InFlight Emergencies - InTheHangar Ep1

Mayday Mayday Mayday we're talking to people who have had emergencies today I used to be a lot of expected member of the aviation community and then I started flying too serious in that chain that was great until the engine quit all of a sudden I see these explosions crews exploding I'm walking away a better pilot because of this obsession welcome to in the hangar I'm Chrissy Wong and I'm Dan Millican today we're talking emergencies and we have some people who have had real emergencies on my right Travis Travis wants you to tell us a little bit about yourself my name is Travis J I worked for a part 142 training provider and a business jet manufacturer I own a small company that restores the light aircraft particularly vintage beech twins and I'm currently working on an STC for a cabin lighting system so a little bit of everything mixed up into a bunch of nothing married a pilot my wife is a member of the fast team which is how I met tomorrow and Kristi and got here at today I suppose all right so mark tell us about yourself I was retired from FedEx last year by age I retired out of the Navy yeah the flu fighters both the Air Force and the Navy oh wow and flown general aviation since 1965 Wow I've been around for a few years all right tomorrow my name is Tamar Griffiths and I have been in aviation since I was born didn't know there was any other life grew up with it with both my parents as pilots and mechanics and air traffic control I am an aircraft mechanic also and right now currently a career flight instructor I've done a lot of other areas of aviation but this is what I am a little nothing a bunch of wing nuts that's yeah that was my first thing that took apart awesome well thank you everybody for joining us today I mean really as a lower time pilot I have not yet experienced major emergencies in flight I had a flat nose wheel on landing once that's about the extent of my adrenaline rush while flying so I appreciate you guys your wisdom today what it constitutes an emergency for you guys Wow well in emergencies anytime that you need priority over anything else so is the engine not working is the landing you're not working are we having a problem where we have potential for catastrophe on top of everything else do I have sick passengers do I have some kind of fuel critical status those are kind of the general big things that we talk about I think in emergencies yeah I would say the same thing sometimes I even you know declaring an emergency even when we think there's a potential for something that's seriously wrong if you had known that my tire didn't feel right when I landed you know declaring that emergency I've done it several times well I think the fear for me is as also a low low time pilot is that you know when do you declare emergency and you know am I going to declare emergency too soon and and you know FAA pointing fingers at me and mounds of paperwork versus declaring emergency too late and I'm dead so there's a balance and as a new pilot I don't know where to reach that balance can we just dispel a room or just to start with yes please in this country there's no paperwork for an emergency okay good at other countries yeah like in the Bahamas you have to fill out a bicycle car boat airplane accident report form it's like half a page two here and two I'm glad you said that because you know yours was a low front tire for me I had a low voltage while an IFR at night heading towards New York City that's a good one so I did not well I wasn't in the New York airspace yet but I was I was talking to I was with with their Center and I went ahead and immediately diverted to the nearest there was a Class C that I was ten miles from and low voltage I'd actually had it before it so it didn't scare me and you know that's just I got plenty of battery the last 30 minutes and I'm five minutes from an airport so no big deal so I just let them know that and I told them it's not an emergency because my flight instructor during instrument when we had a low voltage it said make sure you tell them it's not an emergency or you'll have paperwork you know and or whatever and so I landed and they rolled trucks anyway they declared emergency and I didn't know that they could do that sure can the taxi of shame when the fire department follows you to the ranchers but so I got there and you know I had to fill out now the the fire chief had me all right he asked me some questions and filled some stuff out I didn't fill it out and then that was it until two weeks later I get a call from the physio for for that area and he just he asked me questions so what was the result and I go into this long spill about it was the generator building so planes back in service yep okay that's all I wanted yeah so yeah I think the biggest thing is to not worry about the consequences what matters is getting the airplane on the ground safely okay and alerting somebody that you may have a situation like what you're talking about you don't have to declare emergency but you can certainly let it control or no we have a problem and I need some time to sort it out call me back whatever but don't let them fly your airplane for you and and the situation depends upon what kind of airplane you're flying if you're in a heavy airplane and with a crew and the airplanes on autopilot do you have plenty of time to grab a cup of coffee and go through the checklist if you're in a single-engine airplane that's a whole different situation if you have a fire you have smoke in the cockpit that determines that is for your action on what you can do but even in those situations you can squawk 7700 immediately and that's going to draw some attention of the people and they're gonna get somebody that's gonna follow you so you can go on from there well if I'm on flight following a farm on IFR and I'm talking to center anyway do I really need to take the time to squawk 77 and because I'm gonna tell them right off the bat if you've told them then you've already addressed the problem okay how does one train for an emergency really like I mean during private pilot training of course it's oh then you lost an engine what do you do find a field and land but obviously as you grow up in the pilot career there are