Upset Prevention and Recovery

[jlunseth]

For anyone interested, I am sitting in Mesa AZ the day before I start Upset Prevention and Recovery training at Aviation Performance Solutions.  I will be flying in their Extra 300XL’s and doing some ground school and sim work.  I will do 2 days of UPRT and then a day of spin training before going home on Wed.  I have read through the written materials, they are short.  They teach the mnemonic “Push-Roll-Power-Stabilize” and an alternate “Push-Power-Roll-Stabilize” for some situations. I am sure I will be finding out more about it in the next three days.  When Capt. Sullenberger landed in the Hudson, I read somewhere that he had to touch down on the river with exactly a 7 1/2 degree attitude. Any more and the tail would break off, flooding the plane and killing all. Any less and the engines would catch, causing the aircraft to tumble with the same result.  Somewhere along the way he learned, or read in the checklist, just how to make such a rare,  unusual landing, he was trained for the scenario.  I am taking this training on the same principle.  If I happen to be flying in IMC some day, stumble into an unexpected Tstorm and invert, I will have two strategies, (1) crap in my pants and die, or (2) know how to get out of it.  I want to know how the second one works.  Will try to post at the end of each day, or once my stomach settles down, whichever comes first.

They said to bring long underwear and a heavy jacket because its winter.  I am from Minnesota, I thought that was a joke, but I brought them anyway.

[carusoam]

Somebody said...

The more prepared you are...

The less the chance you will ever need the skill...

Could have been my Mom...

 

The extra 300 has got to be the ride of the century!

Be prepared with what to eat, when to eat, and know why aerobatic pilots eat bananas... 

 

Look straight ahead, don’t move your head, keep the vent pointed towards you...  know that bananas taste the same no matter which direction they are traveling....

 

send lots of pics/video...

The more inverted, the better...

Good luck with your training.

Best regards,

-a-

 

[jlunseth]

I’ll stop at the convenience store and get some bananas.  Pics maybe, but I think I will be too busy on the controls to get much video and my iPhone is not looking for an excuse to convert to FOD.  They also fly jets if anyone has the pocket change.  There is a cryptic note about bringing your own flight suit for jet work, I wonder if they are thinking pressure suits.

Am studying up this afternoon.  Looks like there is a great safety organization down here. aftw.org. They have made custom overlays of the practice areas and visual reference points that display on Foreflight and Garmin Pilot.  Very busy airspace.

[PT20J]

This is a great thing to do. Good for you to do it. I'm eager to hear if you think it is worthwhile after completing it. Upset recovery training is kind of geared to jets which can be more prone to upsets. We are more likely to get into pilot induced unusual attitudes -- but, it doesn't really matter how you got there, the recovery is the important thing. 

Here's a course I've been thinking about for a long time (I'd have done it already if it wasn't on the opposite side of the country from me and I keep trying to figure out how to work it into some vacation with my wife). I like it because it seems like a mini-test pilot course. The course notes are a terrific review of aerodynamics and stability and control.

www.flightlab.net

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[EricJ]

5 hours ago, jlunseth said:

They said to bring long underwear and a heavy jacket because its winter.  I am from Minnesota, I thought that was a joke, but I brought them anyway.

Lol.   It'll be decent here all week.   I'll wave if I'm at the school hangar and I see one of their Extras taxi by.    We only open the hangar door when it's really nice out, though, and since it's so cold maybe I can't wave. 

2 hours ago, jlunseth said:

Am studying up this afternoon.  Looks like there is a great safety organization down here. aftw.org. They have made custom overlays of the practice areas and visual reference points that display on Foreflight and Garmin Pilot.  Very busy airspace.

There's so much school traffic around here the aftw.org site is very useful.   That said, it's not that big of a deal once you're used to it and I'm sure you'll be in the groove in no time.   IWA is a fun and interesting field.   Looking forward to your updates.

[jlunseth]

We had a two hour ground school and briefing for the first flight. I am in the second wave, so the first wave is out now and I fly around noon. The briefing was a review of basic aerodynamics with some interesting tidbits.  Far and away the #1 cause of aviation fatalities in the commercial fleet is Loss of Control Inflight.  49.4% of fatalities.  CFIT used to be tied with LOC-I, but GPS has dramatically increased situation awareness and reduced CFIT to a small number. There are three main classes of causes of unusual attitudes, Environmental, System Anomalies and Pilot Induced.  In the Env. category, the largest cause is wake turbulence. Wake turbulence can cause bank angles of over 60 degrees where stall speed goes way up and ability to generate vertical lift way down, in fact less than 1G. Aircraft can stall nose down especially in heavily banked attitudes.

