You guys are not inspiring me to learn to fly light planes. Or fly in them.
The night forced landing procedure:
- Establish best glide speed
- Descend to ~100 ft AGL
- Turn on the landing light
A. If you like what you see ahead, land.
B. If you don’t like what you see ahead, turn off the light.
Just fly one with a parachute built in. Honestly though, pilots don’t generally train to crash and like anything else you’ll default to what you know how to do in an emergency. If you don’t set up a stable airspeed then the likely outcome in a panic situation is to stall it by pulling up or banking. Which could easily have happened in the Lake Placid crash.
And just to make it clear, the act of setting up a stable airspeed involves trimming pitch. Once it’s trimmed you can take your hands off the yoke and focus on where to land.
An aircraft parachute will not save you from a low-altitude engine failure. As an example, the Cirrus SR20 is their lowest performance simplest design. Here is the Cirrus SR20 POH in pdf.
Ref Chapter 10 pdf page 338 once in an established engine out glide you should decide to continue to a forced landing or deploy the parachute at or above 2000’ AGL. Below 2000 feet it is not assured that you’ll achieve a fully safe parachute-borne touchdown. For our non-pilot audience, light plane airport traffic patterns are generally flown between 500 and 1000 feet above the ground.
To be sure, if the airplane is unflyable from midair, spin, pilot incapacitation or spatial disorientation, etc., firing the parachute regardless of altitude or attitude at least offers some hope better than riding it to uncontrolled impact. But it’s not a guaranteed save by any stretch. Having spent a few years riding an ejection seat I’ll just share a common wry comment about needing to use one:
I plan to commit suicide to avoid being killed.
IOW, sometimes it works great, sometimes it works marginally, sometimes you’re outside the safe or survivable parameters and it’ll injure, cripple, or kill you. But nobody lives through an uncontrolled impact with the ground.
And of course, if the place you touchdown is the side of a cliff, frigid water, etc., your problems don’t end just because you have a good 'chute and a survivable vertical descent rate. But as said above, even badly injured is far better than killed. At least if help is readily available.
Unrelated to the previous post, but kinda-related to the Lake Placid Cessna stall/spin accident I cited yesterday …
This morning my news feed included a (paywalled) lessons-learned analysis of a fatal bizjet accident. NTSB Final Report Docket WPR21FA286. The accident was a couple years ago but the final report came out just over a month ago.
In very brief summary it was two pilots flying together for the first time, with the FO the more experienced and evidently the more skilled. The PIC started out behind the airplane and it got worse as the flight progressed. They were dealing with a complex and changing arrival into a limited field in marginal weather. Eventually they (but mostly the PIC) got so far behind the airplane the situation was untenable and a go-around was necessary.
Instead there was some disagreement over who was flying and what to do, they stalled and crashed short of the runway. And this in a crew environment where there is a clear and generally disciplined PIC/SIC relationship understood and expected by both. Oops.
Along the way the bigger picture I see is the huge difference in standardization, knowledge, and operational repeatability between airlines, the bizjet quasi-airlines like NetJets, and the typical corporate flight department, or worse yet, charter operator. Which latter group was the case here. I would imagine @Llama_Llogophile could share some harrowing tales up this alley were he so inclined.
Cutting back to the Cessna mishap, I can readily see that same sort of battle for the plan of attack and for control in rapidly-deteriorating circumstances. Due to lack of recorders and lack of NTSB give-a-shit / resources we’ll never know. But damn near nobody with a yoke in front of them can keep their hands off it in extremis. And nothing good happens once two people are trying to fly the same airplane.
The key, as always in aviation, is to avoid getting quite that extremis. Both in terms of aircraft situation and even more so in terms of the pilot(s) mental situation(s).
FYI, not paywalled for me: the PDF downloaded and opened just fine. Thanks.
I’m sorry I was unclear. The NTSB report is not paywalled. It’s the government; they’re never paywalled.
The analysis article I read this morning about that accident that caused me to go look up this NTSB report is paywalled. Else I’d have linked to it too. It’s a good article; a lot more approachable than the full NTSB report, or even the opening narrative thereof.
