Page 16 - Index

Arizona Type Rating 1/4 page
4/C Ad
www.winner-aviation.com mail to: mx@winner-aviation.com
bouncing up and down. Thinking some of the engine’s spark plugs may be fouled from combustion deposits, you select both magnetos, advance the power slightly and lean the mixture ag- gressively to increase the cylinder temperature and burn off the deposits. After about a minute, you re-do the magneto check. You find the left mag alone gives a 50 rpm drop, as before; the right magneto alone runs much more smoothly, but still gives about a 150 rpm drop and the tach needle still bounces a bit. What do you do?
My impression – based on 30 years of flight instruction and my own tendencies when faced with seemingly minor issues that appear to have at least partially corrected themselves – is that on a training flight most pilots would reluctantly call off the flight and taxi the airplane back to the mechanic’s hangar. But outside of an instructional environment, I believe most pilots would mentally latch onto the minor improvement seen after aggressively ground-leaning. They’d rationalize that the problem was only a little carbon on the plugs, and that the heat and power of takeoff and climb would burn the rest off. I’d be tempted to make this rationalization myself. After all, it’s run- ning fine when both mags are selected, they’d think, and it got better with only a short exposure to a little extra heat during ground-leaning. What could go wrong?
What’s the Difference?
A balked landing is a normal part of a required Flight Review. If you don’t put yourself in a position to require a go-around while flying with an instructor, the instructor is going to have to manufacture a reason to see you practice the balked landing maneuver. We expect to have to fly a balked landing now and then during a training flight. A go-around is considered routine in a training environment. But we almost never go around outside of instructional flights.
A magneto check is a normal part of every departure, but we almost never see a bad magneto check. We know there’s a “trick” of running the engine at moderate power with the mix- ture significantly leaned to burn off combustion deposits, and if that trick works – even a little – it reinforces that even more heat should result in even cleaner plugs. So, in normal opera- tions pilots are conditioned to rationalize a takeoff following a bad magneto check, something they would probably never do with an instructor observing their actions.
In our day-to-day flying, we’re far more focused on meeting the objective of making it to the planned destination. Anything less is “failure.” Further, we want to tackle unusual situations and overcome obstacles between us and our objective – it’s in our psyche as a pilot to solve problems and attain goals. A systems discrepancy is a problem to be solved. A request from a control- ler becomes a challenge, one that we naturally try to master.
Here’s the difference: While a situation in training usually prompts a pilot to make one decision, a similar scenario in ev- eryday flying tends to make pilots make a different decision. More succinctly, in training pilots are pessimists – we expect and look for problems, and make conservative decisions based on what provides the safest outcome or one. In non-instructional, “normal” flying, pilots are optimists – we assume things will al- ways turn out well, and may even get better. We make decisions that we feel will result in the expected or most convenient result,
Winner Aviation 1/4 page 4/C Ad
www.winner-aviation.com mail to: mx@winner-aviation.com
14 • TWIN & TURBINE
October 2018