It's a skill that can help you pass a checkride, and more importantly, it's a skill that can save your life! This week we're talking about recognizing system problems.
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop SR73 Cherokee number two following swim traffic three mile final one trolley bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:25
Bobby Doss
What's up Wally?
00:26
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:28
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. This week we're tackling a topic that I'm sure we've spray wrinkled in all over a bunch of other podcasts. But based on some recent incidents and things that Wally's seen on checkrides, we're talking about recognizing systems problems and we're not just going to hone in on an electrical failure or other things that we've probably done shows on in the past, but some recent training that I've done in preparation for my next checkride and other things I've recognized some of my own weaknesses and not recognizing things in the cockpit that I should have recognized.
01:04
Bobby Doss
And we're going to break it all down and hopefully tell you how to be a better pilot, better prepared and instructors that are listening maybetter ways to teach and practice with your students so that when they see Wally and have a issue or a simulated issue, they'll do a much better job of recognizing system failures. Now we talk a lot about fuel, we talk a lot about electricity, but there's a million little things that could go wrong. So much so that some post it notes have like kicked my butt lately. Wally, it's almost embarrassing to share some of the things I'm going to share. But as not flying in real IMC or really instrument conditions in the last couple years, I decided I wanted to get really current, get really smart again, get back to flying regularly and feel confident flying in imc.
01:52
Bobby Doss
And so I started a instrument proficiency check with some instructors and man, when they covered up the airspeed tape, I was flabbergasted on what and then they covered up the altitude and I was flabbergasted and I recognized obviously what the problem was, but I was stumped on how I was going to figure this information out. So much so that I, I literally just blanked out on the standby instruments and mad at myself. And I think the CFI thought I was kidding, but I think I was so fixated on what was on those screens that I had forgot that those should have been part of my scan. Just because it's been a few years since I've really trained, I'm sure, you've seen people make bigger mistakes than that.
02:37
Bobby Doss
But what are your thoughts when I tell you I forgot about the standby instruments like that could be deadly.
02:44
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, it could be, but I can see it happening. I just. What I have come to find out just here recently. I've. I've asked a lot of. You know, first of all, the airplane is a horrible classroom. So we. We end up teaching a lot in a briefing room. And, you know, we have a nice whiteboard probably there. The lighting is good, the sound is good, and it's much more conducive to communicate with. With each other. And I think a lot of instructors sit in a briefing room and they talk about a lot of this theoretical stuff. What would you do if this happened? Well, I would do this and go over here, and I would do this, and then I would do that. Okay, well, what about this? Well, we would do this, too. Okay, great. All right.
03:37
Wally Mulhern
Now they move on to the next thing. And I think the thing that we don't do a good job of is now taking that, maybe that scenario, and then actually going out and doing it in an airplane in a less. In an environment that's less conducive to easy communication. You can do some of it in a simulator. And there are certain things. For instance, a vacuum pump failure. I mean, how do we simulate a vacuum pump in. In an airplane? Well, we take suction cups and we stick over the attitude indicator and the heading indicator. Well, that's not very realistic because if you have a vacuum pump failure, it's going to be a slow failure, and just recognizing it is a big deal. So that's a scenario where a simulator is like liquid gold, you know, learning.
04:38
Wally Mulhern
Learning what a vacuum pump failure actually looks like and how you would manage it. And it's easy not to look at an attitude indicator and a heading indicator when there's a suction cup stuck on top of it. You know, it tells you, hey, I'm no good. But when it's in front of you and it's bad information, but it looks like it's good information, man, it's hard. It's not hard not to look at that because you've been taught, you know, you've heard your instructor say, attitude, attitude. Look at that, you know, well, now. Now you can't do that. So, you know, there. There's one scenario where, again, the simulator is just worth its weight in gold.
05:22
Bobby Doss
It really is, no question. And. And while I was experiencing this partial panel experience with my flight instructor, I think it was one of those times where I was just so frustrated that I lost so much skills compared to where I was at. But then again, it was the lack of recognition on how to solve it because there was other ways to solve it. Right. I could move my primary flight display to my mfd. I could look at the standby instruments, I could change some of the navigational information that was at the top of the G1000 to get some of that information. And thank goodness this was a simulated experience. But had it been a real world experience in imc, I don't know where my mind would have gone once I started compounding.
06:11
Bobby Doss
Like I don't know how to get on the ground without altitude and I'm not looking at the other altimeter. I don't know what I'm going to do about airspeed. Just keep going fast, but until I can see it. And so hopefully those instruments would have been made available to me at some point or I would have thought of them. But there's a lot of little things in my own training that I'm glad I'm experiencing because they're making me a better pilot. But even autopilot functions, a lot of the procedural stuff is what I've lost over the last couple years. Of course I can read a plate and kind of know what I'm supposed to do on the majority of them.
