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Briefing Room
Turbojet, and, of course, flying airshow demonstrations.”
“Being around the corporate community and attending a variety of sophisticated training programs, I was struck by the lack of training in unusual attitude and upset recoveries. Yes, it was normally touched on but not covered in any detail,” he said.
“We started our Upset, Prevention & Recovery Training (UPRT) program in 2012,” Lauderback added. “Our goal was to help every type of pilot, but es- pecially corporate pilots, expand their envelope of skills and comfort zones.”
He explained that while flying the P-51 Mustang was a thrill for UAT’s students, it really was not the best plat- form for honing the skills of a turbine pilot between the big propeller, Merlin engine, and analog instruments. The question became how to match the aircraft to the program’s goal?
Train Like You Fly
“We’d love to do this training in actual corporate aircraft, but due to margins of safety, it’s just not possi- ble. They’re normally not structurally strong enough to withstand a student’s possible incorrect recovery,” he said. “That’s why we use a highly-modified L-39 Turbojet. It’s very strong struc- turally and has been modified with instrumentation very similar to what they might be flying.”
“Additionally, its handling qualities are similar to a typical corporate jet,” he continued. “We’ve tried to match the aircraft as close as we possibly can yet keep the safety margins.”
But you may be thinking, “What about the upset recovery schools that use popular piston aerobatic aircraft for training?” Lauderback said that while he is a strong proponent of this kind of training and feels it is a good baseline, it isn’t really optimal for training pilots who f ly turbine- powered aircraft.
“We look at preventing upsets as our number one goal. If you find yourself in an unusual attitude, what is the opti- mum form of recovery?” he explained. “Aircraft can be maneuvered safely well outside of their normal envelope if one understands and knows how to properly recover from such attitudes.”
“As aircraft are becoming more automated, there seems to be less of an emphasis on stick and rudder skills for pilots,” stated Lee Lauderback, Chief Pilot for UAT, LLC. “If you look at the pilots coming through our pro- gram, a large number of them – and these are very experienced pilots – have never flown past a 60-degree bank angle. They have a very limited maneuvering en- velope that they are comfortable with and proficient.”
“In training, pilots normally don’t actually stall turbine air- craft; they are basically taught
as the stick shaker activates to recover. It’s said that a stall warn-
ing shaker ‘prevents’ a stall, but
not necessarily so,” Lauderback continued. “It’s only an artificial pre-stall warning. What if the system is out of calibration or the deceleration rate is so high the pilot reaction is not adequate to prevent the stall or the on-set of G is rapid enough that they pull through the shaker warning to the actual stall?” Two recent accidents have proven this to be true.”
“In my experience, in the personal and corporate aviation worlds, a pilot is closer to an actual stall in a circling approach than they might realize,” he said. “As an example, if they put any kind of Gs on the aircraft to increase
14 • TWIN & TURBINE / February 2022
Lee Lauderback
the turn rate, their V-ref might not be adequate to prevent a stall.”
And when Lauderback talks “ex- perience,” he’s not spreading hangar hyperbole. He spent 18 years as Arnold Palmer’s chief pilot, f lying a variety of Learjets, Citations and helicopters. Today, he has well over 22,000 hours, with a great percentage dedicated to instructing in the TF- 51 Mustang, Aero Vodochody L-39