First ADM Lesson: 1*

May 18

Posted by Chris in ADM, Instructing, Safety | 1 Comment

Way back, I took an Emergency Medical Technician course. On the first day they put up the star of life and Primum non nocere (First, do no harm). Right there I though WTF, I’m taking this to save lives and “do no harm” is the industry motto??? But this simple message lays the foundation for many EMS concepts that accomplishes the greater goal. The obvious medical application comes from the days when ambulance drivers would just scoop up patients, throw them in a station wagon, and race off to the hospital (often making spinal injuries worse or getting into an accident along the way). The not so obvious one is that making more patients by rushing into an unsafe scene, or blowing through a red light and wrecking an ambulance, doesn’t serve the patient well. That simple motto comes back again and again throughout EMS training and in practice, and it becomes cemented in your head.

ADM should be the same way, and I’m a proponent of introducing it early in helicopter pilot training. Set the precedent in every prospective pilot’s head that safety is their first consideration. I also recognize the practical limitation to doing this. A private pilot student is overwhelmed with “important information”, and isn’t mentally prepared to accept a  full-blown ADM lesson when they 1) are still just excited about being in a helicopter and 2) might not be in the mindset of undertaking professional training. Instead, what happens is that ADM/safety get pushed off until some undefined later point in time.

Take the SFAR. We all should have gotten the SFAR training before our very first demo ride. At that time, how many of us understood anything about energy management, low-G maneuvers, or mast bumping? I remember standing there in front of the helicopter, the instructor said “We have this training that we have to do for Robinsons.” He then took a deep breath and gave a well-rehearsed summary of the required training. Looking back, I remember it being thorough and accurate; at the time though, only bits of it even registered (wait, what was that about separation of the main rotor??!). But he ended with “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be monitoring all these things to make sure we don’t get into any trouble.” In terms of the principles of primacy and readiness, the lesson here is that the safe operation of the helicopter was not my responsibility. That’s not what was intended, but it’s what was received because the SFAR training isn’t really at a level that is appropriate for somebody who doesn’t know the first thing about flying a helicopter. This is the precedent that the typical demo flight establishes.

In this month’s safety article by J Heffernan in Rotor, he essentially validates this problem.

Even ab initio programs do not produce pilots right out of their cribs; just the fact that you have to wait until their feet can work the pedals really puts a delay in the learning process, and training delays are where bad habits can be learned…Before you can teach, you have to unteach.

One way of taking this statement is that Mr Heffernan is saying, if you want safety to be a core value in your organization, you have to undo the bad habits acquired (in part) during initial training…the fact that you have to wait until their feet can work the pedals… To me, he’s talking about this grace period student pilots get where safety, ADM, situational awareness, and all that is somebody else’s responsibility. Thus, the powerful effect of primacy has to be overcome somewhere down the line. I disagree that it has to be that way, in part because Mr Heffernan provides a solution which could easily be applied to flight training.

This is where 1* comes in. I’m not going to tell you what it means now because I want you to be bothered and a bit annoyed that I didn’t tell you right off what 1* has to do with safety. Then you can read the lesson plan or Mr Heffernan’s article and his personal story (it’s in the Spring 2010 issue, which isn’t online yet).

The simple symbol/mnemonic 1* is appropriate for a brand new student’s level of experience, and like “First, do no harm” it’s something you as an instructor can build on throughout a student’s training. Start off on that demo ride by giving them the required SFAR73 Awareness Training, then make a point of writing “1*” on that endorsement and telling them This is all you need to remember for now. If they ask what it means, tell them it’ll become clear later–you’ve done your part in associating 1* with their first flight, and unconsciously set them up for thinking safety before flying without overwhelming or scaring them. Later, as you progress through the ADM lessons, you just need to associate that mnemonic/symbol with the pre-flight preparations that will enhance their safety consciousness, risk management, and situational awareness. From 1*, you can associate lesson plans on weather (Is 1* worth making a flight with forecast low ceilings at night?). Want to make sure your student is doing a good pre-flight? Get your school to slap a 1* sticker on the door leading out to the hangar.

The payback–hopefully–is that down the road, this little mnemonic will pop up whenever there’s a critical safety decision confronting your student, and it’ll trigger all those other ADM lessons.

Captain Easy and SBT

May 12

Posted by Chris in ADM, Scenario-based training | 1 Comment

Sometimes watching the Original Forum on JustHelicopters can pay off. For most of the last 1.5 weeks, “Capt Easy” has been throwing out training scenarios and letting everybody bicker over them. Just sorting out the trash talk though, can be difficult enough, but on top of that, scenario based training (SBT) also requires a little bit of extra effort to arrive at the take-home lesson. In this scenario, Capt Easy was looking for problem solving skills when faced with inadvertent instrument meteorological conditions (IIMC) at night. It looks like a pretty nasty situation to begin with, and not something a low time pilot should be faced with for many years (most of the scenarios have been targeted at HEMS pilots it seems). This scenario does get at one thing that is introduced into every pilot’s early training though, and you’ll see it come up in the discussion. Also, the scenario assumed the aircraft was equipped with at least basic instruments (ie, not your stock R22) or was IFR-capable. Okay, here’s the situation (slightly edited):

It’s winter and there’s snow on the ground. It’s also night time, and there’s an overcast layer that’s not real high, but it’s high enough that you can easily fly below it. The visibility is >5 sm. The METAR and TAF both say you can easily make the 30-minute flight back to your base under VFR.