06:46
Bobby Doss
But when autopilot isn't in approach mode and you don't command it to be an approach mode, but you know the autopilot's on, that can confuse the heck out of somebody who doesn't fly that often and. And you could go to the wrong thing.
07:02
Wally Mulhern
Yeah.
07:02
Bobby Doss
Not activating a flight plan. You know, a lot of the stuff that I'm preparing for is the type rating that's coming up and this. I don't think they're going to give me much leeway in a jet to make some big mistakes like that. So hopefully I'm sharpening the edge of my game and getting much better. But autopilot, depending on the glass information, not knowing how to use standby instruments, all those things could add up to a lot of really bad stuff. I think what you're talking about is things we've discussed where, what does it sound like when the intercom stops working? Who knows really what that's like and are we demonstrating it? And if you're timid to do that in the air, you can do that on the ramp. Right. Start. It happens every time.
07:47
Bobby Doss
Probably you start the plane if you don't Turn the avionics switch on. It's just like having an intercom broken and you got to sit there and scream at each other for a little bit. That can all be simulated and demonstrated on the ground for sure. And my instructor turned the master switch off in flight and we flew for probably 10 minutes and yelled at each other and realized what that felt like. Be very careful if you're under a Bravo shelf or where ads Bs required, that could cause you issues. But on the ground, I think you should demonstrate that as a flight instructor. I think there's a lot of things flight instructors can do to create some stress in recognizing failures that maybe aren't in the syllabus or aren't really advertised that we could share with them.
08:34
Bobby Doss
While you've had a couple of check rides where things haven't gone well, what do you think pilots should do or investigate? Maybe not believe all the hearsay. What kind of tips do you have based on some recent activities?
08:49
Wally Mulhern
Well, you know, back in the day when I was a 727 instructor at my airline, one of the performance problems I used to always give to all my checkride people coming in for their annual checkride was a wind shear performance problem. And I found out through the grapevine that I had a nickname out on the line. And my nickname was Wind Shear Wally. And you know, I kind of like that, kind of affectionately. I'm thinking, okay, so that means that everybody coming to me for a checkride and is boning up on performance data for a takeoff and a potential wind shear. And I'm thinking, well, so we're better pilots now, I think nowadays doing general aviation checkrides. If I had a, a nickname, and I haven't heard anybody say this, but I think it would be Electrical System Wally.
09:51
Wally Mulhern
You know, the two big systems. We have to cover three systems on a checkride. But I guarantee every single one of my checkrides we're going to cover the engine and we're going to cover the electrical system and then we're going to cover something else and that other something else kind of rotates. But I think the two most important systems in these airplanes, and again, we're talking about single engine trainer type airplanes, the two most important systems are the engine and the electrical system. And I've just found that a lot of people, they can talk about theory of the electrical system, but when it comes down to maybe actually applying it, we have some issues. And we had a recent accident Here locally just a few weeks ago.
10:50
Wally Mulhern
And they think that kind of contributed to things, that there was confusion, and I don't want to speculate, but confusion as to what was really going to happen with an electrical system failure. So let's talk about an electrical system. Let's dummy it down and say we've got a battery, we've got an alternator, and we've got the components, the things, the radios, the lights, whatever. All right, there's a little bit more to it than that, but let's just call it those three things. So the alternator is basically a battery charger. So if we have an alternator failure, do we have an electrical system failure? No, we don't. Not yet. Maybe somewhere down the road we will, but now we're just. It's just like operating your cell phone without it being plugged in, it works just fine.
11:51
Wally Mulhern
Eventually that battery is going to die, but right now it's just fine. I would venture to say if we looked in most POH's for small airplanes, most of them will not have an alternator failure checklist. I actually looked at my Saratoga two days ago and I actually do have an alternator failure checklist in that particular airplane. But most airplanes will not have a checklist called alternator failure. So we sit in a briefing room, we talk about alternator failures, pull out a checklist. Well, now we look for a checklist. We don't have an alternator failure checklist most of the time. What we have is a checklist that says something to the effect of low voltage. And why would an alternator failure cause low voltage? Well, if the airplane has a 24 volt electrical system and you can change 24 to 12, it doesn't matter.
