Snoopy wrote:
Your club, instead of banning you from renting, which does nothing to increase safety and awareness, should have asked you to give a presentation in front of other members about this trip and your lessons learned.
It would have been a great opportunity to show that reflection the way you practice it is what increases safety.
By being honest and as a result banned from renting, the club actually incentivizes „hush hush“ cover ups of members in order to avoid consequences („remember xyz, he was honest and look what happened to him, he can’t rent anymore“). It will strengthen get-there-itis (make it look normal), other dishonesties and have undesirable effects on the decision making of club members.
Excellent conclusion. The way the incident was handled by the club does not increase safety for anyone. A true “culture of safety” requires openness and prevents undue punishment for mistakes for exactly the reasons explained by Snoopy.
Through this discussion here, at least Sebastian can reflect and learn, which is just what the club’s reaction should have been about. That enhances long-term safety.
The argument about “asset protection” brought forth by @Mooney_Driver is imho unsuitable for a flying club, which should be all about facilitating safe flying. That cannot be ensured by grounding people for making mistakes, otherwise the “safest” club would be one were nobody is permitted to fly…
MedEwok wrote:
That cannot be ensured by grounding people for making mistakes, otherwise the “safest” club would be one were nobody is permitted to fly…
That’s too black and white. I’ve seen this happen quite a few times not only from private owners like myself but also flight schools and clubs who deemed the way a member used their airplanes and had safety occurrences was a reason to ban this member from flying, either until retraining and a check was done or in more severe cases for good. Bringing back airplanes late on a regular basis, actually wrecking one, and shutting up about damage (a very good point Silvaire gave) were reasons I recall that clubs felt they would be better of without certain members.
I had one pilot who made me uncomfortable every time he flew, coming back with almost empty tanks, actually damaging the plane with the use of wrong equipment, coming home late, e.t.c. and so on, we decided that it was safer for us to stop him from flying with us. The question in such cases will also be what if this person does produce a fatal or serious accident investigated by the TSB at some point and you, as an owner, have to answer to them why you let this person continue to use your plane despite ample indication that there were deficiencies in his skills. Even airlines have to answer such questions.
It is easy for renters to accuse the rental agent of being petty, but looking from an owners point of view, I can understand that if an owner (and clubs are owners) feel uncomfortable with a renter, they will terminate him before something worse happens.
In this case I would have thought that the ban is temporary and pending remedial action. To ban him for good would be way over the top and do exactly what Silvaire suggests. What we do not know as well is what consequences the overtime on maintenance has had on the club, it might well have ended up with a fine or considerable hassle or both. Flying with an unairworthy airplane IS a deviation which will have consequences and rightly so.
The other bit is, that many clubs do not like their planes going on longer trips exactly for the reasons which come out in this report. Pressure to come back on time or pay hefty fees, availability of the airplane to other members, e.t.c. all actually would discourage longer multi day trips. For such things, ownership is the much better variant as you will not be responsible to anyone else but yourself.
Thanks for all your input and comments; a few of those points have also been raised during the debriefing and working with my club.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
How was that actually in real time numbers? 50 and 100 hour checks generally have a tolerance of +- 10 hours, were these calculated into the figures here? If you say 26 hours, does this mean to the actual hour limit of 50 or 100 or to 60 / 110 hours? If it was to the actual limit, then a 10 hour tolerance can be acceptable unless the club or your CAA sais differently.
Actual limit. What happened is that after landing in München/EDNX I phoned the club to discuss how to proceed, and they asked me to make a log entry adding 5h on top of the maintenance hours left (discussed with our maintenance company) in order to have a safe buffer. The plane was never out of hours or unairworthy in that respect. But it could have easily been, and then an accident with a legally unairworthy plane would have voided insurance, and good luck extracting the value of the plane from the pilot, so this was of course a very big black mark for me.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I would not call this a mistake. VFR on top is perfectly legal. Yes you need to know the consequences if the donkey quits and possibly develop a plan for it, but in general, flying VFR on top is in most countries accepted without any problem.
It was the situation in case of an engine failure I was considering as a mistake on my part as I had no reliable knowledge how far down the overcast went. In the worst case it would have been fogged in to ground level and then doing a safe emergency landing would have been probably impossible.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Well, was there? Did they find something afterwards?
