I’m another who wouldn’t be here without URT. As others have mentioned, it is the startle effect that one needs to overcome. If you can think calmly while the spinning ground is rushing at you then you’ll be fine. Everyone should do it.
Interesting topic. We are actually starting a UPRT centered ATO in Norway this spring. We are in the process of acquiring an Extra 300L.
We have experienced UPRT instructors on board and think we can provide valuable tailored training programs for operators and the private pilot.
Seems to be a niche market without too many providers.
I also disagree. I did UPRT training with a former Air Force guy in an aerobatics plane (Fuji 200) after I got my PPL through an AOPA camp out of personal interest.
It was the first time in my life when I had a real stall. You know not stall warning going off, buffeting, but a real stall.
But it was very insightful to do a spin training. The aircraft is turning around its own axis, you only see ground, no sky – I wouldn’t like to imagine when I encountered this for the first time without any training, just knowing from a book what you theoretically have to do.
I did about 20 spins and I became quite good at it, only lost a couple of hundred feet.
I can only highly recommend to do UPRT training, especially right after your PPL – and then maybe every year an hour or two doesn’t hurt.
AOPA Germany offers this every year.
Another important element of upset training in any airplane, within it’s limits is to be reminded that the plane is much more capable than many pilots expect. In the case of certified planes, if they end up up side down, they are still capable of flying, and being righted, if you devote yourself to it – promptly!
When it comes right down to it, from a structural perspective, relative to the airframe itself, the list of things to not do is surprisingly short: Don’t fly it too fast, don’t allow [most planes] to go backward through the air, don’t pull too many positive or negative G’s, and avoid putting the plane in a situation where you might be about to be doing one of the forgoing. Oh, and don’t hit anything! If you haven’t done any of the forgoing, you probably have not hurt the plane (though you still might have done bad things to the engine, or other systems). But, the plane will still be flyable.
Training, and cautious practice are worthwhile. Read the flight manual, understand what the proper techniques and limitations are for it, and within those, go and practice. If you can arrange training in a more capable type (aerobatic), even better.
QuoteLeSving wrote:
In an a sudden and stressful situation we work by gut feeling and by association to previous experience and knowledge.
In upset training the objective is to avoid an instinctive, ‘gut feel’ reaction. In the past you needed a basic UPRT sign off, which required around four hours in the aircraft plus ground school. From later this year you will need advanced UPRT before your type rating, this will add another four hours of UPRT in the aircraft.
One of the lesson objectives is to understand and control the ‘startle’ effect. ie don’t do the first thing your body wants you to do! Hence understanding the various undesired aircraft conditions, experiencing them, and methodically working through the recovery.
In GA most LOC fatal outcomes seem to occur either from an inappropriate recovery, or recovering from the first upset and then being unable to resume straight and level, and going into the next undesired state.
The classic is a cloud break from a spiral dive where the pilot instinctively pulls at the ground rush in the transition to VMC and pulls the wings off. Or alternatively recovers in IMC from a spiral dive into a nose high condition leading to a spin, usually flat, in IMC.
A lot of UPRT is exploring deep into the stall regime, or nose low/nose high conditions. Where the recovery is a form of negative transfer type training (single engine propeller to underslung turbo fan swept wing), with different recovery techniques, this would be covered in ground school/CRM case studies.
Arguably the days of tail chasing in Extras with some basic aerobatics is consigned to history. The courses today are quite structured, and address some of the issues raised in the article.
greg_mp wrote:
During JOC session, one of the instructors puts us into some of the scenarii of the crash you mentioned (turquish, af447, and some others) even if at the end recovery is not realistic, you can follow were your security margin is reducing and think to the decision you take and what happened. That was really instructive in that sens.
I imagine. And those scenarios don’t really need a particularly good flight model… All of these were within an envelope where I would expect the tables to cover them. The more shocking they were.. basic stall recovery, basic speed control, basic instrument surveillance. It simply wasn’t there.
Of course they were not certified, I was referring more to conditions that leads to loss of situational awareness that leads to loss of control, that cannot be really approached in a aerobatic airplane because like in a syllabus, you already know what is going to happen. But I didn’t know that even FM Sims was running lookup tables instead of realistic models… Actually that’s a pity.