12:54
Wally Mulhern
Most pipers are 12 volt. Cessnas are usually 24 volt. Usually. But let's say you got a 24 volt electrical system, you're going to have a 28 volt alternator. So that alternator, just call it a little bit of headroom. It needs to just put a little bit more power in to keep that battery charged. So the reason it would be called a low voltage is if you got a, you know, a voltmeter reading voltage, if the alternator is working, it's going to say 28 volts. If the alternator stops working, it's going to say 24 volts, hence low voltage. That's where that comes from. And I was flying my Saratoga again just a couple days ago and Just for the heck of it, I reached over, I turned the alternator off. Nothing changed.
13:51
Wally Mulhern
But on my engine monitor, instead of it reading, that airplane has a 12 volt system. So instead of it reading 14 volts, it went down to 12 volts. It was like 12.2 and it turned red. So that told me that. And I didn't have any other indication. There was no light that said alternator failure or anything like that. Now, a G1000 airplane, you would probably have something that would say alternator failure. So I think as instructors, it's something that's important that we do to go up in the air and say, let's turn the alternator off. Let's see what we get. What does it look like? And again, I would venture to say that turning the battery off too, would be good because maybe it's a confidence booster.
14:48
Wally Mulhern
It says, okay, I know in theory we said in the classroom that we could shut the master switch off in flight and everything would be fine, but, boy, I really don't want to do it. But now you go up in the airplane and you do it, and I think everybody kind of goes, oh, okay. The engine really still runs. So that, you know, it is a.
15:15
Bobby Doss
Piece of art when you actually experience it for sure. Right? I mean, absolutely shocking. I think we all know the magnetos work and how they work, but to believe it because you did it is a whole nother ball game. Right. And this isn't something you should be testing at low altitudes or whatever else. Like, go, be smart about it. Do it with your instructors do with a chief. If you've never done it and you're not confident about it, but you know, the safest way to do it is just do it on the ground. Right. Turn the alternator off on the ground. See what happens. If you have an ammeter, see what happens with the ammeter. If you have a voltmeter, see what happens with the voltmeter.
15:49
Bobby Doss
But what's going to be shocking to everybody, there's not much is going to happen because not much happens until the battery dies.
15:57
Wally Mulhern
Right? Right. And now, you know, we have more and more airplanes that are incorporating electronic ignition. So now even older airplanes can be modified with electronic ignition. Now, how does that change things? Well, if you went out to your car, most of us have, you know, cars that are less than 40 years old, and you eliminated the electrical system from your car, it would stop running. That's the point of electronic ignition. So the part that provides power to the spark Plugs is electronic, electric. Okay, we need electricity to run our car. Same with electronic ignition. So electronic ignition is much more efficient. It burns fuel better power, easier to start, all kinds of things. But it needs electricity is the downside.
16:59
Wally Mulhern
So there are some airplanes now that have, and usually the older airplanes, what they'll do is they'll put the electronic ignition one side and most of the electronic ignitions have its own internal backup battery. Just like if you have a, maybe a G5 in your airplane, that G5 probably has its own internal battery that stays charged. And in theory, with a total electrical failure, that G5 is going to run for another four hours or so. So if you have an airplane that has electronic ignition, you need to know what the situation is. Do I have a backup battery built in to that electronic ignition? Or maybe not, maybe I don't. And in when and if that battery dies, I'm going to lose that side of the ignition. So now we're going to be basically operating one magneto. And can we do that?
18:06
Wally Mulhern
Well, yeah, we can do that. I mean, is it ideal? No, absolutely not ideal. But we do a mag check every day. We shut off one mag and the engine still runs. We lose probably 5% power, but it still runs.
18:25
Bobby Doss
And in that situation, I think we've talked about this a bazillion times, but it's really up to the pilot to decide whether that's something to declare an emergency or not. You might have two magnetos and you lose one of those magnetos and you recognize that problem by testing the magnetos. But I think from all I've learned and from all I've thought, I think I would declare an emergency because you only have one left that when that second magneto quits, you, you're out, you're, the engine is going to stop. And so absolutely there's no one that would fault you for declaring an emergency with only one magneto working, because you will have an emergency if that one quits working. And yeah, I've heard it from a bunch of people who've had that situation happen. Some have declared an emergency, some haven't.
19:16
Bobby Doss
But after the fact, all of them said I should have declared an emergency. So it's one of those things where you recognize it and you decide. It's some of the stuff I'm working on for this type rating. It's a vision jet type rating, is a CAP system. And I've never really been around the cap system because I have limited Time in a cirrus aircraft. But their thought process is pull immediately. And there's a number of scenarios where you would pull it immediately no matter what. And then there's a number of times where you would consider pulling. And I think that just that thought process and going through training and having someone else give me a different thought process has made it interesting to me to say that those two thought processes are really defining how bad the situation is. Right.
