Although I have no evidence to prove it, I think pilots of turbine aircraft are spending less time hanging around the airport regaling each other with flying tales. Most of them grab a rental car after landing and are off to a business meeting or family event. And COVID hasn’t helped the situation.
It’s a lost opportunity to share experiences and perhaps even save a life or two.
At the Citation Jet Pilots Association (citationjetpilots.com/safety), we have created a workaround. It’s called “What Good Looks Like” and is a video series available free to any pilot. Yours truly volunteers to fly a less than perfect flight in a FlightSafety International simulator, and then safety consultant, Neil Singer, demonstrates the “right way” to do it.
The series, now in its fifth year, began by showing things like engine out procedures and maneuvers you might expect to see in your recurrent training.
Then, something interesting happened. Call it “virtual hangar flying.”
Our safety foundation chairman, Tom Abood, shared a scary incident while flying his Citation CJ3. Right after takeoff, in low ceilings and icing conditions, Tom had his stick shaker engage. For those unfamiliar, the stick shaker causes the control column to vibrate vigorously, warning of an impending stall. A problem with the angle of attack vane in Tom’s airplane was sending invalid data to the stall warning system. We literally never train for this type of failure, and Tom was experiencing it in real-time, IFR conditions. This story could have had a nasty ending, but Tom set the appropriate pitch and power settings and maintained control.
Finding folks willing to share a story, especially if it calls attention to a less than perfect flight, is often challenging.
“Tom, could we tell your story in one of our videos?” I asked. “Sure, I’ll be happy to help,” he responded. He then met me in Wichita and we strapped into the simulator.
In the video, “Flight Control Stick Shaker,” you can see me experience the event and hear in Tom’s own words exactly what he was thinking as it happened. It’s worth watching even though it’s unlikely it could happen to anyone else.
But it did.
Several months later, one of our CJP members, Michael de Nigris, posted a story about his stick shaker inadvertently engaging right after takeoff. He and his co-pilot briefed the event and the possibility that it might happen again on approach to landing. Sure enough, it did. They simply flew as Tom did and made an uneventful landing.
I was amazed, and I answered Michael’s post with a reference to the video we had produced about Tom’s incident.
“I know all about the video,” said Michael. “I watched it a couple of months ago and remembered what Tom did while my stick shaker was vibrating. My situation was basically a non-event because of the video.”
Tom’s sharing some virtual hangar flying made Michael’s flight a little safer.
Fly safe.
