>
>> It's like when a VFR pilot gets caught in a cloud for the first time.
>> All of a sudden the artificial horizon fails. Amazing how that
>> happens. In the past 200 hours, you've NEVER had a single gauge fail
>> and 20 seconds into a cloud and the thing decides to pack it in?
>
>
>I've been reading accident reports about just that sort of thing, Ken. It
>wasn't fun.
>
I have an interesting story to tell about that. When I was getting my
private pilot's license, my instructor was instrument qualified. He would
occasionally put me under a hood and teach me the basics. One day while doing
this he took out a blue plastic cover (later named the Blue Meanie) and put it
over the artificial horizon and said "Fly it!". It was a rude introduction to
partial panel instrument flying. He did this more often, covering one
instrument after another.
When I went into air force UPT, I would occasionally go down to the T-37
simulators to see if one was not being used. I would get it going and then
pull the circuit breakers for all of the electrical instruments, simulating
total electrical failure. The instructor, a senior NCO, found me doing this
one day. He hopped in and showed me some finer points of partial panel flying,
such as leading the magnetic compass which would turn in the opposite direction
when entering or exiting a turn.
The flight instructors got wind of this, and they secretly put up a
substantial bet that I could not fly a T-37 for real with total electrical
failure. I was not aware of this, and soon afterwards while we were out doing
instrument flying all sorts of red failure flags popped up on the panel, except
for the gyro compass. The instructor, Hal Teelin, told me about the bet and
had me fly straight and level for one minute. Then changes in airspeed. Then
the vertical climbs and descents at constant airspeed. Then turns to a
heading. Since the radios were still on we did a VOR approach.
I didn't miss a single beat, and we both won a case of beer.
A week later, two instructors in a T-37 at Laughlin AFB had taken off in a
T-37, entered the clouds, and immediately had total electrical failure. They
eventually brought it back, climbing above the clouds and flying north to clear
weather, and within a week ATC issued a directive that all instructors were to
receive partial panel tranining.
Everyone was looking over at me that day, and I just sat there and smiled.
I've done this with C-130s, and after flying in the Mediterranean area I
would fly non-precision approaches (VOR and TACAN) approaches everywhere using
the RMI as a reference instead of the the HSI as most of the instrument
approaches in that part of the world (at that time) were NDB, and you got very
little experience with those here stateside, except in a simulator.
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|