“When confronted with a crisis, you will not rise to the occasion; you will descend to the level of your training.”
– Lee Lauderback, Chief Pilot, UAT/Stallion 51
According to FAA statistics, on average, there is one fatal loss of control (LOC) accident every four days. And they’re not confined to inexperienced pilots yanking and banking close to the ground. Loss of control happens to very experienced pilots flying very sophisticated aircraft. And therein could lie part of the problem.
“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 program, 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 envelope that they are comfortable with and proficient.”
“In training, pilots normally don’t actually stall turbine aircraft; they are basically taught as the stick shaker activates to recover. It’s said that a stall warning 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 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, flying 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 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 especially 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 platform 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 possible. 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 structurally 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 fly turbine-powered aircraft.
“We look at preventing upsets as our number one goal. If you find yourself in an unusual attitude, what is the optimum 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.”
Broadening one’s personal abilities and comfort zone is why he refers to the majority of UAT’s training as being aimed at “Envelope Expansion.”
Ready Pilot One
“Identifying each student’s background is one of the first things we do. Each pilot is different, and our two-day program is tailored to each student’s personal comfort level and maneuvering envelope,” Lauderback said. “As an example, if you are a former military pilot, your training is obviously different than a pilot who has never flown beyond a 60-degree bank angle. Envelope expansion is based on foundations and does not have to be intimidating.”
He said that UAT’s team of instructors run the gamut from corporate pilots (Lauderback’s focus) to airline, military, airshow, and bush pilots. No matter what you fly, one of their instructors has a similar background and can relate to your kind of flying.
After the first day’s welcome session, students receive an aeromedical briefing presented by UAT/ Stallion 51’s resident Naval aviator/Flight Surgeon, Captain William “Doc” Busch, Ret. Doc’s presentation explores what causes pilots to become spatially disoriented, how to identify the conditions, and the best ways to get through them.
“Next comes the aerodynamics of unusual attitudes, like V-G diagrams, stalls and stall speed manipulation, maneuvering speed, unloading, rolling and pulling as well as the many other aspects of advanced maneuvering,” Lauderback continued. “Digging deep into the aerodynamics is critical to getting a good picture of what is happening when your cockpit goes all topsy turvy.”
Following aerodynamics, the next brief is on the dynamics of recovery. Options are reviewed, and optimum recovery techniques are discussed.
Now for the Fun Stuff
Lauderback stressed that safety is UAT’s number one priority. Students receive a detailed pre-flight briefing prior to every sortie. Each flight’s procedures, goals and objectives are clearly defined. Then students climb into the rear seat of the L-39 for a detailed cockpit briefing, including egress procedures before flight.
“Our students do roughly 95 percent of the flying. That’s the best way for them to stay comfortable and build confidence while expanding their maneuvering envelope,” he said. “After arriving in the working area, the student will take a few minutes to settle into the L-39, its control feel, roll rate and general handling qualities.”
“During clearing turns, we start to work on G awareness and calibration, then look in-depth at stalls, both clean and configured, normal and accelerated,” Lauderback explained. “Then on to envelope expansion. The instructor will normally talk them into an attitude and talk them through the recovery. The next training segment, they will get talked into the attitude, and without coaching, they fly the recovery.”
“In the third segment, with their eyes closed and chin on their chest, the instructor will place the aircraft in 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 expansion 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,” Lauderback 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 familiar 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) familiarization 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 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 sophisticated 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 moment 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 student review the video after the first sortie to see how much G force the student utilizes during a nose-low recovery. 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 Lauderback loves is to have the student put the L-39 in an approximate 30-degree 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 between what they felt and where they actually were.”
Putting the Usual in Unusual
As you might well expect, developing and honing the skills to truly master unusual attitudes normally takes a lot more than you can accomplish in two days, even under the tutelage of Lauderback and his team. Recurrent UPRT is the logical follow-on. They take where each student 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 maneuvering 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 envelope so that they can recognize and avoid upset situations before they fly 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, Lauderback 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 become better pilots and strong believers in the benefits of UPRT.”
