Engine Roughness after Take Off

The only real emergency is a situation you haven't been trained to handle. 

My CFI told my daughter that many years ago when she interviewed him for a school project. The only real emergency is a situation you haven't been trained to handle. That phrase has stuck in my head for many years. Especially now that I'm training other pilots and future pilots. As I train them I try to make sure my pilots don't have a real emergency.

One of the situations I commonly train people to troubleshoot and handle is a rough running engine with some power loss. This is much more common than complete power loss. Once I'd experienced a engine that seemed to be running a bit rough with no power loss. However, I'd never experienced a severely rough running engine and major power loss. Fortunately, my training, and the training I've been providing, did prepare me for the situation when it happened today.

This afternoon I was in a Piper Arrow with a commercial student. We were planning on doing Chandelles and Emergency Descents, maneuvers Commercial Pilot candidates must master. We taxied out to the run-up area and he did the run-up checks. Everything, including all magneto and propeller checks, seemed fine. He requested take off and off we went.

On the take off roll my student commented he needed more right rudder than he expected. I thought the engine seemed to be running strong but the climb out performance wasn't as good as expected. He brought up the landing gear and it seemed to take forever to get to 500ft AGL. I kept checking my student's airspeed but he was climbing at Vy, which should have given us at least 800fpm climb rate. Just as we gained enough altitude to turn crosswind the engine started running rough, rougher than I'd ever felt before.

"The engine's running rough!" the young man said. I told him to turn downwind and not change anything until we got over 1000 AGL. Our climb rate was down to 100fpm, with occasional increases to 500 fpm in an updraft. My initial thought was the propeller was somehow out of balance because I felt vibrations throughout the plane. I told him to keep climbing and then turn off the fuel pump and pull back on  MP and throttle to "25 squared" after we were abeam the numbers. This was deliberate because I knew I could do a power off approach from that location and altitude without issue. He did and the roughness seemed slightly better, though the climb rate was still pathetic. Time to troubleshoot.

We continued downwind, climbing slowly away from the airport. We both checked the oil pressure and temperature, fuel pressure, everything looked good. I was thinking now this was a magneto issue. The magneto check on the ground, just minutes before, was good, but I couldn't think of anything else it could be. With our climb performance so poor I didn't know what else would happen and I didn't want to climb away from the airport any further to attempt an airborne mag check. At about 2000ft MSL, I told the student to request a return to the airport to land.

We were cleared immediately to make a 180 degree turn and come back in to land on 31L. I told him not to change any other power settings until we knew we could make the runway if we lost complete power on our return to the airport. Once we were sure he slowly reduced the throttle and pitched for lower airspeed so we could slow down, get the gear down, and land. 30 degrees of flaps and a loooooong forward slip later we were back on the ground at RHV. The tower asked us if we wanted to stay in the pattern. We requested to taxi to transient to see if we could figure out the problem (perhaps a suddenly fouled plug?)

In transient we did a magneto check again and this time there was a major difference between left and right mags. Left mag ran smooth, right mag dropped 500 RPM and ran extremely rough. Just in case the spark plugs were fouled we ran up bit longer at high RPM and leaned aggressively. No difference. This was something we couldn't fix. We taxied back to parking and shut down the plane.

The problem could be a bad magneto, plug wires or a spark plug I think. In any case, it wasn't an emergency, even though it was quite disturbing for my student. For my own part I didn't feel nervous at all. It was a situation I'd been trained to handle.

As we debriefed on the event I told my student what my daughter was told that day, "The only emergency is a situation you haven't been trained to handle." That gave him pause as he realized even with his private pilot training he was trained to handle that situation. At the same time, he said, he was really glad I was there with him.

Pet Peeves

I did a flight review for a friend of my husband, Jeff, yesterday and Jeff said the friend asked if I have any pet peeves. When I first thought about it I didn't think I have any... but then, when I thought more, I realized I do.

1. Centerline, centerline, centerline. Taxi, take off and land on the centerline!! Why? because if you can't stay on the centerline how will you stay in the middle of a narrow runway when there's a strong crosswind. Not to mention you just look much more professional. Our airport had a plane crash at night one night, he landed ok but, as far as I can tell, he failed to maintain directional control, let one wheel drop off the runway and ended up cartwheeling down the runway. Fortunately the pilot and passengers survived. But if he had landed on the centerline, there's a much lower chance of that happening.
2. Taxi speed. Taxiing is not a race. There's no reason to taxi at 20 knots or with full power while dragging the breaks. Seriously people. Take it easy, these planes aren't designed to handle well on the ground.
3. Coordinated flight. I'm sorry, I don't care how much right rudder it takes that you aren't used to using. Fly coordinated. For one thing it feels almost sickening when you fly uncoordinated. Who wants to feel like they're slipping or skidding sideways all the time? More import if you want to kill yourself, fly uncoordinated and stall a plane. Instant spin. And I'll bet money if you're a pilot who routinely flies uncoordinated you will not be able to recover from a spin quickly. 
4. "Pinching the runway" a very common issue, the pilot is flying a distance from the runway and reduces power to start the landing process. Immediately the plane starts veering towards the runway... after which the pilot turns base and overshoots final. 
5. Don't call in over a waypoint when you are nowhere near it. This happened to me today. My student and I were directly over a waypoint at an altitude. Another plane called in over the same waypoint and at the same altitude. In this case I knew that plane was well behind us because I knew where it took off from, when, and we were flying a much faster plane. Fortunately the tower realized there was a faster and slower plane and which was which. 
6. Probably my biggest pet peeve. For Christ's sake, fly a heading! Pick one. I don't care what it is... just pick a heading and fly that way. It drives me nuts when private pilots just cannot maintain a heading. They flop all over the sky!

Yeah, I have my pet peeves. I'm sure every pilot and CFI does. What are yours?

Pilots do/say the funniest things

I've decided to keep my blog going and share more of the funny / amusing things my students do. These are private pilots, student pilots and more experienced pilots. Our funnier moments prove we are all, always, learning. Here are some recent funny moments.

Turnabout is Fair Play

I was working with a pilot on his complex endorsement. Complex endorsements are needed for aircraft with retractable gear. A large part of complex training is designed to imbue the pilot with a healthy paranoia about landing gear. There are many ways for Arrow landing gear to fail, or appear to fail. I use them all when training people for complex to make sure they are consciously and constantly checking the gear before landing.

On this particular flight the gear was "failing" often for my student. And he was, indeed, getting paranoid. During the flight I also demonstrated some specialty take offs and landings for him. After we finished the flight he said he had a confession to make.... he had "failed" one of the landing gear on me by pulling out the gear light bulb, but it didn't work because I was also paranoid about the gear (where do you think I got the idea to make my students paranoid?), so I pushed the bulb in as a matter of course on final. We both had a good laugh on that one. And I was very glad that I practice what I preach!

Flashlights at 5500 Feet

Flying with a student on a night cross country. I pointed out an airport and the airport beacon for him to know he was getting close to his waypoint. He took his handheld flashlight and pointed it out the windscreen so he could better see the airport. After a second he looked at the flashlight and said, "That won't work. Will it?" "Nope," I said. We laughed hard about that one.

Where's the Door?

Working with a pilot on his complex endorsement. He's spent his whole flying career flying Cessnas which are blessed with pilot and co-pilot doors. The complex aircraft we were flying was a Piper Arrow. Pipers only have one door on the co-pilot side. This was his first flight in the Arrow. After our flight we shut down and I got out of the plane. There was a sudden laugh from inside the aircraft. The pilot said, "I was trying to figure out how to open *my* door!"