During JOC session, one of the instructors puts us into some of the scenarii of the crash you mentioned (turquish, af447, and some others) even if at the end recovery is not realistic, you can follow were your security margin is reducing and think to the decision you take and what happened. That was really instructive in that sens.
greg_mp wrote:
and upset recovery in a B738 full motion some is way better
Do you know of any B738 (or other airline grade full motion sim) that is certified for unusual attitudes? At least about 15 years ago (when I last got substantially involved in SIMs) it was actually the worst thing one could do to train unusual attitudes in a SIM as their behavior could be completely different from a real plane. I would assume, in a spin situation a real Extra is more similar to a real B738 that a normal B738 SIM is to a real B738.
On the original article: Typical clickbait – if you want to make sure to earn lots of money with internet article just write some stupid things about a topic which is controversial. I bet his next article will be on shock-cooling ;-)
In my professional life I decided to ask the new FO’s that I fly with if they had any aerobatic experience, the answer in most cases was No.
Apart from one trip in an aerobatic aircraft to tick the upset box most of them had not been past 60 degrees of bank and even he upset training was regarded as something to be endured. The few who had done some aerobatics are much better at hand flying the aircraft and are much less reliant on auto flight.
It is little wonder that the airlines have to teach upset training as the latest generation of pilots does not have the mindset or confidence to disengage the autopilot at the early stages of an upset when speedy manual intervention would prevent a full blown upset event.
With the reliable autopilot coming to GA I am seeing parallels with the airlines when it comes to hand flying skills, little wonder that upset training is now an issue.
greg_mp wrote:
Let’s be clear, uprt training is a good thing in many ways, but doing upset recovery in an extra200 and a b738 isn’t the same thing, and upset recovery in a B738 full motion some is way better as soon as we don’t want to do it in a real plane, just because B738 and extra200 aren’t the same.
I think one of the lessons learnt from some of the more amazing failures of todays air crews to manage a cristal clear upset situation leading to accidents and crashes was that it is NOT a good idea to forego basic flight training and skills in favour of direct sim training on airliners and letting people loose on those without knowing how to fly an airplane without the whole shebang of protections and autopilots. You don’t even have to go as far as inverted flight or such stuff, in recent years we have had ample examples of airline crews failing to recognize even the simplest of stalls or failures of their auto throttle systems e.t.c. with horrible results.
On the other hand, whether to use acrobatic planes for this purpose is a different thing. Maybe jet trainers or at least airplanes like a PC7 or 9 would be better as it has been shown to work really well in the air forces (Swiss Airforce have a program where people transition from the PC21 directly to the Hornet).
Full flight sims are in many cases not suitable for upset recovery training unless these upsets are covered by their flight data package really to the max. That is usually not the case as in flight test, not a lot of airliners are e.g. tested in inverted spins and stuff like that. When I worked in Flight Simulation for a few years, it was quite strange to see that almost no FFS that I am aware of works of aerodynamic models but almost all of them use look up tables. Flight models based on those are NOT capable of anything outside their flown envelope. Therefore, doing upset training with those may produce counterproductive “lessons” as it is basically anyone’s guess how a sim will behave outside it’s data package envelope. I am not sure if newer sims these days go new ways but i recall vividly the reactions of some very seasoned captains and sim instructors to a full aerodynamical model done in an entertainment sim which never really got people’s attention due to outdated graphics, but was a class of its own in flight modelling. I recall an incident where that model would do something weird and when the question was put to Boeing if the real airplane would do this, they actually had to go fly a test airplane to find out as their sim was not capable of reproducing whatever it was. The aerodynamic model had it right… full flight sims did not.
So my take on this is, upset training in FFS has to be taken with a bucket of salt unless the upsets trained are verified to be simulated properly in the sim. Otherwise, that aspiring airline pilots need upset training should be about as clear as anything in the wake of the horrible accidents of Air France, Turkish Airlines and Asiana, only to mention a few. Likewise, it would be a huge improvement if airlines stopped forcing their pilots to basically use automated flight from 200 ft to 200 ft. I am perfectly sure that had some airlines who suffered massive upsets and saved the day done this, those crews would never have been capable of recovering these situations. But in the day and age of flight data monitoring and the mistaken trend towards unpiloted airliners it is difficult to make that case unfortunately.
