VSI – Use a fortune teller to improve your flying

by Wally Moran on December 5, 2011

Most of our instruments tell us where we are – not where we are going to be.  For example, the altimeter tells us we are at 7000 feet or the airspeed indicator tells us we are at 120 knots.  However, one of our instruments can see into the future. No, this is not a fancy computer with lots of data, but a simple instrument which almost never fails. It is the vertical speed indicator (VSI).

This often ignored and sometimes scorned instrument can truly make you a more precise and smoother pilot. For example, if you are trying to hold altitude and you see the vertical speed indicator showing a 200 FPM descent, guess what?  I can now predict that in 30 seconds you will be 100 feet off your altitude. See how it predicts the future? So if you heed this prediction and make a little correction, you will maintain your altitude. That is one way we can use a fortune teller to improve our flying.

As an instructor it is painful to watch a pilot doing slow flight and have the altitude and speed on for the moment, but not realize that the vertical speed is showing 200 or 300 FPM down. They seem so proud to be on the numbers but are unaware that if they don’t do something soon they will be out of limits. So, as we sink slowly below the PTS limits, they add a little power, but usually not enough to get that VSI needle pointing back up. Finally after we are well below our altitude they add enough power to get a climb going and guess what, here we go right through our altitude and up beyond the limit on the other side. Using the vertical speed as a fortune teller in this maneuver tells you where that altimeter will be in a minute or two. Good information to know. Watching the altimeter only tells you what’s already happened.

Same thing works on steep turns. If you establish a pitch attitude that gives you zero on the vertical speed indicator, you will hold your altitude. While pitch attitude is the primary focus on steep turns, the vertical speed indicator will still predict where you will soon be if nothing changes.

When making an approach with a glide slope (GPS or ILS), the vertical speed indicator is essential to staying on the glide slope. Again it will predict deviations before they are displayed on the glide slope indicator. If the required descent rate is 500 FPM and I notice that the vertical speed has just changed to 200 FPM, I can predict the next thing that will happen is that I will start getting high on the glide slope. If I recognize that the vertical speed is not correct and fix it before the glide slope needle moves, I don’t have to make two corrections. One correction to get back on the glide slope and another to return to the proper rate of descent.

We all know that it takes a constant descent rate to stay on the glide slope and the one instrument in the cockpit that tells us that information is the vertical speed indicator. When I began to realize that the vertical speed indicator was great at predicting where the glide slope needle was going to go next, my ILS approaches got much better.

So why don’t pilots pay more attention to the vertical speed? Maybe it is because there instructor told them not to pay any attention to it because it has a lag in its response. I was told that on my first lesson and it took me about 30 years of flying to realize that instructor was wrong. Yes, there is a small lag in the vertical speed indicator but it still predicts the future better than any other instrument I know of.

So if you want to stay ahead of your airplane, learn to get more use out of the instrument that predicts the future.

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Split Flap Emergency

by admin on September 6, 2011

This is a guest post from Jim Reed (Lt. Col. USAF Ret.) author of, “Turning Final, A Life Complete”

Here is an example of an unwritten rule that I have used for years:

If you’ve just done something and everything falls apart, put everything back where it was.

As simple as it sounds, most folks won’t do that unless they have been trained to do it.

Here is a story that supports that theory. It is an excerpt from my book:

One morning, after an early flight, I stopped off at D’s Restaurant at the Sonoma County Airport to grab some breakfast. I happened to sit at the counter next to Kentucky Pentegrast, a man whom I had met through Hugh. He owned a small twin and told me that he hadn’t made a decent landing in six months and asked if I would be willing to go along with him someday and try to figure out what he was doing wrong.

I said sure I would, and that, in fact, I wasn’t doing anything at that moment. So after breakfast, we went out to his plane and took off north to a small landing strip next to the lumber mill at Cloverdale. As we came down final, I watched to see if I could detect anything that Kentucky was doing that might aggravate the landing, but everything looked pretty good and we made a satisfactory touchdown.