No damage found, even after the the second runway excursion by the ferry pilot back in Rotterdam.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Crosswind landings are a challenge. What were the actual winds and which limit did you consider? What wind were you given, was it over the limit or not at the time?
From the runway excursion MOR, the METAR wind was 23015G26, and with landing on 31, I got thus the full crosswind component. The club limit as per rental agreement is not more than 15kn crosswind, and the POH gives a demonstrated crosswind limit of AFAIK 21kn. Quite rightly, our safety manager hammered the point home that with the wind on that day, I was operating outside the demonstrated envelope of the plane, while having had neither a lot of experience overall nor with crosswind landings in particular.
gallois wrote:
SebastianH will not have been the first nor will he be the last to lose control of a Robin on landing. From the description it seems to me he was more concentrated on the crosswind than on being a little to fast which could well have led to the nose wheel being held off and landed too gently which would have meant that the stick needed a slight push forward for it to become useful in staying straight.
It was mentioned during my flight training that the nosewheel needs some weight on it to fully unlock, but as this issue never reared its head during training and subsequent flights, it faded into the background and I was not thinking about it at the time of landing. I should have been more interested in the construction and technical details of the Robins when I was planning the longer trips in order to understand easier the pitfalls and peculiarities.
tmo wrote:
Mooney_Driver wrote: at least without any flanking measures?You’re not seriously calling “no plane for you” a “flanking measure”, are you? My point, as I believe is Peter’s, is that the punishment (total flying ban) is not appropriate.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The point is: If I don’t feel comfortable with a renter, I will not rent the plane to him, not to punish anybody but as a simple act of asset protection. I’ve had to do this once before after some telltale incidents which were suggesting that more might be on the way. Not fun but part of my responsibility.
The club as ATO has offered to help me with further training regarding flight planning and weather, and the instructors I talked with were all happy to have a look at my flight planning and offer their experienced input. The club as the plane owner has decided – as MooneyDriver wrote – to protect their assets for the time being. It’s not meant as punishment, and I don’t see it as that either.
dublinpilot wrote:
With that in mind, and given that it was a new pilot’s first long distance trip, I’m surprise that an instructor of the club wasn’t tasked to sit down with them and go through their plan and intensions, discuss contingencies (eg if they needed help or weren’t sure about something…who to call to check about equipment failure, non-starting aircraft etc) and offer to be on-call if the pilot needed to discuss something with someone on the trip. This would have surely involved the instructor checking that there was sufficient hours left before maintenance.
In hindsight, two months before my flight our most experienced operations staff member had retired, and she would have spotted my booking and raised a flag so that someone (head of training, examiner, etc.) had a look and a chat with me. Exacerbating that, I was known that after my PPL exam I did e.g. longer trips to Le Touquet, Mengen, or Lübeck, so it was a common sight to see me as soon as the club opened in the morning to disappear with a plane for the day and return around closing time.
The second issue where there was simply a misunderstanding was, that after the return from Deauville I had a beer and a chat with one of my club colleagues who was the operations manager at that time who asked me a bit about the upcoming trip, general planning, etc. Wishing me good luck and a happy flight, I assumed that my plan was circulated at least quickly within the instructor/examiner group – but assumption is the mother of all trouble: He was just a pilot as I was, and just by running the operations, flight bookings and reservations, etc. did not mean that he had checked my flight with any of the instructors. So I thought – wrongly – I had gotten a kind of blessing from the club board …
But, no excuses for my lack of better flight preparation and checking my ideas with our more experienced pilots and instructors.
dublinpilot wrote:
The second thing that jumps out at me was the decision to offer to fly in formation, over the radio, with a total stranger. This is bizarre. Sebastian probably had little or no formation flight experience, and the other pilot was of unknown experience and skills. And to offer to do so, without being asked, without even seeing the colour of the other pilot’s eyes, seems very strange. Perhaps there was a sense of euphoria at being free on his first big trip, that lead to such a strange decision.
I understand the point you’re making. I come from a sailing background and it was the normal thing to do to help out a fellow skipper in need; so when I overheard that someone close by with the same destination and trip dates was in trouble, I thought to offer reasonable assistance (first idea was to check if they would fit W&B-wise in my plane). When meeting, I had a good impression of the other pilot, and with the clear weather, and the planned way how to organise and proceed, I deemed the risk very low – in the worst case I could easily cancel the formation via FIS and proceed alone. But yeah, euphoria might have had her hand in that as well.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I wonder for instance how much pressure of the club to get their plane back contributed to that decision to continue in bad weather. That is one of the bits which I have known to have caused grief more than once and one you usually can avoid with your own airplane. But in any case it is better to live to get screamed at by the club responsables than for them having to deal with losing an airplane and you loosing your life.