a lot more things that can go wrong how do you train for that I think Travis hit it on the nose you know you train in the simulator with as many emergencies as you possibly can I did plenty of hours as a sim instructor myself we can make you sweat absolutely you know if you're gonna make a mistake do it in the simulator and that's where you get your best way to learn is by mistake you're putting somebody in the simulator and oh no you lost a Wingo you deal with it and you learn and and we always have the ability to critique and anything we do if we have an actual emergency we can go back and say hey how did that go and what did i do right and what didn't I do right and it can happen internally or it can happen with other people and it just depends in a simulator environment then yeah there's eyes watching you all over the place and everything you do is critiqued and sometimes harshly and sometimes not harshly enough but the professionals get a lot more training on that front then the average GA pilot does and that's something that really is kind of more of a problem I think for the for the recreational pilot we just don't don't back up that information very well so I mean obviously you know as a right now as a ga pilot I practice go arounds and practice engine outs and the powerup 180s and things like that but realistically what can we do as she pilots to prepare for an emergency or train or practice our teach must play the what if game while you're sitting there board you know whether it's in crews like that where would I put this plane down looking out your various places how much altitude do I have to lose how much altitude do I have to lose you know so how far what is that ox tank doesn't feel right you know play the little water if games and I will tell you through my few emergencies that I've had in my career it was other people story so hearing their stories hearing their critiques hearing these you know breakdowns affected my decision-making down the road and that's where you know those are your practice sessions all right so stories listen that's a good segue tell me well let's go by each one of you tell me your story about emergency probably the most severe one was when I was flying Freight I had an engine began to give me problems in flight about 5000 feet I was inbound to austin bergstrom at the time and it in the clouds and they called zero zero about the same time my engine started coughing and sputtering to the point they have less time to shut it down ok so just for those who don't know what zero zero zero zero visibility is we're basically it's all fog all the way to the ground you can't see you can't see your hand in front of your face feeling that's about the easiest way to put it I was so intense that it was probably less than zero zero in my mind in this case the engine I to shut it down but where these airplanes it was between engine aircraft normally would maintain altitude and continue flying this one refused so we were slowly in a descent rate based on all the calculations we do as pilots looking at my descent rate already called my emergency I'm aiming for the airport that has the Boston Berkshire has the emergency facilities I'm not gonna make the airport as mine and my glide and everything that I'm doing minimally to try to make this runway I'm thinking I'm not gonna make it that day and but amazingly it decided at the last minute to give me a little bit what happened I don't know what happened to the engine I never learned from maintenance but it kicked back on No never quit it just basically it got low enough I think I've gained enough the other engine to finally just stopped that descent rate and finish the approach did you land in 0 0 yes I never officially saw that runway I felt it that I did not see it I probably the the fire department said they could see my wingtip lights when they went by honestly I never saw anything but part of that's that focus we get when we were in an emergency we can't think beyond literally this little tunnel that what we're doing and I was very focused on putting that thing on something I didn't know what was below me but we're gonna find out the hard way so what's the best landing of my life yeah mark how about you well we're talking about engine failures I've had eight eight and two were in single-engine airplanes and both of those were at 500 feet whoa we don't have a lot of time to think about it you just fly the airplane and put it on the ground I will say that out of all the engine failures none of them were catastrophic engine failures most of them were feel related in one way or another and the first case was back in college I was delivering airplanes and you just at the time pull back and if the houses get smaller then you're you're flying yeah it didn't really matter as far as qualifications go I was delivering airplanes and I didn't know anything about that particular airplane it was an air coop and I could see that it had a feeder tank and a cork and a wire like on a j-3 cub right and that's your good fuel gauge and that's going down but I got two full wing tanks that should be putting gas in there and that's not happening and I was following the road my plan was if the engine failed to be landing on this particular Road and all that was great until the engine quit and there was a little town right in front of me and there was time to make a 90-degree turn and another 90-degree turn and I was on the ground and it turned out I knew there was an airport over there somewhere and turned out I was on final a hundred yards short of the runway Wow had I seen I might have tried to go for it but it's a good thing I didn't because I wouldn't have made it and it was up on a plateau anyway and the problem was there was a fuel valve behind the seat inaccessible in-flight that was supposed to be safety wired on and it wasn't so if you're gonna fly another airplane know something about the fuel system and the other situation was the Skybolt that I had built and had - 300 horsepower engine and took off at a very steep climb which was the fortunate thing therefore there had been fine on the airplane for many flights and in this particular case at 500 feet the engine just quit boom it's gone and I made an immediate turn