Yeah, I didn’t think an NTSB report would be paywalled, but now I see the paywall was referring to a different source. It was early and I was probably still a bit fuzzy.
Well, there are charter operators and there are charter operators. I’ve worked for a NetJets adjacent outfit, and I’ve worked for one that would be considered not at that level. The differences can be subtle.
For example, when I moved from the not-so-great reputation charter company to the very well regarded one, my training was conducted at the very same simulator facility with the very same instructors (I was hired to fly the same type of aircraft). Which means the only differences were company specific procedures and policies. And those polices can be where the rubber hits the road.
Example: What are the company’s policies on flying into a “mountainous airport”, such as Aspen?
Can any line captain fly there? Do they need to have flown their before? Do they need to complete any in-house training? At one company there was a process for being able to fly into (what I consider dangerous) airports like Aspen or Telluride, and some fairly strict weather minimums. At another company there was no such process or policy.
Let me tell you, despite all the standardization in aviation, a little local knowledge goes a looooooong way when it comes to places like Aspen, or even Teterboro. So I was rather surprised to find that any company captain could be assigned an Aspen trip without ever having been there.
(Aside: Stupid f***ing place to put an airport. The damn place should be bulldozed)
Which leads to another truism - the charter world is going into more difficult and potentially dangerous airports than the airlines generally do. I’m amazed Aspen has airline service, but that aside, charter operators can go anywhere within the airplane’s capabilities, sometimes day or night.
One reputable company I worked at had a rule about night landings: You had to use an approach with vertical guidance regardless of weather. Another less reputable company had no such rule.
Another gotcha scenario I ran into… At a less reputable (but still mostly good, I thought) company we got a new DO (Director of Operations) who mandated a change to how we flew. Most charter outfits have the Pilot Flying occupy the left seat, regardless of whether they are captain or first officer. So if the FO is flying pilot, they are in the left seat and the captain is in the right, and vice versa.
Our new DO decided we would instead do things airline style. That is, the captain always occupies the left seat and the FO always occupies the right seat, irrespective of who is the flying pilot. This means when the right-seater is the flying pilot there is a control swap on takeoff and landing, usually at 80 knots. On takeoff the captain steers with the tiller until the 80 knot callout, at which point the right-seater takes control. On landing the captain takes over control at 80 knots during the rollout.
Now I’ve been an airline pilot, so I’m familiar with that sort of control swap. Each person needs to know their role and make the right callouts - it’s a bit of a ballet. But lots of my colleagues had never done it. I grew concerned when we instituted that change without any training. I was astonished we were even able to do that without some sort of oversight or new training.
In the end, on-demand flying is just inherently more hazardous than most airline operations. Bringing this back to the Truckee crash, notice that a circling approach was at the center of this tragedy. You’re more likely to do circling approaches in the charter world than the airline world, and MUCH more likely to do them at dangerous places like Truckee. Hell, one of the circling approaches at Teterboro has killed a number of people and it’s mainly configured the way it is due to airspace, not terrain.
Companies like NetJets can be a bit more picky about who they hire, which I think accounts for a lot of their safety record. And being as big as they are, they have no choice but to have airline-like policies in place. Smaller charter operators have neither of those advantages, which means it depends on the safety commitment of the people who run them. On that account, I’ve seen good and I’ve seen bad.
Thank you.
The bizjet safety/ops-oriented magazine I was reading makes this point frequently. Those aircraft’s mission takes them often to places with challenging airports, weak weather reporting, perhaps crap weather frequently, less snow-clearing and aircraft de-ice capability, short runways, weak lighting, etc., etc., etc. It all piles on. I started to say “it all adds up”, but truthfully the hazards are multiplicative, not additive.
With the punchline that it’s important to “grade on the curve” when discussing things like accident rates. The “degree of difficulty” is a lot higher a lot more often in bizjet world than in Boeing world.
I personally have flown 757s into Eagle/Vail and Montrose. Both of which are somewhat difficult by our standards, but are on the easy end of the bizjet mountain / ski resort destinations.