Retrospectively, I had put a slight pressure on myself to return the plane in time. There was again a misunderstanding during the runup to that trip as I wanted to have a reservation extending my planned flight by at least two days to account for weather, but I was advised to just book what I had planned and we would figure out what to do in case of weather-related delays when it came to it. It needs to be said that initially our reservations manager thought I was planning to block a plane for an inordinate amount of time and then only fly a few hours as there seemed to have been some trouble with such a booking in the past; in an email exchange leading to the trip, we talked at cross-purposes and only during the beer chat on the evening before I left, we figured out that I was not trying to get a block of time for free. But, I had a bit the impression that the club’s operating model (lots of flying lessons and half-day local trips) was less ideally suited to long-distance touring as I had planned it. Still, my fault that in the end I made up a time constraint for myself that was unneeded and unsafe.
MedEwok wrote:
The way the incident was handled by the club does not increase safety for anyone. A true “culture of safety” requires openness and prevents undue punishment for mistakes for exactly the reasons explained by Snoopy.
I have to break a lance for my club here: What snoopy mentioned (give a talk) is exactly what my examiner and safety manager also proposed. Quite simply, the disussion of my trip within the club board took a while, and then the Corona crisis hit us all and for the last two months everything went into hiatus. I wrote the report here also as part of my preparation of a club evening talk; I would argue that my club does take Just Culture seriously (but as they wrote to me, Just Culture does in their understanding not mean lack of consequences).
Sebastian_H wrote:
Actual limit. What happened is that after landing in München/EDNX I phoned the club to discuss how to proceed, and they asked me to make a log entry adding 5h on top of the maintenance hours left (discussed with our maintenance company) in order to have a safe buffer. The plane was never out of hours or unairworthy in that respect.
In which case procedures were followed and there was no issue. AFAIK hour based maintenance always has a tolerance of +-10 hours, so the 5 hours they made you enter is well within that. We got it quite a lot in recent years where the question of doing a 50 hour check or fly to 60 hours and do the 100hour/annual if we did not reach the 100 hours. Never was an issue and did not need any log entry. Actually, we write down the TT where the plane has to be in the next check with the remark of +-10 hours right next to it. That is accepted practice here.
Sebastian_H wrote:
But it could have easily been, and then an accident with a legally unairworthy plane would have voided insurance, and good luck extracting the value of the plane from the pilot, so this was of course a very big black mark for me.
The main point is it wasn’t. And you knowing to what time you could fly rises the question if you would have continued thereafter, which I suppose you would not. So I don’t see that as a black mark. You noticed the problem, got a solution to it from the club and that is that.
Sebastian_H wrote:
. In the worst case it would have been fogged in to ground level and then doing a safe emergency landing would have been probably impossible.
This is an issue with VFR on top as well as Single Engine IFR and to an extent single engine night flying as well. While it’s legal you are right that there is a problem with this which you have to decide how to deal with it. The fact that you reckognize it as a problem means you need to come up with an acceptable way which makes you comfortable. The same goes for over water flying. I would not regard your routing over the Lake Garda as a “mistake”, any such over water legs have the inherent risk that in case of cases you end up swimming. The question is do you and how do you prepare for that.
Sebastian_H wrote:
No damage found, even after the the second runway excursion by the ferry pilot back in Rotterdam.
The fact that this plane had excursions twice in a row would warrant some investigation I think. Filing an occurrence report is not necessarily the admission of guilt of a pilot but also may and very often is the indication of a deficiency of the plane.
Sebastian_H wrote:
From the runway excursion MOR, the METAR wind was 23015G26, and with landing on 31, I got thus the full crosswind component. The club limit as per rental agreement is not more than 15kn crosswind, and the POH gives a demonstrated crosswind limit of AFAIK 21kn. Quite rightly, our safety manager hammered the point home that with the wind on that day, I was operating outside the demonstrated envelope of the plane, while having had neither a lot of experience overall nor with crosswind landings in particular.
