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an unusual attitude, and after transfer of the controls, the student will have to orient themselves and recover,” he added. “It’s a building block approach, and their skill level and confidence level goes up quickly.”
While one is all about VFR (visual reference) recoveries, day two’s sortie covers the same basic envelope ex- pansion maneuvers. But this time the canopy is covered by the retractable curtain to simulate IFR conditions, and recoveries are made on instruments.
“Depending on the student, we can also pull some sneaky stuff if we want – fail instruments and the like,” Laud- erback said. “We can allow pilots to make errors, see the results, and still recover the aircraft safely.”
“With the L-39 Turbojet, it’s a close to one-on-one correlation with the typical corporate turbojet – similar sights, sounds, and feels. The rate of roll and pitch are comparable along with power management and the use of speed brakes/spoilers,” he added. “Pilots are surprised about how famil- iar the L-39 feels after just a short time. It’s not exact, but it’s close.”
Along with the aforementioned unusual attitude and upset recovery training, Lauderback said that their program also spends significant time on angle-of-attack (AoA) familiariza- tion and training. It is a very useful tool for unusual attitude recoveries.
“Virtually every corporate aircraft today has an AoA indicator, but unless you are a naval aviator, it’s rarely used. Why? Because no one does a good job of training AoA,” he said. “It’s a great takeaway for our students. They have a better understanding of its use and
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L-39 Cockpit
the beneficial tool that it is, not only for unusual attitude recoveries but many other areas as well.”
The Benefits of a Thorough Debriefing
Lauderback stressed that one of the biggest benefits of their UPRT program is the in-depth debriefing each student gets after every sortie.
“We take great pride in our sophis- ticated debriefing system. Everything you do in the cockpit is recorded by our proprietary video system. It allows us to record everything from your actions to the individual instruments and indicators – even your instrument scan,” he explained. “We can go back and look at anything, from any mo- ment in time and see exactly what you are doing, right or wrong. Those things are normally lost if you can’t go back and review them. Debriefing is a big part of our program’s effectiveness.”
For example, the instructor and stu- dent review the video after the first sortie to see how much G force the student utilizes during a nose-low re- covery. The goal is to help ‘calibrate’ the pilot’s pull to the type of aircraft they are flying and stay within its structural limitations.
One demonstration that Lauder- back loves is to have the student put the L-39 in an approximate 30-de- gree nose-up attitude and have them close their eyes.
“I have them push forward on the elevator until they think they are at zero g’s, then terminate the maneuver and re-open their eyes,” he said. “The average pilot will stop at about one- half positive G, but it feels like zero G to them. Going back to the video,
we can show them the difference be- tween what they felt and where they actually were.”
Putting the Usual in Unusual
As you might well expect, devel- oping and honing the skills to truly master unusual attitudes normally takes a lot more than you can ac- complish in two days, even under the tutelage of Lauderback and his team. Recurrent UPRT is the logical follow-on. They take where each stu- dent finished with initial training and build on this foundation to advance their understanding and skills to the next level. Each recurrent training session starts with the IP (instructor pilot) reviewing your last video to have a better understanding of your ma- neuvering envelope, your strengths, and possible weaknesses. This allows the re-current training syllabus to be unique to the student and not just a “one size fits all” approach.
“Our goal is to expand a pilot’s en- velope so that they can recognize and avoid upset situations before they f ly into them,” he said. “We work hard to make our training enjoyable, not frightening. Yes, we may take you out of your comfort level, but it will help eliminate the fear of the unknown and give you a skill set that might just one day save lives.”
With well over 1,000 pilots from all kinds of backgrounds coming through Stallion 51’s UAT program, Lauder- back said it’s difficult to categorize what they each individually gain from the experience.
“One thing I can say, though, is that the biggest advocates of this type of training are the pilots who have been through it,” he said proudly. “They be- come better pilots and strong believers in the benefits of UPRT.”
Dale Smith has been a commercial, private and business aviation marketing and media communications specialist for nearly 40 years. He is an award- wining aviation journalist and aviation artist. Dale has been a licensed pilot since 1974 and has flown more than 40 different types of aircraft. Contact Dale at dalesmith206@comcast.net.