We take (I took) the 737 to some “interesting” destinations in the Andes and in Central American volcanic valley bowls. An upside to the 737 is its long takeoff and landing rolls mean we don’t get to the real short low-services airports. But it also means that even on otherwise longish runways, we’re in a more critical stop/go performance situation than the other airliners on the ramp.
As always, the few accidents represent the thin end of a much larger wedge of FUBARed flights that ended uneventfully except for some excess sweat & adrenaline.
Or flights that were completely unremarkable, but only because they were lucky, not because they did good or were prepared to do good had more adversity shown up.
And in small airplanes in an engine out situation if you trim for minimum sink airspeed (which is slower than best glide, and not usually in the manual except in gliders) then just let go of the controls you will usually survive the crash.
The problem comes that a good pilot can turn an engine out into no injuries or even no damage to the plane and every pilot thinks of themselves as a good one. If they then stall at low altitude (pulling up when the ground looks close) it is usually unsurvivable.
Have you flown into Telluride? I did quite a few times when Grave Mistake (Great Lakes) was flying Beech 1600s in code share with United. You had a 50/50 chance of being diverted, but it is a spectacular flight! Commercial ops are required to not fly beyond Highway 145 south, so you were basically in a tight bank until flare. Spicy!
I had one or two trips intended to go to Telluride that didn’t for one reason or another. So I’ve never actually been there, which is fine with me. I think I’ve only been to Truckee once.
I’ve been to Aspen too many times, in three types of jets. It always worried me.
At least Telluride is on top of a mesa instead in the bottom of a valley. And the strip is oriented E-W. And they took the 250’ dip out 10 years ago.
Kind of too bad they retired the Beeches. Kinda slow, kinda noisy, but they needed less than half that runway to land or take off. Seemed like tanks.
A friend of mine crashed on take-off with his family aboard there–they all survived, but no more family flights.
Richard McSpadden wrote a safety column in the AOPA magazine. The articles often referred to his military experience flying fighters and related it to the average GA pilot. He always always made a good points. I heartily agree with the “If it can happen to him.” statement. Such a shame.
Given his flying background it’s hard to imagine him not taking control of the plane. But I can easily see a scenario where panic led to a stall before control could be established.
You can only take control when the other person is willing to give control. When that other person is a retired NFL player 15ish years younger than you are, that other guy will have the final say in the matter.
CFIs have died when students panic in relatively benign situations unfamiliar to them and Will. Not. Let. Go.
That is my imagined scenario here. The player is the airplane owner. Or at least is probably the airplane owner; the articles are a bit garbled. He’s also the legal PIC & the practical PF. So they launch, certainly him and maybe both not really in the mindset of a low altitude engine failure. It happens, Mr. NFL makes a bad or panicky decision and before McSpadden can persuade (or “persuade”) him to let go of the yoke they’re both doomed and a few seconds later dead.
That’s also why I opened the discussion of the Telluride bizjet accident. Same basic scenario with the lead pilot not hacking the situation, but unwilling to be overridden by the second pilot. Whether as a matter of misplaced pride, or a simple misperception that the situation is not nearly as FUBARed as the other pilot is perceiving it. As always when there’s a difference of perception or opinion, the only thing that can be ascertained quickly is that the discrepancy exists. It takes time and effort and concentration and willingness to tease out which view is correct, and it may well be neither of them.
There’s a lot more to the bizjet story, but the good news is the facts of that one are well established by NTSB and available for our consideration. Unlike my / our conjectures about the Cessna.
But IMO the bizjet story tells a more complete tale of how these problems develop. That might illuminate the last bit of the Cessna’s flight in more highly compressed form. And is a useful cautionary tale even if it doesn’t bear on the Cessna mishap at all.
The bizjet story also demonstrates how, like so much in aviation, the situation can go from “mildly uncomfortable” to “poor” to “poor and deteriorating” to “scared & need some Yeagertastic flying to recover” to “Game over; we’re doomed” to “we’re dead” in the space of fairly few seconds, and with each stage coming exponentially more quickly than the last. The slope there gets steep quickly and is very very slippery. The way to live to old age is don’t even get close to the slope.
Yes, yes.
