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                                                Actual Ice on Wing photo after storm encounter

Being known as a somewhat experienced aviator to my many customers over some 20 years since starting this company, I get many seasonal questions from my "Mooneylander's". Many questions come in the Spring as the start of THUNDERSTORM season. To fly or not to fly in the vicinity of thunderstorms; what to do if one is inadvertently encountered, etc. Those many questions lead to the article on:

Being a pilot as many of you Mooneyland readers are; you no doubt get questions from people you know right after a sensationalized aviation accident as I do and the most recent came from a cousin of mine that lives in the Buffalo NY area. Sensational air accidents are so publicized that often times it seems to shake the foundation of the question "Is flying safe" within each non pilot type person mostly because they have to fly and in some cases spent many years getting used to detachment from "terra firma" by convincing themselves that flying is "Routine" and safe.

In this case I actually emailed my cousin to check on her and her family after the recent Continental Airlines accident near Buffalo NY that took the lives of 49 people onboard that aircraft and one person on the ground. I asked if she knew anyone involved and thankfully answer was no, she didn't know them, but she asked what had happened to bring down that airliner. This question was within 2 or 3 days of the accident and while only preliminary facts were in coupled with the suddenness of the crash compared with the pilot's last transmission of normalcy having just taken place, I could only think...............ICE!

One of the initial reports from the NTSB investigators was a mention in passing that he thought that the auto pilot was on at the time of the difficulty the crew was having in flight.

As I said, this email dated 2/15/09 was just a day or two after the air accident and these were my initial thoughts:

Dear Richard:

Thank you Richard. What happened? Fortunately, so far we do not seem to know anyone  affected. My father's brother Bernard, who would be your cousin, does live in Clarence, but he was apparently lucky to avoid it. All of these NY plane crashes are getting unreal. What that other pilot did to land that plane in the river was amazing. I know that you have been flying a long time, but it does make me think of you. I take comfort in knowing that you've got that survival instinct that I well know, which comes from too many youthful butt-kickings, but sometimes shit happens. May you always be safe.   Anna

My Response:

Hey Anna,

Happy to hear no one you know was on that bird. Ice is as big an enemy to pilots as are thunderstorms and the fact that those recently purchased small airliners  many airlines are using now on some routes; still have de-ice boots! The FAA should have outlawed those decades ago for airliners in my humble opinion. Boots are inefficient for this reason: Timing has everything to do with WHEN to remove the accumulated ice that is on the wing. If you air-expand the rubber leading edges too early, then the ice is not frozen enough to crack and fly off the wing, but frozen enough to stay there. Then once it's there and won't go away, it makes a terrific primer base for the upcoming ice to stick upon. On airliners in order for the FAA (who is usually under pressure from one entity or another, gives their blessings to certify for flight a needed "cheaper" airliner for the airlines on their shorter routes. So; the FAA said they would certify the boots even though a much better system as used in the larger jets is heat from the engine's "bleed air" system. But they said they would only certify the boots if you took away from the pilot the decision as to when to boot and when not to by mandating a timer that goes off every few minutes so as to remove the responsibility from the pilots' workload. Soooo, like placing a band aid on a severe wound, they came up with the automatic booter idea and it killed these people, and all for the price of being politically correct, or; when to bow to pressure. THE FAA KNEW BETTER! They sold out because they knew that the correct way to operate boots was to inflate them at near the exact right time or it could get worse. Then compound that with the fact that the crew screwed up which hasn't been made public yet, but true nonetheless according to what I was able to piece together. When that plane crashed in Buffalo, it was on autopilot! Autopilot at only 3 or 4 minutes before touchdown is wrong in of itself, but they monitor it while on the instrument approach, but what they didn't take into account was the fact that THEY WERE AWARE of ice on the wings. They discussed it as heard on the cockpit voice recorder, yet neither pilot thought that with the ice there on the wings, coupled with the fact that any experienced pilot should know about the timing that is necessary in order for the boots to be effective; the plane would begin to feel strange but when the auto pilot is engaged, it, not the pilot is flying that plane and it compensates for the pre-mature stalling of one wing before the other and before you know it, the plane begins to stall eventually leading into an unrecoverable spin. BOOM! Had one of the pilots been cognoscente enough to know that the wings can stall with the ice they knew was there, they'd have hand flown the bird so that they would have a "feel" for the airplane and done something to counter act the impending stall they were caught by surprise by. There is no reason in this day and age to have to worry about such things as we learned our lessons on ICE decades ago, that's why conventional airliners are so safe. Today's engines are so powerful that only two are needed to propel a jumbo jet. I've always felt that 4 is better than two, yet I went over the Atlantic recently in a twin jet. Had Captain Sully's plane (Miracle on the Hudson) had four engines, chances are that at least one would have survived the bird strikes and they could have flown safely back to the airport. However; had Captain Sully been flying that turboprop airliner, he would have taken the ice into consideration and even if he couldn't over-ride the boot timer, he would have been hand flying that airplane and it never would have crashed. I just know that in my gut to be true.

