"Maneuvering Flight - Hazardous to Your Health?" Seminar Impresses ANN

by ANN Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien

If you're like me, when a pilot tells you, "watch this!", you cringe inside. "Watch This!" were the first words of the latest AOPA Air Safety Foundation seminar, Maneuvering Flight - Hazardous to Your Health? From that attention-grabbing opening to its tidy conclusion, the seminar holds your attention and - to my great surprise - shakes some well-established preconceptions to their foundations.

I caught a 1-hour preview of the 2-hour seminar on 1st November, at AOPA Expo 2003 in Philadelphia. Mark Grady of the Air Safety Foundation (ASF) presented the seminar to a packed house, and if reaction to the preview is anything to go by, it will be well received among the local pilots' groups, type clubs, and ad-hoc safety meetings that are ASF's delivery means for its vaunted safety seminars.

How'd it Go?

Mark (below, right) began with the obligatory "instructor's joke." Soon we learned that he wasn't simply following a tried-and-true recipe - he has a naturally humorous delivery, and kept the mood in the hall light even while we were discussing gravely serious subjects.

ASF developed the seminar in close cooperation with the FAA's safety personnel, as usual: "We all want to be singing off the same hymn sheet!" Mark explained.

The first thing to establish was a working definition of maneuvering flight. The definition was a negative one: flight that is not takeoff phase, landing phase, or direct cruising between point A and B. Examples of maneuvering flight include student/training air work, traffic patterns, aerial missions (traffic report, pipeline patrol, banner towing, aerial application, etc.), and, of course, aerobatics. There is also the Maneuver that Dare Not Speak its Name: buzzing (more on that anon).

Video Enhances the Seminar

Characters Buzz McClanahan and Loop D. Loop are the good cop/bad cop of the video. Buzz is the good guy, the voice of reason. He presents the Darwin Awards, as he helpfully explains, "for improving the gene pool by removing himself from it." (This goes over well - the Darwin Awards are a hoary old Internet joke, but enough pilots have never heard of them for the joke to sound as funny as it did the first time you heard it. Loopy is the other guy. He is very likely to collect one of the Darwins if he doesn't straighten up and fly right. They engage in banter and Loopy performs some braincase-challenged things. He can't stop himself, but I guess that no one has told him that Gravity is Not Just a Good Idea: It's the Law. Some people commented that they thought the levity was too much; many more seemed to enjoy it. If you know the ASF series, you know that they tend to have painfully corny moments, anyway.

While the characters in the video are played for yucks, the substance of the presentation is serious business. I was taken aback to know that maneuvering flight, which produces a significant but hardly leading percentage of GA accidents, produces a very much higher percentage of GA fatal accidents. The reason: an accident while maneuvering is much more likely than average to be fatal than a takeoff, landing, or cruise prang.  Fully 44% of maneuvering accidents are fatal.

Fatal accidents are the ones we most ardently wish to prevent… and the data presented in the seminar make it clear that we haven't been doing as good a job on fatals as we have done on accidents in general. Since 1938, aircraft accidents have dropped from 125.9 per 100,000 flight hours, to 6.28 per 100,000. But fatals, after a little improvement in the 1930s and 1940s, have hovered at about the same number - around 1.5 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours.

You Mean Buzzing, Don't You?

The seminar addresses the widespread misconception - a misconception that I certainly shared - that maneuvering accidents are usually buzzing accidents. Buzzing, while an excellent way to collect a posthumous Darwin, is only a small part of maneuvering flight. To put it in statistical terms, a high percentage of buzzing flights end in a maneuvering mishap, but a much smaller percentage of flights that end in a maneuvering mishap involve buzzing.

If not buzzing, what then? Well, maneuvering flight also includes, says the seminar: the traffic pattern, aerial work, formation flying, and practicing stalls and spins, among other things. Each has its own hazards, and the hazards and risk-management strategies for each are reviewed in depth.

An interesting part of the seminar dealt with spins. Aerobatic pilot and instructor Nancy Lynn demonstrated a spin in an Extra 300L aerobatic monoplane… showing the altitude loss inherent in a spin and recovery, even with the snappy recovery of this top-drawer pilot in a top-drawer competitive bird. The verdict: if you spin at low altitude, knowing how to recover won't help you. At that point, better to make Pascal's wager and spend your last few seconds in frantic prayer. (I'm joking about that of course; if you ever get in trouble remember Bob Hoover's admonition, "Keep flying into the crash. Don't stop flying until all the pieces have stopped moving." God will forgive you; Newton will not). 