20:01
Bobby Doss
If you're at 5,000ft in the daytime, in VFR conditions, you probably consider pulling it if your engine stops working in a cirrus because you probably have a lot of options or more than one option at 5,000ft, thousand feet at night, in the middle of nowhere, maybe some mountains, there's probably not many options left and it's probably more like a pull immediately thing. But that again, helps people think through kind of the process by which you might make a decision. I've heard you say it a million times. I know we've talked about it a million times. If you have an electrical failure, no matter what it is, that's not an immediate pull. Put it in the field. Like that doesn't. That's not going to help the situation.
20:47
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah, I, there was a point in time doing checkrides that I would give a scenario and I'd say, okay, you're flying from point A to point B. Let's say it's 150 miles. Okay, there's no wind today, it's 150 miles. So a little bit over an hour flight. You're 75 miles away. So you're at exactly the halfway point and your number two communications radio fails. I'll say, what are you going to do? A, continue. B, turn around and go home. C, divert. D, put it in a field. Thank goodness. Nobody has ever elected to put it in a field. And there's no wrong answer. There is really no wrong answer. Somebody may say, well, I'm going to divert because I'm thinking maybe there's an underlying problem. Maybe I got an electrical problem.
22:06
Wally Mulhern
And well, okay, all right, maybe not what I would do, but you know, am I going to continue or am I going to turn around? Well, it just depends. But it's. I think it's a great discussion. It's a Saturday morning donut and coffee at the local airport discussion. What are you going to do if you've got eight people in the room, you're going to have, you know, many different opinions on what to do. But it's just to get you thinking about things like that. You know, I, again, I'm passionate about electrical system failures, and I'm going to talk about them all the time on checkrides. And I will say, okay, if we have an indication of an alternator failure, is it. You know, what are you going to do? Is it an emergency? And I think the best answer is it depends.
23:00
Wally Mulhern
I mean, it really depends on the weather. I mean, if we're in the. If we're in the clouds, yeah, maybe. Maybe it is an emergency. If it's clear and a beautiful day, maybe it's not an emergency. And I may say one thing and you may say something else, and they're both okay.
23:25
Bobby Doss
Yeah. And I think the practicality of my recent training has helped me think about how we continue to help pilots better, how this show helps pilots better. And I think we do that by giving some tips and tricks or examples by how they practice and incorporate some of this. Right. You've mentioned the turning the master switch off on the ground after the engine's running, maybe turn off the alternator in flight or on the ground to build into that thought process. Tomorrow I have a flight. Hopefully, I. I've earned the respect of my instructor team, and I get signed off on my IPC. But on that flight, we are 1,000% committed. We've exchanged information. We're going to do it. We are going to shoot a practice approach, as the forecast says. It's gonna be perfectly clear here tomorrow.
24:16
Bobby Doss
And in that practice approach, we're both gonna only use foreflight. Well, the pilot who's under the hood's only gonna use foreflight because we've mentioned that. Like, what are you gonna do If I'm at 5,000ft and I have an electrical failure and I'm in the clouds? We know one thing, two things should continue to work. The engine should continue to run, and my iPad, if charged, should continue to operate. And with the stratus that I use, and she uses a Strat the Century, if her Century and my Stratus are both working, we should have Ahars. And with that Ahars system and a flight plan, I should still continue to be able to navigate. And I'm excited because I've never done it. You've picked on me and others for not doing it. But go practice that with an instructor.
25:05
Bobby Doss
If you fly a lot instrument conditions and you haven't actually gone out and done that, what an opportunity to incorporate that in a. In a lesson with an instructor in your Aircraft, the one you fly the most, to be confident that if everything goes wrong, you are able to do it.
25:23
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah. And again, suggest. Well, first of all, let's put a disclaimer out here. We're not saying going around and navigate using nothing but foreflight as your primary source, but when everything goes bad and that's all you got left. Works because I've done it now. You know, it's just like this. I mean, I, I, you know, Bobby comes from a law enforcement background and I've got other friends in law enforcement. I know when those police officers go to the range that they shoot with their non dominant hand, you know, and it may not be as they may not hit everything inside the little bitty circle like I'm sure Bobby does, but, you know, it's a confidence level to say, you know, what if something really came back? You know, if it was a really bad day, I could do that.
26:23
Wally Mulhern
So yeah, it's, it's something that we can do. And when I bring it up to people, most people say, well, yeah, I could do that. And then I will say, well, have you ever done that? And they say, no.
26:40
Bobby Doss
Yeah. And I think you talk about pistol practice and I thought, always thought shooting from the hip was harder than shooting with my left hand, but you know, you don't always get the aim right. That was kind of the concept. And it's shocking how good a police officer can shoot from the hip because they do it so much. And that's where I think my recent training has been like, wow, I can land without the PFD working and I can do it with the foggles on. I can do a lot of cool stuff that I hadn't been practicing, so I couldn't do it. And now that I've incorporated it into my practice, I can do it.