Ok, so we have two issues. One: The plane has a demonstrated crosswind component, which in itself is NOT a hard limit. Crosswind limits as I understand them usually are for steady wind, not gusts, at least that is how we handled it in the airline and that is how we handle it in my operation. So legally speaking you were within the demonstrated component (with 15 kts steady). How the club takes the 15 kt hard limit they impose is a different matter. With the characteristics of the Robin here described it may well be a point. In my own experience I know some planes I would not try to land in a 15 kt cross whereas others are unproblematic. Knowing one from the other comes with experience.
Sebastian_H wrote:
I should have been more interested in the construction and technical details of the Robins when I was planning the longer trips in order to understand easier the pitfalls and peculiarities.
That is quite some task for any plane. To make that connection is definitly asking too much of a novice pilot and if it is such a problem for crosswind, it should be part of the type introduction. Even after 10 years flying a certain type you will find out stuff you never knew, I made that experience many times over the last 10 years flying my Mooney. You do show the wish to learn which is important. Way too many people never care about this. I find it’s actually fun to learn more and more about the type you fly.
Sebastian_H wrote:
The club as ATO has offered to help me with further training regarding flight planning and weather, and the instructors I talked with were all happy to have a look at my flight planning and offer their experienced input.
That makes sense. So basically what they did is tell you that after this remedial action you will be allowed to rent again? That is what I would have expected in this case.
Sebastian_H wrote:
So I thought – wrongly – I had gotten a kind of blessing from the club board …
Well… do you really need it? How does that club operate?
In general, you are a licensed pilot and what you do with your rented plane has to be within legal limits and that is it. Does your club demand you discuss all your flight plans with them before you leave? Or just for longer flights? Do you actually need to get a permission for each longer flight individually?
IMHO the latter would interfere with your qualification, yet it is to an extent an owner function. What I do is that when people book for longer I ask them to tell me roughly what they are up to so I have an idea where the plane is at any given time. Prior to ADS-B I also asked for a landing message per SMS at the end of the flying day so I would always know where the plane is parked, in case something were to happen to the renter outside flight operations… I know of a case where a renter flew a plane on a weeks trip he had announced to Norway and then had an accident while the plane was parked abroad which rendered him unable to inform the school at the time about anything. At the end of the rental period a week later, they spent a merry time looking for the airplane and eventually found it was parked at one of those private strips in southern Italy. Turns out he had replanned on short notice due to weather but never told anyone about it.
Yet for a club to basically want to scrutinize every longer trip a renter does and to give their yes or no to a flight within a pretty ordinary European flight would appear a bit over nanny like. It is good that they are available if you seek their advice and offer coaching on request, but other than that you ARE a licensed pilot.
Sebastian_H wrote:
It needs to be said that initially our reservations manager thought I was planning to block a plane for an inordinate amount of time and then only fly a few hours as there seemed to have been some trouble with such a booking in the past; in an email exchange leading to the trip, we talked at cross-purposes and only during the beer chat on the evening before I left, we figured out that I was not trying to get a block of time for free.
This is a common problem with clubs and renting in general. Most clubs have a minimum hour pay per day but how that is handled varies massively. The goal is to make sure that a full day rental does not deprive the club or the other membership unduely of a plane, e.g. flying 30 minutes but keeping the plane a full day or more.
The way we handle this is, that we do have a minimum rental time per day if nothing is said or done before. In some clubs, they will charge that per day regardless how much you fly, e.g. if the minimum rental is 2 hours per day and you fly for a week with a rest day, they will charge 2 hours for the rest day even if the total amount of hours is above the days rented x 2. Most will forego the daily charge if you fly more in total than the daily minimum even if the plane has sat for a few days. e.g: You rent for 5 days, fly 3 days but a total of 11 hours, it will be fine for some clubs, while others will charge the two rest days on top of that. Almost always in times where flying is at a low activity, clubs will be happy to rent out any time at all so it is always worth discussing this before you go on a longer trip.
The way I handle this is that the minimum will be charged if nothing is said previously, but only if the total time is less than the total days times the minimum hours. In almost all cases so far however, people renting for a week or two will tell me roughly what kind of hours they are planning, which may be considerably less. If they do that I usually make a not of that and if the hours actually flown are within reason of those predicted we’ll leave it at that.
