Scudrunners

Flapless Landing With Out Power?

It's instructor speak for forced landings with out power.

Don't feel bad I had no idea what it meant either.

Chuck Ellsworth wrote: Don't feel bad I had no idea what it meant either.

Me either but I am unconsciously aware of it every 3 minutes or so, every flight. Single engine through the mountains tends to do that to a person. Being constantly aware of where you are and where you are going when TSHTF is in my best interest as a person who likes to spend time with my family and live another day.

Exactly.

Constant scanning for best crash area may someday save your life.

I'd say about 90% of my time is in a single, in that I've had one shut down, which resulted in landing on the departure runway. Pretty much all of my time is flying in mountains.

With that being said, if I was actively scanning for a crash site, I would be a nervous wreck by now. I think it's important to know where you are and what your options might be, but I think it should a more subconscious scan then an active conscious scan. That probably comes with time?

Chuck, I don't think anyone here would dispute your experience, so honest question:

When you're out bombing around, are you actively thinking "oh I could land there... Oh I could Land there... Oh I could Land there". Or are you thinking "I'm over a river with good shores. Now I'm over fields. Now I'm can see a road".

I know when I started it was the former , and now it's the latter. Could be I've just become complacent and it might bite me...

E

Scanning for emergency landing areas is a subconscious activity that becomes second nature.

Conversely many pilots just fly along with very little situation awareness except the fact they are flying.

I try to teach pilots that the very best
thing they can do in an emergency is
to let go of the flight controls.

You wouldn't believe how a pilot can
take a nice gentle vanilla spin, and
using the ailerons and elevator, turn
it into something really wild.

Let go of the fucking stick.

I remember reading somewhere that
90% of the airbus accidents wouldn't
have happened if they had let go of
the stick.  Not sure if that's really true,
but AF447 could have benefitted from
that, as could have Colgan 3407.

On the aerobatic mailing list, the topic
of spin recovery techniques came up.

My friend Spender Suderman actually
did a bunch of tests in his Pitts.  And
you guessed it, minimum loss of altitude
was obtained with Beggs-Mueller which is

[size=36pt][b]LET GO OF THE FUCKING STICK[/b][/size]

I wish pilots could realize that much of the
time, they are the problem.  The airplane
would fly much better if they would stop
trying to frantically induce a PIO, for example.

Less is more.