Lesson #23 Precautionary Landings

Since I've already done forced approaches I expected that this lesson was going to be easy. I arrived at the airport early and waited for Dave to return with another student. After a few minutes I saw them land and a couple of minutes later I watched as they pulled up to the pumps. Dave and the student hopped out and the student topped Fern up for me. Nice!

Dave came in and we chatted for a couple of minutes and then I went out to preflight the aircraft. A few minutes later Dave had arrived, we fired her up and I called the tower. Tower came back telling us that an aircraft would be landing in a few minutes. Since the controller's response was a bit choppy we missed what kind of aircraft it was so, Dave asked me to find out. I asked tower to repeat aircraft type and tower responded that it was an F-18. Dave then told me to tell tower that we'd taxi to the hold short line for runway 03 (so we could get a front row seat for the show).

We both scanned the sky back and forth trying to pinpoint where it was, after a minute or so I called tower for his location and tower responded that the radar had it right on top of the airport. Sure enough we spotted the dull grey fighter directly overhead at about 2,000 ft. It turns out that he was heading outbound to do an ILS approach for 03. Since it was going to take some time we decided reluctantly to do our takeoff.

A couple of minutes later tower called and asked where we were... which was pretty strange because he should have us on his radar. I replied with our location and then tower asked if we had our transponder on, (we had forgotten to turn it on in all the excitement).

We never did get to see the F-18 land, but we could here the controller falling all over himself to provided any and all assistance. The fighter pilot called in and told tower that he was going to perform an ILS approach with an overshoot, tower then asked him how low he was going to go and if they could expect an afterburner climb out. (I could almost hear the pretty please in tower's voice). The afterburner climb out didn't happen, I guess the fighter didn't have the extra fuel.

Although we lingered about 8 miles from the airport for a few minutes but we couldn't see the dull grey fighter in the haze. Damn!

We reluctantly got back to the lesson at hand, precautionary landings. These types of landings are something that you do when things start to get bad. Say your flying along and all of a sudden the ceiling started dropping or the engine starts acting up and you haven't got a proper airport nearby to use, so you have to land but where? Generally a private airstrip or a wheat field makes a good spot to set down in.

The first thing you usually do is overfly the field at circuit height to perform an initial inspection to make sure it looks good, then you make another pass this time much lower to ensure that it still looks good, and that you haven't missed anything. If everything still looks good and you decide to continue with the landing, you do so using your best soft field technique, which for us is 40 degrees of flaps, nearly full stall, until the mains touch, then keep the nose light as long as you can.

We used the two private grass strips that we had practised with before, this allows us to get nice and low. Actually we could only get really low on one of the strips as the other strip had a bunch of cows nearby and we didn't want to spook them. We made three precautionary landings using both high and low passes. At the private strip without the cows I came down to about 100 ft AGL, but I found myself high so I preformed an overshoot. Our 172 will not climb with 40 degrees of flaps hanging down so after I went to full throttle, pushed carb heat off, I had to bring the flaps back up to 20 degrees before things on the ground started getting smaller again. Having to overshoot didn't really bother me all that much as the smallest runway I've ever landed on is 5,000 ft long and 100 ft wide, so I kinda expected this to happen. Actually I blamed Dave for it because he's never let me land at anything smaller. (He found my logic somewhat amusing).

The next time I came in nice and low, so much so that Dave mentioned that the trees that we were flying over are taller than they seem. We weren't all that close but Dave tends to err on the side of caution when a student is at the helm, I certainly can't blame him. His warning was more of a "you see the trees below us right"? I told him to relax, that of course I see them.

This private strip, which is only about 1,000 ft long sits at one edge of a farmers field on top of a small hill, At the end of the "runway" it drops off pretty good (30ft or so) into a tree line which is maybe 400 feet away. Coming in on low final over the tree line you can almost get down to level with the end of the runway and then have the land come up to you. I wasn't quite that low but there wasn't any question of overshooting it this time.

In real life and depending on your situation you might not have the time to make both a high and a low pass so you might decide to opt only for the low pass at 500 ft AGL for your first and final inspection. Obviously things like cell towers, livestock, hay bails, trees, hills, wind direction and speed are all going to be factors in choose a suitable place to make a precautionary landing.

With this out of the way we headed back to the airport. About 10 minutes later I top off a nice straight in approach with a picture perfect full stall landing, for which I received a "Nice" from my instructor.

My next lesson will be a solo to practise precautionaries, I'm also going to do some power off stalls and some slow flight which I didn't get done during my last solo lesson.