The industry has changed stall training.  I believe the AC is 120-109A.Training used to emphasize minimal loss of altitude. However, that has led to a number of accidents where the pilot held the nose up, applied full power to fly out of the stall, and still descended in an uncontrolled descending stall. The industry now teaches to unload the wings first and foremost, in other words to PUSH. Attempting to minimize loss of altitude can lead to a stall condition or result in a stall becoming unrecoverable.

The basic formula they teach at APS is PUSH ROLL POWER STABILIZE.  A reason that PUSH comes before ROLL is that if roll is induced with the ailerons in a stall or near stall condition, the angle of attack on the aileron-up wing is increased, which will cause reverse aileron control.  Intending to roll left, the aileron on the right wing goes up causing the angle of attack to increase and that wing will stall and fall. 

The pilot needs to PUSH to reduce the lift to about .5 G’s (light in the seat).

The pilot will experience a “startle factor.” In this condition the pilot generally can solve only one issue at a time, there is an inability to judge passage of time, there will be a limited ability to control inputs, and there likely will be spatial disorientation. Hence the need to have a trained-in strategy to follow.

Flight 1 will be interesting.  Steep turns to 60 degrees, an adverse yaw demonstration (ailerons induce adverse yaw), standard power on and power off stalls, a Falling Leaf exercise, a zoom maneuver to show flight at less than 1 G, all-attitude maneuvering, and inverted flight.  We will do a roll and a loop.  

For the faint of heart, the briefing ends with a lesson in how to use the parachute and bail out.

Sounds like fun! The instructors are all very experienced, the aircraft are designed to pull 10G’s positive and negative, although we are told we will work in a normal G envelope.

Probably no videos or photos, they want nothing in the cockpit except glasses.  Not even headsets.  The headsets are held on with a buckle-up cloth head covering.

Yee-hah!

 

[Volare]

Sounds like great training. All of the Major US airlines are teaching this recovery technique these days too. I think you'll find your training in an actual aircraft more helpful than the stuff I did in a full motion simulator.

[PT20J]

Warning: loops and rolls can be habit forming. Pretty soon you’ll be looking at used Decathlon’s if you aren’t careful 

[jlunseth]

OK, we did our first flight and before I get too detailed and analytical, let me just get this out.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t think I have ever had that much fun in an airplane and it ranks right up there with sex!! The 300XL is a great little plane.  The cockpit is small, two seats in line (the training model). 300 HP. The ailerons are really big in relation to the wing surface. The result is that the controls are really tight, just a joystick and power knob (and rudders). The joystick is very sensitive, just small moves, and even in the heavy G maneuvers the forces are not great.  Probably can fly it with a finger and thumb.  The wing is very strong, but also the achilles heel.  The aircraft has a life of 6,000 hours.  The wing is carbon fiber which needs to be completely rebuilt, and the cost is high enough you might just as well buy a new plane.  Interestingly, it has a steel tube frame not unlike the Mooney. Did I mention you get strapped into a parachute and then a 7 point harness. There are 8 of us in the class, most of them commercial pilots and former military.  Everybody just came back grinning. 

The first, analytical thing to say is that APS’s method really works.  We did upset recovery from several attitudes, nose high, nose low, it always worked to PUSH first, to unload the wing, then ROLL to equalize the lift forces and control surfaces, then POWER and Stabilize.  One of the things they try to do through a number of exercises is to get you to calibrate the feel of pushing to 0.5 G’s, which stops the stall and lets you do the next steps without incurring another, accelerated stall.

For the first flight we started with simple things, climbs and descents, steep turns to 45 then 60, then an adverse yaw demonstration to show how too much rudder in a recovery can feed on itself.  Nose was all over the place. Slow flight, then into simple stalls, a power on and power off.  The power on stall is immense.  Nose up is about 70 degrees, but the recovery was pretty easy.  Then a falling leaf exercise, the rudder has a ton of control and it was easy to over-correct.  Then a zoom maneuver - a dive followed by a climb followed by a push at the top to reduce the load to about a half G.  That was to get the feel of the .5G force for upset recovery.  