You depart with full fuel for home. About halfway through the flight, you find yourself flying through a snow shower with good (but still reduced) visibility. Suddenly everything goes black–no lights in front of you our below you on the ground. You just went IIMC. What’s your plan?

The first step, which will be a post for another day, is figuring out what just happened. Sitting here reading words on a screen, it’s not so difficult, but imagine it happening real-time. There’s actually a mental process that you go through when the unexpected happens, and getting through that is the first step to making the proper response. But that’s not at issue here. What matters is that you are  now in IMC.

The “discussion” broke into 2 camps: do a 180 degree turn back to VMC, or climb and contact ATC.

The 180-degree turn back to VMC

The rationale here is that you know what the weather is behind you, so why not just go right back to it? I can’t say where I heard this first, but I’ve heard it many times: the lifesaving 180 degree turn. Detractors to this response have a good point though: many good pilots–even instrument-rated pilots–kill themselves trying to make that 180 degree turn out of an IIMC encounter. And it is true that turning puts you at risk for spatial disorientation and all those sensory illusions that you read about in the PHAK. Conclusion:never make a 180 degree turn, especially at night.

Climb, contact ATC, get vectors to VFR or an ILS

Okay, turning is dangerous, so climb out. Can’t hit the ground if you’re high enough above it, right? Additionally, you can then contact ATC and get their help. This is advice has also been doled out, especially with respect to lost procedures, and you might remember it as the 3 or 4 C’s (Climb, Confess, Communicate, Comply, Conserve, etc, etc). The other side of the argument goes that climbing will guarantee that you remain in IMC, increases your workload (especially if you aren’t proficient), and might stick you in icing conditions. Conclusion: climbing is for morons.

Other options then?

There is actually a “right” answer in there. Both sides make good points for and against their approaches to the problem. So how do you approach this scenario? It starts during your pre-flight planning, and from there adapts to your circumstance.

  • Plan an en route altitude for obstacle clearance. In my training, we usually flew as low as possible (500-800 AGL). Lots of reasons for that, but in this case it’s night with surrounding weather. You want to be high enough that if you suddenly can’t see obstacles around you, you know that you can safely make turns or continue straight ahead without hitting them. The easy way to do this is to fly above the Maximum Elevation Figure (MEF) on your route. Not always practical, especially if you fly adjacent to high terrain. What I’ve done for my night VFR flights is planned them as if they were IFR, climbing to some altitude above the highest obstacle within 4 NM of my flight path. Once you have your instrument rating, your ways of thinking about how to establish an en route altitude open up: MEAs, OROCAs, the 4 NM rule, MSAs….
  • In flight, set a hard deck that will maintain obstacle clearance. At the RHC Safety Course, somebody recommended turning around or landing if you have to descend twice because of weather. I think this advice is mostly a way of imposing a limit on how many times you’ll descend to stay clear of the ceiling, and not necessarily something you should follow. But if you do, plan your en route altitude to take this into account. If you’ve made a descent and are now below your highest obstacle, your options have changed.
  • In an IIMC encounter, you don’t have to react fast. IIMC might be an emergency, but your response shouldn’t make a bad situation worse. To me, this one bit of advice settled the whole argument. Fly the aircraft. Get level and in trim. Relax. Commit to flying by the instruments. Once you’re in a stable situation, decide what you’re going to do. Turning when you haven’t fully transitioned to instruments does put you at risk for spatial disorientation, and climbing might not be necessary. This article from AOPA summarizes the rationale nicely.
  • Once you are flying straight and level by instruments, decide whether a climb or turn is indicated. Climb if you’re below your highest obstacle. If not, consider a turn if you still think there’s VMC behind you. Or contact ATC and utilize that resource. Either way, with the aircraft under control and your mental state adapted to the situation, you have time to think.
  • Stay on your instruments. Transitioning back to VFR from IFR can be a challenge, and for most of us, the closest we’ve come is flipping the hood out of the way. Getting partial spatial information from your peripheral vision or as you’re coming in and out of IMC is another risky area.

Conclusion

This could start as a lesson in determining en route altitudes for a night flight. Set your student up to do a night flight, and ask him what altitude is appropriate (although for a lesson in an R22, the decision would probably be to not make the flight, so you have to tweak that). Once he’s IIMC, you can discuss the decision-making processes that his flight planning left him with. The last part is discussing alternative options that he might not have considered. In this case, Capt Easy set up his flight so he was high enough that obstacle clearance wasn’t a concern. He transitioned to instruments, and made a 180-degree turn back to VMC. If he’d been in an R44, not instrument-proficient, and had descended to below his highest obstacle, his decision-making process would have been different.

The key lessons here are:

  • Your en route altitude should take into consideration the conditions you expect to encounter during the flight;
  • Changes to your altitude en route will also affect the options available to you if you encounter IIMC;
  • If you are IIMC, aviate first: control the aircraft and commit to flying by instruments;
  • Once the aircraft is under control, you have time to determine the best course of action.

wikiRFM Proof of Concept

May 4

Posted by Chris in Flight Training | No Comments

Last week this thread was on the VerticalReference.com Flight Training forum; in writing a response to it, I decided to just go ahead and develop the lesson plan for helicopter pick-ups/set-downs. I think it illustrates the limited tools available to new instructors and overwhelming task they’re faced with. From the student’s perspective, you can also see that there’s a lack of accessible, quality training resources to start with, and to fall back on when the instructor isn’t able to help. Here’s the OP’s question:

I’m…close to soloing, but not real happy with my lift-offs. Most of the time I don’t seem to have the cyclic centered properly while lifting off, so there is usually some horizontal movement that needs to be dealt with….

