Flight Training - November/December 2020 - 54

ADVANCED PILOT ACCIDENT ANALYSIS

BY DAVID JACK KENNY

PURSUING PRECISION
WE CAN'T BE PERFECT, BUT WE CAN BE BETTER
BY DAVID JACK KENNY

CERTAIN MOMENTS STICK WITH YOU.

54

WAAS-enabled GPS and a three-axis
autopilot really will hold 285 degrees at
4,000 feet. The implication is that it's a
feat too difficult-or merely too much
trouble-for ﬂesh-and-blood aviators. But
the automation doesn't know what's going
on outside the cockpit or whether the
instructions it's been given actually make
any sense. Until air traffic control can
program the autopilot directly-at which
point there'll be no reason for you to be
in the cockpit at all-an attentive human
intelligence will still have to ride herd on
the circuitry. And since electronics can
and do fail, that intelligence will need to
be able to read the instruments and guide
the ship where it needs to go.
The more comfortable you are doing
so and the more precisely you can do it,
the less of an emergency that equipment
outage will be. Plenty of grizzled veterans can demonstrate that hand-ﬂying to
airline transport pilot standards by raw

FLIGHT TRAINING NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020

DAVID JACK KENNY is an airline transport pilot

and aviation writer living in Frederick, Maryland.

WEBB CREATIVE

Decades ago, at a dog obedience class in
Arlington, Virginia, an owner expressed
misgivings about the apparent strictness of
the curriculum. The instructor paused for
an instant before asking, "Why would you
prefer having a dog who doesn't listen?"
By the same token, if you're instrument rated or working on it and your
CFII is good, he or she has progressed
from warning you of impending heading,
altitude, or bank excursions when they
neared checkride limits to reminders to
mind your heading, altitude, or bank any
time you failed to detect and correct a
drift within the ﬁrst few seconds. The
principle's the same. If your clearance was
to maintain 4,000 feet on a heading of 285
degrees, what do you gain from heading
277 at 4,120?
One of the selling points of the
increasing levels of automation in GA
cockpits is that the combination of

data indications is well within human
abilities. And of course, if you ﬂy an
older aircraft with little or no automation, the precision of your control is the
very deﬁnition of proﬁciency.
The same logic applies to VFR.
Instructors like to move students along
and may encourage them to schedule their
checkrides once they meet test standards
most of the time. As the customer, if your
wallet can handle it, it's reasonable to
insist on holding off until you're almost
always at least 25 percent better than the
standards, and your worst practice runs
would still pass. If you can ﬂy steep turns
or do practice autorotations within plus or
minus 100 feet of target, you can do them
within 80 feet-so why not shoot for 50?
In an emergency, exact control of the relationship between airspeed, altitude, and
glidepath can be the difference between
ending up in the trees and making the
open ﬁeld just beyond. We'll hope you
never need to do so-but if you do, that's
too late to start practicing. FT
Flight Training - November/December 2020

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