Sebastian_H wrote:
But, I had a bit the impression that the club’s operating model (lots of flying lessons and half-day local trips) was less ideally suited to long-distance touring as I had planned it.
That is the case with most clubs and is why many people who fly longer trips regularly eventually go the ownership route. Some clubs however also have planes they operate particularly for longer trips, e.g they have their training planes and they have one or two touring planes.
But again, most of this can be sorted by talking to the people. In the time you did this, over the new year, I don’t think rental potential was so big that they would make you pay daily fees even if you came back a day early.
What is important as an OWNER is to NEVER put pressure on people to be back at all cost. I do tell this to all my pilots: If you feel unsafe, DON’T press on for the sake of getting the plane back on time, but TELL me about it. I guess what you might have done is to call them the day you came back that weather is bad and you’d possibly be back a day late, most probably the answer would have been, ok, thanks, take your time.
Well, flying is a learning process. You’ve done a lot of this now, but there is one other factor: Don’t let this flight erode your confidence overly, on the opposite. You show a remarkable sense of self-reflection and will, if you continue on this path, become a very competent pilot. The fact that you did land from your IMC encounter proves that you got the right nerves and skills for this job, even if you need to learn your limits, which in some points you now have. So I reckon take the lessons learnt, speak with the board of your club about it and get yourself requalified.
If you are thinking of travelling more then I’d suggest to think ownership before too long. In the class of what you rent now, it is well possible to do that. And there are planes better suited for longer x countries than Robins.
I don’t think there should be lot lf fuss about this on the club side to ban you from renting, the aircraft was always flown airworthy with that 10% hours extension, the runway grass excursion should have been a non event but a check on uour crosswind landing technique is a must
For weather, I personally would be very careful flying long trip in frontal weather bellow zero degres and risk IMC, it will never go according to plan and this will not change much in the future with further pilot qualifications and aircraft equipments (you are far better equipped in Robin as far as precautionary landing goes)
Altought, I think it would have been stupid and reckless doing that with family & passengers but I would not question club a PPL who want to fly an ambitious 1pob trip in that weather, it is even good to go and explore that boundary alone with backup plans or escape routes, you will set your limits later after you have seen how far these things goes…
As long as you are aware and happy with 80% chance of diverting to a big airport or landing in a field go for it !
There is nothing wrong with Robins as cross country aircraft and their demonstrated crosswind landing capability is better than most.(Most Robin 400’s have a demonstrated figure of 24kts).
The need to put a little pressure on the nose wheel after landing has nothing to do with crosswinds. It is a design thing, it doesn’t always happen but should be explained not just mentioned in any club using Robins. The problem is that it is more likely to occur the nearer you get to a kiss landing than if your landing is not so good.
The main problem (for some) in using the Robin 400 series for cross country journeys is perhaps a lack of speed compared to say the Mooney, but otherwise on a hp for hp basis the Robin will have a better useful load, less fuel consumption and better all round visibility.
Yes, I would have flown that trip the same way on a Robin as a Mooney, the former can land anywhere when you get caught and the later may climb higher or get away faster other that none of the two is able to punch though a layered stratus or cumlunimbus bellow 0C for more than 5min, the front chimey gear on a Robin need some technique for taxiying & landing with some crosswind
gallois wrote:
Most Robin 400’s have a demonstrated figure of 24kts).
That is pretty good indeed.
I’ve never flown Robins so far but people do like them generally. I did not like to fly Pipers and particularly the Seneca in x wind at all, but am very comfortable in the Mooney. Strange sometimes.
As cross country airplane, I did consider this one for a while.
It’s a HR100-Royal with 210 HP Continental Engine and a whopping 400 liter fuel tank and consequently almost 10 hours of range. I’d say that makes for a good 1200 NM in still air and VFR. Should be a pretty good x country plane.
@Ibra it is not a shimmy in the way you might get on a Rallye or Grob it is caused when you lift the nose wheel off the ground it drops slightly so that it stays straight, not affected by wind, once in the air reducing drag.
If you land and the nosewheel touches the ground gently it does not force the wheel strut upwards making the connection to the steering on the ground. It very rarely affects taxying but sometimes when you try to push the aircraft back into the hangar it becomes difficult to steer if the nose has been lifted when attaching the tow bar for instance. In this case you need to apply pressure to the nose to make sure the steering is linked.
HELP! I’m sure someone on here can explain this better than me.I only know the French phrases.
