UK authorities are now obliged by the Human Rights Act to interpret Article 137 of the ANO in a manner which is consistent with an owner/pilot’s Article 2 and Article 1 Protocol 1 Convention rights.
What is that?
Jacko wrote:
but if someone can’t glide an SEP to some sort of landing from 5,000 above a runway, they need more practice, not less.
If your landing clearance is denied on final, or there is a runway incursion in front of you, your practice all of a sudden is turned into a full blown emergency.
There is no “landing clearance” on an uncontrolled field, and there’s a parallel grass runway. We don’t have to discuss that not doing this is safer.
I was thinking that while i can understand the dramatic impact in fact what is to be gained? After all closing the throttle has essentially the same impact.
Flyer59 wrote:
We don’t have to discuss that not doing this is safer.
I would like to discuss exactly that. What you did (removing the ignition key so as to turn your Warrior into a glider) added a tiny bit of realism and stress to the PFL. Now if and when it happens for real, it’ll seem less of a sweat. Good job. Not everyone wants to train for emergencies, the nature of which depend on who, what and where we fly, but criticising those who try to inject a bit of realism into such training is like prohibiting lifeboat drill on a ship.
You could start by looking up the ADs on the standard crappy (Bendix?) ignition switches…
Also you are converting the failure probability of an engine with an MTBF of the order of 50000hrs into a much higher chance of a forced landing.
If an instructor did this to me I would tell him to put the f****g key back in right there and then, land immediately, and file a report to the CAA. And I would make sure they bust him, by going to the very top. No real instructor should be doing this in a SEP. It’s outrageously dangerous.
Most PPL/VFR pilots will not see a catastrophic engine failure in their entire life – so long as they put fuel in the tanks.
Actually none of the two got that scared. To land a Warrior gliding from 5000 feet should be a non-event for anybody calling himself a “pilot”.
It’s interesting how many regulations are declared completely useless B.S., how most UK pilots have no problem flying in IMC without a FPL in 2500 feet, how some fly IMC at night and over mountains, and then get that much upset because of a maneuver that is done by glider pilots and pilots of motorgliders all the time.
As i said, for various reasons i am not doing that anymore, and it was probably a mistake. But otoh i like realistic training. My LBA examiner let me land the Seneca one engine off, for example.
yes, i share your view. And i have done the same maneuver with highly qualifies CFIs and examiners aswell. Ok, without the key part :-). My regular IFR examiner (a 10.000 hour LH pilot) let me do an engine off landing on a small glider field, and it was a great lesson – and it gives you a lot of confidence to have actually DONE it (not written about it).
But i learned to respect that there’s pilots who are scared of stalls, steep turns, spins, emergency training. When you are asked to do a “power on stall” in the USA, most CFIs expect you to do it at 20 percent power. When i got a checkout in Florida in the same Warrior i have and did it with full power (which is not THAT spectacular in a 160 hp plane..) the poor CFI got completely scared… “uh, we don’t do them like that”…
Peter wrote:
UK authorities are now obliged by the Human Rights Act to interpret Article 137 of the ANO in a manner which is consistent with an owner/pilot’s Article 2 and Article 1 Protocol 1 Convention rights.
What is that?
Article 2 protects the right to life, and A1P1 protects the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions. Both are qualified rights, but the qualifications are subject to the usual test of “proportionality”.
Article 2 protects the right to life, and A1P1 protects the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions. Both are qualified rights, but the qualifications are subject to the usual test of “proportionality”.
How does this apply to flying?
Back to the thing about removing the ignition key in a SEP (BTW a Seneca is not a SEP, so not applicable here) I think there is a much wider issue here, which an instructor (an FI, not a CRI whose job is class ratings) should be dealing with:
There is so much more which the average PPL would benefit from on the 2-yearly flight, which for many pilots is the only time he/she gets any chance to learn useful stuff and possibly un-learn bad habits.
Pop up on a sunny day here in the UK and listen to the radio. Hear how many people have no idea how to put together a basic radio call. Then they end it with “over” which ended (for VHF) many decades ago. There is so much more to teach people. Start with planning a flight. Planning the route. So many PPLs find flying Shoreham to Le Touquet utterly daunting. Most would never even try it. Even if you paid for the plane and the fuel. Then look at tafs and metars. I know a ~3000hr pilot (owns and flies an RV) who cannot read them. He can fly allright (I have flown with him) but he cannot “get wx”. Then look at notams. Most PPLs here don’t check notams. I was never taught (2000-2001) anything about notams. Admittedly that was pre-internet, but I am a “young pilot” compared to most of the flying community. Then look at circuit practice. The plane is a PA28, not a B52, so why fly a B52 circuit? Etc…
Genuine engine failures are way down the list, somewhere one or two orders of magnitude below flying with empty tanks. I have had two (not catastrophic – the engine restarted inside a minute) and I still think there is so much more important stuff to cover in that one-hour flight. But that’s for another thread…
