You’re on your Private Pilot checkride and established in a steep turn. Everything is perfect. You’re spot on your altitude and the bank angle is pegged at 45 degrees. It seems easy. You’re thinking: “I’ve got this!” Then the nightmare happens. Your scan moves down to your heading indicator and you realize you’ve already blown past the heading by 20 degrees. A good reference point could have prevented the dreaded pink slip.

It’s easy to get stuck inside the cockpit, staring at the instruments as if you’re wearing blinders to the outside world, particularly with the pretty screens in glass panel equipped airplanes. You may become fixated on the instruments to maintain heading, airspeed and altitude. But looking outside gives you the whole picture, literally. The horizon serves as the ideal reference for attitude. It takes a fraction of a second to determine whether the nose of the airplane is pointing down or up, or whether it is on the horizon. Another great benefit of keeping the eyes outside the cockpit, TIS, TCAS and TAWS aside, is that you can see if there is any traffic or a potential hazard in your path of flight.

Picking and using a reference point is much easier than trying to keep track of a tiny number on a round gauge or glass panel. The reference point helps you maintain a straight path. Unless you’re experiencing a severe crosswind aloft, the propeller should point right at your target. A prominent target also helps with timing at the completion of a steep turn. You are already subconsciously aware of the rate of turn as you watch the world go by through the windscreen, and as you come around you can see the target in your peripheral vision. Anticipating the end of the turn this way is much easier than watching the heading indicator.

With the exception of ground reference maneuvers, a good aiming point should be located in the distance, preferably at the horizon. The best type is a prominent mountain or structure of some kind – something that is hard to miss. This type of reference point is helpful for maneuvers such as steep turns, stalls and slow flight, and can also help keep you straight in the legs of the traffic pattern. A prominent reference point at the horizon can also be used for Chandelles and Lazy Eights, but in this case one wingtip should point to the reference point at the beginning and the opposite wingtip at the completion of the maneuver.

Targets for ground reference maneuvers are generally easy to find. The key is to find a shape that suits the maneuver. If you’re doing turns around a point, try to find a round shape, such as a water tower. For S-turns, find a long, straight line, like a freeway, railroad tracks or power line that you can use to align your wingtips at the completion of each turn. Eights-on-pylons provide the biggest challenge for finding reference points. Optimally, you need two points of similar shape and size, at a distance that allows two circular turns around each point and a short segment of straight and level flight between each turn.

Whether you’re practicing maneuvers or just flying around, reference points are great aids. While instruments give you more detailed information about flight conditions, the view outside the airplane tells you everything you need to know about your progress through the maneuver, without interpretation or scanning. Spend most of your time looking outside, but always keep your eyes moving to verify the outside picture with the gauges on the panel. You may need small corrections to pitch, power, bank and yaw to maintain the perfect track. But looking outside will prevent the dreaded overshoot that could get you a pink slip on a checkride or make you drift into the path of another airplane at an airport with parallel runways.

I once spent two hours and eleven minutes cooped up in a non-motion visual display flight simulator getting thoroughly schooled in holding pattern technique from an instructor (a young guy, go figure) who was quite expert at it. Quite unlike me and most pilots I know, he adored holding patterns. He liked teaching them even more. He talked to me at some great length about the methods for figuring the proper entry and then flying it–he was a stickler for using all three entry types and was none too pleased with my shunning of the odd and illogical parallel entry. (Psss…don’t tell him, but I still don’t fly them. They make no sense!) His biggest thrill, however, came when he got to explain at even greater length how to determine heading for holding when there’s a crosswind. It has to do with tripling the correction angle when outbound, or correcting the tripling angle when inbound; I forget exactly. But for those two hours, I was flying them like a pro.

Of course, to teach me all this he had to turn off the displays on the Garmin G1000 in the sim, which, when illuminated, showed me a lovely racetrack holding pattern and directed me to a proper entry. See, if I had had that information, well, we wouldn’t have gotten to do any math at all. I just could have flown the magenta line. Which is what I do in my airplane now whenever I get a hold. Which is close to never. Except in training, when I get them all the time.

It is conceivable that one of these days ATC will tell me to hold Northeast of XYZ VOR as published; it’s happened twice in my 15 years of IFR flying, including once when I had a stacked approach. So it is important to know, even if it’s not something we use all the time. But when it comes to hold entries and wind correction, come on. The controller wants you on the protected side of the airspace (with wide margins, something your instrument instructor probably never mentioned) and he wants you on altitude. Because the real goals are for you not to hit anybody and to stay out of the controller’s hair until he’s got something better to do with you.

Now, wind is important. It’s how airplanes fly and, often, how they don’t get to where they’re going or overshoot the mark altogether, like in the traffic pattern when you’ve got a stiff tailwind on base leg. So it’s important to understand wind when flying close to the ground. When you’re in the hold, it’s not such a big deal. Especially when you can see the winds aloft on your PFD. Then it’s just like base leg with a tailwind. Turn a little early or a little late (how early depending on hard the wind is howling) and you’ll be fine. No math needed. Not that it’s a big help to begin with. I remember asking an instructor one time about how many turns in the hold it took before he nailed the wind correction angle. “Three,” he said. I asked how many times he’d had three turns in the hold in real life. He shot me a dirty look and continued with the lesson.

