Paul's Down-Home Page

(Yes, I know it’s not Friday. That’s because on Friday I was busy… flying. Not flying myself, you understand; rather, I was being flown by the fine folks at Delta from SFO to ATL and then on to HSV.)

I had already planned my weekend around the trip to Alabama to see the boys, but early Thursday morning received some bad news: my Uncle Edgar had passed away in Houma, Louisiana, and his funeral service would be first thing Monday morning. That seemed like a great opportunity to get some cross-country time; I could rent a 172 from the Redstone flying club, fly KHUA-KHUM in about 3.5 hours, and easily make both the Sunday night wake and the Monday service. I jumped online, reserved an aircraft, and went about my business… at least until I saw the weather.

AviationWeather.gov showed a strong chance of rain and scattered thunderstorms Sunday in Huntsville. So did the Weather Channel, but the WAAY-TV forecast called for scattered light rain. The local forecast for Houma for my arrival time looked good. What to do? I had a few options:

• Adjust my flight time to get out of town before the bad weather. Of course, if I ran into any delays, that could be a problem.
• Wait and see how the weather developed, planning on flying if there was no convective weather developing or forecasting.
• Call Delta and book a flight to New Orleans.

As much as I wanted to fly down there myself, I chose option #3. That turned out to be exactly the right move, because the weather across southern Louisiana deteriorated Sunday morning. Here’s what the weather looks like right now, as I sit comfortably aboard my Delta flight. All that green crap in the lower right corner of the map has been forming and blowing up from the Gulf into north Alabama over the last 36 hours or so—but the forecast I saw on Thursday didn’t predict that.

It might have been possible for me to adjust my departure time either earlier or later and still make the flight safely. However, the old adage that “it’s better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here” certainly applies. At this time of year, convective weather can be unpredictable, and tackling it at night as a non-instrument-rated pilot in an aircraft without onboard weather display or radar would be foolish.

As WOPR said, sometimes the only winning move is not to play. So I sat this flight out, and I’ll build my cross-country time another day.

Rule #1 in aviation, as recounted to me by my first flight instructor: Don’t hit anything.

Rule #2, of course, is If you have to hit something, pick the softest object you can find and hit it as gently as possible while going as slowly as possible.

It turns out that both of these rules are surprisingly applicable to the art of making good off-airport emergency landings.

First, I should distinguish between a forced landing (one in which you have no choice, usually because the engine has quit) and a precautionary landing. The latter are undertaken when something is wrong and you need to get on the ground ASAP, but where the issue isn’t yet a full-blown emergency such as an in-flight fire or a dead powerplant.

Forced landings are where rule #2 really comes into effect. There are really only two tasks in conducting a successful forced landing. First you find someplace to land, and then you land there. This, of course, obscures much of the real complexity of getting the job done, but it’s easy to let the other tasks you have to perform along the way overshadow these two major requirements.

What’s a good place to land? Well, it has to be within range of your aircraft, and ideally it will be a nice, flat, unoccupied, soft surface with no obstacles or bumps. The odds of finding something like that varies greatly according to where you are. For example, in the area around the Palo Alto airport, you have water to the east, with marshes and power lines to the immediate north and south of the runway, in a heavily urbanized area. On the other hand, out of Madison County Executive you have lots of nice soft farm fields. One key trick is to always be looking around while en route and thinking “OK, if I needed to land, where’s a good spot?” This is both a good habit and a fun game to play, especially in unfamiliar terrain.

“…then you land there” is the more challenging part. During my primary training, one of my major obstacles was my lack of airspeed discipline. Each airplane has a characteristic best-glide speed: maintain that speed and you will get the maximum forward motion per foot of vertical descent. If you go slower or faster than that speed, you’ll get less gliding distance. While your instinctive reaction might be to look around for a landing site, the very first thing you should do is grab the trim wheel, get some nose-up trim in place to reduce the control force required, and slow the airplane to its best-glide speed. Do that and then you’ll have more time to find an ideal landing spot. You have to use that time to do other things, like run through the emergency landing checklist, call Mayday, and so on, but those are all optional… maintaining the best-glide speed is not.

The other problem I had was my approach to the selected landing spot. Ideally you want to pick a spot and arrive abreast of it at about 1000′ above the terrain. In the diagram below, you want to be at the position labeled “2”. At that point, you’re in exactly the same position you’d be in if you were performing a normal landing, and one of the things you practice all the time is power-off landings from exactly that position. For some reason, though, it just didn’t sink in that I needed to approach the landing spot as though I were entering a traffic pattern; I was perpetually too close to, or too far away from, my selected landing spot.

airport traffic pattern; diagram courtesy http://www.cfidarren.com

Why it took me so long to figure out, I don’t know. Once my instructor pointed that out to me, though, my emergency landings improved about 1000%. That’s what I would describe as the secret, at least for me: pick a spot and then navigate to it, at best-glide speed, just as though I was planning a landing on an ordinary runway. Doing that made all the difference in the world. Now I just have to keep following rule #1 and I’ll be in good shape!