I’m sort of amazed at that Truckee accident because they actually encountered the stick shaker. In my very worst moments in a jet I’ve never had a stick shaker fire, or even come close. It takes a lot to reach that point (let alone the stick pusher!) considering that Vref on an approach is quite a bit above predicted stall speed.
In my mind, the stick shaker would be an automatic escape and reset cue. It would mean everything has gone south and you’ve nearly lost control of the airplane. But as LSL noted, there can be powerful psychological barriers to taking that sort of action.
Even so, stick shaker / pusher is such a dramatic event in simulator training I can only predict and hope it would scare me into action in real life.
TL;DR: You can take a landing-configured jet in slow flight, or in G-loaded not-so-slow flight, and stall it instantly by yanking on the speedbrake handle.
Long version:
There’s even more going on than meets the eye there.
A factor not well-discussed in most jet POHs is that speedbrake deployment raises the 1G stall speed significantly. Which is another way of saying what it does is greatly reduces how much G it takes to achieve stall AOA at any given speed.
In the airline-type jets I’ve flown, speedbrake deployment is prohibited beyond about 1/3rd to 1/2 flaps. For a number of overlapping reasons, but one of them is with large flap settings, adding speedbrakes may well put you in a situation where the limit speed for that flap setting is below 1G stall speed. And even if that is not true, the window is tight and the critical AOA of a flaps + speed-brakes wing is far far lower than that of the same wing at the same flap setting with speedbrakes stowed.
As I read the accident report, they were fully configured, high, fast, and tight coming around the overshooting turn to final. The CA/PF is task saturated. So the FO/PM announces he’ll “help” slow things down for the CA/PF. And chops power to idle. So far so sensible, although too little too late for what’s already a very badly unstabilized situation. And that also sets up the very dangerous flare at idle if somehow they do salvage this mess enough to actually land. But that’s still about 45 seconds in the future and these guys are operating about 30 seconds in the past right now.
Then somebody (probably FO/PM; NTSB isn’t sure) yanks the speedbrakes out just as the CA tries to roll to wings level and the up-going wing instantly stalls. Boom, Headshot. Game over.
[Rant On]!!
I hate hate hate that we teach so much about stalls in the context of speeds and bank angles and so little about them in terms of AOA and G. It’s aerodynamically illiterate. IMO it’s about like believing in Wile E Coyote physics where after you run off the cliff you don’t start plummeting … until you look down. The real world does not work that way.
The 737 NG & MAX instrument system is pretty advanced, with dynamic min airspeed markers for both aerodynamic stall and for approach-to-stall stall warning. And of course we set a bug for vRef. If you are maneuvering aggressively down near those speeds you can watch the two speeds jump around 15 or 20 knots in response to changing AOA. Bank angle in and of it self changes nothing; it’s only when you pull or push that stuff happens.
If you ever do absent-mindedly deploy speedbrakes with lots of flaps (we’ve all done it once), the speeds jump about 25 knots, which can trigger the first stage of impending stall warning, a very loud and insistent “AIRSPEED LOW! AIRSPEED LOW!” Your speed did not change bupkiss; it’s still fine. What changed was the stall AOA plummeted due to speedbrakes and the actual AOA stayed about the same, and the space between the two is now very, very slim.
A bit of ham-fist right then and yes, you get a stick shaker, STALL aural warnings, and all the rest of the adrenaline rush. I’ve never done that for real, but flying aggressive maneuvers in slow flight to (hopefully) cement these ideas was part of transition training in the sim for later-model jets with full-featured EFIS.
And still we talk about anodyne BS like stall speeds and bank angles affecting stall speed. That’s not how airplanes fly goddammit!
[/Rant OFF]!!
Looking into the NTSB report, there is a caution message displayed for speedbrakes deployed with gear down. And by normal certification standards, gear must be lowered before the flaps are moved into the landing range or else you get loud horns and red lights and such.
The effective result of those two things is that deploying speedbrakes with landing flaps is evidently against the ops limits of that model jet. And they learned why that limitation exists, although I doubt they figured it out before the ground arrived.
Gear-up landing of a FedEx 757:
