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Jet Journal
Small Mistakes
by Kevin Ware
Pilots are an odd group of people. They tend to be perfectionists who have an element of obsessive-com- pulsive behavior, and hate making mistakes, even very small ones. No matter how hard they try, most pi- lots rarely achieve a “perfect” f light where everything mechanically and performance-wise is flawless.
I suffer from this malady. So much so that even after a year goes by, I can often remember every little thing that went wrong on any given flight and mentally chastise myself, vowing never to let it happen again. From a purely psychological perspective, that may be a bit pathological, but if so, at least it is a constructive use of pathol- ogy because it makes for better pilots and safer flights.
Here are a few of the flights for which I am still chastising myself.
We are at FL410 over Klamath Falls, Oregon on a moonless night northwest bound under Oakland Center’s watch- ful eye. The Lear is on autopilot with the altitude set and shown in magenta
at the right upper corner of the pilot’s PFD (primary flight display). I am the pilot flying (PF) sitting in the left seat messing around with my iPad to look up the TIMBR2 arrival we expect to get into Portland. My search is interrupted when the pilot monitoring (PM) in the right seat says, “You are gaining alti- tude.” I look up, and sure enough, we are at 41,100 feet and slowly climbing.
My first thought is to see what hap- pened with the autopilot and FMS con- trol system, so I direct my attention to the set of tiny switches partially hid- den in the dark under the glare shield. As I am focusing on those switches, the next thing I hear from the PM is, “We are still climbing...watch it, or we are going to get violated.” The word “violated” finally wakes me from my autopilot reverie at which time I turn the thing off and manually take con- trol of the airplane. That was the right move, although a bit late, as we are now 200 feet above assigned altitude and that is likely to catch the attention of the controller.
With jets in the high flight levels, the distance between a stall and cruise airspeed is quite small (the so-called “coffin corner”) so pilots must be care- ful and gentle about control inputs when turning off the autopilot hand flying the airplane. I am aware of this fact and am now fully focused on the PFD, gradually reducing altitude hop- ing not to hear from the controller but confused as to what caused the altitude deviation.
So, I ask the PM, “Do you know what happened there, Mike?” To which he replies somewhat defensively, “No, but I didn’t touch a thing.” I then say, “Tell you what – I will hand fly the airplane and you re-set the autopilot on NAV and ALT and let’s see what it does.”
He does as instructed while I firmly hold the control wheel, only to find the airplane has completely forgotten about the whole episode and now f lies precisely at the selected altitude with no problem at all.
Several quiet and anxious minutes pass as we listen for the unpleasant
30 • TWIN & TURBINE / April 2019 Jet Journal