You may not realize it, but the commercial airliners we fly on have redundancy for virtually every onboard system. This, of course, is no accident—it’s a popular saying that the history of aviation improvements is written in blood, so the reason why we have redundant electrical systems, pressurization, and so on is because in the past, single points of failure have caused catastrophic accidents.

Even light airplanes often have more redundancy than the casual observer might suspect. For example, the engine ignition system in piston airplanes has two redundant magnetos, wired so that each magneto is independently providing spark to both cylinders. If one mag fails, no worries; you’ve got another one.

Luckily, the same is true with radios, as I found out on a recent night flight. My mission: leave Palo Alto, fly up to Napa to pick up my cousin, and continue on to Willows for dinner. I was in a fairly new G1000-equipped 172, one that I hadn’t flown before. When I listened to the ATIS broadcast on COM1 during my preflight, I noticed quite a bit of audio clipping, but I wrote it off as due to my position on the airfield– behind a large metal hanger with an electrical box that causes an audible squeal in the audio system as you taxi past it. I preflighted, started, and called ground; I could hear them OK, so I taxied to the runup area. Runup was normal, and then I switched to the tower frequency and called them for a takeoff clearance.

Silence.

I called them again.

More silence.

That’s odd, I thought. Even a busy controller will usually respond after a second call, and I’m the only guy out here anyway. A few seconds later the controller answered but his audio was unintelligible. I tried a couple more times, then switched back to ground and told them I was taxiing back to parking. When I got there, I started playing with the squelch controls on the audio panel while listening to the ATIS frequency and eventually got a squelch level that gave me clean audio… or so I thought.

Taxi back, runup, and takeoff were uneventful. I was talking to Norcal Approach the entire time; they vectored me over the San Mateo bridge, then over the runway 29 numbers at KOAK, then past the Nimitz Freeway, then VFR direct to the Napa airport. The trip was gorgeous, and I made a good landing at KAPC. Sadly I had forgotten my spare headset, and the local FBO didn’t have one, so Chris and I decided to have dinner in Napa instead of flying to Willows. We had a great visit while devouring burgers at Gott’s (where I had the best milkshake ever), then I dropped him back at the airport and got ready to fly back.

In the meantime, the Napa control tower had closed. This isn’t uncommon; many airports are towered only during part of the day. The normal procedure is to use the tower frequency (or another freq, if designated) to announce your position and intentions to any other aircraft in the area. I did so and had an uneventful takeoff. As I turned back towards the Bay Area, I tuned in the Norcal Approach frequency and called them.

Silence.

Uh oh, that’s not good, I thought. I knew I hadn’t gotten the frequency wrong because I used the G1000 to enter it directly from the airport  diagram, but I looked it up anyway and tried again.

Silence.

By this time I was getting uncomfortably close to controlled airspace, and I didn’t want to enter it without being in radio communication with ATC, so I started a nice, gentle standard-rate turn to keep me out of trouble while I troubleshot.

First I tried calling Flight Watch, the nationwide FAA enroute advisory service that uses the same frequency, 122.0 MHz, everywhere. No joy.

Next I switched over to COM2 and called Flight Watch again. “Four Lima Bravo, we could hear you a minute ago but you couldn’t hear us. How copy?”

Bingo! My primary radio had gone dead.

While this was a little disconcerting, it wasn’t a problem; I had another completely functional radio, so I switched back to Norcal’s frequency, called them, got cleared along my route, and went about my business. If my secondary radio had failed too, I wasn’t without options; I could have changed my transponder code to 7600 to indicate that I was NORDO, then I would have flown a route and altitude to keep me away from Oakland and SFO. In this case, that basically means about 1500′ straight down the middle of the Bay. The Palo Alto tower was closed by the time of my arrival, so I would have had to be very careful about entering the traffic pattern (and as it turned out there were a couple of other planes working the pattern there).

Although this wasn’t an emergency by any stretch, I was glad to have that second radio. Operating in busy controlled airspace at night is not a good time to be muzzled. It might be time for me to pick up a handheld nav/comm radio to keep in my flight bag as a backup. (Of course, then I’d need a bigger flight bag…)

One of my goals for 2013 is to continue my aviation education and skill-building. Another is to do more writing (and photography) on aviation-related topics. To do this, I’m kicking off a new habit: Flying Fridays. While it would be great if I could guarantee that I’d get to fly every Friday, that’s not likely to happen right now. I can, however, guarantee that I’ll have a new blog post every Friday on an aviation-related topic. This might be as simple as a trip report or a tip on how to use a particular feature of an app or avionics device, or it might be more involved. With that in mind, I’d love to hear what my readers are interested in knowing about aviation. I’ve gotten several private e-mails asking questions about various aspects of my flight training, and I’m happy to write about that, or any other topic that catches your interest– leave me a comment here or send e-mail and I’ll add it to my queue.