Then we did some fun stuff.  A roll.  Yes, I got to do a real roll, it was pretty easy.  Then a loop. In the roll the G forces were nominal, in the loop you pull about 2.5 near the end, when the aircraft is diving and you are pulling it to horizontal.  Have to get used to looking out the side window to see what your attitude is. Then just plain old inverted flight for awhile.  You are strapped in pretty good, but I held on to the bars anyway.  Lastly, we did some exaggerated Lazy 8’s, a maneuver starting with the nose up and a sharp bank, then a push to get out of it, then the same maneuver the other way.  About half of this: power on and power off stalls, Lazy 8’s, climbs, descents are maneuvers we do in PPL or Commercial, but a lot more fun in this aircraft.

Tomorrow it gets more interesting.  Several types of accelerated stalls, skidding turn stalls (the dreaded base to final turn). Then a Split S, a Cuban 8 and maybe a hammerhead.

 

[MooneyMitch]

Thank you for your blow by blow!  This is super interesting and I'm feeling as though I'm in the cockpit with you.  Looking forward to your next post.

[ilovecornfields]

I did a similar course 20 years ago and still remember it. Lots of fun. Hammerhead turns were my favorite because I loved being at the top of the turn, nose pointed straight down but not yet going fast. Neat to see how you can have almost no airspeed yet not stall.

For the wake turbulence recovery the instructor did a snap roll then as soon as we went inverted said “you got it.” It was a good lesson to use the momentum to continue the aileron roll instead of trying to fight it in the opposite direction.

After reading your posts I think it might be time for me to do some refresher training....

[jlunseth]

2 hours ago, ilovecornfields said:

I did a similar course 20 years ago and still remember it. Lots of fun. Hammerhead turns were my favorite because I loved being at the top of the turn, nose pointed straight down but not yet going fast. Neat to see how you can have almost no airspeed yet not stall.

Because the load on the wing is zero positive or negative, therefore there can’t be a stall.

 

2 hours ago, ilovecornfields said:

After reading your posts I think it might be time for me to do some refresher training....

I’ve already decided I am coming back next year. The one thing we are not going to do this time is upset recovery on instruments, would like to do that.

[MoonFlyer68]

I did the initial course as well as a couple recurrent courses with them a number of years back when I was still in the Army.  I think the most interesting recovery we did back then was an inverted spin recovery.  That was insane.  It is absolutly great training.  The pilots there are top notch.  The only one I can remember off the top of my head is Otter.  I know you mentioned no cameras, but at least when I went through they had cameras mounted in and around the plane and you could get the video from them.  Back then I think it was included in the price, may be different these days.

Also from back then I think it was PUSH-POWER-RUDDER-ROLL-CLIMB.  Things change of course.  Probably worthwhile to go back again someday.  Glad your having a great time and don't forget to use your boarding pass if you need it.

[Jerry 5TJ]

Day One sounds very like the CFI spin training I did this month in a Citabria.  Two flights, about 3 hours, steep turns, wing-overs, spins out of steep turns and level, falling leaf, a flattened spin due to deliberate wrong recovery.   I found it lots of fun.  I had to be reminded when scanning for traffic to look down, too -- our flight path in a spin was just about vertical. 

[jlunseth]

1 hour ago, MilitaryAV8R said:

Also from back then I think it was PUSH-POWER-RUDDER-ROLL-CLIMB.  Things change of course.  Probably worthwhile to go back again someday.  Glad your having a great time and don't forget to use your boarding pass if you need it.

They teach a variant, PUSH POWER ROLL STABILIZE. In the written materials they also have  a discussion of PUSH RUDDER ROLL POWER STABILIZE, the idea being to neutralize the rudder.  The main thing is to push first.  The basic strategy, PUSH ROLL POWER STABILIZE works pretty well for me.  We are beginning to cover unusual situations where the standard strategy does not work well, but they are truly unusual, fly-by-wire malfunctions for example.  Push the rudder left and it goes full hard right (there were three such incidents in the 737). They allow cameras, there is a pouch in the aircraft to store them in. They don’t want anything in pants pockets because of interference with the harness and chute.  Hard to take pictures though, I have been on the controls a lot, trying to watch and learn.

