What if the fan stops?
- You know why there is this fan in front of small airplanes?
- To cool down the pilot – look how he’s sweating when the fan stops!
Today I did my third solo. Nothing really exciting happened except that on my third round Terry said:
- ‘OK now when we’ll be about half the length of the runway I want you to do a simulated emergency landing, the whole nine yards’
- ‘Uh?’ I said more surprised then scared
- ‘You know, you do the “big knob pull”, establish best glide speed, start the pattern with all the call outs, proceed with emergency checks – fuel tank, pump, mixture, carburator heat and magnetos and land’.
- ‘Uh….’
In his words it sounded like piece of cake. OK let’s give it a try. About half downwind I pulled the throttle all the way back and the fun began. I tried very hard to keep 85 mph but I’m still far behind it so when I was doing emergency check and calls the speed kept lurking around 90-95mph causing me about 200 feet of altitude before I was able to catch up with it. Then, from the point of no return (the point we know we can’t restart the fan and we have to land) everything seemed to calm down. I trimmed the plane to more or less 85mph, aligned it with the runway and landed. Actually it was much harder than it sounds – due to previous mistakes it required some fancy wind dancing just above the runway as I overshoot base a little bit . Normally I’d call it unstable approach and went around, but remember – the fan is not working so I tried to save my day. There are plenty of things to train before I can tell I’m proficient with this emergency procedure but I’m pretty happy with the outcome. Funny thing – even though the emergency landing process was far from being perfect I never, even for a second thought about stopping it, adding full power and trying to do it again. Good or bad?
After that the rest of this lesson was a routine. One more round then Terry left. I backtaxied and did another 6 rounds on my own including one go around when I was so high and fast on the final that there was no way I could put this bird on first third of the tarmac. Oh well, not first and definitely not the last one.
Next time it will be my first real solo – I’m supposed to go to the airport, get the bird out and do full hour with at least 10 landings completely on my own.
1.2h/0.0h inst : 10 to/ldg logged
25.8h/0.8h inst : 139 to/ldg total
