Emergency manoeuvres

One such organisation offering an EMT course is Advanced Cockpit Flight Training at Jandakot. Chief Flying Instructor Jeremy Miller told Australian Aviation that the impetus for the course was to give pilots additional skills and confidence which could be called upon in an emergency.

“It’s all about breaking down the barriers that the basic training doesn’t. It’s about giving pilots more confidence and giving them more tools and skillsets to handle situations that hopefully they will never have to handle.”

As Miller explains, the EMT course taught by AFCT has been based on years of research and learning from other flying disciplines. “It’s been a collective six years worth of work to come up with a course that takes the best of what everyone does,” explained Miller. “Some of the stuff that we teach does have its origins back in the military. They’ve been doing it for a number of years, so they have had a lot of time to get it right and work out the best way of doing it.”

At a basic level, EMT is designed to extend the knowledge and skills of pilots for should they find their aircraft departs from a normal regime of flight, or if they need to react to a challenging situation. In many cases, pilots without specific training pilots will act on instinct, which can sometimes prove fatal.

“It’s all done in a controlled environment, it’s all fully briefed beforehand and there are no surprises as to what’s going to happen.”

A lot of the theory behind the course is designed to build a pilot’s understanding, and in some cases take them further than the standard syllabus. Miller explains that this is particularly the case in his school’s teaching of stall awareness, which focuses on stick position, rather than airspeed.

“Because the Day VFR syllabus is all about performance, instructors relate it back to airspeed as opposed to relating it back to the angle of attack,” he said. “I see people dive the aircraft with 200-300 feet to recover from the stall, where all they’ve got to do is move the stick forward a bit and fly away, and I can have any pilot recover in under 100 feet.”

As such, the course teaches a different approach to managing stalls, whereby instead of managing airspeed, the pilots are taught methods to be more aware of the aircraft’s angle of attack, and recover by simply pushing the stick back to neutral, rather than diving the aircraft.

“The stall stick position concept is probably the best concept that comes out of this EMT course, because it takes people as close as you can get to being ‘stall proof’,” said Miller.

Another major part of the course is spin training, with a particular focus on identifying when an aircraft is entering a spin and the best techniques for recovery. “The idea behind the spin training is not to actually get the pilot entering a spin but to implement a recovery,” explained Miller.

In addition, the course also teaches advanced aircraft handling, which involves pilots learning different skills for handling the aircraft. Much of this component is based on introducing pilots to basic aerobatic manoeuvres. “We get them to roll the aircraft around at 60 degrees – something which any aircraft is capable of – so it’s not a manoeuvre that an aerobatic aircraft,” said Miller.

“We also have a look at wingovers as well, because they’re quite a good manoeuvre to do if you need to turn around in a short space of time.”

The course also includes ways to recover aircraft in unusual attitudes, which can be caused by factors such as wake turbulence or other obstacles, such as mountains or buildings.

“For myself as an aerobatic pilot, these create the fundamentals of a safe aerobatics flying,” said Miller.

A major part of the course involves a great deal of ground briefing before taking to practising some of the manoeuvres, usually in one of the school’s two Super Decathlons. As Miller explains, this helps to put pilots at ease for what they experience in the sky. “We make the training as enjoyable as we can, given that we are going to be taking a pilot outside their normal comfort zone. It’s all done in a controlled environment, it’s all fully briefed beforehand and there are no surprises as to what’s going to happen.”

“That having been said, for a lot of pilots, this sort of training is something that they’re not comfortable with. There is a fear of the unknown,” he adds.

However, once a pilot goes past that fear, Miller says that a number of the basic manoeuvres taught help to build confidence for the pilot. “It’s not uncommon for me to go flying with a new pilot who’s never been upside down before, and I’ll get them to fly a nice simple aileron roll which is a very comfortable manoeuvre. It’s a massive confidence builder.”

As Miller explains, the course is designed to teach pilots at all stages. “It’s for anyone from any stage of training from GFPT onwards. Even for pilots who have had their license for quite a long time, you can always learn something new and improve your skills in some way.

“It’s a little bit like a defensive driving course that you wouldn’t necessary be worried about when learning to drive, but you might decide to do so afterwards,” said Miller.

He adds that while it is an additional expense (currently approximately $2000) other instructors teaching similar courses elsewhere, such as national aerobatics champion Phil Unicomb, have heard from pilots who have been able to put into practice their knowledge of emergency manoeuvres. “He’s had guys come back to him six months later and say, ‘Mate, you saved my life’,” said Miller.

While ACFT offers EMT as a separate course for licensed pilots, it also includes some elements in its basic PPL and CPL courses. “One of the big philosophies we have here is when we train someone to fly, we don’t want to train them to 100 per cent of their capacity, we want to train them to 120 per cent,” said Miller. “So we’re going to take them outside of what they normally do, so in case they get outside of that they’ve already been there with us, and they know what to do to get them back to where they want.”

Miller says that the three years that ACFT has been offering EMT and including it as part of its basic and aerobatics training that over 50 pilots have gone through it, with the majority reporting that it helped them to understand how to handle their aircraft better in general, not just in emergencies.

As a relatively new concept in Australia, ACFT is one of only a few flying schools offering the training. “There’s maybe five flying schools, and less than a dozen instructors who can actually teach this because there are a number of instructors out there who are scared of spinning and stalling, mainly because their instructors were scared of it,” said Miller.

“To teach this sort of stuff properly, you’ve got to be comfortable going out there and spinning an aircraft or turning an aircraft upside down and knowing what it’s going to do.”

While each flying school offering EMT designs their own course, Miller says that some of the CASA staff he has regular contact with have commended his school for being proactive in taking its students past the regular Day VFR syllabus.

He adds that he would like to see more such training incorporated into the training syllabus. “I personally think some basic aerobatic training should be a compulsory part of every pilots training because it does give a pilot more skills and expands their envelope,” said Miller.

Ultimately, he believes that learning emergency manoeuvres will help to save lives and prevent some incidences of both controlled and uncontrolled flight into terrain accidents. “We will probably never know the extent to which it does work, but we will know the extent to which it has not been applied because we still keep seeing the same basic accidents,” said Miller.