I also take way too long pulling the collective…. The last time I tried to speed things up I shot up off the ground and everyone got a little excited.

My instructor wants me to use a little left cyclic to make sure the left skid comes up first, pause briefly when light on the skids, correct and then lift off, but not being able to tell where neutral position is, things get a little hairy at times.

This is a student who’s getting frustrated. He’s not happy with his progress, and his instructor isn’t communicating what he needs. To me, this type of circumstance is exactly the type of situation where the wikiPPLH syllabus and maneuver guide can help a student (and instructor) out.

Think of the maneuver guide as a starting place for your training’s standard operating procedures. My experience was that most schools don’t have a published training manual/”SOPs”, and they don’t use the RHC R-22 Maneuver Guide. This is a critical problem: if your school doesn’t have a written reference for teaching flight maneuvers, how can you study for a lesson in advance? How can you be assured that you’ll get the same training from one instructor to the next? A secondary problem is that the guides that are out there (like the Helicopter Flight Instructor’s Handbook and R-22 Maneuver Guide) are pretty bare-bones manuals that focus on the technical aspects of the maneuver. Unfortunately, they lack context and practical training tips. Add into the mix an inexperienced CFI or two, and you can have a very confused student and an inefficient training program.

For students then, if your school doesn’t have a training manual, here you go. The day before you start practicing a new maneuver, wikiRFM is a place where you can start learning about the purpose of the maneuver, specifics about the configuration and completion standards, and different ways to go about learning the maneuver.

Back to the case that started this all. The student is concerned about his lift-offs, and needs help “centering” the cyclic/preventing lateral drift. Now, the student’s instructor is telling him what he needs to know, but for learning to occur, that info has be be presented and received. The instructor is essentially telling this student what he needs to know, but he’s not delivering it in a way that makes sense to the student: you can see this in the last paragraph, where the instructor is advising the student to prepare for the pick-up and use a 2-step process. You also get a hint about where the student’s confusion is coming from: does he need to neutralize the controls, or does he need to neutralize the movement?

From my own experience, I can think of a few things that could be going on:

  • No correlation: some aerodynamic (eg, translating tendency) and mechanical (torque/anti-torque) concepts aren’t getting translated to the real-world. If the student just reads the assigned books front to back, this is what happens (and was my point in this post). The instructor’s job is to correlate book knowledge with practical skills, and the easiest way to do this through a well-thought-out syllabus. It’s a hell of a task, and more trouble than it’s worth for any individual instructor: that’s where a Part 141 syllabus should help, but failing that, it’s what this site is about.
  • Inadequate pre-flight briefing: it’s so easy to just go out and fly. At a busy flight school that uses 2-hr blocks, you’re hard-pressed to get an hour of flight time, and an instructor that goes all out is lucky to slip in short post-flight briefings (most of which is filling out the log books) and get a drink of water between lessons. In this situation, there’s a good chance that the pre-flight briefing is going to happen on the ramp or in the cockpit–informal environments that lack access to learning aids, are fraught with distractions, and not conducive to quizzing and review to ensure that the student understands. Not the best set-up for an efficient lesson. In this case, the instructor might help drive correlation by setting the student up this way: “Eyes outside. Little left cyclic for translating tendency, little left pedal to correct for torque. Raise collective until we’re light on the skids….” For this to work, the student needs to start the maneuver knowing not only about the steps in making a pickup, but having also learned all those ground lessons that apply to it: that’s what the pre-flight briefing is for.
  • Inflexibility: sometimes cancelling a lesson or changing plans is the best course of action. If during a pre-flight briefing, the instructor finds that the student doesn’t have the required knowledge, a ground lesson is in order and a flight lesson is inefficient. This is where the intersection of a student’s enthusiasm for flying, an instructor’s motivations, and pressure from owners to maximize flight hours come together in a way that can screw a student.
  • Not sticking to a lesson’s goals and objectives: Have a plan for a lesson and stick to it. Sometimes this means going back to the ramp 20 minutes into a lesson. If you brief a lesson on quick stops and go out and do 3 or 4 perfectly, the lesson’s over. The temptation, of course, is to go practice or learn something else, in which case you aren’t getting the good pre-flight briefing you need to make the lesson valuable.
  • Limited tools/experience: This instructor is teaching his student in a way that made sense to him during his training. From what the OP said, it looks like the instructor hasn’t formulated the insight that the student is confusing “neutralized controls” and “neutralizing movement.” He also hasn’t impressed on the student that, for learning pick-ups, it’s okay to be slow and deliberate in the beginning. And the 2-step pick-up process’ purpose (minimizing the risk of dynamic rollover) also hasn’t gotten through to the student. Preparation, knowledge, and experience can all help an instructor recognize when and why a student isn’t receiving the message. Helping instructors prepare, developing and organizing their knowledge, and drawing on the experience of others is where I think wikiRFM can really help. In addition, several respondents to the OP’s question added other techniques that hopefully will add to the student’s knowledge and approach to learning pick-ups. This is a double-edged sword: some techniques were useful and things I had never heard of before, other things were probably inappropriate for this student’s level of experience.

