Flight Test

Flight tests are a bit of a strange exercise in pilot psychology; As pilots we will spend countless hours mastering the art of flying an aircraft, perpetually sharpening the skills we will use on every flight, and skills we may only use once during an entire career to the point where we would be able to manage most any eventuality which could occur while flying. Despite all of this preparation, flight tests, at least for myself, remain a source of apprehension. While sitting at the flight school where I took my private pilot license, I overheard a student ask one of the instructors what he though of pilots who got nervous before a flight test to which the instructor responded that if he knew on a given flight he would be faced with short field takeoff followed by a stall, a diversion due to weather and finally concluding with an engine failure, he would be nervous too. Flight tests typically consist of a little more than a dozen or so flight exercises that will require the pilot to use a broad spectrum of skills in order to pass. Our performance is graded on how closely we can maintain parameters of altitude, airspeed and heading, among others. To a certain degree, my own flight test apprehension, has been not so much a product of the exercises themselves, but rather of the unknowns. Even while you can know a given exercise inside and out, the behaviour of weather, of particular aircraft and of examiners will only be found out at the time of the test itself.

At one point in time, it was steep turns that was cause for a sleepless night before a flight test. I saw the steep turn as one of the few exercises where my performance, during the minute the exercise would take to complete, would determine whether I passed or failed. One slip beyond 100 feet, or 10 knots or 10 degrees of heading and it would all be over.

Knowing that I had not gone outside of flight test standards since my first steep turns did little to quell the fear that the possibility existed that it may happen on a flight test. While there were other exercises which would be challenging, the success of most other items on the flight test would not come down to my performance during a few key minutes, but rather my performance during the entire exercise itself. With time I became comfortable enough with steep turns that, even when considering the unknowns of a flight test, they were no longer a cause for worry.

I read once that one of the many marks of a good pilot is the ability to keep a level head and exercise sound judgement, regardless of how sweaty their hands, or how tight their grip on the controls got. Some would argue that flight tests are good preparation for dealing with the stressful situations with which pilots can sometimes be faced in the real world outside of training.

Unfortunately with flying as with life outside of flying, intellectual knowledge of what causes apprehension does not always go very far towards eliminating it. A fact that I am revisiting again on the evening prior to the flight for the upgrade to captain. After having studied emergency procedures and performance charts, airspeeds and operating procedures, I lay in bed wondering if there wasn't some i I had left undotted, a t left uncrossed. Eventually after some period of reciting engine failure drills in my head, sleep finally overcame me early enough in the night to allow for a decent sleep. In the morning I awoke early to check the weather and prepare a bit of breakfast before heading in to the hangar. Even while the evening prior had me reviewing anything that could be of use for the flight test, today I put that aside; now was not the time for studying.

I arrived at the hangar a half an hour early to get the plane set up for the ride. After talking with the examiner about our route and where we would conduct the upper airwork, I looked at the weather once again to see if anything had changed, typed up and filed our flight plan, and figured out the performance numbers I would soon be asked for. From here the test followed a fairly routine pattern; Aircraft systems and IFR procedures questions, hypothetical situations followed by a briefing of the flight test itself and what would be expected of us as a crew. Once in the plane, it simply became a matter of doing what I had been doing since learning to fly a number of years ago, flying the airplane.

Touching down after the last approach of the flight test, I felt a simultaneous rush of relief, pride and fatigue. I taxied the plane in to the hangar, careful not to let the flood of emotions get in the way of the task at hand; I was not finished yet. Setting the park brake in front of the hangar, I paused for a second before bringing the condition levers back, shutting down the engines. As the engines spooled down I felt a hand on my shoulder, "Congratulations, gather your things and I'll meet you two inside". I sat there, for a few minutes after the pilot who had been flying right seat and the examiner deplaned, alone in the cockpit, trying to take everything that had transpired in the past 5 hours. All that had come before it, the months of preparation, the studying, the reading, the worry, everything leading up to this moment, in an instant, all worthwhile.