27:19
Bobby Doss
And I'm not overly confident, but confident going into this type rating that I can pretty much read any approach plate, know the rules that I need to follow and get there because I've been practicing it and that's, I think, the biggest tip, right? Challenge yourself, challenge your students. Take an autopilot and kill it before you want to use the autopilot more than you normally would, turn it off later than you normally would, whatever those things are. Like, constantly sharpen the edge of your pilot skills and continue to get better. There's enough problems that can occur that you can create 50 scenarios on every flight if you want to Become a better student and become a better flight instructor and make better pilots every day.
28:05
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. And with that in mind, you know, with the thought of using an iPad to navigate, you know, we need to try to get in the habit of keeping that iPad charged. You know, if you've got an external battery, you probably need to have an external battery in your flight bag. If you've got a USB port on the. The panel of the airplane, keep that. Keep that iPad plugged in.
28:31
Bobby Doss
Well, it's also. It's. It's this interesting challenge that I. I seem to do with people, and I asked an instructor how. I have a friend who's on my podcast named Wally who always talks about this Victor Airway. And I said, hey, if I ever have to ride with Wally again, I want to know how to find and follow this Victor Airway. Can you show me how to load it into the G1000? I'm three for three, and no one's been able to show me how to load the Victor Airway. Now, I have since learned myself how to load a Victor Airway. So you can't give me Wally, but I probably won't track it the way you wanted me to, the way I would load it. So I need to load the VORs and track it with the localizer signals or the VOR signals.
29:15
Bobby Doss
But it's really easy to load the Victor airway in the G1000 if you know how to do it. And I think I've been complacent myself for years where that'd be cool to do, but I don't know how to do it, so I'm not gonna. That's not gonna be part of my. My quiver. Well, that's a pretty important piece of information if you fly a G1000 all the time to have in your quiver.
29:36
Wally Mulhern
Right.
29:37
Bobby Doss
And I think that those sorts of things, those can be challenged on every flight. I had a flight today where the instructor did not know how to put the approach plate on the screen on foreflight. And I was. I was like, wow, I guess if you've never been shown it or no one's ever used it next to you might not. You might go from plate to map, plate to map.
30:01
Wally Mulhern
Right.
30:01
Bobby Doss
But he saw me put it on my map, and I was like, oh, this is so cool. I get to teach you something. But there's a million things like that to learn. Continue to challenge yourself. Continue to ask the hard questions. I showed them another trick that in foreflight, you can actually put the waypoints of an approach in the flight nav log. Foreflight's designed for this. And get so much more situational awareness to have that redundancy both on the screen and on your leg. Really good stuff. So keep challenging yourselves, keep learning, keep recognizing problems and create a few on your own with post it notes or whatever you can to better pilots. Anything to add as we close?
30:45
Wally Mulhern
No, no, just, you know, I've really started incorporating this on my checkrides. I, I tell people now and this just isn't a checkride thing. We can say we can apply this to any flight, but I, I apply it to checkrides. I'll, I'll. Before we go out to fly, I'll say to the applicant, I'll say we have three goals today. Number one goal is to not die. Number two goal is to complete a checkride. Number three goal is to have some fun. I'll say if we have, if we get all three, it's a great day. If we get two, it's a good day. If we get one, at least we live to live another day. And I think we can take that and just take the word checkride and put flight. Okay, we have three goals for our flight today.
31:32
Wally Mulhern
And of course, that, number one goal, that's what we're going for. We want to, you know, and, you know, we can't measure the lives that we save. But I don't know, maybe we can look at the statistics and say, well, less people got hurt this year than last year. But, you know, that's the bottom line. We want to, what we're doing here, if we mess up bad enough, it can hurt. It can hurt, yeah.
32:04
Bobby Doss
With that, you bring up a good tease for a future show that's coming probably in a few weeks now. But Paul Craig has finished the third edition of the Killing Zone. Got new data, new statistics, new numbers that he's excited to publish and share. As soon as we know the launch date or the release date of the third edition, Paul's gonna jump back on the show with us and tell us a number of things that have changed in those numbers and what pilots need to be thinking about. So we look forward to having Paul Craig and a good discussion about the Killing Zone third edition. And hopefully we've continued to get better in GA and all of aviation and have solved some of the problems we've had in the past. With that, as always, fly safely and stay behind the prop.
32:56
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@bravetheprop.com behind the Prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss, co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.