Now; I fly a class of aircraft that has a much worse safety record than airliners do, but that is because there just aren't that many Captain Sully's out there, especially within the realm of General Aviation's light personal aircraft. Sully is a man who does more than pilot an airplane, he becomes a part of it and that is exactly how I try to fly. In order for a pilot to be a safe pilot not just MOST of the time, but ALL of the time, he has to be a working PART of that airplane just like an arm is part of a human being. That is a talent that cannot be taught. Believe me, I've tried to teach that in all my customers for 20 years now but few achieve that status.

I wouldn't let this accident spoil your thinking that overall flying is safe because it is, just that to err is human and some pilots consider everything in their flight decisions and some do not.

Well as they said in Texas: I said my piece.

Hope you are well.

z

There are few things in aviation that frighten me as much as:

1. Midair collisions.

2. Thunderstorms

3. Ice

However, if you encounter ICE, all is not lost. There are things to learn and memorize about ice.

Fact: When pilots see ice forming on the wings, few think about the ice they cannot see on the tail. (Out of sight, out of mind). Can you fly your airplane without the tail? Not even, so what happens if ice takes out the tail's authority before the ice on the main wings take out the lift? How will you know if that happens in time to do something about it?

A LESSON TO LEARN HERE AND NOW!

You're flying along in turbulent air and your airplane stalls. What do you do? You relax back pressure or push the yoke as necessary, add power and re-gain flying speed, right? We all know that. BUT WHAT WILL YOU DO IF YOUR TAIL BEGINS TO STALL AND HOW WILL YOU RECOGNIZE THAT?  Would you believe that in most airplanes the procedure is just the opposite of a "normal" stall? Check with your manufacturer to be certain, but in most cases the tail stall has to be corrected by raising the nose, lowering the power setting (high power can make your tail work harder and aggravate the scenario) and you have to move quickly to retract or reduce flaps that may have just been added which caused the heavy pitch change to being with. In most cases this is what happens to give the pilot warning of an impending tail stall due to ice: Your yoke begins to feel strange including a heaviness toward a dive and oscillations in that yoke. You can feel it ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE HAND FLYING THE AIRPLANE WHEN YOU SUSPECT ICE. Once you begin to feel that, you naturally attempt to correct it and at times it gets worse due to PIO. (Pilot Induced Oscillations). Because of the angle of attack and wing altering shape, the flaps should be considered when ice is suspected because under some circumstances, adding flaps while on approach can send your ice-burdened aircraft out of control.

There is a NASA produced video that I want you to view after you read this article. Click on this link to view and then hit your back button to return to Mooneyland. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2238323060735779946

TELL IT LIKE IT IS ZEF!

I've been flying since 1971, and like life itself, your being a pilot evolves with time as well. I am a much better pilot now than I was in the '70's, but not as good as I once was when I had owned my own Mooney and flew the pants off of her, and I have to keep reiterating that the majority of pilots that I fly with cannot even pass my trick test where I pull a gear circuit breaker and the divert their attention elsewhere. I'm talking 95% fail that simple test and usually only minutes before I pound into their heads about dropping the landing gear is more than just a switch; it is first a switch, then a feel, then a look at the down light, and then VERIFY gear down in the window between the seats. I worry and pray at times for some of the pilots that I fly with because they haven't mastered the ability to THINK ON THEIR FEET, even when distractions occur.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that there were never any "Jesus Help Me" words out of my mouth while flying because were a few times in my flying career when it actually happened. (Sorry that's not politically correct, but that's what I had exclaimed and more than once). When that type of thing happens to you......and you get that close........ you ponder for weeks or more as to why you survived that, and what I came up with was that I always seemed to have a BAG of TRICKS to pull out just what I needed when I needed it. To me there are SIX words that every pilot must remember. The first three you may be familiar with and that's; "FLY THE PLANE, FLY THE PLANE, and FLY THE PLANE!" The other THREE WORDS that I want you to put to action are: "READ, READ, and READ!". After all is said and done, every time that I have had to ponder as to why I survived a given situation of the "help me Jesus" category, I came up with the same answer. It was because of my reading about aviation every chance I got both then and even now. It doesn't seem to matter if you remember something that you read at this time or not, for me it was filed away in MY BAG OF TRICKS as I refer to it and I have thus far been able to survive, tell the story, and live to fly another day. It works friends and I am more than passionate about flight safety. It's just too important an endeavor not to be all that you can be and like our old buddy Elvis.  Elvis's motto was: TCB; (taking care of business) when it comes to putting your skills against old Mom Nature and that includes knowing all there is to know about ICE as well as everything else that can happen to you in flight.

