I flew with my first helicopter instrument student today (ink still wet on my Helicopter CFII). He drove all the way to Boston from Dayton, Ohio to fly with us because he hadn’t been happy with the instructors in his region. The guy was a reasonably good instrument pilot but somewhat befuddled with the big challenges of doing approaches. His instructors had taught him to start a timer at the final approach fix, even on an ILS in case the glide slope failed and they wanted to turn it into a localizer approach. He was supposed to use a timer to hold, and a timer for procedure turns, even though his previous trainer aircraft had a Garmin 430 GPS. They hadn’t taught him to use more than the most basic features of the Garmin.
I pointed out that the new FAA Practical Test Standards required an applicant to use a moving map if available. I noted that a professional crew of two airline pilots would not try to salvage an ILS into a localizer approach if the glide slope were to fail. Since they did not brief the LOC approach they would go missed, ask for delay vectors, brief the LOC approach and come back to do it. Why would a general aviation pilot by himself try to do something that an airline crew wouldn’t do?
What about timing? The Garmin shows you where to hold, how to enter the hold, where to start procedure turns, when you’ve reached the missed approach point. Why would you run a timer to second-guess the Garmin? If the Garmin fails, ask for vectors from ATC.
I told him that I had recently passed an ATP checkride where I timed nothing, telling the examiner that I was going to turn off my brain and rely on the Garmin. Why was he making his instrument checkride tougher than my ATP ride?
He is doing great and I think he’ll be ready for a checkride in another week or so. I said “As soon as you can do all of this with about 20 percent of your attention, you’re ready. You need to save the other 80 percent to watch for and handle the unexpected.”
Phil, great practical advice. You don’t know how many of us were tortured
through instrument training with the timer, just in case the GS failed..
I did my instrument training in a C172 with a Garmin 300XL. Very bare bones in this day and age. Immediately after the checkride I began multi-engine training in my C310R with a 430W. I haven’t used a timer since. I’m with you Phil, if the GS goes out on final I’m going missed to regroup and, hopefully, fly an LPV.
I’m not a pilot so I’m curious, does the GS fail very often? I would think that equipment would be well maintained.
Does the localizer also fail? No one ever mentions that. Is it less critical than the GS when on approach?
Bob: The equipment is well-maintained, monitored continuously, and checked periodically. Either the glide slope or localizer might be turned off for maintenance. Either could fail in a power outage if there aren’t backup generators. What’s the probability of an unscheduled failure of just the GS occurring during the last two minutes of an approach? I’ve never seen it!
The localizer (left/right guidance) is more critical in that if you have only the LOC you can still do some sort of an approach (whereas GS by itself is useless). That’s probably why people talk about taking some sort of action in the event of GS failure (in the event of LOC failure you’d have to go to a totally different kind of navigation, e.g., GPS, or land at a different airport).
Phil,
You’re obviously right about taking a miss and ‘briefing’ before trying a non-precision approach. And old practices die hard, even in the face of newer and better technology. But I kind of wonder, not about rotary wing where the added expense of solid avionics is probably not significant – nor with a new glass panel fixed wing a/c – but with club aircraft and tired FBO rentals:
-only approximate info from fuel gauges, so time and record tank switching
-many say no single pilot hard IMC IFR without an autopilot, but in 800 hours over 30 years, I can only recall one dependable wing-leveler.
-typical avionics stack was two Comms, two Omni localizers and one glide slope. There are two because they failed occasionally. GS is most primitive, and not bullet=proof by a long shot.
-no multi-color display, so situational awareness is all in your head.
-missed approach means power, flap, trim and maybe gear reconfiguration – and maybe some Nav retuning.
-Having a timer ready in case the GS receiver doesn’t wake up could be handy, huh?.
Maybe one shouldn’t really fly single pilot hard IFR with that kind of equipment, but we do train to do so.
Bob
Bob #2: A handheld GPS can be purchased or borrowed at minimal cost, contains approach procedures, and can provide nearly all of the situation awareness benefits of the panel-mount Garmin (though it can’t be used as the primary means of navigation).
