You don’t know for certain how well you or the airplane will perform until you’ve already committed yourself to flight. You have to bring your A game to even the first few minutes.
From an NTSB final report:
The pilot and two passengers departed in the multi-engine airplane from a controlled airport under night, marginal visual flight rules conditions. Radar showed the airplane climb to about 2,200 feet mean sea level (MSL). When the airplane was about three nautical miles (nm) from the airport, it began a descending left turn, followed by a right turn, losing about 700 feet of altitude during this time.
The airplane then began a climbing left turn. The left turn continued while its radius decreased until the end of the recorded data. During the final left turn, the airplane initially climbed about 400 feet, descended about 400 feet, and then climbed again about 1,300 feet before reaching its peak altitude of 2,800 feet MSL. The final recorded radar point was 0.1 nm from the accident site, and the calculated descent rate between the final two radar points was more than 5,000 feet per minute.
Postaccident examinations of the airframe, engines, and propellers revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The airplane’s avionics and instruments could not be functionally tested due to the extent of the impact damage.
The recorded weather conditions at the destination airport, located about six miles from the accident site, at the time of the accident included a broken ceiling at 1,000 feet above ground level (AGL), an overcast ceiling at 1,700 ft AGL, and visibility of six miles with mist. The radar data indicated that the airplane penetrated the cloud layers during the accident flight. The pilot held the appropriate certificates and ratings for operation of the multiengine airplane in instrument conditions but no clearance had been issued. The weather and light conditions at the time of the accident were conducive to the development of spatial disorientation. Further, the flightpath, which was not consistent with the intended course; the airplane’s repeated climbs and descents; and the loss of airplane control and high-speed impact were consistent with the known effects of spatial disorientation. Based on this evidence, it is likely that the pilot experienced spatial disorientation after the airplane entered the clouds at night, which led to his failure to maintain airplane control.
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause of this accident to be: The pilot’s loss of airplane control due to spatial disorientation while operating in night, instrument meteorological conditions.
This is (Not) Only a Test
It’s easy to dismiss this triple-fatality tragedy as a “VFR into IMC” loss of control, tell yourself “I’d never do that,” and move on. In part that’s true, but this crash – and many more like it, often flown by highly qualified pilots – points to another high-risk activity: the first few minutes of flight. Especially if it is your first flight of the day or the first flight of the day in a particular aircraft. The first moments of a flight are a test for both you and the machine.
Are you at your A game, that is, doing your very best from the beginning? Or do you need a few minutes to get back into your groove? Will the airplane perform perfectly, or is there a discrepancy that won’t become obvious until the airplane is in the air? You won’t know for certain until you take off. It’s a test, but it’s not only a test. You and your passengers must live with how you and the airplane fly before you’ve had time to catch up or to prove the airplane’s systems and equipment are set and working correctly.
Risk and Scrutiny
Any flight requires a serious evaluation of risk and detailed scrutiny. But unlike physical activity, playing a musical instrument or even public speaking, we don’t really have a “warm-up” period before we begin a flight. We can inspect the airplane meticulously in preflight and follow Before Takeoff checklists precisely. But some mechanical and software-driven things don’t reveal their true working nature until fired up and in flight.
So what can we do? Unless you are extremely current and the airplane is regularly flown, think hard before launching into instrument conditions or at night (and certainly into a combination of the two). Regulations and tradition have us gauge our proficiency based on arrivals – the number of landings in the previous 90 days for carrying passengers, the number of approaches for flying under IFR. Perhaps we should have another column in our logbook to track actual and simulated instrument departures. Unless a pilot has logged a departure (or six) into instrument conditions in the previous six months, actual or simulated, then that pilot might limit themselves to marginal VFR conditions for departure in the daytime or full visual meteorological conditions at night until resetting that currency counter. It’s as vital to proficiency as counting approaches, in my opinion.
It’s unlikely 14 CFR 61.57 will be updated to include such a requirement, and no doubt the “alphabet organizations” would fight it if FAA tried. But it’s not a bad idea as a personal
minimum to help cover for the fact we (or the airplane) may need just a little time to show our true capability as it exists in the first few minutes of flight.
Stack the Deck
You can do a lot to make the first few minutes easier and safer. Here’s one example:
Recently returning from a trip, I had to land at an airport about five miles from my home field, both nontowered airports in the Wichita Approach Control area. My primary airport was closed for runway repair, and I had positioned a car and arranged hangar space at the alternate until it reopened. We had an extended period of rainy weather and after four days it improved enough to move the airplane but still required I file and fly IFR and fly an approach. The weather was “few clouds” at 600, 1,000 overcast, visibility three miles.