there was a diagonal runway that I was able to land on the grass strip and just as the prop was about to stop it started again and I said a few words to it and we taxied back to the hangar and I took the whole fuel system apart and it was basically some air had gotten into the line enough to cavitate the whole system so you know it goes back to what we were talking about you know where you're always looking for that place to land doesn't matter where you are and you have to commit and there isn't any time when you're flying and you have an emergency to be thinking about what may happen because you've already thought about it a hundred times you're always thinking about well if that engine should COFF this is where I'm gonna go if it's flying in a congested area at night for example there's only two things that are gonna be dark one is water and the other is going to be mountains and I'd rather go into the water then I would in the mountains so these are things again that you have to have already thought about ahead of time but it's it's always been an interesting situation Wow I want to point out the body language we're talking about emergencies and we have a pair of very seasoned pilots in front of us and the eyes are watering the voices are wavering this is always scary stuff it doesn't matter if you're new to aviation or you've been around a million years everybody is afraid of the next thing that's gonna happen it's gonna make them think oh man is this gonna be the last thing I ever see alright and it doesn't matter I can see it in every veterans tales and I can see it and new neophytes tales as well when you're new to it it's just as scary as when it's your last date they're talking and I'm like tensing up ya know my chair is creaking I think underneath these stories so Travis how about you well my last emergency let's just go to that one we bought a new airplane just recently my wife and I and it's a very old airplane it was built in 1942 and it's been modified many times since it was built it's an old radial engine beech 18 officially ac45 but we put it back into service had been sitting for about five years out of service before that it was a non program maintenance it was doing maybe contract flying before that belongs somebody else belong somebody else and the government operated it incognito for quite a while before that it was in the army so it's a really unique airplane and it has a great history but it's been sitting out in the desert granted some of its indoors some of its outdoors but a museum had ahold of it and they were doing what they called the long annual program which was about a three year long annual which is not really enough to be considered program maintenance in my opinion I'm sure tomorrow can latch to that so we did a lot of work and we actually did an annual inspection on the airplane and we got it up and running and we flew it and ran it and flew it and ran it and finally we brought it all the way from California back to Texas where we are where my company has its base and we flew it around a little bit and then we decided we're gonna go to Ashe Kosh right because where the heck my family hasn't had a flyable airplane and likes for longer than two weeks in more than six years right and so we got Oshkosh our son wants to go to Oshkosh we want to go to Oshkosh we load up throw everything in there we could have enough fuel to go there and back and still load you know the barbecue and everything else with it so we're cruising along and we're almost there and the field goes IFR and so I'm thinking man I'm 40 minutes from there I just passed my first plan diversion Airport I'm gonna go up and see because in 40 minutes the airport may reopen let's go take a look at it so we're coming down there's clouds we're VFR my wife and I are both professional pilots and we spend our time in the professional sphere of aviation and I had decided you know what I'm gonna go back to grassroots I'm gonna fly at 10-5 with no radio communication whatsoever I'm not gonna do a TC I'm just gonna sit back and cruise and watch the clouds go by cuz this is my vacation and I don't want to deal with it so you don't have to operate in the system private pilot's there's a million people at Oshkosh you got there without speaking on the radio once and that's great I think this is one of the beauties of our country and the ability for us to be able to do this professionally yeah we have to operate in the IFR world and we have to talk to everybody and we have to dot the i's and cross the t's but vacation is vacation so here we are cruising along and in the descent I'm ducking and weaving around some-some towering cumulus and all of a sudden my left engine starts revving and I'm thinking oh well boy that prop governor sure is acting up right now right so I'm looking at my power settings and I'm adjusting and we're weaving around the clouds and my son's turning a little bit the wrong shade of color and and so I'm trying to be mindful of my passengers and and where I'm going and I know there's a million airplanes in the sky so I got some real traffic to concern myself with in other words the workload all of a sudden has gone from hey I'm cruising I'm listening the ATIS to you know wow this is really complicated and then the engine starts giving me fits well I'm sitting there thinking man that the tachometer is revving back and forth and what am I going to do with this so I I pull the power off on that engine and I'm like it behaves itself is it okay so I continued my descent still shooting the clouds trying to find the bases and I come out the bottom and the engine just quits and I'm like what the heck is going on with this engine and I said you know what I have time to deal with it I got a load shed something here I've got too many things going on so I feathered the engine and then I thought hmm should I call somebody and I thought well I have garden dialed in but who's going to help me right and that's when I threw the idea out the window no reason to declare it because nobody knows who I am where I am or what I'm doing all right so then the next thing I'm doing I've secured the engine I'm looking at my cabin everything's okay a seat belts are on we're going to find an airport and so