It’s the same with the ILS. Understanding how an ILS works is important. As you get nearer the runway, the sensitivity increases and the deflection of the needles gets more dramatic. It’s angular! Once you’ve got that concept down, understanding how much deflection means how much off course at how far from the station is not particularly valuable knowledge. What is valuable is knowing that you need to keep the needles centered or close to it and getting good at doing that in different conditions. Knowing what two dots deviation on the localizer means when you’re three miles out is useful in theory if you’re sitting on the ground with a pencil, a piece of paper, a slide rule and a bear claw. When you’ve got a moving map and a glideslope indicator on your HSI, who needs the math?

A lot of these little math tricks were developed when we needed to figure things out to know where we were in space compared to our favorite places on terra firma. That’s all situatioal awareness is, after all. Holding on to these quaint and arcane pieces of knowledge when we have to tools to put them aside strikes me as missing the point. We want to arrive in one piece. The less time we spend doing math–and crosswords and sudoku–the more time we have to make judgments about the particular conditions of the day’s flight, which is what really matters.

I recently asked FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt about the tough time that applicants have been having on FAA Knowledge Testing (the tests that many of us still refer to as the “writtens”). Many test takers are failing the tests because the FAA has included a lot of new, previously unpublished questions that are hard to get right even if you do know your stuff. The FAA thought it would see this as proof that test takers had been gaming the system and found out instead that, if it wants to, it can get people to fail the written.

Babbitt’s response to my question on the subject was essentially that test takers need to study harder. This was a disappointing response and betrayed a misunderstanding of two things: how bad most of the FAA written tests are and how the flying public at large views the tests.

The situation used to be tenable. The FAA issued all of the questions and the test preparation industry did a commendable job of creating software and videos to help prospective test takers bone up for the written. They studied, learned a lot and memorized the answers to the worthless questions, and everyone was happy.

Or so it seemed. Things started getting dicey about a decade ago, when the FAA began to get uncomfortable with people (like me) getting perfect scores on the tests while taking very little time to complete them. They felt as though that indicated that test takers were memorizing the answers. There is a good explanation for that conclusion. The test takers were memorizing the answers.

Rule followers might think that this is cheating, and it would be if two things were true. First, if in memorizing the answers the test takers didn’t learn the knowledge being tested, it would be cheating. Second, on top of that, if the questions actually tested something important to know, then memorizing the answers would be cheating.

Many of the questions were pointless, and on those questions that did hold some meaning, the act of memorizing the questions and answers surely had some value. Rote memorization has taken a beating in education theory of late, but that’s how I learned what 7 x 8 is and how I still can come up with 56. So don’t bad-mouth memorization.

To see how bad some of the questions are, let’s take an example question from the commercial written exam.

Inbound on the 190 radial, a pilot selects the 195 radial, turns 5 degrees to the left, and notes the time. While maintaining a constant heading, the pilot notes the time for the CDI to center is 10 minutes. The ETE to the station is

A. 20 minutes
B. 15 minutes
C. 10 minutes
D. It doesn’t matter. No one ever does this in an airplane.

The correct answer, of course, is D, “It doesn’t matter. No one ever does this in an airplane.” Unfortunately, D was the only answer the FAA didn’t supply. I had to make it up myself just now. The correct answer, as far as the agency is concerned, is … well, unless you’re taking the test, it doesn’t really matter, now, does it?

So here is an example of a question that tests something no pilots need to know and will never use if they did know it. Is it cheating to memorize the answer, then? Of course it’s not.

Why, you might ask, does the FAA include such useless questions? It’s because it needs to get test takers to miss questions, for fear it will look as though the test is too easy if everybody does well. The problem is that we all work hard to get good scores on the written. This kind of a test is really all about testing minimum qualifications, not limiting the field, as is necessary with some kinds of admissions testing.

If the FAA were to write only questions that mattered and that an applicant could reasonably be expected to get right after a solid course of study, then the test would matter and no one would have a gripe.

Such, however, is far from the case, and the FAA, from Randy Babbitt on down, doesn’t get that.

Flight Sim 1930

Last month I wrote about how much Young Eagles has meant to the aviation world as a whole and how much it will mean in years to come. While only a small percentage of the group’s young people will take the keys to an airplane any time soon, there are thankfully a few great ways they can participate in flight without spending a lot of dough, and we should celebrate this fact.

In last month’s “Stuck for a Week,” I wrote about how an extended delay can eventually lead someone to diminish or ignore what should be obvious risks. Another common cause of faulty risk awareness involves failing to “do the math.” Risk factors seldom operate in isolation. Multiple risk factors will typically interact with each other, causing at least an additive effect, and often go far beyond that to multiply the total risk many times over.

