Friday, November 28, 2014

Practicing emergencies and landings

I did this short flight to practice emergencies, different landing configurations. I took my brother as my copilot (non-pilot) to give him a small idea the kind of things we train.
The flight consisted on:
- simulated engine failure at 1000' on our way to our house for a fly-by
- engine fire
- wing fire
- 2 Simulated engine failures on the pattern circuit. 
- Go-around
- Landing with 10/20/40 deg of flaps

Auto-critic
It's been a while since I practice emergencies and go-around so this flight was mainly to test my proficiency on this. I like to critic myself in every flight and on this one I point out the following:
- I didn't had a problem with the memory items for the engine fire and wing fire 
-  On the first simulated engine failure on the circuit I didn't had enough energy to reach the runway because I extended too much the downwind. I should had executed an immediate turn on the runway direction. Nevertheless I recognized the situation quickly and in a real situation I had decided to land in a field before the runway. On the second try I arrived with more energy but nothing I couldnt dissipate on the ground (80 mph instead 70mph).
- Because of this high energy I executed a Go-Around with flaps 30. I didn't lost altitude but pitched up to much and let the airspeed drop to 60mph. I recover quickly by droping the nose and selecting flaps 10.