VOLO PER VERITAS — A Surprise in a Turn!

Juliana Torchetti Coppick | jutorchetti@yahoo.com.br

Last week I received a message from a longtime friend telling me about a situation that made me reflect, as he is a pilot whom I respect and admire. For obvious reasons, I will keep confidential the person and companies involved.

He was flying a Pawnee had just over 25 gallons in the hopper. Suddenly, during a turn, he heard a crack and realized that something was wrong with the aircraft; the control stick no longer commanded the ailerons. The aileron cable pulley support that had broken. He told me both ailerons were deflected downward. His reaction was to use the rudder pedals to turn and level the wings. He decided to return to the base at a low altitude, so if something even more serious happened maybe the aircraft could be controlled long enough to land straight ahead.

I asked him what was the angle of bank in the turn when this happened? He answered, “45 degrees.” I still wonder what end of this story would have been if he was “bending” the tiny Pawnee into a knife edge turn.

Fortunately, he landed safely and without further damage to the aircraft. Mainly because this pilot always flies inside the flight envelope of the aircraft.

Afterwards, I remembered a video called “Turn Smart”. The video is on YouTube and is highly instructive. Wayne Handley, the pilot in the video, explains some of the circumstances that can lead to a stall and how to get out of it. He makes an interesting observation and I will paraphrase: “Just as an example, I will use the 30-second turn as a reference, simply because it’s easy to do the math. “If we have a morning where we perform 100 turns with an average time of 30 seconds each, and are well on the edge, suppose we back off by 10%, then we have a 33 second turn. The aircraft

will be much more inside the flight envelope. The pilot will be much more comfortable and safer, especially in case of an emergency. Okay, so we added three seconds to those 100 turns. Now, we have 300 seconds added to a working morning. That is only five minutes! It is very easy to recover five minutes of your operation.”

Some pilots still complain about comments that are commonly directed at our profession; like “the agricultural pilot is crazy” or, “these pilots are not afraid of anything”. We know this is not true. If we stop to reflect, some comments that at first glance do inflame some egos. The comments are actually quite pejorative. We should not fly like we want to validate those kind of comments. We are not crazy. We are trained professionals and pay dearly for our training. We have an image to look after. If we have to prove something, it should be relaying our professionalism to those who do not understand what it is that we do.