[PT20J]

On 1/26/2020 at 3:16 PM, jlunseth said:

There is a cryptic note about bringing your own flight suit for jet work, I wonder if they are thinking pressure suits.

Pressure suits would only be used when flying very high as in a U-2 or a SR-71. You are probably thinking of a g suit. But, most likely they just meant a nomex (fire resistant) flight suit. The pilots wear these when flying the museum planes. My wife says that the pilots may think we look cool but all the women wonder why we're wearing pajamas. 

[jlunseth]

The instructors here all look just like that. I gotta get me one. And a handle, no fair that they all have handles and I am just “John.”

[Hank]

14 minutes ago, jlunseth said:

The instructors here all look just like that. I gotta get me one. And a handle, no fair that they all have handles and I am just “John.”

Handles are given to you, not picked out . . . . Fly well, you may get one!

[jlunseth]

Alright. Just finished Mission #2. This one was fun, we finished with a Split S and then a Cuban 8. But time for a serious note.  This mission included slipping and skidding turn stalls. Slipping turn stalls are fairly benign, you get the typical stall warnings, buffet, the horn works, etc., and although the plane will try to invert it pretty much gets itself out of it with a little help. Benign or not, you would not want to do one on short final, there would be no recovery.

Skidding turns are violent and without warning.  The aircraft went to 90 or inverted suddenly and we were looking at a windscreen full of ground. The normal stall warnings may or may not happen.  In the Extra there was a vibration, sort of a pre-buffet that would probably go unnoticed. but other than that nothing until you are hanging upside down from the harness. If the stall horn is on the wrong wing, that won’t activate because that wing is still flying. What they say here is “Ball High You Die.” We have had the debate in this forum about tight patterns, and certainly you can bank even to 90 without stalling as long as you don’t load the wing, but the tendency is to pull just a little to keep the nose up and it does not take much.  The part that should concern everyone is the lack of warning in the skidding stall.  This is a silent killer. The wing just goes and there you are. I make my downwind .75 to 1 mile in my Mooney and will stretch it further if there is a strong crosswind from the upwind side, which will blow you through final and set up the conditions for the skidding stall. The set up is cranking in a little extra rudder to get the nose around to make final, and then a little pull up to keep the nose where you want it, because the rudder causes the nose to drop a little. I have seen enough video now of unfortunate pilots.

[MooneyMitch]

Thank you.  Points well taken.

[PT20J]

1 hour ago, jlunseth said:

The instructors here all look just like that. I gotta get me one. 

Usually lot's of used ones on eBay.

[Ibra]

Great you enjoy it, sounds like useful aerobatics

1 hour ago, jlunseth said:

and certainly you can bank even to 90 without stalling as long as you don’t load the wing, but the tendency is to pull just a little to keep the nose up and it does not take much

Yes but you can't keep that "dynamic situation" going forever in a controlled fashion when low on height in the pattern (especially with no height margins and tight VNE), so you have to accept a max angle of bank and a min maneuvering speed or increase your pattern height

The same as max pitch up angle on takeoff and flying at Vy (or Vx for the brave) before an EFATO, while you can promptly push the nose over to keep flying in low G way bellow Vs0 you still have to take a stall when back to G =1 if you don't have height margins to build enough speed

[Yetti]

My flight review guy won't let you out unless you can do 60 degree bank angle turns.    He pointed out a useful feature asking for the controls and popping us to 60 degrees.    It is a perfect turn around the point.    If I ever have to get a FR from someone else I am going to practice up and do it when asked to show a turn around a point.

He also pointed out that 60 degree bank was a 2G when done properly.

 

 

Edited January 28, 2020 by Yetti

[Yetti]

Which then brings up how strong is the wing of a Mooney

 

 

[PT20J]

2 minutes ago, Yetti said:

Which then brings up how strong is the wing of a Mooney

 

Yes, we’ve all heard some variation of why Ralph Harmon overdesigned it (either he was afraid to be blamed for further wing failures after several failures in early Bonanzas, or the Mooney wing is the way he would have designed the Bonanza wing if Beech had let him). But did you ever think how much useful load the extra structure eats up?

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