I should also point out that being an armchair instructor is easy, and I’m not criticizing this guy’s instructor. Teaching takes practice, and I doubt I could reliably do a better job. This became obvious to me last week while I was reviewing the aerodynamics of vortex ring state with another pilot who’s sitting for his commercial check ride. Even though I know this topic pretty well, have practiced teaching it a few times, and had my lesson plan right there in front of me, this student threw me off pretty easily simply by saying “thrust” and meaning “induced flow” in a question he asked. Queue me up as the babbling idiot. From my experience teaching CPR, it took me teaching that class probably 20+ times to get to where I could feel confident walking into a room knowing that I could handle 95% of the curve balls students could throw at me.

True vs Absolute Altitudes

Apr 26

Posted by Chris in Ground Lessons | No Comments

In one of the recent AOPA newsletters I get, there was training tip on remembering the different altitude terms. Indicated, pressure, and density altitude are all pretty easy to remember–and, since you use them all the time, they’re also easy to understand and apply, right? Density altitude is what you use on your performance charts, and it takes into consideration 2 things: pressure altitude at the landing site and temperature. Not an elegant definition, but a working one. Pressure altitude is corrected for…atmospheric pressure, or is what the altimeter shows when set to standard pressure. And indicated is…wait for it, wait for it: what you see on the altimeter.

The 2 that trip me up, especially on tests, are true and absolute. The best excuse I can come up with for this is that you just don’t use those specific terms day-to-day, even though you constantly apply the concepts of both true and absolute altitudes. What we (or maybe just “I”?) need is a memory aid to help us when somebody asks for true or absolute altitude, or we see those specific terms in our studies. I got all excited when I read that newsletter:

Memory aids may help you remember the meanings. Indicated altitude is just that—the altimeter’s indication at the current altimeter setting. Pressure altitude is what you get when you set standard pressure (29.92 inches hg) on your altimeter. Density altitude is an important calculation telling how air density at any level is affected by nonstandard temperature and pressure. True altitude is defined as the “vertical distance above sea level.” Think of it as the true yardstick measure. Absolute altitude is the vertical distance of an aircraft above ground level, and is an exception to the above rule that altitudes are usually referenced to sea level.

Well, those are a little helpful, but a memory aid should be something that really sticks with you. For example, during grad school, I walked into class one day, and the last lesson from the class before was still scrawled on the chalkboard: “Some Say Marry Money But My Brother Says Big Breasts Matter More.” Can’t tell you what my class was about, but never forgot that.* CAMAFOOTS, IP-TA-FER, 7-5/taken alive! are some of the ones I like for required equipment, position reporting, and squawk codes. Here’s what I came up with for Absolute and for True:

Absolute = Altitude Above ground, or just remember that the A in Absolute is for the A in AGL

True = altitude in the Troposphere

Not elegant either, but maybe they’ll provide a some simple terms that help you form a mental image of these two terms.

*(it was the med students trying to remember the order of sensory and motor neurons)

Only 1 Kind of Hypoxia I Care About…

Apr 18

Posted by Chris in ADM, Pilot Health | No Comments

One thing all teachers have to face at one point or another is a student asking “Who cares? Why do we have to know that?” I was recently faced with that question while working with a helicopter pilot who’s sitting for his commercial ride. First some background on this pilot: he’s good. His level of confidence and skill going into his commercial ride well exceeds mine at any time during my training. He has a few things in his favor: he owns and maintains the helicopter, flies it weekly, and has over 300 hrs in it. He’s also been flying airplanes for many years, and knows more about aviation than I may ever know. Most of his flying has also been outside of flight schools. It’s awkward for somebody with as little aviation experience as myself to be “teaching” somebody at this skill level, and if anybody’s learning, it’s me.

His weak point is his book knowledge, and most of my time has been spend going over the PTS knowledge topics with him. After our last meeting, I gave him a list of topics that we needed to cover before I could feel good about signing him off, and I thought I’d heard him say he’d been studying. So I thought I’d put him to the test, hoping I could sign him off for the practical. I started with a topic we’ve all learned at the rote level: “What are the 4 types of hypoxia?”

“There are 4 types? Only one type I care about…the type where you ain’t getting enough oxygen!”

In the ensuing uncomfortable minutes, I fell into a trap that so many other teachers have. Since I couldn’t tell him outright why he should care that there are more than one type, the motivation I provided is that this is something you just have to know for the test. If he’d said “This is stupid!” or “This crap is just relevant for plank drivers” I’d have probably agreed with him as well. And what message would this have sent?

I’m going to try and atone for that now, and I’m going to try and do it with a couple of scenarios that hit the highlights. If you don’t remember, here’s the lesson plan for hypoxia. As part of a lesson on “The 4 Types of Hypoxia” these would be pretty obvious, but as part of a general lesson that included ADM scenarios, you might be able to get a student thinking beyond the rote level.

