AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2016 - 100

P&E

PROFICIENCY

TRAINING FOR SAFETY

Holistic approach emphasizes prevention, reaction
The AOPA Air Safety Institute's position on accident avoidance has recently evolved
and it's certainly noteworthy. In addition to avoidance, ASI supports a more proactive
approach to accident prevention that includes "training for safety." In this way pilots
are taught both how to avoid and how to deal with a situation (such as VFR into IMC)
when it occurs. For instance, the institute's newest seminar series, "Emergency: Getting
it Right When Things Go Wrong" focuses on how to keep abnormal situations from
becoming full-blown emergencies and gives advice for specific emergency scenarios.
WEB

www.airsafetyinstitute.org

Actually, the study disappeared from
history for almost 40 years, but then rose
to prominence in the early 1990s. That's
when part of the study was written up in
the second person, creating a countdown
to disaster for a fictional pilot in IMC: "You
now have 100 seconds to live. You glance
at your altimeter and are shocked to see it
unwinding.... You now have 45 seconds to
live. Now you're sweating and shaking....
You have 10 seconds to live."
It ends, I kid you not, with, "You open
your mouth to scream but... you have no
seconds left."
The attention-grabbing story spread
like wildfire, generally with the statement that the author is unknown. It first
appeared in print in a 1993 article in FAA
Aviation News titled "178 Seconds to Live:
Spatial Disorientation Can Be a Killer."
In 2003, Transport Canada reprinted
the scenario as one of its "Take Five..."
bulletins. In 2006, it was the cover story of
Flight Safety Australia. In the past decade,
the "178 seconds to live" story has been
featured on countless blogs, flight instruction websites, pilot Internet forums, a
handful of books, and even advertisements for autopilots. The statistic itself,
without the story, has appeared in articles
in markets as diverse as General Aviation
News, Smithsonian Air & Space, the Indian
Journal of Aerospace Medicine, and the
Montana Pilots Association newsletter. It's
even part of the Wikipedia entry on spatial
disorientation.
In 2009, the story got a new life when
the AOPA Air Safety Institute made a dramatic black-and-white video of the same
text, complete with an increasingly rapid
heartbeat as background audio and a large,
green digital timer counting down the
pilot's remaining seconds of life. Like its
100 | AOPA PILOT March 2016

written forbearer, the sensational video
garnered a lot of attention. It also caused
many pilots to question if the use of scare
tactics is the best way to inform and educate the pilot community.
The institute itself wasn't even sure
what to do with the video. Calling it a
"scare 'em straight" video, an Air Safety
Institute blog asked readers to vote on
whether it should be shown to new pilots.
Opinions were mixed, but one thing
is certain: The video went viral as did its
written counterpart.
Most of what's written on VFR into
IMC focuses on ways to avoid getting into
the situation in the first place: getting better
at reading weather, setting personal minimums, and avoiding get-there-itis. But not
much has been written on what to do if it
actually happens to you. That's the real tragedy, especially when you learn the lost part
of the story-the part no one remembers.
The original study was done in a
Beechcraft Bonanza C35 using IFRtraining goggles to simulate IMC. Each
volunteer pilot was accompanied by an
instructor, and an observer who recorded
details of the flight. The pilots ranged in
age from 19 to 60, with total flight times
ranging from 31 hours to 1,625 hours. The
purpose of the original study wasn't to
find out how quickly control was lost in
IMC-not at all. The study's charter from
the AOPA Foundation (now the AOPA Air

Safety Institute) was to "Devise simple,
practical curriculum for special training
program intended only to teach a pilot to
keep plane upright if caught on instruments, make good enough 180-degree turn
to get back to VFR weather, or get down
through cloud deck." In fact, the name
of the study was the "180-Degree Turn
Experiment."
So where did the whole "178 seconds"
thing come from? It was the pre-test, a
control group to let the researchers measure how effective their training program
was. The real purpose of the study was to
measure the effectiveness of a new six-hour
training program to teach noninstrumentrated pilots how to turn tail safely and get
out of a bad situation by making a controlled
instrument 180-degree turn followed by a
descent. The authors called this curriculum
a "fly out," not a "fly through" procedure.
"The non-instrument pilot encountering either actual or simulated instrument
flight conditions for the first time usually over-controls the airplane," wrote the
researchers. "He is also likely to fix his
attention on one instrument and ignore
the others."
Their plan? Six steps to safety:
1. Use the inherent stability of the airplane
as a partial solution.
2. Reduce the possibility of over-control.
3. Minimize the control required.
4. Limit division of attention of the pilot.
5. Reduce the possibility of structural damage from over-speed.
6. Teach pilot the key instruments to focus
attention on.
I won't bore you with the details. You can
read the original report online-just Google
"180-degree turn experiment"-but in a nutshell, here's the procedure laid out for pilots
who have inadvertently entered IMC:
Center the ball. Hands off the yoke.
Control the airplane with the trim tab. Lower
the gear, reduce the power, and trim for slow

WHY A BONANZA?

180-degree-turn test subjects up for the challenge
Researchers chose the Beechcraft Bonanza C35 for their 180-degree turn experiment
because preliminary flight testing indicated the technique would be most difficult to
accomplish in the Bonanza: "In short, the assumption was made that if the subjects,
none of whom had soloed a Bonanza, could master the technique in this airplane,
they could master it in any single-engine airplane under 3,000 pounds gross weight."
http://www.airsafetyinstitute.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2016