"I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. Free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them." Charles Lindbergh

Upgrade

The past months have kept me quite well occupied; work has picked up slightly since the summer in addition to training, which for me comes due in the fall. So as to not get caught with a great deal of reviewing to do in a short span of time, I had begun looking over IFR procedures and regulations in the early summer in preparation for fall training. This would leave me with enough time to study King Air procedures and systems after returning from vacation in August, and with any luck a month or so of time between King Air training and Beech 1900 training to refresh on 1900 related material. With whatever time was left in between, I would fit in dangerous goods, aircraft surface contamination, and minimum equipment list training, among the other various courses which would need to be completed over the course of the fall.

Returning from vacation in late August I was told by one of our training captains to prepare for left seat training which would begin in the coming weeks. While flying an aircraft from the left seat requires the same basic flying skills as flying one from the right, the judgement and decision making skills required and ultimately the responsibility were far from the same. As a result, being trained to fly from the left seat would be not so much an exercise in learning to fly like a captain, as much as an exercise in making decisions like one. Over the course of the training, I was presented with countless hypothetical situations designed to test systems and regulations knowledge from a practical standpoint;

"So Josh, you are in the descent to the City, and arrival reports the visibility at 3/8's of a mile, what are you going to do?"

"Well, assuming we are flying the ILS into the city, 3/8's is sufficient so as to not impose an approach ban, but the city doesn't have RVOP, so until the visibility comes up to at least 1/2 mile, we would either have to hold, or look at what the weather was like at the international, and plan to divert there to wait for the weather to improve."

"OK, lets say you now have an engine fire on the right, how will that change your plan?"

"Ahh, well, with an engine fire we would first run through the memory actions and checklist for engine fire in flight, and upon completing those, I would declare an emergency and request direct to the approach fix for the the ILS in use at the international. They have RVOP there, so as long as the weather doesn't drop below 3/8 we can fly the approach, and they have firefighting equipment there as well, should we need it. "

The hypothetical questions continued until the training captain ran out of questions, or until I could convince him that I knew what I was talking about. While there are numerous situations in almost every phase of flight that can occur which would test a pilots skill, most are confined within the phases of flight that are inherently demanding to begin with; take-off and landing. This is where training captains will tend to focus their attention, and for good reason. An engine failure which occurs shortly after lifting off from the runway will require precise flying, and for memory actions to completed expediently and efficiently in order to achieve a favorable outcome. If the engine were to fail while in cruise, the crew would have the luxury of time and altitude to sort through the problem. Moreover, if a given crew can successfully deal with an engine failure shortly after taking off, dealing with one during a less demanding phase of flight should not pose a problem.

While I did not find flying from the left seat to be any more demanding than flying a particular procedure from the right, landing from the left certainly did not feel as intuitive. When landing an aircraft, whether it be from the right or left hand side, visual references are used to compare the alignment of the aircraft relative to the runway. When learning to land the king air from the right, my brain formed a mental picture of how the runway should look in relation to the top of the instrument panel when the plane and runway were aligned. Attempting to superimpose this mental picture I had formed from my time in the right seat, to use during my landings from the left, resulted in a handful of landings that were not as straight as they could have been. With each successive landing I refined my mental picture to account for the new vantage point. With that refined metal picture firmly planted in mind, landings became, as one would expect, a fair bit easier.

Sandwiched in between training flights and normal line flying, I would sit in the plane on free evenings and run through emergency checklists to be able to accomplish memory actions without hesitation. I repeated the actions to be completed in the event of engine failures and fires, electrical malfunctions, smoke or fire in the cabin, and loss of pressurisation over and again until they were seeded deep within my brain alongside other bits of information I hope to keep stored in my memory for sometime. While pure memorisation certainly does help to keep items like emergency procedures available for when I may need them, I have found that understanding why you are accomplishing a certain task on a checklist goes a long way towards helping you to remember that task when it counts.

Initially, it was with the intention of preparing for the flight test that I studied IFR and emergency procedures, aircraft systems and performance charts. However, the reality is that while preparing for the flight test is important the flight test is but one day, it will be the flying which follows the flight test that will be the real test.