You’ve been contacted by a rancher who needs to clear some feral goats off his property. He lives in Lakeview (KLKV), and his ranch is to the east (N42 4′ 30″ W120 8′ 20″); you’ll be working mostly to the south and west in some foothills. He’s retired military and a former cop, so he wants to do the shooting. Assume you’re qualified to do the flight and you have access to a helicopter that can perform this mission safely. The rancher offers to put you up Friday night so you can get an early start Saturday morning.hypoxia lesson plan

You arrive the afternoon before the flight and discuss the flight with the rancher over dinner. It sounds like he’s familiar working around helicopters and doing aerial predator control. After dinner he pours you a scotch and, when you decline it, says something about not letting good whiskey go to waste as he drinks it quickly. He has a few more drinks and puffs on a cigar as you chat into the evening. By the time you head off to bed, he’s slurring his speech slightly.

The next morning he’s up and puffing another cigar while you have breakfast. As you review the plan for the day, you notice the bottle of scotch and figure that he probably had 1 or 2 more drinks after you went to bed. He doesn’t seem to be hung over this morning. As he shoulders his rifle, he asks “We ready?” Can you legally and safely do this flight?

Three things come together in this case: the elevations where you’ll be working are generally above 6,000 MSL. Although this is lower than where most people would be be feeling the effects of hypoxia, at those altitudes there is less oxygen available to breathe (hypoxic hypoxia). On top of that, smoking definitely affects a person’s ability to utilize oxygen (hypemic hypoxia), and so can alcohol (histotoxic). Although this rancher might not be visibly impaired, could residual alcohol in his system further sensitize him to the affects of altitude? In this type of operation–where judgment, reaction time, and a good aim are necessary–is this client prepared to conduct this flight safely and efficiently?

You have a commercial student who’s check ride is scheduled for next week. He’s ready for it, but bad weather has kept him from getting his night solo flights done. It looks like the weather tonight, and maybe tomorrow night, will be above the school’s minimums for night solo flights. As you’re reviewing the student’s pre-flight planning and he’s briefing you on his plan for the flight, you notice he has a bruise and needle mark on his left arm. You make a joke about him getting his heroin habit under control, and he tells you there was a blood drive yesterday at work. The weather turns out to be better than expected, and the student appears to be well-prepared for the flight. Any concerns about sending this student out to wrap up his required night solo flight hours?

The issue here is that night vision can be affected at altitudes as low as 5,000 MSL, and supplemental oxygen has been recommended for night flights at or above 6,000 MSL (although this is not in the current PHAK). In this student’s case, a blood donation can cause a hypemic hypoxia condition that lasts for several weeks. If he’s flying out of a high altitude airport, his night vision could very well be affected by the combination of altitude and anemia.

I think these 2 scenarios are both reasonable and realistic, and can be used to teach students the effects and types of hypoxia closer to the application-correlation level. Are they putting unreasonable expectations on the pilot? Like the SCUBA lesson, these topics are here so that you can evaluate your own fitness for flight, and possibly recognize conditions in your clients and passengers that could affect their comfort or health.

Winds Aloft When You’re Never That Aloft

Apr 13

Posted by Chris in Weather | No Comments

The Winds Aloft Forecast (FD) is a prediction of wind direction, wind speed, and temperature at altitudes from 3000 MSL to FL390. I’m adding an FD Helicopters Mini-Lesson on this weather product, but it basically focuses on what we might be using the FD for.

Maybe you don’t even look at this report (or the wind streamlines chart) during your pre-flight planning, and only venture to decipher it prior to check rides. For helicopter pilots, the goofy rules that kick in closer to the stratosphere than we’re ever going to be (like wind speeds >99 knots, and the different nomenclature for below-zero temps at altitudes above FL240) make the FD seem more like fodder for trick questions than a practical tool. I’ve always considered it simply as a back-up source for figuring my en-route winds on cross-country flights, but here’s something cool that the FD table can tell you. Check out this FD from over Nantucket (ACK) for today, and specifically look at the 12000 and 18000 columns:

FT 3000 6000 9000 12000 18000 24000 30000 34000 39000
ACK 3310 3414-05 3212-11 2812-17 2845-28 2863-39 286552 295352 293752

Well, it’s not a brilliant example (but it’s the best I could do today), but between 12000 and 18000, the wind speed is forecast to increase from 12 to 45 knots, or 5.5 knots per 1000 feet. As a rule of thumb, when wind speed increases by >6 knots per 1000 feet, you can expect moderate or greater turbulence.* I’m not going to call it definitive–and keep in mind that the FD is just a forecast–but at the time there were a couple of PIREPs for light to moderate turbulence in the KBOS area.

This came up for me before my commercial cross-country flight. I was looking forward to flying into a mountain airport (KMYL) and the weather was pretty much a go as far as I was concerned. Winds were dead calm at KMYL, and the sky was clear below 12000, as it usually is in the Boise Valley. The one thing bothering me was an AIRMET Tango overlying KMYL. It didn’t go down to the surface, but it did get close enough to the altitude we’d be flying to get into this airport that it had me thinking over whether it was going to be safe to make the flight. I remember being a bit baffled by the calm winds at KMYL and the high winds at the 9000 foot level for the KLWS FD. I talked it over with the CP and, even though he didn’t tell me outright not to make the flight, I didn’t get the feeling that he’d do it. So I bailed on that cross-country, and ended up second-guessed that decision extensively—I’d just cost the school’s owner a 4-hour block on that helicopter, and another student was walking out to do that exact same flight solo (until her instructor called her back after I decided not to go on my flight). It wasn’t until months later that it hit me: that AIRMET Tango was probably there because of the turbulence between the dead calm layer near the surface and an overlying windy layer, and that’s probably about the altitude I’d have been flying at to get over the ridgeline and into KMYL.