Unless Ice is in your glass; ICE is YOUR ENEMY!  Its effects are as unpredictable as are thunderstorms and can be just as lethal to pilots of every walk of life. Remember that you are in the air not because of your fancy Garmin equipment, but because and ONLY because of the shape of the AIRFRAME. At least in a storm your airframe remains aerodynamic (until it gets shook apart that is), but in ICE, your airframe design can change in front of your eyes to the point that it is anything but AERODYNAMIC.

Some of you have read somewhere on this site about my encounter with ice over Las Vegas in my Mooney 201. OMG! That airframe was feeling like it was going to shake itself apart from prop ice and the airplane was not performing anywhere near the way it was designed to. At 12,000 feet I couldn't climb because I was barely above stall speed trying to hang on to 12,000 feet as I had large terrain below me. Well I'm still here THANK YOU AL MOONEY, because when I landed, there was ice nearly everywhere and the amount was frightening to behold and yet; there was no ice in the forecast! Surprise...........forecasts are not even close to 100% reliable and for those pilots who take it as gospel, your days may be numbered.

Look guys; I haven't even counted how many pages and sub pages Mooneyland.com contains, but save a few of them for the business I operate; the majority of this site is dedicated to helping you become a safer pilot. I suppose that I'm somewhat BLUNT at times in these articles, but there is no "politically correct" way to convey to the public that the GREAT AIRPLANE PILOTS of the world have fewer fatal accidents than the not so great pilots that at all times are "BEHIND" the airplane. No one wants to second guess any pilots actions because that is "politically correct". While I may seem a bit harsh on some that have died in aviation, often times they're dead because of LACK or LAPSE of talent that finally caught up with them. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BEING A PASSENGER CARRYING PILOT is huge, and that includes having the ability to learn in advance a planned OUT for any situation that may arise that considering everything; it was an otherwise survivable situation had the better pilot been in command. Consider: How was it possible to get a Iowa bound jumbo jet without any control surfaces responding on the ground where some survived, and yet no pilot was ever able to duplicate the outcome on their super sophisticated simulators, or how could Captain "Sully" land a huge jet on the water without having a single fatality? Luck? Hell no. TOOLS! As they say here in Texas; "Ya'll got a lotta work to do".  If you have ice on your airplane; hand fly that airplane! That's the kind of stuff I want you to learn; simple but vital. Become a machine yourself and leave all of your emotions and problems on the ground where they belong. In flight, COMMON SENSE SHOULD BE YOUR GOAL! ************

The general aviation safety record is in my opinion; pathetic. By that I mean when someone asks you "if aviation is safe"; your response should be "who is the pilot?" Each month I prepare for you a single engine accident stats running list singling out the Mooney in particular, and while it is normally at the top of the safer list, I read as to why that pilot and his passengers had to die. Was it because Gen Av itself is unsafe, or is it because many pilots themselves are unsafe. Don't be an "ICE-HOLE" READ, READ, READ and then fly the plane.....

Once again, here's that link to NASA's icing video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2238323060735779946 

The opinions expressed here are not necessarily a reflection on any specific accident involved pilot or crew. This article is simply an attempt to help all pilots to learn from the mistakes of others without having to pay the same price.

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Call Tom Johnson "TJ" direct at: 602 628-2701. Tell TJ to give you the great and personal service he has given so many of our Mooneyland customers. zef said so! CLICK HERE for more information and testimony about TJ.

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