Flight Training - July 2014 - 4

RIGHT SEAT

By Ian J. Twombly
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THE SKY IS FALLING

THUNDERSTORMS, CRASHES,
AND ENGINE FAILURES, OH MY

or all their practicality, pilots have a flare for the dramatic.
Everyone has a story about being on fire, losing engines,
running low on fuel, or surviving some weather catastrophe.
You'll be surprised to learn that somewhere around a quarter
of these are actually true.
Magazine stories can be similarly over
the top. They say that death, danger,
and doom are seconds away if you don't
remember to turn on your landing light or
use your after-landing checklist. We tend
to shy away from these types of references,
but I'm afraid that in this issue we've failed
miserably. The cover is intentionally dramatic and the stories are cautionary.
And, unfortunately, in our case all these
stories are true. Our cover story about a
thunderstorm encounter happened many
years ago (see "Knocked Sensless," p. 26),

and has done virtually no real-world
flying. It's a quandary-a classic chickenand-egg problem. How does one gain
experience safely without the experience
to fly safely?
There are two basic answers. First, you
fly within a set of parameters that allows
you to slowly increase your knowledge
and judgment. This is akin to starting
in the shallow end of the pool until you
know how to tread water. The second
thing you can do is be a lifelong student of
aviation. A pilot who is mentally curious

A PILOT WHO IS MENTALLY CURIOUS HAS THE
ABILITY TO LEARN AND GAIN EXPERIENCE
WITHOUT EVER PUTTING HIMSELF IN DANGER.
a lack of checklist usage has caused accidents (see "More than a List," p. 32), and
carbon monoxide can and does kill people
(see "Aviate and Ventilate," p. 36).
Learning how to fly an aircraft
ultimately comes down to two key things-
acquiring the skills to control the machine
completely through the flight envelope,
and gathering a base of knowledge upon
which you can develop judgement. The
time will come when you are faced with a
situation that didn't come up during training. Your training is meant to teach you
how to use the tools to arrive at a decision.
It's not meant to give you the answer. If
that were the case you'd be flying with
an instructor forever-which would get
expensive, not to mention impractical.
Obviously high-time pilots can continually draw upon their experience to
get the right answer, where a student
has only a limited amount of knowledge

FLIGHTTRAINING.AOPA.ORG

has the ability to learn and gain experience without ever putting himself in
danger. By learning through the mistakes
of others, he can know to avoid thunderstorms by at least 20 miles without
testing different distances first-hand. He
can learn why the checklist item calls
for leaning the mixture during taxi so he
doesn't take off with fouled spark plugs.
And he can learn that if the engine ever
quits, that same checklist should stay
comfortably stowed until he's established
a glide, chosen a landing spot, and tried
his own restart.
So, my apologies if the stories this month
are a little alarmist. But it's better to be reading about these issues on the ground than
experiencing them in flight.
Email Editor Ian J. Twombly at ian.twombly@aopa.
org; Twitter: ijtwombly; and visit Flight Training on
Facebook.

Publisher | Mark Baker

Senior VP, Media/Editor in Chief | Thomas B. Haines
Editor | Ian J. Twombly
Editor at Large | Thomas A. Horne
Managing Editor | Julie Summers Walker
Technical Editors | Mike Collins, Jill W. Tallman
Senior Editors | Dave Hirschman, Alton K. Marsh
Media Production Specialist | Sylvia Horne
Administrative Assistant | Miriam E. Stoner
Contributors | Pete Bedell, Greg Brown, LeRoy Cook,
Budd Davisson, Rod Machado, Dan Namowitz, Wayne
Phillips, Bob Schmelzer, Jack Williams

Design Director | Michael E. Kline
Art Directors | Elizabeth Z. Jones, Jill C. Benton
Senior Photographer | Mike Fizer
Photographer | Chris Rose

eMedia Managing Editor | Alyssa J. Miller
eMedia Editor | Sarah Deener
eMedia Associate Editors | Jim Moore, Benét Wilson
eMedia Production Assistant | Melissa Whitehouse

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email: flighttraining@aopa.org
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Flight Training - July 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - July 2014