So even though the FD might not look especially relevant for a flight at 1000 AGL, you can still use it to guess when and where you might encounter turbulence. In the absence of better info (like a PIREP with wind or turbulence reported), a difference in wind speed at the surface reported on a METAR and forecast winds at the lowest altitude from the FD could be a warning sign. For example, if the winds forecast for KXYZ (elev 18 MSL) on the FD was:

FT 3000 6000 9000 12000 18000 24000 30000 34000 39000
XYZ 3129 3133-01 3138-04 3044-08 3045-17 2845-28 286042 275952 275460

and the METAR was reporting:

KXYZ 132256Z 20006KT 10SM SCT160 15/07 A3005

You might want to consider the possibility of a bumpy ride.

*I’ve seen this in a few places, but the closest that I could get to for a credible source is an old Navy manual, the Aerographer’s Mate 14010. Unfortunately, it’s not in AC 00-45F (Aviation Weather Services), AC 00-6A (Aviation Weather), or the AIM. It was also the topic of a question in AOPA Pilot (Nov 2009).

Two New Lessons

Apr 2

Posted by Chris in ADM | 1 Comment

What I wanted to get across with these 2 lessons isn’t the content of them, but where they fit in a helicopter flight training syllabus. The first lesson is Helicopter Main Rotor Systems (MRS), and the second is Helicopter Crew Resource Management (CRM). Neither of them are lessons that would get a student excited, and if I told you CRM was all part of Aeronautical Decision Making (ADM), that would probably further dampen your enthusiasm. Main Rotor Systems is the very first thing in the FAA’s Rotorcraft Flight Manual, right there on page 1-1. It comes before helicopter flight controls (page 1-3), helicopter aerodynamics (Ch 2), weight and balance (Ch 7), and even basic helicopter flight maneuvers (Ch 9). CRM is one very long paragraph in Chapter 14, and it starts off with something about the airlines. Seven pages later, you’re reading about some crazy thing called an autogyro.

Just judging from where these 2 topics are in the RFM, which one do you think is more important? Which one are you going to use earlier in your training, and throughout your training? Which one is going to make a bigger impression on you--the one you see when you’re fresh and excited about becoming a helicopter pilot, or the one that you have to get done before your check ride next week?

That’s my point. ADM and CRM are things that should be with you starting with the first few hours you log. These 2 topics, though, are shoved to the back of the RFM (and things like Aeromedical Factors didn’t even make it into the RFM). Of course, you don’t have to learn things in this order, but if you don’t know any better, you’re going to read the RFM from front to back like any other book, right? What about your school? Well, the easy thing for a school to do is to just follow the FAA’s lead, and here’s the result:

helicopter syllabus CRM vs MRS

MRS is the very first lesson, and, along with anti-torque and flight controls, gets a generous 2 hours. ADM is the second to last lesson, and gets 1.5 hrs. Again, what does this tell you?

Operationally, I’ve seen plenty of students and instructors roll their eyes and use diminutive descriptors (“such bullshit“) when referring to ADM-type topics. I’ll also admit that I was one of them. Part of my 1.5 hr ADM lesson was spent joking with my instructor to the point of shortening the DECIDE model to the DIE model (Detect, Identify, Evaluate). The chief pilot and in-house DPE wasn’t amused, but Exhibit A: primacy and Exhibit B: he didn’t do much to impress the value of ADM on me afterward.

That actually came $400 later at the HAI Flying in the Wire and Obstruction Environment course. I signed up for that class not knowing really what would be covered, so I was a bit surprised that about 1/3 of that class was ADM/CRM. The instructor’s approach to CRM wasn’t a historical account of what the airlines did, or a series of acronyms that had no operational significance, or what some desk jockey needed to do to implement a CRM system to please upper management. A lot of it was just talking about how we screw up and miscommunicate, and some simple bullet points to tell you how to get out of that rut. By starting the class with CRM, he made the point that “Hey, CRM is critical to surviving the wire environment!” It’s more important than learning where to look for wires, what kind of wires are out there, what weather conditions are more conducive to wire strikes. All the interesting stuff, in summary, is secondary to good operational procedures and crew communication. Is flight training so benign that CRM/ADM is effectively just an appendix to your primary training? (For that matter, if you’re doing off-airport landings, you are in the wire environment.)

I’d been meaning to write up a few lessons on CRM/ADM, and something from the Wire Environment course, but it was a post on VerticalReference that inspired me to actually do it. Somebody asked what everybody’s favorite YouTube helicopter videos were, and mine is, hands down, the Oh Ye of Little Faith Apache video (which you can see as part of the CRM lesson plan). That’s a pretty classic example of a CRM fail, but it doesn’t have to be so overt: consider the Bonanza video where they almost whack a mountain in IIMC.

That’s exactly the kind of scenario that will bite you in the ass. Everybody in that airplane was clinching sphincters long before they kissed that hill, but either nobody said anything or somebody didn’t listen. CRM fail.