[Aside: spin recovery performance differs dramatically from one type to the next - a lightly loaded, i.e. to Utility category limits, Cessna trainer, recovers with less loss of altitude than the aerodynamically cleaner Extra, but many other common GA planes either require more altitude, and some can't be recovered at all].

Nancy also appears in another video segment, playing a rogue pilot who terrifies her passenger with a long takeoff roll followed by a zoom takeoff in an ordinary Cessna. As she bubbles, "Isn't this fun?" the passenger gets increasingly queasy, the audience laughs, and one hope, the ASF's message: "don't fly like this," gets imprinted. (Nancy, a veteran ASF Safety Seminar presenter in her own right, was in the audience for the seminar I attended).

Off We Go Into Opinionland

Mark polled the audience - just to satisfy his own curiosity - about whether they thought the FAA's change from requiring private pilot students to demonstrate spins, to requiring only CFIs to spin, was a good or a bad one. Like any group of pilots, they split on the issue. My own opinions on the issue are complicated. While I think it is good training, and that everyone would be a better pilot if he or she had met the old two-turns-and-out-on-a-heading standard, I'm also very conscious of the much greater amount of information that today's pilot is expected to absorb, and skills he or she must master, ostensibly in 40 hours. (Yeah, right. In the really real world most students have sixty-something hours these days before they are ready for their Private flight test). Also, one thing interesting to me was that the percentage and number of stall/spin fatalities has steadily declined. A stall/spin accident that is not fatal is usually one that happens outside the pattern… maybe the FAA is right and the current training is working at preventing stall/spin fatalities, especially the classic base-to-final skidding turn kind. I don't know, and I'm going to look at the ASF statistics in more depth before I form a strong opinion on this.

Another Sacred Cow Feeds the Hungry Multitudes

Misconceptions and conventional wisdom continued to take a beating as the seminar drove on, powered by Mark's lighthearted delivery. I was astonished to find that student pilots are some of the safest, while commercial pilots have the largest numbers of accidents and fatal accidents. One would think that these professionals, trained to fly at a higher standard of precision and almost invariably instrument-rated, would be better than the private and student pilots. But in this measure, they are not.

Why? There are at least two possibilities. One reason might be the kind of flying they do - low and slow types of air work such as pipeline patrol, photography, or wildlife management. Banner towing and aerial application have their own well-known hazards. While risks in these operations can be managed (and the seminar discusses how), they can't be eliminated; they're inherent in the work. Another possible reason suggests that some of these commercial-rated pilot accidents might be prevented: some of these pilots might suffer from complacency and overconfidence.

How Did Mark Start Doing This?

Waiting for my airliner, I ran into Mark again. Juan Jimenez shortly joined us - weird, but we were all on the same plane out of Philadelphia. Mark described how he came to do seminars for ASF: "I've been in radio for years, and I've been flying for a long time too. I was doing a presentation somewhere, and Rod Machado was in the audience - I didn't know he was there, but afterwards he complimented me on the job I did. Well, a few years later one guy that did these for ASF retired, and one passed away, and so there were a couple of openings, and Rod remembered me and recommended me to the board. I interviewed by phone - they took me on before we ever met face to face."

Mark's aviation background is varied, but includes a number I bet you don't envy him - 6,600 hours pilot in command of a Cessna 152, flying traffic patrols at 80 knots. This is a classic example of the maneuvering category that the ASF calls "aerial work," scoping out traffic jams from aloft for the edification of the luckless commuters down there in the bumper-to-bumper.

He did have an unusual law enforcement assist once.

"I heard the call that a man had stolen a handbag, and I spotted him running. He threw the bag away and slowed to a walk - he was smart. Then he ducked into a shop and was sitting there calmly. Of course I saw this, and he must have been surprised when every cop car in town pulled up in front of that place! You should have seen the look on his face when the cops were leading him out and he looked up at my little airplane."

Mark's safety presentations have entertained him and audiences for several years now, and promise to do so for years to come.

Summary

When Maneuvering Flight comes to your area, don't miss it. It's free, as are all ASF Seminars (ASF is funded by donations, mostly from individual pilots like us). If you can see it presented by Mark Grady, that's even better.

Have you ever imagined yourself as a presenter of such a seminar? Perhaps something like this would inform and entertain your flying club, EAA chapter, or other group. ASF has made that easy to do with their Seminar-in-a-Box, which is available for just a low shipping and handling charge. See the ASF website for more details.

FMI: www.asf.org, www.lynnaviation.com