We made the touch and go and I sat there with my arms folded looking at the surrounding scenery as we made a right turn and thought, “Gosh, those hills are awfully close for us to be turning into them.” I looked at Kentucky and could not believe what I saw. Although he had all of the control inputs for a left turn, WE WERE TURNING RIGHT. His mouth was open, his eyes were wide and he had a look of terror on his face.

I instinctively reverted to the training the Air Force had drummed into me – if you’ve just done something and everything starts to fall apart, put everything back where it was! Since we had just made a touch and go and had retracted the gear and flaps, I reached over without asking Kentucky and extended the gear and flaps. The controls started working again and, after some experimentation, I determined that only the flap on one wing had retracted from the full flap landing.

The other had stayed full down and we had experienced a split flap. Kentucky told me later that throughout all of his training, he had never even heard the term ‘Split Flap’.

We left the flaps down, returned to Santa Rosa and landed. His problem with landings over the past six months was obviously a result of that flap partially hanging up either going up or going down. This time it decided to hang up while it was full down, and I’m convinced that if I hadn’t been with Kentucky that day he would not have survived that incident.

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Stall Training

by Wally Moran on August 16, 2011

There has been a lot of talk recently about stalls. For example, the recent reports about the Airbus A-330 that crashed in the Atlantic between Brazil and Paris. Here apparently we had an airplane inadvertently flown into a deep stall by the pilot and for whatever reason he continued nose up inputs until the airplane crashed. Then there is the Colgan Air accident in NY state. In this case the aircraft entered an unintentional stall and instead of pushing the yoke forward, the pilot continued to pull back putting the aircraft into a deep stall.

We all know the proper procedure is to lower the nose and add full power to recover from a stall, yet here we have experienced pilots doing exactly the opposite. Why would they do this? I can’t say for certain but I have some thoughts on the subject.

In the past I have trained many glider pilots in a trusty old training glider that is so gentle when it stalls that it is actually hard to recognize. Later we switched to a glider that had more normal stall characteristics, that is, the nose would drop and so would a wing if you weren’t perfectly coordinated. Guess what many of our pilots did when they saw that nose going down and the glider beginning to rotate. They pulled back on the stick and cranked aileron in against the turn!! They all knew the correct response but when they saw the ground coming up at them they did the wrong thing just like the pilots in the recent airline accidents.

Today and for many years we have trained pilots to recover at the first indication of a stall. The theory being that if the stall is caught at this point there is no need to learn further recovery procedures. Unfortunately this deprives the pilots the sensation of seeing that nose go down and learning how to fix it. Interesting that full stalls are required training by the FAR’s for pre solo students but are never mentioned again unless one trains to be a CFI.

I wonder how many pre solo students actually get proficient at full stalls? Guess what, airline pilots don’t get the benefit of doing full stalls either. Air line pilots are taught to recover at the activation of the stall warning. So it is possible for an airline pilot to fly their entire career without ever actually stalling the plane. Then we wonder why they don’t respond properly when faced with this situation.

Because of these recent accidents there are now proposals to require full stall training at the airlines. I hope the FAA responds favorably to these proposals and adds the requirement for full stall training for airlines as well as general aviation. In the meantime, there is no reason for us not to make this a training requirement of our own. If you have not experienced full stall practice recently, I strongly encourage you to find a competent CFI and get to work.

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Air Force One Go Around!

July 12, 2011

As my good friend Bob Martens is fond of saying, the Go Around is the least practiced maneuver in Aviation. During initial training as student pilots, the instructor teaches us the Go Around.  The Practical Test Standards (PTS) require us to demonstrate the Go Around/Rejected Landing maneuver.  The FAA objective for the task is “Makes [...]

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Airplane Taxi Tips

April 28, 2011

The recent taxi accident between an Airbus A-380 and a regional jet at JFK serves as a reminder that taxiing our aircraft can be a dangerous endeavor. Just think about the potential of all that fuel in the wing of the A-380 had it been ruptured. Now I don’t know where the A-380 was in [...]

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