For a simple example, let’s say you know the tires on your car are worn to the point where there is very little tread left. Because money is tight, you decide to defer purchasing new tires for a few more months. At that point every trip you take in the car carries with it the increased risk that you will skid if you have to stop quickly. A few weeks later it is raining hard as you hop in the car to do an important errand. Even with new tires, the wet roads increase the risk that you will skid, especially if you have to stop suddenly. However, with bald tires that risk is increased to the point that, if someone pulls out in front of you, you will not be able to stop in time and will find yourself staring at your crumpled wreck of a car, kicking yourself for not getting the new tires. The combined risk of the bald tires and the wet roads was much greater than the sum of the two separate risk factors.

Let’s consider how we as pilots often find ourselves sliding down that same slippery slope of increasing risk. Imagine you are a low-time private pilot who recently received your instrument rating. You have been very busy at work, so you have had only one local flight over the last five months since you passed the instrument flight test. You have also noticed that the attitude indicator seems to be getting a little sluggish and have made a mental note to get it checked during the next annual inspection. None of this worries you much because you don’t plan on taking any serious trips in the near future.

Then a friend suggests that you fly together on a weekend mountain fishing trip. Like your flying, your fishing has fallen prey to a busy schedule, so the chance to get away for the weekend while doing the two things you love is very enticing. You are, of course, aware of your low time and lack of recent experience, but a quick check of the weather forecast shows a fairly good weekend followed by rain and storms the following week. Since the weekend weather looks good, you enthusiastically agree and start planning the trip.

As you check the weather for your departure, you find that early effects of the coming storm are causing overcast clouds nearer your destination. You figure that’s not a problem, since you are still legal to fly IFR and will be flying only in instrument conditions en route. You launch with your friend on a beautiful clear morning but soon encounter the thickening clouds and have to concentrate on flying the airplane despite your rusty scan. You are glad the weather at the destination is supposed to be VFR so that an instrument approach won’t be necessary.

As you approach the destination, you are surprised to find that the weather in the mountains is much worse than forecast, and it looks like you will have to fly an instrument approach. At least the weather is still well above minimums, so that should not be a problem. You get out the approach plate and carefully study the approach, trying to remember everything you were taught during your instrument training while keeping the airplane on track and following the instructions of the controller. It is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything, let alone stay ahead of the airplane.

Just when you feel like you are hanging on by your fingernails, and are counting the minutes until you are safely on the ground, the attitude indicator gradually tilts over to one side. You desperately try to remember the partial panel flying you did during your instrument training, but it is all too much to handle, and soon you find yourself desperately hauling back on the control wheel as the airspeed indicator winds up and the altimeter winds down. It is all over in a matter of seconds.

This same scenario has been replayed thousands of times with different sets of details. Typical risk factors include:

• Lack of overall experience.
• Lack of recent experience.
• Little or no time in type.
• Fatigue.
• Known mechanical issues or failures.
• Loading the airplane over maximum gross weight.
• Loading the airplane out of the CG envelope.
• Departing without enough fuel.
• Headwinds that increase the amount of fuel needed.
• Failure to check the weather.
• Weather worse than forecast.
• Failure to assess runway requirements.

In each case, one risk after another is either ignored or accepted over the course of a flight. Each individual decision may seem fairly reasonable at the time, but taken in the context of the previously accepted risks, the pilot is accumulating an unacceptable level of total risk. All it takes is one unanticipated event for the entire house of cards to come tumbling down.

The best way to avoid this scenario is to carefully keep track of each decision you make and maintain an accurate tabulation of all risk factors previously accepted, with a rough idea of the total risk at that point. If you make a decision based on certain parameters, also set a “no go” or “turnaround” value for that parameter. In the hypothetical example above, the pilot could have decided that, due to his lack of total, instrument, mountain or recent experience and the sluggish attitude indicator, he would not depart or would turn around if it looked like he would have to fly in instrument conditions.

When reading accident reports, it is often heart wrenching to watch the steady accumulation of risk until it reaches the point where an accident is inevitable. The challenge is to have “hindsight in foresight” and be aware of the growing chain of risk as it is happening. With each new decision you face, go over your mental or written list of risk factors, not only assessing the total accumulated level of risk, but also considering how various risk factors might interact to quickly make the situation much worse. To fight the common tendency to do some “wishful thinking,” maintain an attitude of aggressive skepticism, always considering the potential consequences if the weather is worse than forecast or an intermittent problem finally becomes a permanent failure.

Often there are alternative solutions available that allow the trip to be completed safely. For example, there might be an airport at a lower elevation outside the mountainous terrain where the weather would remain VFR throughout the weekend. The pilot and his friend could land there and rent a car for the remainder of the trip into the mountains, thus allowing them to still enjoy the weekend fishing trip while holding to the pilot’s commitment not to fly in instrument conditions. Even if that is not possible, keep a rational perspective on risk versus benefit. Remember that the fish will still be there next week, and that whatever is driving your relentless pursuit of making it to the destination is probably not worth dying for.

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