Is it wise to fly single-pilot IFR with no autopilot? It is illegal in Europe. It is illegal in the U.S. for helicopters. I’ve never had a problem with the S-TEC autopilot in our Cirrus.
Does it make sense to fly IMC in a tired old flight school airplane? There are plenty of airplanes with full glass panel avionics that now qualify as “tired” (more than 1000 hours) and “old” (2004-2005). Our airport is one of the most expensive in the U.S. and yet it is possible to rent a single-engine piston airplane with a Garmin G1000 panel for $140/hour.
I’m always a little reticent when I hear people referring to Europe. How much GA instrument flying is there in Europe, anyway? For that matter, how much GA is there in the Old World at all? Things like user fees see to that.
http://www.pplir.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=57
Anyway, in general they have less freedom to fly than we do over here. It’s not just Europe, either. Trying flying single engine VFR at night in Mexico.
I really appreciate the ability for pilot to decide whether or not they want to fly with an autopilot in IMC. I owned a Skylane and flew it about 800 hours, all over the country, single pilot, often IMC, with no autopilot.
In my opinion, Europe needs to become more like the U.S. in terms of its general aviation system, not vice versa.
Belated congratulations on your first IH student!
I agree that it’s unwise to convert an ILS approach to a LOC if you lose the GS. But I still think the timer makes sense to help locate the MAP to execute a missed approach properly. If you have an electrical failure, you can lose both your GPS and your ATC vectors (plus, you might not even have radar services during the approach).
Hand-held GPSes aren’t certified for instrument approaches, are they? A problem with built-in GPSes in rental planes (aside from the expense) is that different planes have different models, and they’re not well standardized, so it’s hard to be proficient enough to rely on them in challenging situations. Also, does ECAC have a G1000 plane for $140? The cheapest one I see is the 182T for $165 (compared to $125 for a 172 or $135 for an Arrow).
Gary: You concern is that a handheld GPS units are not certified for an instrument approach. You’re positing a situation in which the pilot has suffered an electrical failure, however. In the Robinson R44, that means you would lose the following: governor, rotor tachometers, attitude indicator, turn coordinator, HSI, GPS, nav radio, comm radio, etc. You would have no way to know whether you were upside down or not (the situation would be similar in a IFR-certified helicopter). I’m not sure how watching a timer would be comforting. Nor do I think a pilot in that situation would be too worried about whether a working GPS were IFR-certified or not.
[You were asking about a cheap G1000 airplane? Executive Flyers advertises a C172 with G1000 for $130/hour, but adds another $10/hour in fuel surcharge.]
True, I was thinking of airplanes, not helicopters.
Gary: In newer light airplanes, which are the ones that tend to fly the most real IMC, a complete electrical system failure will cause you to lose (1) the timer that you started at the FAF (unless you decided to fill the cockpit with extra crud, such as a kitchen timer), (2) the PFD, which was your primary source of attitude information, (3) the backup attitude indicator, which was your only other source of attitude information, (4) your Nav and Com radios, (5) the GPSes, etc. You would not be able to follow any published procedures and would be lucky to keep the airplane upright.
What about a partial failure? In the Cirrus, the most common modern light airplane, if you lose ALT1 and BAT1, you have ALT2 driving the primary flight display, one Nav/Com/GPS (Garmin 430), and the autopilot. You would be able to continue flying the ILS or any other published procedure.
If a student came to me and said “I would like to spend the rest of my life renting ancient trainers from flight schools and taking them into hard IMC”, I would design a special training program for them with a lot of emphasis on vacuum pumps, timing approaches, LORAN, recognizing attitude indicator failure and switching to the turn coordinator, etc. But that isn’t possible in the helicopter world. If they go into IMC it is either in a two-pilot aircraft that will be very well equipped for its day (1980s) or in a single-pilot aircraft that will have a lot of automation. And in the airplane world you still have to recognize that you only have 40 hours to work with a student. You can’t teach them to do every kind of flying in 40 hours. With luck, you can teach them how to do one kind of flying competently and safely. If they decide later to sell the Cirrus and start renting 1960s airplanes with vacuum pumps and flying them down to minimums, they will need to get some training for that kind of operation.