Marin County 99s

My recent BFR included a few power off/ engine failure procedures that can really make you gather all your training; there’s no time for slow, deliberate thinking. Your response should be clear and crisp. Most pilots spend too much time ‘swimming in the glue’ before they start any useful response such as establishing best glide speed and then troubleshooting and trying to restore engine power.

This denial, frozen mind, glue-like response happens because the pilot has not practiced his or her emergency procedures and is trying to recall the steps that she/he should take. Muddling around takes time and altitude. You can loose 1000’ in a nano second looking for your emergency check list.

In the meantime the airplane has not been trimmed for power off, best glide
speed condition. Every plane has their ‘official’ manufacture defined best glide speed.
Besides getting up in the morning and knowing the sun is up you need to know what that speed is. Go ahead, put this article down now and find out. Come back when you know. If you just remember the big number, which on my plane is at the three o’clock position on the airspeed indicator, you won’t be far off. If you are light (no
passengers or baggage/fuel) you can slow it quite a bit more.

Before you take any other action, remember to fly the airplane. There should be a hammer spot on your head from your flight instructor beating that into you. This must always be your first priority. The following steps are my pattern; your plane may take a different configuration:

1. Establish best glide speed and don’t lose any altitude until best glide speed is established.
2. Electric fuel pump “ON” and switch to a fuel tank containing fuel.
3. Carburetor heat or injected heat “ON.” This step should be taken even if ice is impossible. Something (sand? flying stuff?) could have blocked your air filter and the use of “heat” allows a different path for air to enter your engine and may allow a restart.
4. Switch the magnetos from both to “left or right” to see if the engine will run better on one of them than it does on “both”. If it does leave the switch where it is.
5. Enrich the mixture to ensure that the engine didn’t quit because it was too lean. If at high altitude, moving the mixture control full forward may flood the engine. Go slowly!
6. If the engine has not restarted pull your prop control all the way out to improve your glide ratio. This will cut your sink rate about in half.

How long does this sequence take? It should take less than 10 seconds and a few more to fight out of the paper bag in your mind. You need to be at the same altitude as when the silence started, approaching best glide speed and already deciding the direction you should turn to head for your landing site. Hopefully that’s an airport. Out in the middle of no where it will be a dirt road, paved road or open field. Mountainous terrain often has lots of forest service roads. Passes over mountains usually have two lane roads. ‘IFR’ to me means I follow roads when in uninhabited areas.

The above steps do not have to be completed in this order. The geometry of each cockpit drives your actions. You can be holding the nose up and trimming while turning on the fuel pump, switching tanks, turning on “heat” or switching the mags. The point is to complete them and hopefully one of them restores that magic noise of a purring engine.

Cockpit Resource Management is all about making the most of whoever is in the plane. If your partner is usually with you train them on specific moves. In our plane the right seat is in charge of switching the fuel selector because it’s on the floor and looking down, turning the lever takes time. The right seat can also find the closest airport, pull out the directions, get the radio frequency and be the calming influence to your spiking blood pressure. Use their logic; their sight is not as muddled as yours.

A good thing to do is sit in your plane, on the ground, and practice your maneuvers until you can do it in 10 seconds or less. Make this a part of your run-up. Engine failures so rarely happen, but when they do, you need to be on auto-drive.

After your automatic response, if time permits, pull out your written
checklist and make sure you did not skip any steps. It’s really important to trim
for best glide speed so that if your attention is diverted while reading you won’t loose excess altitude.

My aspirations to become the ‘back country’ pilot have been put on hold. It was too far of a reach, there were too many missing building blocks to become proficient in just a few hours. The rugged and unforgiving wilds of Utah’s canyon country are no place to be in less you are extremely experienced. The flight service needs a ‘shelf ready’ pilot. That will come, but not now. When I got the call back in March to come on board my first response was “Why not?” Give it a try; put 100% into the effort and all that you gain from such an investment. The challenges weren’t just the terrain, (or lack of it), the winds and the wildness.

My biggest obstacles would be learning to fly planes that I had no experience in. The Cessna 206, 207 and 210s feel like driving a bus around. Their power management, sight lines, geometry of the cockpit was a challenge that was going to take more than a few hours to figure out. I had to have a thick booster seat to get my eyes up and over the cowling and extended engine compartment. But the boost took away my reach necessary to get on the rudders. When you have a load of people in the back you have to make each landing a ‘wheeler’. The nose can’t touch down until the final roll out or you’ll bury the nose gear.

Our destinations were skinny, short, dirt strips, hanging off mesa edges or hidden deep in the rubble of canyon walls. Common approaches would be following a creek or river, deep into a canyon, down to a blind bend, chop and drop the plane onto a patch of sand or gravel to pick up a load of river rafters. They would be dreaming of their first shower and cold beer, you’re dreaming of those lazy days when landings were simple.

Winds howl, they scour the rock into cracks and crevasses lining the ancient, earthen face. From the air the pathways of wind and water look like animal trails etched deep into the history of our planet. The wind is the herd that migrates, stampedes, from a lower resting place to the heights outside the canyon walls. We as back country pilots become familiar with all that this rugged and often wicked flight environment can generate. Flying along picking your way over upheaval, drainage, swell and mesa is a challenge and privilege. There is always something new or a lesson to be gained.

Some days it can be so hot those huge Continental engines refuse to start. The fuel will evaporate before it gets to the cylinder head. There are tricks. Fred Patterson told me before I left “Cindy you have to be the engine”. He was so right! Your hands dance between ignition, fuel pump, mixture controls and throttle. The passengers get edgy wondering if this is the start of another TV series called ‘Canyon Survival”. You coax, you swear, you sweat to get those engines sputtering, coughing, then roaring into life. Engine start up after a 20 minute period to load gear and people can be the worst challenge of the day. I’ve lost liters of sweat in just a few hours.

Redtail Aviation is a wonderful group of pilots, friends and now family. Unfortunately I am not ready to jump on board. Twenty years of flying Pipers across our continent does not equate to the knowledge you need to fly the back country. We decided to put my job on hold until the fall when I can put in some more training and find a comfortable position in their flight line. At first I was crushed, it felt like I had failed to step into these new shoes. Yet what I gained was a HUGE respect for the learning process. It’s not impossible; it will take some time, this I can do.

As a post script… Our chief pilot was lost to a back country flight. A father/son from Texas flew their C-180 out to fly the canyons of Utah. Larry was hired to show them around the area and get them comfortable with the very un-Texas like terrain. No one knows what has happened, there is no NTSB report, other than they crashed into a canyon wall and everything and everyone perished. Larry was a legend in the back country flying community.

It is like loosing Sparky Imeson from the Idaho flying community. All have been humbled by this accident. We still mourn the loss of life. What can we learn? Our lessons never cease.