Accident Analysis: Pursuing precision

By the same token, if you’re instrument rated or working on it and your CFII is good, he or she has progressed from warning you of impending heading, altitude, or bank excursions when they neared checkride limits to reminders to mind your heading, altitude, or bank any time you failed to detect and correct a drift within the first few seconds. The principle’s the same. If your clearance was to maintain 4,000 feet on a heading of 285 degrees, what do you gain from heading 277 at 4,120?

One of the selling points of the increasing levels of automation in GA cockpits is that the combination of WAAS-enabled GPS and a three-axis autopilot really will hold 285 degrees at 4,000 feet. The implication is that it’s a feat too difficult—or merely too much trouble—for flesh-and-blood aviators. But the automation doesn’t know what’s going on outside the cockpit or whether the instructions it’s been given actually make any sense. Until air traffic control can program the autopilot directly—at which point there’ll be no reason for you to be in the cockpit at all—an attentive human intelligence will still have to ride herd on the circuitry. And since electronics can and do fail, that intelligence will need to be able to read the instruments and guide the ship where it needs to go.

The more comfortable you are doing so and the more precisely you can do it, the less of an emergency that equipment outage will be. Plenty of grizzled veterans can demonstrate that hand-flying to airline transport pilot standards by raw data indications is well within human abilities. And of course, if you fly an older aircraft with little or no automation, the precision of your control is the very definition of proficiency.

The same logic applies to VFR. Instructors like to move students along and may encourage them to schedule their checkrides once they meet test standards most of the time. As the customer, if your wallet can handle it, it’s reasonable to insist on holding off until you’re almost always at least 25 percent better than the standards, and your worst practice runs would still pass. If you can fly steep turns or do practice autorotations within plus or minus 100 feet of target, you can do them within 80 feet—so why not shoot for 50? In an emergency, exact control of the relationship between airspeed, altitude, and glidepath can be the difference between ending up in the trees and making the open field just beyond. We’ll hope you never need to do so—but if you do, that’s too late to start practicing.