the "Turn Back"

[George Sychrovsky]

FAA takes a note of the "Turn Back" controversy

https://www.faasafety.gov/SPANS/event_details.aspx?eid=92129

[DRGT]

I watched this video in its entirety (even tho the streaming connection was poor). It is one of the best reviews of this topic that I have seen. The speaker gives practical guidance on how how every pilot can determine if the turn back is possible or impossible. That is, he lays out the skills, capabilities, and conditions that a pilots needs to successfully make the turn. He then goes on to lay out how pilots can develop/maintain those skills.
I have to admit that my preflight briefing in single engine aircraft often lacks the discipline required to maximize safety. We all need training and practice to overcome instincts that might kill us.

[George Sychrovsky]

I used to engage in this as my favorite topic on the boards , since I got banned from most of them I don't any more.
The "never-turners" will be with us for a long foreseeable future. They will keep presenting crashes as their evidence and without the distinction of what the real cause was like the lack/absence of training and of planning for emergency actions, and rows of dead pilots graves who tried it and so on, but there will be fewer and fewer of them.
In the past people relied on the priest in their church as a sole authority on what they should and should not do, later on they submitted themselves to the news gods on the radio and television to feed them the propaganda and official thinking , Times are different now.
The humanity and the technology moves forward , When I started to fly a video like this was nonexistent , yet now there are many on line at you fingertips and anybody can access it if he only wants to.

[don170]

I can not believe the FAA, with all the talk about LOC turning base to finial, now wants
to open the turn back drill.

[Frank Giger]

I see it as a tempest in a teapot.

When I was in flight training, my instructor and I went over what altitude and airspeed during takeoff would allow a turn-back if the engine failed on take off. It's really all about the turn itself and how much altitude one will lose.

Likewise "to the airfield" wasn't portrayed as "to the spot you took off from on the same runway." It was "the big flat area with the paved surfaces and grass between them."

Frank "try not to hit the FBO" Giger

[George Sychrovsky]

I can not believe the FAA, with all the talk about LOC turning base to finial, now wants
to open the turn back drill.


Do you think the "LOC turning base to finial" is some kind of supernatural event caused by some divine intervention that just happens and then you must die ???

I myself believe it is simply just the lack of skills that can be solved by proper training.


To all others - decide for yourself which way you want to go.

[rwanttaja]

Pilots of homebuilts, at least, have more problems with takeoff/climb than the base-to-final turn.
http://www.wanttaja.com/phase.jpg
Note that this graphic EXCLUDES cases where the power has failed. I don't expect power failures on departure to improve the takeoff/initial climb results.....

Ron Wanttaja

[jstro]

Do you think the "LOC turning base to finial" is some kind of supernatural event caused by some divine intervention that just happens and then you must die ???

I myself believe it is simply just the lack of skills that can be solved by proper training.

To all others - decide for yourself which way you want to go.

LOL, supernatural event, that's perfect. You said it better and more humorously than I could have. There's nothing mysterious about making coordinated turns in a rectangular pattern, or lacking the skills to do so.

[Mayhemxpc]

OK, two part story that I know I have told before in the forum somewhere.

1. When I got my first airplane, a 1975 Warrior I used to go up and play "What if" games, learning the real envelope of the airplane. A big game, developing out of Lazy 8's and wing overs, was, how tight can I turn and how much altitude will I lose turning around after an engine failure. The answer was 300'. I learned through experience that the airplane's stalling speed is much lower when unloading the wings and if you stick to minimum sink airspeed. (This is knowledge I take for granted now, but I was much younger and everything was new.) 45 deg bank was do-able but 30 deg was enough. Then, one day, I actually had an engine failure at 300 feet departing runway 36 and easily put it down on runway 15. (Of course the engine came back to life in the flare and the one thing I neglected was closing the throttle.)

2. When I give check rides for CAP I use examiner's discretion and combine engine out procedures with take off and departure stalls (which should really be stall AVOIDANCE.) Pull power, count one thousand one, one thousand two, and THEN the pilot can apply corrective action. Minimum sink airspeed (think Vx) prop full decrease, while banking to 30 to 45 degrees and the 182 can turn around in about 200 feet of altitude loss. (Note that the plane is still going up for that two second count.) You may not be lined up with the runway, but probably with the parallel taxiway that you wisely turned towards or the grass or some other flat unoccupied piece of real estate.

Like with the first part, it takes knowing your plane and practice. That practice is really a lot of fun, as long as it isn't a real emergency.

[George Sychrovsky]

Minimum sink airspeed (think Vx) prop full decrease, while banking to 30 to 45 degrees

If you at fly Minimum sink airspeed and bank into 30 to 45 degrees turn you will definitely stall and enter a spin promptly.

I don't know how you could fly like this and still be here to type replies.

[max_reason]

The fact that people have an opinion about this topic WITHOUT asking:
- how long is the runway
- how long was the roll before rotate
- how steep was the rate of climb
- what is the airplane glide ratio

... seems nutty to me.

Seriously. An airplane might takeoff and start to climb in the first 200 feet of a 5000 foot long runway. And maybe it is a motor-glider with a 20:1 or 30:1 or 50:1 glide ratio. And maybe this particular motor-glider has a 140HP 915iS engine that lets it climb at an astounding rate. So by the end of the runway the airplane could be thousands of feet in the air ... and yet still over the runway! Hell, the extreme case I'm describing the motor-glider might be able to glide around the pattern 3 times before reaching the ground.

And on the other extreme a pilot might be flying a "flying brick" that barely gets off the ground by the end of the 5000 foot runway.

And yet people think they can hold one simple "rule of thumb" and apply that to every case? Well, they can do that for themselves, but some of us are too thoughtful and "calculating" to adopt such massively over-simplistic context-free authoritarian dictates for ourselves.

[Mayhemxpc]

If you at fly Minimum sink airspeed and bank into 30 to 45 degrees turn you will definitely stall and enter a spin promptly.

I don't know how you could fly like this and still be here to type replies.

...and yet here I am. Maybe it’s because (a) I know the planes I fly and what their envelopes are (b) Vx for the Warrior is 63 KIAS and stalling speed at 30 degrees bank is 52 KIAS, for the 182 Vx is 65 and stall at 30 degrees is 54, and (c) as I wrote, I am unloading the wings during the turn, which lowers the angle of attack and thereby the effective indicated stall speed.

As you wrote earlier, “proper training is everything.”

[George Sychrovsky]

My numbers for 182 45 degrees bank shows stall at 70 knots

happy landings

[rwanttaja]

My numbers for 182 45 degrees bank shows stall at 70 knots
What does it stall at in that bank angle if you're not trying to maintain altitude? The wing stalls at a given angle of attack, not airspeed.

Ron Wanttaja

[Frank Giger]

In my little plane, if the engine quits on takeoff, chances are I still have 3/4 of a mile of runway ahead of me. :)

[DRGT]

If you at fly Minimum sink airspeed and bank into 30 to 45 degrees turn you will definitely stall and enter a spin promptly.

Sorry - I couldn't let this one go. An airplane will only enter a spin from a skid position. Review the Private Pilot ACS - applicant is required to demonstrate a stall while in a turn. Of course a pilot can make a airplane stall and spin at any airspeed - but that's the pilot who makes that happen - not the airplane.

[thomaspanton]

That's great.