then the nearest button comes out on the GPS I've got two feet on the right router pedal and I'm I've trimmed everything that is stopped the trim tabs on the left rudder which isn't helping when the left engine shut down so now I'm fighting the good fight and I can't find an airport that has more than 2,800 feet of runway in front of me and it's just one of those days where I'm like man can't a guy catch a break I just wanted to be on vacation my margarita machines waiting yeah Oshkosh and now I'm here so anyway we ended up diverting and having an uneventful landing at an airport that had just opened that very day so we touched down on a runway with no paint marks or anything else and it was completely uneventful and what I want to attest to it is that the first thing in my mind was just fly the plane work the problem and fly the plane and everything that I hear about successful outcomes typically is people not getting distracted by the million things that are going on that Qantas had a flight in the Asian realm a while back in a380 and they blew their number two engine and it basically crippled the airplane and they got so involved working the problem that they kind of forgot to fly the plane and it's finally an observer there my understanding was five people in the cockpit one of them in the very back the lowest guy on the totem pole to rank wise said we're gonna run out of gas and CG because we can't transfer our fuel forward out of the tail and all of a sudden everybody stopped and said holy smokes he's right we have to land now somebody needs to be flying the airplane we can't just focus on only the problem at hand is that engine behaving itself no it's not but what am I gonna do after I cage it I need to do something else right need to get the airplane on the ground do I need to worry about communicating with some tower somewhere who's gonna answer my guard call well maybe but I'd rather find a place to land then worry about getting on the telephone with somebody all right that guy can't help me in my situation so I need to help me I have to fly the plane to the ground and find a safe conclusion for my event whatever it happens to be so did you in a strip did you declare an emergency I did not and you're but you also had a seasoned professional pilot sitting right seat with you right no she was in the back I was she was in the back yeah I have a great she took great pictures of it well it happened so interesting interesting I like to say one other thing about emergencies and I talked about this ad nauseam with clients you pay a lot of money to come see us at our training center but one of my big issues is you get one decision and then you have to live with whatever you decided to do and whether it's good or bad now all of a sudden you have this happening you can't go back we go to Sully Sullenberger which is not my favorite example of things but I will credit him with one of the things that I did I think that he did very well once he decided a course of action he didn't waver from it right we're gonna land this plane in the Hudson the end right I'm in an air coop oh look there's a runway over there can I make it and that thought of can I make it that's the one that puts everybody in the dirt we say oh there's a perfectly good field there the airplanes gonna maybe survive but I'm gonna walk away from this that's where we're gonna go we're not going to stop and change things once we've decided our course of action and then we live with the results atr-72 crashed in out of taipei i think it was not that long ago was spectacular dashcam footage of the thing clipping a bridge and traffic lanes and one of the big problems in that accident was that they changed their course of action several times and then nobody flew the plane and no one accepted the fact that they were gonna have to land the airplane tomorrow said I can't hold altitude we're landing it doesn't matter what's in front of us we're gonna aim for the runway follow this until we stop moving right those guys they refuse to accept the reality of the situation which was we screwed up the good engine and the bad engine isn't going to get us to where we need to go and instead of finding a place where the airplane could survive they tried to hold altitude until they ran out of flying speeds alright so sticking with it and accepting the decision that you made and then working through the decision is one of the best pieces of advice give anybody we follow on one thing Travis just said I think it's important in an emergency to understand that saving the airplane is the last priority the only priority is walking away from it as best you can so somebody has insurance on the airplane and if they don't it doesn't really matter all it matters this that you come up with a plan and you do follow through with that if it means putting it between trees because that's the only thing that's out there then do that but make sure that you fly the airplane into the trees if that's what you're going to do yeah well good I really appreciate you guys coming today and sharing your wisdom on emergencies I know I learned a lot no I I'm walking away a better pilot because of this discussion so thanks for watching and as always please share subscribe and leave comments and [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Taking Off

Views: 30,658

Keywords: emergency landing, general aviation, emergency landing plane, emergency landing cessna, general aviation videos, general aviation flying, taking off, s-films, sfilms s films, christy wong, dan millican, daniel millican, flying, aviation, hangar, hangar talk, in the hangar, inthehanger, takingoff, s films production, general aviation crashes, taking off in a plane, general aviation aircraft

Id: m__JhS2kr38

Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/tbann]

TL/DR, Choose a course of action and then fly the plane until it stops moving.

[u/JustPlaneSilly]

My friend Daniel put out his first "In the Hangar" video. This is on In flight emergencies. I didn't get to see this one filmed but I watched it twice now and it is food for thought for sure.

The guy on the far left (Travis I think) offers some really good perspective. They all do.

Anyway, hopefully you get something from this.