A common tactic would simply be to file direct to my nearby destination. Heck, around here I could call Approach without even filing and get a local clearance for vectors. But taking off to the north, vectoring 180 degrees to a very nearby initial approach fix and then almost
immediately flying the procedure is a very high workload event – and it was my first flight in several days. I decided to stack the deck in my favor.
First, I filed an IFR flight plan from my destination airport to a fix about nine miles due north. From there, my flight plan went northeast about 15 miles to LASKI, another charted waypoint designed to give me plenty of time to turn around and head to the IAF for the approach. Since my destination is nontowered this should moot the ATC question, “Which approach do you request?” The entire route was about 73 nautical miles, and the flight would take 29 minutes, which seems excessive to move five miles laterally. But it saved the rapid-fire transition from takeoff to approach that would test me even if it wasn’t the first flight I’d made in several days.
Next, I did not make the hop first thing in the morning. I waited until about noon to see if conditions might improve and also to see if any PIREPs for low-level turbulence were issued. Surface winds were in the high 20s, not unusual for Kansas but on the threshold of releasing moderate or greater turbulence close to the ground. A little delay also let me better evaluate whether I was up to the flight. I’d had a bad cold about a week before, and I didn’t want any relapse to dizziness to show up in the air.
Before starting the engine, I thoroughly briefed the approach, including marking up the approach chart and making a “cheat sheet” of the items I needed to know from the final approach fix inbound and sticking it to my control wheel. I telephoned the ASOS at destination and got the airport information. Before takeoff, I uploaded my route, loaded the approach into the GPS, and set the minimums bug on the glass cockpit display. I preloaded the approach chart in the multifunction display and had it overlaid on the chart on my iPad. Everything was in its place. I would need to do very little besides fly, move the heading bug, and switch radio frequencies between takeoff and landing.
All that preparation came in handy when the autopilot tripped off repeatedly on my short, solid-IMC hop and I had to hand-fly the entire flight.
First Flight of the Day
We don’t see this much in light airplanes, but some flight manuals identify checklist steps that must be done prior to every flight and others that need to be done only before the first flight of the day. A good example is the flaps check in the Pilot’s Operating Handbooks of the piston Beechcraft models I frequently fly. They call for running the flaps through all positions to check the flap motor stops when the flaps reach the full down position. Also that the flaps (and motor) stop in the Approach position both when running the flaps down (from fully up) and when retracting the flaps (from fully down). I consider this a “first flight of the day” check and will skip this step when running the Before Takeoff checklist on subsequent flights. Another common first-flight-of-the-day item is cycling the propeller during engine runup. Other checks, such as controls free and correct, electric trim check (in case it triggers a runaway) and magneto check (to detect fouled or failed spark plugs), must be done before every flight.
Just as your preflight walkaround inspection before the first flight of the day is undoubtedly more complex and takes more time than your walkaround after a quick fuel stop during a day of flying, you may be able to cull some Before Takeoff system checks from the items you perform at the beginning of the second or third leg of a full day of flying.
Subsequent Flights
The hazard of doing this is complacency. Don’t rush through the checklists before you board or during the Before Takeoff checks. Take a look at your checklists and decide if there are any steps you don’t have to do before every single flight. If you eliminate any steps, do so not because they take time, but only if they are items that aren’t critical. You might highlight the Every Flight items or even make a second abbreviated checklist for takeoffs after the day’s first flight is complete. Still, use these amended checklists.
One last thing: If you make more than two flights in a single day, I suggest performing the full, first-flight checklists on subsequent flights. I especially recommend this if the later flight occurs at night. In part, this might catch something that has broken during the busy day. It also reflects the different settings of some items in darkness compared to when operating in daylight. Mainly, though, I suggest this to help slow you down and pace yourself, compensating somewhat for accumulated fatigue.
Bring Your A Game
The NTSB Probable Cause statement for the piston-twin accident that opened this article may suggest otherwise, but we don’t know for sure what may have contributed to the fatal loss of control. What we do know is that the theorized pilot-induced loss of control, or some undetected instrument or systems failure, or both, happened in the first few minutes of the flight.
You don’t know for certain how well you or the airplane will perform until you’ve already committed yourself to flight. You have to bring your A game to even the first few minutes. What warm-up we get is in mental preparation and physical workload reduction techniques completed before advancing power for takeoff, backed up by careful completion of systems and operational checklists.