So in the ground lessons section, I’ve placed the MRS and CRM lessons where I think they ought to be relative to each other: CRM up front, and MRS stuck somewhere in the back. I bet you can make it through your PPL without being able to list the 3 kinds of rotor systems. And I think you could tuck them into the Aerodynamics lesson somewhere in the middle of your training just fine. Weight and Balance, Weather, Performance: all more important, and things you should be doing before every flight by the time you’re hovering. I think I know why MRS is on page 1-1: it’s a starting place for establishing a common language between instructors and students so they can go on to learn the more complicated stuff. And, from a marketing standpoint, it’s better to start off saying “Today you’ll fly a helicopter with a semi-rigid rotor system, but one day you could be flying a BO-105 doing loops in with it’s rigid rotor!” than starting off by saying “You very well could die flying helicopters.” Ironically, by handling ADM/CRM the way it is handled, the chances of that are probably higher.

Thoughts on Pinnacle Landings

Mar 22

Posted by Chris in Flight Training, Off airport | 2 Comments

I had the chance to fly some last weekend, and took the opportunity to do a few pinnacle landings. The pilot who I was with has just a little more helicopter experience than I do, and quite a bit of fixed wing time. He’s done more of what I’d characterize as “real-world” flying (ie, out of the flight training pattern), and his experience shows. We picked a reconned a pinnacle just south of the airport: a nice ridge with a steep drop-off on the west face, and a smooth slope moving off to the east. The wind was blowing briskly up the face at probably 12-18 knots.

Wind is one of the factors that dictates how you approach a pinnacle. When the wind is light, the airflow is laminar (flows smoothly over the earth, following its contours). As the wind picks up, two zones that are separated by a “demarcation line” form. Above the demarcation line airflow remains laminar and smooth–good for flying in. Below the demarcation line, turbulence and eddies are going to toss the helicopter around. The method you’ll read about in the FAA Rotorcraft Flying Manual uses a steep approach that terminates right at the windward edge of the landing zone (LZ). Flying a steep approach keeps the helicopter above the demarcation line and in the smooth air. The downside of the steep approach is that it gives you fewer options in the case of trouble and, especially if you don’t plan it well, can require larger power changes. Also, as the wind picks up, your approach has to become increasingly steeper to stay above the demarcation line.

The alternative to flying a steep approach is to use a shallow approach. I’ll add a disclaimer right here that you shouldn’t try anything I’m suggesting–find an instructor who knows what he’s doing and have him show you. A shallow approach offers a few benefits that I might elaborate on at some point, but one key advantage is that you fly the approach so you don’t have to fool with trying to stay above turbulent air behind the LZ. In this instance, we could fly the helicopter along the face of the ridgeline, taking advantage of updrafts there while keeping a convenient escape route down the face. So here’s how I [tried to] fly it. Both my high and low recons were elongated ovals, with the high recon passing just over and to the east of the knob that we were going to land on. On the low recon, I descended to just above the LZ, flying the helicopter parallel to the face of the ridgeline. The final approach phase was right along the cusp of the of the pinnacle face. The entire approach is lower, and it’s set up to be a shallow descent that terminates right at the LZ. One key feature of flying this approach is that you start with the wind perpendicular to your flight path. As you slow, you still need to align with the wind to stay in trim, so you are moving along the ridgeline laterally as you approach the LZ. Since you never move behind the LZ, the helicopter never enters the turbulent airflow there.

For the record, I haven’t flown much in the last 6 months, and the Schweizer 269A is still a strange helicopter to me (different sight picture, higher skid height, no governor). The results weren’t as nice as I’d planned it in my mind: mostly, I flew it too low and started the approach too soon, so that I ended up moving over the ground sideways and lower for a lot longer than I’d have liked. In theory though, flying the approach like this has it’s benefits–for example, we were above ETL throughout the approach, right up until the point where we came to a hover.

The other pilot took the helicopter and demonstrated how he would have flown it. Not only did he execute his plan much better than I did mine, but his approach had some advantages that I hadn’t considered. Basically it was a hybrid between the steep and shallow approach techniques. He flew the approach pattern the same as I did, but a bit higher. As he lined up on final, he started a shallow descent as if he was shooting past the LZ. Once he intercepted a steep approach sight picture though, he flew that profile to the LZ. The steep portion was about what you’d do at the termination of a quick stop…or maybe about how you’d fly into a confined. His result was exactly the same, but kept us up at a much more comfortable altitude until the very end of the approach. That extra altitude makes it easier to exercise the option of breaking off the approach and flying down and away from the pinnacle face. One of his (well-justified) complaints with my approach was the risk of catching a skid while moving laterally along the face of the pinnacle–even if I’d flown it at the altitude I wanted to, I was still lower for a longer portion of the approach…my approach looked a lot like what a shallow approach to a runway would look like. Some unlucky combination of a change in wind, the lateral flight path, and an unseen obstruction would have ended my approach very badly.

Off-airport landings are something I think a lot about since confined and pinnacle landings are the mission profile for many helicopter operations. No two are the same, and getting your head wrapped around off-airport landings is tough to do in 200 hrs. Even though I’ve read up on different methods, taken a mountain flying ground course, and spent a good bit of time during my training to try different techniques, I recognize that I still have tons to learn. I’m in no position to be saying what the optimal approach is, but I liked the shallow-to-steep method.

