AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2016 - 102

P&E

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PROFICIENCY

flight. Make a shallow-bank 180-degree turn
using the rudder only. Level off. Reduce
power for 400 to 500 fpm descent.
That's it. Each participant went
through a curriculum of six one-hour
periods comprising preflight discussions,
flights, and postflight discussions to learn
and practice the technique.
After the training, how did the 178th
Second Squadron of 20 volunteers do? Each
pilot was put through three more scenarios,
for a total of 60 sorties for the group. This
time there was no 178 seconds. In 59 of the
60 flights, the pilots successfully controlled
the airplane, completed a 180-degree turn,
descended out of the simulated cloud deck
safely, and "lived" to fly another day.
So what happened to the 180-degree
emergency turn? Why do we remember
the "scared straight" time of 178 seconds,
but not the real reason for the study-much
less its amazing results?
I don't know. At some point the powers
that be decided it was easier to try to scare
people into avoiding a bad situation rather
than to teach them how to work through
the problem if they found themselves in it.
Later, a new technique began to gain
popularity: the four Cs. Climb, Communicate,
Confess, Comply. The theory was that if you
just went into IMC, you are probably close
to the ground from scud-running, so you
need altitude. Take the airplane up farther
into the soup, call for help, and get radar
vectors to somewhere sunny. But I'm not
sure that's realistic, given the workload of
controlling the airplane, changing the radio
to the emergency frequency, changing attitude, and beating that 178-second clock. If
the four Cs are such a great solution, why
haven't accident statistics shown a corresponding dramatic improvement?
By contrast, a simple training
program in 1954 showed dramatic
improvements in pilot performance in
inadvertent IMC. Maybe it's time to add
a lesson from the past to the flight training curricula of today.
AOPA
WILLIAM E. DUBOIS is an aviation writer

who holds a commercial pilot certificate
with instrument rating, and advanced and
instrument ground instructor certificates.
He blogs his personal flying adventures at
www.PlaneTales.net

102 | AOPA PILOT March 2016
http://www.aopainsurance.org/hangar http://www.aviationseminars.com/pilot http://www.aopafoundation.org http://www.PlaneTales.net
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2016
