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March – April 2015 AUSTRALIAN FLYINGaustralianflying.com.au©Jim DavisSafe
- All your exam subjects
- All your flying exercises
- Easy & relaxed, fun reading
- 500 pages, 360 brilliantcolour diagrams
- Stories & priceless wisdom from a an instructor who knows his stuff
PPL
A Practical Book about Flying SafelyJim Davis
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MakingYOU a Pilot
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CASA Approval 1-JTA0N – 2What Can We Learn?
1
Let’s have a quick look at the things that might
cause you to be hot and high in the first place:
(a) If it is a strange field everyone has a tendency
to make their circuit too tight. I’m not certain why,
but I suspect it is a subconscious fear of losing the
field after coming all this way.
(b) Poor viz will certainly have you too tight, which
usually makes you too high.
(c) Obviously, not losing enough height on base.
I like to reduce power during the turn on to base,
and then use more flap as soon as the wings are
level. Aim for a steady descent from the beginning
of base all the way down to the threshold.
(d) Remember that in a high-wing aircraft you
are going to lose sight of the runway during
your base and final turns – so plan for it. You
shouldn’t roll out of a turn and be surprised at
where the threshold is.
(e) If you fly a right-hand circuit in wide, low-wingaircraft – like a Cherokee 6 or a Saratoga, you
also lose sight of the field during those two turns.
(f) A narrow runway, as you often find on
farm strips, can be very deceptive. They look
much longer than they are, with potentially
disasterous results.
(g) A downhill runway is murderous. As the
aircraft sinks, so the runway sinks away from
it and you can find yourself using a hell of a
lot of runway before touch-down. Then, of
course, you have to brake much harder
because of the down slope.
(h) Obstructions, like wires or trees on the
approach, can easily cause you to come in too
high. You are also likely to be too fast because
you stuff the nose down once past the obstacle.2
Once you know you are too high, or too hot, or
both – act immediately, don’t wait to see how
it’s going to turn out. Be sensible - do a Victor Smith:Two other possibilities seem far
more likely. The first is that the
aircraft bounced or ballooned and
that while it was on its way down
again he pulled the nose up, used
full power to soften the blow and
continued down into the ground,
on the edge of a stall.
Finally, and I think this is the
most likely scenario, in his panic
to avoid a crash, he banged the
throttle open with the result that
the engine missed and backfired
and failed to produce any power. In
fact I suspect he had a combination
of banging the throttle open and
the mushing scenario.
Without all the information we
will never know, but you have to
do something pretty drastic with
that aeroplane to accomplish what
this guy did.