The 60:1 Rule

Mar 8

Posted by Chris in Flight Training, Ground Lessons, Navigation | No Comments

No I’m not talking about the number of students who go through helicopter flight school for every instructor that gets hired. Actually, there are several problems on the Commercial Helicopter Pilot Knowledge Test that require you to understand this rule. In short, the 60:1 rule refers to the relationship between distance from a VOR or ADF station and the ground distance of 1 radial. At 60 NM from a station, if you cross 1 radial you will have covered 1 NM of ground. There are some things you need to do, like maintaining a constant heading, knowing your true airspeed, and timing how long it takes for you to cross the radials, but that’s the premise of this problem.

When I went through my commercial ticket, this was a stumbling block for me, and it took me a while to figure it out. I’m not mathematically inclined–1 of the 3 C’s I got in college was in calculus II, and the only thing I remember from that class was that the instructor wore the exact same sweater to class every single day. Yep, true story. Anyway, a friend recently asked me to endorse him for his CPL(H) knowledge test. Before I offered him an endorsement, I asked him to do several knowledge tests and he also hit a wall with these questions. Smart guy too–went to grad school, has his A&P, Inspector Authorization, and rebuilds helicopters for fun. Fact is, the 60:1 rule questions aren’t hard–they are very easy. Why is it that they cause trouble?

Like anything else, you and I can only teach what we’ve been taught, and the 60:1 rule isn’t taught well in any of the helicopter textbooks or the Jeppesen Commercial/Instrument Handbook (which I think is a waste of 0.3 flight hours’ cash). Since you only need it to pass the Commercial and CFI written exams, why not just memorize the answers and move on?

Yeah, you could do that. But I’m guessing that the instructors and students who read this blog are setting a higher standard for themselves. I was disappointed when my instructors glossed over questions or didn’t know things that I knew. Like you, my mission is to raise the bar a little so the next generation of students is a little better trained than I was. So here’s my lesson plan for teaching the 60:1 rule, along with a short animated graphic to help out those of you who like to see concepts illustrated. The animation takes about 30 seconds to run, and I’ll admit that it’s not going to dazzle anybody, but it does more to explain the application of the 60:1 rule than the spiffy graphics in the Jeppesen book does. Now you can impress your students, other instructors, and your friends with your command of this archaic piece of trivia!

Putting TFA’s Lessons to Practice

Mar 3

Posted by Chris in Career Development, Flight Training | No Comments

I thought this would just be a 1-off topic, but as I’ve thought about it, there’s a lot you should be considering when looking for an instructor. In the first part, I said that your instructor is going to be the most important variable in the quality of your helicopter training. In the second part, I pointed out how challenging it is to separate the good instructors from the bad, since most have big aspirations and little teaching experience. That post talks about the qualities and attributes that predict who will make a good CFI. The purpose of this post is to give you some pointers on how to apply the lessons from the first 2 posts to the real world.

First, find out if the school has a selective process for hiring their flight instructors. Ask the school’s owner what their selection criteria are. Take this example of 2 schools up in the Northwest: the first posts job ads, requests resumes, and has a review and interview process. I haven’t been through it–and it might all be bullshit–but at least it’s a formal process for validating what the chief pilot might already know about a prospective CFI (and maybe learning some things he didn’t know). At the other school, instructors are just hired. The owner doesn’t ask for resumes and there are no interviews. Who gets through is based more on the school’s immediate needs, when they graduated, and who the current CFIs recommend (and what are their criteria…?). There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with that system, but does the owner really know what they’re getting? Sooo….

Ask the owner what their flight instructors’ individual qualifications are. If you get a generic answer and nothing deeper (“Well, we look for professionalism, good skills in the helicopter, good attitude, and they have to be good teachers…”), but the owner can’t say, “Well, Bob did XYZ before flying helicopters, and during her CFI training, Sally stood out from the other candidates by…”, then you’re dealing with a flight school that isn’t hiring instructors based on the ability to be good instructors. Does the owner (or chief pilot) relate examples to you that illustrate the attributes that predict who will be a good flight instructor?

Get to know your instructor too, before you sign up. Ask her if she has any prior teaching experience, what she did before flying, what her greatest non-aviation accomplishments are. By the time you complete your training, you’ll probably get to know all these things through the course of friendly conversation, but it doesn’t help you then.

When you do your demo ride, see if the instructor is using the “I do, we do, you do” method, or if he just hands over the helicopter after briefly demonstrating a control’s effect. If that’s what he does (and most will, because a demo ride is really about getting you excited about flying a helicopter), ask him if he uses the “Telling-and-Doing” technique of flight instruction. Every CFI has to know about this method, and the good ones will have learned to put that info into practice (as opposed to just memorizing it for the check ride). You might be impressed if the instructor says he actually prefers the Demonstration and Performance method, but the Telling-and-Doing technique is an extension of the D&P method. They aren’t the same, and the most important distinction is that the “student tells, instructor does” transition. There’s a whole freaking chapter on this in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook, aka The Fundamentals of Instruction or FAA-H-8083-9, so it’s gotta be pretty important! If you don’t believe me, drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy of the FOI with the key paragraph highlighted.

Most students won’t do any of this–they’re too excited about the dream of being a helicopter pilot, and aren’t going to start thinking about their career until some time down the road. Big mistake. Be rational about your demo ride. Almost everybody is too excited or too nervous to make a demo ride meaningful. Consider doing a no-pressure demo ride just for the hell of it, then doing a one-off, honest-to-god lesson that includes a complete ground and flight portion (and the 2 ought to relate to each other…but that’s another topic).

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