a bad initial judgment aggravated by ragged flying, compounded by the absence of margin to make a save.
On September 2, 2019, a 628-hour flight instructor and a student pilot with 114 hours were working on takeoffs and landings in a two-place 1978 Piper PA–38 Tomahawk on the paved 4,000-foot-long runway at Taylor Municipal Airport in Texas. The trouble began when the flight instructor introduced a novel method of commencing a soft-field takeoff into the session. Recall that in a soft-field takeoff the goal is to get the airplane airborne at minimum airspeed, remain in ground effect, and accelerate to a safe climb speed for the initial climb. The maneuver is begun with full back elevator, which is adjusted as control effectiveness builds. A common error until one has a feel for it is to maintain an excessively nose-high attitude during the takeoff run; one risk is the aircraft “mushing” into the air, barely flying, and settling back to the ground. Not a critical concern when there’s plenty of runway available to establish controllability or abort. In this case, however, half the runway had already been used by a touch-and-go landing when the soft-field takeoff was initiated.
“During the landing rollout and with about 2,000 feet of runway remaining, the instructor directed the student to transition to a soft-field takeoff. The student conducted the takeoff and attempted to climb with a high pitch attitude, but the airplane settled back to the ground off the end of the runway. The airplane subsequently impacted a ditch, which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage,” said the NTSB’s report of the accident, assigning the probable cause as the flight instructor’s inadequate supervision of the student’s soft-field takeoff, resulting in the common error of the excessive pitch attitude and the familiar consequence of the settling effect. Neither occupant was injured.
Lesson learned: The CFI acknowledged that “he should not have directed the student to attempt a soft-field takeoff given the runway distance remaining.”
An added insight might be that rolling out after landing does not offer an ideal opportunity to brief the next maneuver and review any operating constraints it may face.
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